Ethan found himself sitting forward. “What could Theodore do?”
“She said he had this beautiful gift, discovered quite by accident when he was in Las Vegas once and played the slot machines. He won.”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Evidently he won a great deal. Actually, she told me he never lost.”
“What? You’re telling me Theodore Backman was some sort of diviner?”
She had to grin, but it fell off her face fast enough. Ethan was staring at her, an eyebrow arched.
“As Shepherd explained it, where the reels stop is supposed to be random, but somehow Theodore could make the reels stop where he wished. She said he talked to the slots.”
“Oh, come on, Joanna. You mean he had this force field that reacted to the reels themselves? Or he had this internal magnet that brought the reels to a stop? What?”
“Look, I thought it was nuts too, even though Mrs. Backman told me he’d made them all rich.”
“It sounds like one of the crazy stories they’d tell us in the DEA as a cover for illegal income,” Ethan said. “It never flew in court. How’d he die?”
“Mrs. Backman told me he walked out of a casino in Reno and a mugger killed him. He hit the mugger with his cane, but the mug-get hit him on the head with a hammer and left him to die, which he did.”
“A cane? How old was Theodore when the mugger got him?”
“Mid-seventies.”
“How old is Blessed? Grace?”
“Blessed is in his fifties. Grace is a bit younger, late forties, maybe.”
“So you’re telling me Blessed and Grace and their mother—what’s her name?”
“Shepherd.”
“Like the guy on FOX News?”
“More like the guy who herds the sheep. She told me, all preening, thatt her husband gave her that name, the mother of his small flock. I wondered what her birth name was, but I was too freaked out to ask.”
“Okay, so these folk say they’re rich because of a man who could line up three cherries. Now the million-dollar question. How did you hook up with these people? If they’re your husband’s family, why did you only just meet them?”
When she remained silent, he said, “You might want to consider me the prince of bad, Joanna. I can handle just about anything.”
That made her laugh, then draw a deep breath. “All right. Martin, my husband, was the third and youngest brother. Autumn and I met them for the first time at his funeral.”
“But he couldn’t have been as old as Blessed or Grace, was he?”
“No, he was thirty-six when he died, much younger than both his brothers. Shepherd was in her forties when she birthed him.”
“Your husband died—a natural death?”
Her mouth seamed tight, but the words were pushing to get out. Why didn’t she want to tell him? Was she still grieving too much?
He pulled on a thread hanging down from the left sleeve of his sweatshirt. “An accident of some kind?”
She shook her head, looking hard at him pulling that thread, and the words came out in a burst, but lifeless and without fury or pain. “He died in prison,” she said, her eyes still on that gray thread.
He nearly fell off the sofa with surprise. He stared at her, unable not to. “Why was your husband in prison?”
She shook her head. All right, so she wasn’t ready to face that yet with him. He shifted gears. “So you found his family’s phone number—where?”
“The warden sent all Martin’s stuff to me. There was pitifully little, to be honest. There was this lone phone number in a small black notebook—no name, only an out-of-state phone number—and so I called it to see who it was he knew in Georgia. It was his family.
“I spoke to his mother and told her Martin was dead. She wept, Ethan. Then she begged me to have him buried with his family, not in cold Boston where he hadn’t known anyone except me and his daughter. Did we feel he had any deep foots there? ‘No, not really,’ I told her. Then please,’ she begged me, ‘please bring him home.’
“She begged me, Ethan, and she was crying again, so I said yes because she was right. I didn’t have family in Boston—no family anywhere, for that matter. And so after a memorial in Boston with all our friends, Autumn and I drove Martin’s urn from Boston to Georgia so his mother could bury it in the family cemetery.”
He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She sat there as if frozen, as if her words were stuck in her throat.
He said quietly, “Your husband never told you about his family, You never asked?”
“Yes, of course I was curious, but Martin refused to talk about them. They are not the sort of people you want to know, Jo. Neither do I. I ask you to accept that. I remember he once said unwittingly that he’d managed to escape them, that they didn’t know where he was. I didn’t know what he’d meant about escaping them, and he never told me. I suppose I thought it was a runaway-kid sort of thing.”
“He didn’t change his name? He kept Martin Backman?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder why he didn’t change his name. With the Internet, you could probably find a missing pet. Didn’t he care if they found him? Bigger question—why didn’t they find him? They found you and Autumn, didn’t they? Real fast.”
She nodded. “They did find us fast, but I don’t understand how they did it.”
“You must have talked to them some about your own family. Did you mention Titusville?”
“I’m sure I didn’t, not directly. When I first met him, married him, I simply let it all go as not being important to me, important to us. I loved him, found him fascinating and funny. But now—it’s obvious I didn’t know him, didn’t know a big part of him at all. Who was the man I married? Believe me, I would really like to know.”
She lowered her face into her hands.
“I’m sorry, Joanna.”
She jerked up and Ethan saw sudden anger and pain radiating off her, like waves of heat laced with poison.
18
HE ROSE. “I’m going to lock us in for the night, Joanna, then we can go on.”
She followed him out to the foyer, watched him lock and dead-bolt the front door, and turn on the alarm.
They checked Autumn. She was curled up asleep on his bed, Mackie in her arms. Ethan covered her with an afghan.
He got them two mugs of tea and motioned her back to the living room.
“You started to tell me about his mother when you first arrived in Bricker’s Bowl.”
She nodded. “His mother was alone when we drove up. At first I thought she was his grandmother, but she wasn’t. Like I told you, Martin was born long after Grace.
“She was very nice, showed me the Backman cemetery, but I knew she was upset that I’d cremated Martin and brought him in an urn, not in a casket as she obviously expected. There were a lot of graves in the cemetery, maybe upwards of forty, maybe more. Must be an old family, I thought, looking out over it. I remember all the graves were set in overlapping triangles, so there were no rows or paths. I asked her about all these triangles, and she said her husband’s grand-parents designed it that way when they’d moved to this spot from the other end of the bowl, and had all the caskets moved here. Then she said the weirdest thing: ‘They knew to keep the old ones with them, because the old ones know how to draw the power from the earth.’ I was so surprised—so creeped out, really—that I didn’t pursue what that meant.
“There were all these oak trees, nearly growing together, some branches pushing down on others, vying for space, and they seemed to huddle over the graves as if trying to protect them, or hide them.
“But then, the next morning, I thought I’d overreacted because it was peaceful and warm, a sun bright overhead—serene, even. It felt right that Martin would end up being buried with his family. His grave was already dug. It hadn’t been there when we’d arrived the day before, so I guessed Blessed and Grace dug it out after Autumn and I went to bed. She told me the space was meant for her, but she could always move, now, couldn’t she? I remember watching her wrap the urn in a lace tablecloth she said her mother had made herself. I watched Blessed climb down a small ladder and lay the urn on a wooden platform at the bottom of the grave. It looked so small in that deep hole. Then she handed Blessed a wood-framed mesh sort of thing that looked like a chicken coop and he set it over the wrapped urn. Grace climbed down and smoothed another white tablecloth over that. Both Blessed and Grace were wearing shiny black suits, and they took turns filling in the grave. It was just the five of us, no one else, not even a minister. Blessed read from an ancient Bible—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—read on and on for quite a while, in a low drone. When I realized no one was going to say a prayer, I did. Then we all stood staring down at Martin’s grave, the raw dirt piled high, all loamy and black. Autumn was clutching my hand, but she wasn’t crying. Her hand was terribly cold. She was so still, never made a sound.