Chapter 19
Sunny watched the town’s shock and pain move through it in the wordless currency Cobbler Cove spoke in the loudest. Flowers appeared at the base of the fire station’s memorial plaque, first a few, then a drift of them, then a huge blanket of them in mason jars and feed-store buckets to hold them all.
The diner went quiet for two days. Not empty—it was fuller than ever—but quiet.
People ate together because being alone with their feelings was worse.
And out at the Shoemacher ranch with the iron arch and missing barn, seven grown children sharing the most hated name in Montana holed up in their father’s house with his crime sitting on the porch like a stray dog that wouldn’t leave.
Cobbler Cove didn’t know what to do with them. So, mostly, it did nothing, which to a grieving family looked exactly like hatred and felt worse.
Sunny saw it up close on Thursday, in the diner, when one of the Shoemacher daughters came in, the tall one with Lucas’s height and a stranger’s careful posture, and asked Rose, quietly, for two coffees and whatever pie could travel.
The customers didn’t say anything. The place simply stopped. Forks went down. Silence filled the place wall to wall. The daughter set a ten dollar bill on the counter, said never mind, thank you, and walked out with her spine very straight.
Rose boxed the pie and poured the coffees anyway, and followed her out the door.
Through the front window the whole diner watched its owner, whose husband had been the fire chief, whose son had grown up without a father because of that woman’s father, stand on the sidewalk in the hot sun and put the bag into Lucas Shoemacher’s daughter’s hands.
They watched Rose keep hold of those hands a moment extra and say something nobody inside could hear.
The daughter cried right there in the middle of Main Street, and Rose stood with her until she collected herself enough to nod, get in her car, and drive away.
When Rose came back in, she picked up the coffee pot and resumed her rounds, and her face invited exactly no comment. The customers found their forks. But something had been shown to the whole room, the way Rose could show a thing from a stage, and nobody knew quite what to do with it.
The widows met that night at the diner after it closed.
Rose had pushed two tables together and they sat down around it.
Sunny, whom Grace had insisted come tonight, took a chair at the end of the table, pulled back a foot or so, half in and half out of their midst, the place she’d been careful to keep all summer.
The question on the table was Saturday’s funeral.
The family had announced nothing, asked for nothing, and expected less.
Word was the burial would be private, on the hill behind the ranch house, with the pastor and whoever came.
The question under discussion was whether the widows of the Shoemacher fire would come.
The anger got its say first because these were honest women.
“He stood with us to commemorate their death every August,” Tessa said, her voice so flat Sunny knew she must be holding back a powerful wave of fury. “I stood next to that man with a candle. He watched Makayla put flowers under her daddy’s name on the plaque, and he knew he killed her father.”
“He let this whole town suspect one another for five years,” Molly said. “He even let them suspect Bonnie.”
Bonnie turned her coffee cup a slow quarter-turn. She had the brass desk clock from the mayor’s office sitting on her kitchen table now, and a letter she had read once and put away. She had yet to tell anyone but Grayson what was in it, and he wasn’t talking, either.
“I knew Lucas Shoemacher better than most folks in this town,” she said slowly.
“The man who wrote the letter Lincoln read out is the only version of him that ever told me the whole truth about anything. I can’t hate him for doing the one honest thing he ever did and writing that letter to all of us.
The rest of him, I’ll hate as long as I please. ”
The women nodded their understanding of her point of view.
Bonnie looked around the table grimly. “Regardless of what the rest of you decide, I’m going Saturday.”
“For him?” Tessa asked, not unkindly.
“No!” Bonnie exclaimed. “I don’t know if I’ll spit on his grave or not, but I want to see with my own eyes that Lucas Shoemacher has been laid six feet under.”
She paused and took a deep breath, as if to steady herself.
“I’m the mayor now. Like it or not, I have to set an example for the town. And I need to be there for his children. I called every one of them to tell them he was dying. I heard the pain in every single one of their voices.”
Sunny understood more clearly now how much it was costing Bonnie to keep her voice level like that.
Bonnie continued, “They buried their father years ago, when he drove them away from Cobbler Cove. Saturday, they have to do it again, and this time they’ll be standing in front of a town that hates their very name for a crime they just found out about, same as us.
No place on earth is colder than that hill is going to be. ”
Jenna sat back, her hands wrapped around her mug. Of all of them she said the least at these meetings but was listened to the hardest when she did.
She said now in her quiet, gentle way, “Sully asked me last night what I wanted out of all this. It took me till just now to figure that out.”
She paused, looking around the table at each one of them in turn.
Then she said slowly and clearly, “I want it over. Five years that fire has run my life. Then I find out this week my life’s really been run by Lucas Shoemacher’s guilty conscience this whole time.
Well, he’s dead. The case is closed. The only thing left still burning is whatever fuel we keep feeding the fire. ”
She set the mug down. “Hating a dead man is a job with no completion date. I’m giving my notice and quitting that particular job. I’ve got a wedding to go to in a week, and I don’t plan to let Lucas Shoemacher run or ruin one more day of my life.”
Quiet went around the table. And into it, before she could talk herself out of it, Sunny spoke up. “I know what’s going to be on that hill Saturday. I’m the only one here who does.”
Eight faces turned to her. The half-in, half-out chair at the end of the table was suddenly the center of attention, and there was no going back. She realized with a start, her heart slamming, that she didn’t want to go back. She wanted to do this.
“My husband’s name was Winston Perry,” she said. “He was the chief financial officer of a major international shipping company in California.”
Grace, who was sitting to her right, and one of only three people this side of the Rockies who knew what came next, reached out to give her hand a quick squeeze.
Sunny smiled briefly at Grace then looked up at the others. “Over the course of a decade, Winston stole tens of millions of dollars from his company and wrecked the pension funds of hundreds of people who trusted him.”
The diner was so quiet she could’ve heard a pin drop.
“I never had the slightest idea what he was doing. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.
Anyway, when he was caught and convicted, he killed himself rather than go to jail and face what he’d done.
It was all over the news. My children’s father was a famous thief and a coward, and I changed their names to my maiden name so they could go to a playground without wearing his name. ”
Her voice remained steady, which astonished her. Maybe she was readier to be done with secrets for good than she’d realized.
She continued, “I’ve stood exactly where the seven Shoemachers will be standing. I’ve been the family at the grave of a man whose name I shared and who did a terrible thing.”
The entire group exhaled audibly.
Sunny said with conviction, “I can tell you exactly what the Shoemacher children need because nobody gave it to me. They need one person, just one, to look them in the eye, in public, and treat them like the dead man’s victims instead of his accomplices.”
She took a breath that shook on the way down into her lungs.
“This town gave me that grace. For a while, I thought if you all knew about Winston, you would withdraw your kindness and acceptance of me and my kids. But after living here the better part of the summer, I don’t think that’s what any of you would do. ”
The women spoke all at once, their voices on top of one another, assuring her they would never hold her responsible for what her husband had done without her knowledge.
When they quieted, she looked around the table at each one of them in turn the way Jenna had.
“You’re the reason I know it can be done.
So, yes. I’m going Saturday, if you’ll have me on that hill with you.
And I plan to look each one of Lucas Shoemacher’s children in the eye and see a victim of their father and not an accomplice. ”
For a moment nobody said anything. The old reflex sat up in her and braced for the condemnation. She got ready to see the flinch, the recalculation, the careful half-step back from her.
Tessa, who was possibly the angriest of them all, reached over from her left and took her hand.
Rose looked at her the way she would at a fellow actor who’d just laid down a performance laced through with undeniable truth.
The others responded with varying degrees of thoughtfulness and their own sets of emotions.
Jenna said practically, in the same voice she’d given her notice in, “Honey, move your chair in closer to the table. You’ve been one of us since you first got here. We were just waiting on you to notice.”
Sunny scooted her chair in. It traveled about twelve inches. It was the longest distance she’d crossed in three years.
Saturday came in hot and still with thunderheads piling up over the western end of the valley. The hill behind the Shoemacher ranch house was brown and baking in the sun.