Chapter 38
Annelise looked at him incredulously, but Rowan thought it was the safest place to start. When she didn’t answer, he asked again, “What do you know about my father’s death?”
“I don’t think you want me to answer that.”
He knew he didn’t. “But I need to know.”
She looked at him, and he could hear the words fine then, even though she didn’t speak it. “I think he committed suicide. I think he walked into the water and let the river carry him away until it did its job.”
“Why do you think that?” Rowan asked, trying to cover up how jolting her simple comment was.
He hated her assessment. He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that his father would never do that—not to himself and not to his family. But he’d asked because he’d started to suspect exactly that.
He’d come here tonight promising himself he’d be open to her answers.
He was grateful she was speaking to him again.
Glad he could come up the front walk and knock on the door or just push it open to find her with her knees pulled up, her head resting on her crossed arms, sleeping as if she were just so tired she wasn’t able to make it into the bedroom or out of the house.
“I think he knew what he did.” Annelise wasn’t looking at him.
Her arms stayed crossed, and she didn’t move.
Her wide eyes stared out the window to the bright moon and the light that streamed in on her.
It caught the blue in her dark, dark hair and showed the tears gathering at the corner of her eyes.
He hated it, but it helped to know she wasn’t immune to what she said.
“What did he do?”
“He fired my mother from her job.”
They knew that part. Why was Annelise mad about the way jobs worked? “He was the manager. I don’t see why that was an issue. She wasn’t coming to work anymore. As I understand it, he gave her every chance.”
He felt it—the moment Annelise flipped from cold to hot. “She wasn’t coming to work anymore because she was sick, and he knew it. Instead of helping her, he fired her.”
“What?” Rowan asked. They all knew Melissa had been ill. “He didn’t fire her because she was sick.”
“The day she was fired,” Annelise snapped back, almost cutting him off, “she downloaded all her records from the plant. She stole them because she wanted them as evidence to sue the plant.”
He felt it then: the knowledge that he didn’t yet know how, but he’d been wrong. Annelise may not have her receipts in hand, but she had them, and he hadn’t expected that. He’d dismissed her proof years ago because she wouldn’t show it to him.
“I looked through them after she died. Her work reports were exemplary. The only issue was her missed days. Every single missed day was accompanied by a doctor’s note. She should never have been fired.”
He blinked. If that was true, what had his father done?
His own knees were pulled up. He’d been leaning back on his hands and now he leaned forward, crossing his arms, mimicking Annelise’s stance.
Their elbows touched, skin to skin, and he could feel the anger from her as if it radiated through the touch into him.
She was a witch, so maybe it did. Maybe she wanted him to feel what she’d dealt with all these years.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” she said.
He had to agree. His father wasn’t here to ask anymore, but Annelise was. He’d ask to see the reports, but he had no doubt what was in them. She wouldn’t lie—not to him.
“Right before she died, we found black mold in the walls.”
“We had that, too,” he offered, thinking maybe there was some common ground here. “My mother knew something was wrong and was just stubborn about it. She tore out the walls one by one until she found it.”
Annelise nodded in response, and he thought maybe she understood, but she replied softly, “She didn’t tell anyone.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
There was a pause—a full, heavy, several heartbeats—before Annelise turned and looked at him. “When do you remember hearing about the black mold in your house?”
Unable to bear the stark stare she gave him, he tipped his head back, arms still crossed over his knees, toes tapping as he tried to think. When had he first heard it? “I don’t remember.”
“I’m guessing it was after you moved. She found it, she had it repaired, and your family sold the house almost immediately.”
“How do you know that?” he asked, though he couldn’t fault the order of events she proposed. He couldn’t say for sure that he’d known about the black mold in the old house before they’d moved away.
“On the one hand, I get it,” Annelise said, but she wasn’t looking at him.
She was staring straight ahead out the window again.
The moon looked like it hung directly over the river, as if it knew it needed to shed light on this conversation.
Rowan understood this conversation would be very important to how they went forward.
He just didn’t know yet which direction it would lead.
“Telling people about the black mold would have devalued the house, even though she had it cleared. I’m guessing she didn’t feel any guilt when she sold the house.”
“Oh, fuck.” He sighed, because he could tell where this was going. “And the people who bought it abandoned it within a few years.”
“Exactly. I don’t think that’s really your mother and father’s fault.
I think they thought everything was clear.
But they didn’t tell the rest of us. They didn’t tell the other families on this row what could happen if the walls weren’t completely stripped after the flood.
” She waved one hand around, showing all the empty studs where he could see through to all the walls of the house.
“And your mom?” he asked, though he didn’t know how he made the words. Everything in him was sinking as if being dragged to hell by some supreme gravity. “Black mold is what made her sick?”
Annelise nodded confidently, though she replied, “As best we could tell. It made us all sick. We did have it repaired, but it was too late for my mom. She still died.”
In that moment, Rowan hated himself for any number of reasons—and there were so many.
He hadn’t asked her these things back then.
He knew how to break through her spells.
He’d done it a number of times. He could have gone to Story.
He could have even gone to Mindy Bormann or any of the other witches in town.
But he hadn’t. He’d been mad at her for being mad at him. What a stupid little shit he’d been.
Annelise lost her mother from the very thing his own mother found, and his mom hadn’t told anyone.
Of course he wouldn’t remember the order of events; he hadn’t suffered from it.
But the families left behind would know when they heard, when they tore out their walls and found it.
He felt his eyes fall closed with the weight of it.
Vienna Velasco protected the value of the house.
She’d chosen what little family wealth they had over protecting her neighbors.
He swallowed hard. No wonder Annelise was mad at him.
He should have seen that. He should have thought some of the pieces through, connected them for himself, instead he’d held his own anger tight in his fist. That made his lashing out all the more deadly.
He’d held onto it for a long time, letting it stay at a soft simmer in the background of his life.
He’d clung tight to the belief that this was her fault and not his.
Yet, there were so many things he could have and should have done.
He swallowed, and it didn’t work. Nothing could get past the knot in the back of his throat. He tried again, and on the third try he realized there was no way to get comfortable with this. He simply said, “I’m so sorry. I’m stupid. I didn’t put it together, and I should have.”
She nodded softly, but she didn’t say It’s okay. I love you. She didn’t say I forgive you. She didn’t even offer an I understand.
He knew she didn’t owe him that. This was on him.
He tried shifting just a little, the knot uncomfortable and heavy in his chest. Maybe he could deal with it later. “Your mom was an ideal employee until she was sick?”
“Pretty much,” Annelise said, “though she was really angry after your father got the promotion.”
“Did she think she deserved it?” Oh, fuck. He heard the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. He shouldn’t have said it that way, and he was scrambling to take it back, but it was too late.
Annelise turned, blue eyes bright in the moonlight as she stared at him hard.
“The documents she downloaded support that, too. About two weeks after it was announced—the first day your father was in the upper-level management position—she came home with a bottle of bourbon. I think she’d gone through half of it sitting at the table. ”
Annelise tipped her head, motioning toward the corner of the room, where their table had once stood.
“My mother wasn’t one to do that kind of drinking.
Not after the way Monica had so poorly dealt with every addiction she could.
She was so mad. She only said it that once—never again.
But she told me it took so long to make the decision about the promotion because the two candidates were so close, and that ultimately they told her they were sorry they weren’t able to give it to her, but Martin had more mouths to feed. ”
The last words were delivered with extra weight.
Rowan couldn’t handle another direct hit, but it landed.
He was surprised he didn’t fall over. In fact, he was too taken aback to react as Annelise was suddenly on her feet, headed into one of the bedrooms, almost stomping.
Whatever she was getting, he didn’t know.
But he was too stunned to make his limbs work, and he shouldn’t have been surprised when the papers fluttered and landed around him from where she’d tossed them.
Old mimeograph sheets, they were obviously work evaluations.
He didn’t have to read through to see that the highest number was circled on every scale.
He didn’t know what his father’s work evaluations looked like, and he wasn’t sure he ever would, but he was willing to bet his marks weren’t that high.
Melissa was often wild and fun and occasionally mercurial at home, but apparently she was an exemplary employee.
And he had to admit his father had likely gotten the job in part because he was a man.
If he hadn’t been feeling so shitty right then, Rowan would have felt her next words like a nail gun pinning him to the floor.
“Your father was a breadwinner, they told her,” Annelise said. “They said he needed it.”
Annelise didn’t sit back down, she was still on her feet. A rage that had been simmering for almost fifteen years was now clearly boiling up as he sat among the scattered old papers.
“She was the breadwinner here. I’m sorry she didn’t keep pumping out kids like your damn family, but it didn’t make her less of a breadwinner. It didn’t make us depend on her less—or her income.”
There was nothing he could say. He waited for her to turn and stomp away, but he was the one taking up space inside of her house.
Her chest heaved with her anger. He hated what he’d learned, but all he could think was he was glad that she was finally getting it out, that someone else could carry it instead of her.
Trying to think of the right thing to say, he found there was nothing that could make any of this right.
But it was Annelise, still on her feet, still towering over him, her breath soughing in and out of her lungs, who finally told him, “I don’t know if everything was okay between our families before the flood—the first flood—”
And wasn’t that just another kick? That this tragedy hadn’t happened to her only just the once?
“But afterward, your parents took every opportunity they could. And they took it when it was on the backs of mine.” She had tried to tell him this over and over fifteen years ago.
“Why didn’t you show me this then?”
“I told you! I couldn’t show you. This was her court case. Her evidence. And she stole it. I couldn’t just flash it around the Hollow. I’m only showing you now because she’s dead! But I told you I’d seen proof, and you never believed me.”
He felt his eyes fall closed. Tears leaked from the corners as his lids squeezed tight. He’d been walking through life with blind faith in his parents, with confidence that it was Annelise who was in the wrong.
He was a lawyer. The information that Monica hadn’t gotten the promotion because Martin had mouths to feed was hearsay.
But the fact that she was an exemplary employee who deserved the promotion was in print, scattered around him on faded pink and yellow pages.
Right next to every bit of info that she shouldn’t have been fired for her illness.
He couldn’t remember for sure if he’d learned about the black mold before the family moved, but he understood: if this was a court case, Annelise had won it. The jury wouldn’t need to deliberate.
He was getting ready to try one more time to whisper the too-late and too-little I’m so sorry into the night around them, but Annelise walked back toward him, stepping on the pages as if they were nothing to her anymore.
Sitting down next to him again, she crossed her arms and stared out into the moonlight, and her next words just about cut him open.