Chapter 19
The call came on a Thursday, while Reno was flat on his back under the Mustang with grease up to his elbows and losing his argument with an oil-pan bolt.
He fished his phone out with a relative clean rag and squinted at a number he didn’t know. Apple Pie Creek exchange. He almost let it ring through to voicemail. Three weeks of Tara Marchand’s lawyer calling him non-stop to try to negotiate a deal had him bracing for a fight every time it rang.
“Mr. Steele.” A man’s voice spoke, careful and quiet. “This is George Hughes from the Apple Pie Creek Savings ’N’ Loan.”
Reno went very still under four thousand pounds of Ford.
He’d set up an account at that bank when it became clear he was going to be staying in the area for a while.
He’d also set up a standing transfer, first of every month, routed anonymously to the bank account of the woman he’d made a widow.
George Hughes had been the bank officer who ultimately approved the anonymous transfers.
Reno’d shaken the man’s hand and asked him never to call unless the building was on fire.
The building was, apparently, on fire.
“Mr. Hughes,” Reno said cautiously.
The banker said, “A woman came in yesterday afternoon. She had her own bank’s paperwork, all of it in order, tracing where her monthly deposit originates.
” A pause. “She got as far as us. She can’t get past us because there’s nothing past us to get to.
You made sure of that. But she sat in my office for an hour and she was .
. .” The man hunted for the word. “. . . determined.”
“Did you tell her anything?”
“Not a thing. I told her our customers’ affairs are private and by law I couldn’t help her.
” Another pause. “Then I watched her cry in a rental car in my parking lot, Mr. Steele. She didn’t tell me anything about her personal circumstances, but I gather that finding you is extremely important to her.
You struck me as a decent man, so I’m asking you to reconsider remaining anonymous to this woman. ”
Reno stared up at the underside of the car.
“She left a letter,” Hughes continued. “Sealed. Addressed to, and I quote, ‘The person who has been taking care of us.’ She asked me to send it on, if there was anyone to send it to. I told her I’d see what I could do, which committed me to nothing.
I have it in my drawer.” He cleared his throat. “What do you want me to do with it?”
The shop’s air compressor kicked on in the back bay. A logging truck downshifted loudly on Main Street and rumbled past. Across the street Grace was almost certainly braiding bread.
“Hold the letter for me,” Reno said. “Don’t mail it. I’ll call you back.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Hughes said, which was as close as he came in the call to telling Reno to quit being a jerk and tell the poor, crying widow who her benefactor was. “My personal cell phone number is on the card I gave you if you need to reach me after bank hours.”
Reno lay there under the Mustang for a long while not fixing anything at all.
A few weeks ago he would’ve led up to it gently and broken the news into little bits that wouldn’t overwhelm Grace’s delicate sensibilities.
He would’ve planned a whole approach to ease her into it.
But now he knew her to be strong enough to hear anything he had to say.
And, in fact, she preferred to get news without any tiptoeing around.
And so, when she came back from tucking Lily into bed that evening, and joined him at the sink to finish the last dishes, he stood there with a dish towel in his hands and said,” I have some news.”
She looked up questioningly, her hands still in the soapy water.
“Susannah Perry traced the money to the bank in Apple Pie Creek.”
Grace rinsed the suds off her hands, turned the water off, and faced him.
“She left a letter,” he said. “The bank’s holding it. She wants to meet whoever’s been sending her the money.” He folded the towel in half, then in half again. “He promised he won’t tell her it’s me, but he did call me to ask what I want him to do.”
“What do you want him to do?”
“Burn it,” he said before he’d decided to say it. The truth came out ahead of the lawyer answer, the way it had been doing ever since this woman taught him there was no profit in arguing with the truth.
“I want him to burn it and forget the woman’s face and let her go on never knowing. She doesn’t need to look at the man who . . .” His throat closed. He worked it open. “She doesn’t need me reminding her of the worst day of her life.”
Grace dried her hands on the towel hanging off the oven door and came back to stand right front of him.
She tipped her head back to meet his gaze, and he was reminded yet again of how small she was in physical stature.
Everything else about her was so big in his mind’s eye: her heart, her kindness, her toughness.
“Reno,” she said. “Do you remember what I told you the night you told me about her?”
He remembered every word. He’d taken them out and turned them over more nights than he’d admit. “You told me you wouldn’t be the one to forgive me.”
“I told you it wasn’t mine to give.” Her voice was gentle and it did not give an inch. “I told you Susannah Perry was the one who got to decide whether to forgive you or not.” A pause. “I also told you she couldn’t make that choice because she didn’t know who you were.”
She reached up and laid her hand flat against his chest, over the spot where a flour handprint had been once. “Now she’s trying to find out who you are, and you want to take the choice away from her.”
“I’m trying to spare her.”
“You’re trying to spare yourself.” She said it without any heat, which made it worse. “Which I understand. I would want to, as well. But you don’t get to decide for her that she’s too fragile to hear it.” She added gently, “You hate it when people decide that about me.”
The problem with being married, he thought distantly, to a woman this honest, was going to be that he would never once get away with anything.
“She might not have come to forgive me,” he said. “She might have come to spit in my face.”
“Then she gets to do that, too.” Grace’s hand was still on his chest. “Either way, it’s hers. You sent that money for three years so she could feed her kids. The least you can do now is let her have the rest of what’s hers, even if the rest of it is a hard thing she says to your face.”
He looked down at her for a long time. The accusing voice that used to live behind his ribs had been quiet for days now, and he desperately hoped it had packed up and gone for good.
But he understood, standing here, that he was wrong. The voice might be gone. But in its place was something he’d never let himself look at directly: a flat, settled certainty that he could love Grace, and cut Lily’s eggs into hearts, and seal the dock, and still not get to keep any of it.
Not really. Not for good. Because a man who’d done what he’d done didn’t get to live in a yellow cottage on a lake with a great family and be happy.
He hadn’t known it was inside him until Grace put her hand on his chest and asked him to be brave.
“Call the bank,” she said. “Tell him to give her your name. Let her come here. I’ll make coffee, and you’ll sit in your own home and hear whatever she came to say.”
His own home? Grace was offering to share her home with him? It sounded as if she’d already made that decision and it was a done deal in her mind.
The rest of what she’d said registered a moment later, and terror ripped through him. “You’ll be here?”
“I will,” Grace said. “I’m not going to hover. But I buried a good man and you helped bury a bad one. I think the two of us might be the only people in the world who can fully understand what she’s carrying in her heart.”
She went up on her toes and kissed him, brief and certain. “You’re not doing this alone. You don’t have to do anything alone anymore. But you keep forgetting that.”
“What if she rips my head off? Accuses me of destroying her family or worse?” he asked hoarsely.
“What if she does? She’s entitled to feel anger at what happened to her. If you are the physical symbol of that to her, so be it.” She stared at him for a moment. “If you could go back in time and were asked to investigate and prosecute her husband again, would you still do it?”
“Absolutely. He stole tens of millions of dollars from the employees and customers of the shipping company. He singlehandedly bankrupted the company’s pension fund and left hundreds of retired longshoremen without a cent to live on. What he did was reprehensible.”
“Then why are you wallowing in all this guilt and regret?”
“I shouldn’t have told him to his face what I thought of him. I drove him to suicide.”
“You don’t know that. Nobody will ever know what truly drove him to take his own life. That’s between him and his Maker. So why are you trying to take all the credit for it?”
He frowned at that. “We already established that you can’t forgive me. And now you’re telling me I can’t blame, or by extension, forgive myself for his death either?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, What you can do is stop insisting that what he did with his life is your responsibility. Last time I checked, every single person is ultimately responsible for how they live their own life. We all make our own choices, good and bad, for ourselves.”
He stared at her for long seconds while his legal mind finished her argument for her.
He said slowly, “So you’re saying that he chose to steal all that money, knowing what the consequences of getting caught would be.
When those consequences came his way, he chose to kill himself rather than face them.
And my only part in that was being the person who caught him and landed the consequences on him? ”
She smiled in triumph. “Exactly!”
He frowned not convinced, even though the logic was unassailable.