Chapter Ninety-Seven Kiersten
Chapter Ninety-Seven
Kiersten
“It’s happening again,” Margaret muttered.
Kiersten looked up. Concrete fragments, dead leaves, and a yellow piece of insulation fell through the hole in the upper corner of the ceiling.
“Margaret, is this how it happened?” Kiersten asked, pointing to the writing scribbled on the back of the yellowed scorecards.
“Peggy. I’m Peggy,” she said vehemently, pointing a clawlike finger to her chest. “That’s what everyone called me. Until I became Richard’s wife. He said ‘Peggy’ wasn’t dignified enough. Too lower class. Then I had to go by my given name. I’ve been Margaret ever since.”
“What happened to Dottie?” Kiersten forced herself to take a deep breath, trying to stave off the panic rising up through her body, leaching into her mind. “After Dickie locked her in this room?”
“I tried to save her.” Peggy’s hands twisted in her lap. “I reached for the gun. It went off. Missed him. Missed me and the baby too. He was too strong. Too evil. All these years, living with that monster. And then you came along.”
The tiny woman turned to look at Kiersten.
“I didn’t know Dottie kept a diary. And then you came over that day and brought the first one.
I recognized the handwriting the minute I opened it.
From her recipes. Richard recognized it too.
He told Chip and Trey everything. And they redoubled their efforts to drive you away from Beaverbrook Lane.
To get your children into trouble. To make you sell that house and go away. And to get the diaries back.”
“Have you ever told anyone about Dottie? About what Richard did?”
She hung her head. “I was too scared of Richard. He told me I imagined it all. That I’d made it up.
That Dottie died in childbirth. He threatened to have me locked up in a psychiatric hospital if I told anyone.
And my son . . .” The rims of her watery eyes turned red.
“He’s not Richard’s biological son. They don’t know that.
But it doesn’t matter. He grew up to be just like Richard.
And my grandson too. This was my punishment .
. . to watch the son I conceived with Daniel turn out just like the man who made my life a living hell . . . the man who killed Dottie.”
“And this room?” Kiersten asked.
Margaret wiped away the tears that trailed down her wrinkled cheek.
“This room was the price of my silence. I said I wanted to keep it just like it was, for her. And he agreed to that. He and Chip. It was my only demand in fifty-nine years of marriage. They shut the door and locked it, and no one has been in here in sixty years, except me. I came down here sometimes, when Richard was at work. Just to sit and feel close to Dottie, the only one who understood the hell of living with Richard.”
“Is that when you found her writing, on the back of all these scorecards?”
She nodded. “I knew she’d leave something behind. She was so clever. So smart.” She held up the scorecards in her lap. “This proves what he did. This. Plus the diaries.”
“Do you know where the diaries are now?” Kiersten asked.
“I stole them. From Chip.” She patted her black purse. “They’re right here.”
Kiersten didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They had the diaries. They had Dottie’s final clue. But they were locked in an underground bunker with no way to escape.
Except she had something Dottie didn’t have back in 1965.
She reached into her back pocket and pulled out her cell phone. Bile rose in her throat as she squinted at the screen.
No signal.
She dashed around the tiny room with her phone raised in the air, willing the little bars that indicated a strong, or even a weak, signal to appear in the right-hand corner of her screen.
But a nuclear-fallout shelter built to block out radiation could also block a cell phone signal.
She lowered her arm and tossed her useless phone onto the cot.
Despite over half a century of technology and progress, she’d ended up in exactly the same position Dottie had been in sixty years ago.
Right before Dickie killed her.
Gently, she pulled the yellow scorecards from Peggy’s hand and began to read Dottie’s last entry.