“From a boy?” Sophia asked, touching one of the flowers. The petals fell, pooling in a sad little pile next to the white vase.
“Nobody special,” Jude said, grabbing the two cups of tea she’d made and carrying them to the sofa. She thought back to that morning in the hospital and cringed.
“You’re so grown up,” Sophia said, touching Jude’s jaw and moving her soft hands up to Jude’s short dark hair. “And so beautiful.”
Jude forced a smile, never entirely comfortable with such open compliments, and tried not to stare at the bones jutting from her mother’s face, at the crude bruise near her right temple, at the way her hands shook when she lifted her mug of tea.
“Can we talk about what happened, Mom? Do you need to rest first?”
Sophia smiled and shook her head.
“I’ve been asleep for ten years. There’s nothing I want more than to be wide awake with you right now. Yes. We both need to talk, there’s so much to say.” Sophia waved her hand at the air as if all the unanswered questions floated there between them.
“Did you and Daddy plan to fake your death?” Jude asked, thinking back to that long-ago summer, the strangeness of it all, joy followed by heartache.
Sophia nodded, burying her hands in the quilt on Jude’s couch.
“It was your grandmother’s idea. After I ran into Margaret Bell at the grocery store, we knew she’d be searching for me. Your daddy wanted to run, but Ruth said if we faked my death it would appease the Bell’s and if we ran, they might hire someone to find me. I would go away for one week and you kids would believe I had died. I didn’t want to, I knew it was wrong, and that it would be horrible for you, my children.”
“It was hard,” Jude admitted, trying not to examine the memory too closely.
“I panicked, we panicked. We had so much to lose, you three kids, our marriage, this beautiful life. Your father had a lot of money. We could easily disappear, but we didn’t want to live in fear of them looking for me.”
“But you didn’t do it, Mom! Why should you have to run from a crime you didn’t commit?”
Sophia’s face looked drawn as she spoke.
“Life isn’t always fair. They wanted me for Rosemary’s murder. A whole town was against me. If I faced them, who knows what they would have done, how they would have destroyed us. Maybe I should have. I’ve never quite known what the right decision was. But I made the choice, your dad and I, and once it was made, it felt like a big rock rolling down a hill, it just kept picking up speed. I tried to back out the morning Ruth came to pick me up. She was so nice to me. She’d never been nice. She gave me a cup of tea and I just… fell asleep.”
“She drugged you?” Jude asked, staring at her mom, incredulous.
Sophia shrugged
“I don’t know. When I woke up I was in a little room and there was a man in a chair watching me. He was a doctor, Dr. Kaiser.”
“How could they admit you against your will?”
“Asylums are different places. A lot goes on that no one is aware of. Dr. Kaiser took ownership of me that very first day. I received one visit during my time in the hospital from your grandmother. She said that Jack had moved on, he wanted me locked away. He was marrying someone else. The Bell’s were satisfied that a murderer had been put away.” Sophia started to cry, and Jude took her hands staring at her mother in horror.
“That was a lie. She lied to you,” Jude seethed.
“I knew that. I knew Jack would never abandon me. She betrayed him too, her only son. That’s how much Ruth hated me.”
“She’s a witch,” Jude snapped, trying to take a drink of her tea, but too enraged to lift the cup without throwing it against the wall.
“I see that temper of yours is still alive and well.” Sophia smiled, leaning towards Jude and taking her face in her hands. “Don’t let hatred make your choices, Jude. It was a terrible thing that Ruth did, but she had her reasons. We all have our reasons. Now tell me, when did your father die?”
Jude studied her mother’s face, feeling the rage giving way to grief. Her voice trembled when she spoke.
“Three weeks after you… were taken. He was in the barn at Gram’s and fell.”
Sophia nodded pursing her lips.
“Did he suffer?”
“I don’t think so. But they never told us much. You had died in an accident and then so did he. I suspected something before he died, though. I saw Daddy smiling the morning of the wake at Gram’s. Like he had a wonderful secret he couldn’t wait to share with us. I was so lost in my sadness, I never thought to ask him later.”
“I can’t imagine what it was like for him,” Sophia murmured. “I doubt he knew where I was, but he couldn’t exactly shout it from the rooftops. We’d faked my death, after all.”
“How did you fake your death? Why would anyone believe you hadn’t just run away?”
“Your Grandmother had connections. She paid a handful of people off. A policeman said he found the body, a coroner made up an autopsy. We had it all planned, but then…”
“She double crossed you.”
“Yes.”
“Why? I mean what did she gain?” Jude asked, trying to understand how her grandmother could be so cruel.
“Ruth never wanted me in her home. Your grandpa, Andrew, brought me there. He’d grown up with my daddy and I believe there was a debt between them. I never knew what it was, but when Rosemary was murdered, and the town pointed at me, my mama called Andrew and asked for a favor. He took me in the same night that I found Rosemary’s body. I never saw my mother again.”
Jude grimaced and shook her head.
“You were a kid, Mom. They couldn’t have put you away for long, a detention center for a couple of years at the most,” Jude said, exasperated, but also realizing that if her mother hadn’t run, Jude would never have existed at all.
“I was thirteen-years-old, Judy. My daddy had died the previous autumn, my mama was trying to keep it together. Jack agreed later that I should have stayed and faced it. He wanted to meet my family, but I couldn’t go back. I was ashamed and… I don’t know. I started to wonder if maybe they thought I did it too. Maybe they wanted me gone.”
“Mom,” Jude sighed and curled up to her mother, such a foreign feeling as a woman who rarely got close to anyone. Her mother, other than Peter, had been the only person Jude ever felt that she could snuggle into, find solace with.
Sophia petted her hair and kissed the top of her head.
Jude started to open her mouth and tell her mother it wasn’t true. She knew, she had spoken with Grimmel, Sophia’s family had never doubted her innocence, but a knock at the door interrupted her.
The knocking sounded again, more insistent.
“Stay in my room, Mom,” Jude whispered, pushing Sophia towards her room.
Sophia stared at the door but nodded and hurried from the room.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Jude yelled. “Don’t dent my door or you can pay for it.”
She whipped the door open, angrily tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
Damien stood on her doorstep, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, a twist of blond hair falling across his forehead. Jude felt a surge in her chest at the sight of him, followed immediately by a burst of bright red fury that caused her to slam the door in his face just as he opened his mouth. She stared at the door, fuming, her fists balled at her sides.
It took the better part of a minute and then he spoke.
“I know you’re angry, Jude. I deserved that, believe me, I know I did, but I have to talk to you. It’s urgent.”
Gram had moved from his rug to Jude’s legs and he stood obediently beside her, offering a little whine. In a moment he would start to paw at the door.