“Hey, I’m sorry,” Clayton said. “Just trying to lighten the mood. I know this is a big deal.”
Jude offered him a smile but couldn’t say more. They’d come into the yard, nearly as overgrown as the driveway with little bursts of wildflowers. A wave of nostalgia swept over her. Bonfires in the backyard, the tree house their father built still suspended-worse for the wear- from a big oak tree overlooking the garden, the porch swing hanging now by a single cable - its white paint chipped and flaked away. Jude stopped and caught her breath feeling dizzy and sad and warm all over.
Clayton picked his way to the porch, touching a rail and shaking it. It didn’t wobble, and he gave her a thumbs up. He walked to the front door and tried the doorknob.
“Locked,” he told her.
Jude nodded and blinked at the house. It was closed up - curtains drawn - the air of abandonment hanging unforgiveable. She walked to the back of the house, her eyes eating the details, savoring them, almost choking in her desperation to take it all in. The rock path Peter and her father had made to the back door, digging fat stones out of the forest for weeks, the remnants of a little scarecrow fashioned from straw bales and her dad’s old clothes because the deer kept eating their mother’s vegetables, memories of Hattie as a baby lying on a blanket in the yard cooing at the birds and the bugs, at their mother’s smiling face. Later memories of Hattie as a toddler and then a little girl, dreamy-eyed, always wandering outside with bare feet and that long blonde hair caught with twigs and leaves.
She felt Peter in the familiar trees they’d climbed a million times, in the steep slope of the roof they slid down sneaking out at night, in the second-floor window that had been the play room, where they whiled away afternoons reading, drawing, teasing each other about this girl or that boy at school.
“Ugh,” she pressed her face into her hands, not used to the memories or the emotion that accompanied them. She felt like an alien inhabiting her body and realized why she’d always stuffed the feelings down. How did people function with so much going on, all the thoughts and feelings struggling to be at the forefront?
“Are you okay?” Clayton startled her.
She nodded.
“Yep, fine.” She swallowed a lump of anguish. “There was a key back here. We’ll look for that.”
She lifted the heavy pot near the back door, the flowers long dead and gone, but only an outline of a key lay beneath it.
Clayton leaned down and touched his finger to the clean space where the key had been and then smudged the surrounding rust.
“If they took this key a decade ago, this clean spot would not be here,” he murmured.
Jude stared at it.
“What do you mean?”
“I think someone recently found the key,” he murmured, and his eyes were wide behind his glasses.
Jude moved to the door and tried the knob, it turned, and the door swung in. They stood staring into the kitchen, afternoon sun slanting across the familiar wood floor. A flurry of dirty footprints coated the kitchen floor.
Clayton stepped in, squatted and touched a smudge of dirt.
“It’s wet,” he said. “Fresh.”
Sophia
Sophia paused at the edge of the woods and stared, disappointed at what was once a thriving pumpkin path. In its place stood a perfectly coiffed yard, green and sparkling. The rows of orange that had once delighted her children had been buried with the years and their corpses likely offered nourishing soil for the useless grass that replaced them.
She sat on a stump and stared into the yard and then at the house beyond. In her time it had been white, but the new owners had painted it violet with dark purple trim. It looked like a house from Alice in Wonderland, one of Hattie’s favorite stories as a child. Sophia wondered who live inside now, surely not the Harrison’s with their grumpy little dog Seymour who barked ferociously at Jack but loved Sophia and the kids.
“It’s all gone,” Sophia whispered wondering if she reminded herself enough it would become real. She kept waiting to step back in time to her teenage children, her eight-year-old daughter and her doting husband. Instead, she was like Rip Van Winkle who climbed into the forest and fell asleep for one-hundred years.
She had been asleep for much of the decade that had passed, or unconscious anyway - tied down in dark stifling rooms as medicine and poison were poured into her. She had likely been conscious for much of it, but the trauma of the experiences obliterated her memory of the events. Kaiser had wanted that. He didn’t want her to remember because she might tell the orderlies or other patients. If she had no recollection, who could she tell? She simply sounded like another mad woman spouting vague conspiracies committed against her.
“I wonder what day it is?” she said to no one. The house before her was silent and still and she suspected the owners were gone, at work or perhaps on vacation. If she broke into their house, there would surely be a calendar, a working television or radio. She’d slip in and out in two minutes.
“A phone,” she muttered as an afterthought. She remembered the phone number of her own home just a few acres away, long ago disconnected, but Gram Ruth’s phone would still be turned on. One of the kids might answer and then…
Sophia’s hands shook as she tried the doorknob at the back of the house, not because she was breaking and entering, but at the thought of calling the Porter Estate. What if Gram herself answered? What could she possibly say?
Though the exterior of the Harrison’s home had transformed the interior was surprisingly similar with new paint and furniture. Gretchen Harrison always had a bowl of the season’s fruit in the center of her kitchen table. This household used the table for paperwork rather than eating, an array of mail and open letters lay strewn about. On the floor Sophia saw a tangle of tennis shoes and a raggedy stuffed bear. Hanging on the opposite wall, Sophia spotted the telephone. She moved toward it, repeating the phone number under her breath.
“Stop right there!” a voice said, and Sophia looked up into the barrel of a shotgun.
Chapter 35
September 20, 1965
Jude
Clayton walked outside while Jude tore through the house. She ran up the stairs and flung open doors, expecting to find her mother behind every one, but each room lay empty. In her parent’s bedroom, Jude found the state-issued clothes on the top of the clothes hamper. She lifted them, touching the fabric like perhaps her mother had gotten lost inside.
“She’s alive, and she was here,” Jude whispered.
Jude ran back down the stairs, the clothes clutched in her hand, and found Clayton halfway across the yard.
“There are fresh tracks in this grass Jude. Look.” He pointed at the flattened grass, some of it already beginning to spring back up.
Jude held up the clothes, not speaking a word, and Clayton raised his eyebrows and then grinned.
“We’ve got her,” he said.
They followed the grass, Jude allowing Clayton to lead, but practically stepping on his heels. In the woods, they lost the tracks, but Jude followed her instincts moving ahead. The Harrisons were their only close neighbors and her mother had been close with Gretchen. She must have gone to them for help. From the woods, Jude watched for the familiar fat orange pumpkins that signaled the edge of the Harrison’s property, but a huge expanse of lawn stared back at her. The house looked different too, a strange purple color that reminded Jude of grape bubble gum.