Chapter Thirty-Four. Melanie
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MELANIE
I drop to the floor before Iggy does to pick up her belongings, but I freeze when I see the note.
The jarring words—BEN DIDN’T KILL IZZY. I KNOW WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO YOUR SISTER.
—scribbled in such ugly, frantic lettering.
I scoop it up quickly with the rest of Iggy’s things and shove it all back into her bag.
When I look up, she is standing stock-still, face so white, she looks like a ghost.
Poor Iggy. She’s already dealt with enough.
She was already so clearly uncomfortable, out of her depth, caring for her mother like this. Which is normal. I see it all the time. People shy away from the intimacy that comes with caretaking, the rawness of the human body with its wounds and fluids and frailty.
But from the time I was very young, I helped Mama look after Oma Greta. I combed her hair and clipped her toenails when she couldn’t reach any longer. I held her elbow as she walked to the toilet, and I rubbed lotion into her arthritic feet.
I set the purse back on the bedside table, and return to the task at hand, walking Iggy through the care routine. And after Mr. Whitmore has come back into the room, has settled in a seat beside his wife, I pull Iggy out into the hallway.
“Are you all right?” I ask, as gently as I can.
“What you saw…” she says.
I put my hands up. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
But she looks like she wants to tell me, needs to tell someone, like she doesn’t have an ear to listen, a shoulder to lean on. Her eyes flick to the open doorway of her mother’s hospital room. No sooner than I pull it closed, does she say, “I don’t know who sent it to me.”
So I sit down on the bench in the hallway, and I pat the seat beside me. She crumples down onto the seat, knees angled toward me. Her eyes scan nervously up and down the hall before she pulls the note from her purse and hands it to me. “Someone sent it to my parents’ house. And then nothing.”
I run my finger over the jagged cuts of the words, then turn it over. It’s written on the back of a Miss Lone Star Princess invitation, just like the one I have hanging on my fridge at home.
“It’s really fucking with me, Mel.” She rubs the fingertips of one hand into her forehead hard. I wonder if she’s been sleeping. “Everything I’ve thought. All these years…”
I put a hand over hers, as if I can take all her jumbled thoughts and straighten them back into the neat orderly rows I know she likes. “Don’t make yourself sick over this. You don’t know anything yet. You don’t know who sent it or why. You don’t even know if it’s true. Maybe it’s a prank.”
She scoffs. “That would be a pretty sick joke.”
“Maybe it was Ben,” I say, because, honestly, it’s the most obvious conclusion someone could come to.
Iggy’s brows twitch together. She shakes her head.
“Does he know you’re back in town?”
She runs her fingernail over her bottom teeth, nibbling at the corner, looking down at the note, studying the words on the paper like she’s looking at them anew.
I turn it over again to the raised golden font. “Maybe someone just really wants to get you to come to the pageant.”
Behind us a door opens, and Iggy’s eyes fly up to her mother’s door. But it’s only Tom coming out of the room next door. I tuck the note beneath my hands.
Iggy’s back is perfectly straight, her eyes and ears trained on that door. She doesn’t want her father to come out and see this note. I lean in to her, sliding the note back out and holding it between us. “Look, why don’t we take this to my dad?”
“No,” she says quickly, ripping the invitation from my hand. Then softer. “No. It’ll be too upsetting for Mom. Thank God she didn’t see this.” She peers down at the message. “Kennedy Claire has been nagging me to come to the pageant for months.” She lifts her eyes to mine.
“Oh, honey, I don’t know. That would be a really cruel thing to do.”
Iggy chews the inside of her cheek, and the way she’s looking at me is like a dog that’s been caught digging in the trash, like she’s got a guilty conscience. I suspect we’re both thinking, from opposite sides of the same coin, that we know exactly what kind of cruelty Kennedy Claire is capable of.