Chapter 77 2025
I remember every detail. It was three days after Thanksgiving, and Ivy and I were back home at Kendall House.
A little after ten, my phone buzzed with an alert that the eagle cam had been activated.
I’d downloaded the link to the feed Thanksgiving Day after Meryl and I had seen Bart on her laptop.
As Profe used to say, “Knowledge is power. The more you know, the more you can control your destiny.” And I felt I needed as much knowledge as possible to figure out my next move.
I hadn’t told Meryl I’d done it. She was already wound tight about the situation, and I didn’t want to add to it by letting her know how concerned I was.
My prevailing thought was I would send Ivy to Germany immediately to get her out of harm’s way.
I already knew Ivy was eventually going to live with Esma and Heinrich.
My hope had been to let her finish out the school year and to allow me as much time as possible with her before I got so sick that I could no longer look after her.
I was even considering asking Esma and Heinrich to legally adopt Ivy so her last name would no longer be Kendall.
That’s how terrified I was of Bart and his seemingly never-ending quest for vengeance against our family.
I carried the phone to the kitchen, away from Ivy, who was watching cartoons in the living room.
I fully expected to see Bart walking toward the water’s edge as he had the previous three mornings.
On both Friday and Saturday, he’d followed the same routine as he had on Thanksgiving Day.
He surveyed the shoreline before climbing the knoll and disappearing out of sight, presumably to look at Meryl’s house, hoping to intimidate me.
But instead of seeing Bart, I watched on the small screen as Meryl stiffly walked down the hill. She was wearing her long maroon parka, the white knit hat Ivy had given her for her birthday, and black gloves.
The Parkinson’s affected her left side more than her right, and with every second step, my breath caught, certain she was going to fall.
Yet miraculously, the athlete in her still alive, she managed to make it to the inlet.
She staggered to the flat rock and awkwardly lowered herself down.
Even on the small screen, I could see the toll the effort had taken, her body trembling and her shoulders heaving with her breaths.
Tears welled as I watched, moved by the sheer heroics of it and the inanity. I wanted to crawl inside my phone and scream at her. What did she hope to accomplish? Did she think she would simply talk to Bart and tell him to stop bothering us and that he would listen?
She shouldn’t have been there, at the inlet, or even in Moosewood.
Each year, the morning after Thanksgiving, she went to Chicago to shop, and Elwood and the dogs went to Florida to visit his kids.
Over our Thanksgiving dinner, she’d prattled on and on about what fashions were in and what was out. She lied. Brilliantly.
Her hands were shoved deep in her pockets, and her chin was tucked into the collar of her coat. Around her, the snow was coming down hard, a veil of white that made her gossamer on the screen. Cold exasperated her symptoms, and I could only imagine how frigid it was beside the pond.
Leave! I cried silently.
As if hearing me, she lifted her head, but it was not me who had drawn her attention.
Awkwardly, I watched her push to her feet on the rock as Bart’s left shoulder came into view. She needed to contort her body to manage it and nearly stumbled backward before finding her balance. It was as she was waving her arms to save herself that I saw the gun—small, silver, and toylike.
I cried out, then slammed my mouth around the sound, hoping Ivy hadn’t heard.
The eagle nest cut off my view of the upper part of her body, so all I was able to see was her shoulders down.
She set her feet and lifted the gun with both hands.
It was clear she knew what she was doing.
She’d told me once her dad had been a policeman and that he used to take her to the shooting range.
She said she was an excellent shot, and I believed it. Everything Meryl did, she did well.
Bart’s left gloved hand lifted into view, raised beside his head as if Meryl had said, “Hands in the air,” though I couldn’t imagine her saying that.
Meryl’s arms trembled, and I remember thinking how much strength it must have taken for her to hold the gun out like that, knowing how much the Parkinson’s had weakened her.
Bart took a step, making it so I could see more of his back and the left side of his head. He had no hat, and snow dusted his dark hair.
His head bobbed, so I knew he was saying something.
Meryl remained stone-still except for the misfiring of her muscles that causes her body to twitch.
Bart took another step, and with no warning at all, she fired, her body jerking with the bright flash.
The recoil nearly sent her off the rock. She recovered at the exact moment Bart dropped out of sight, followed half a second later by him falling back into view, his shoulders and head landing face down in the snow.
“Mom?”
I slammed the phone down on the kitchen counter and turned to see Ivy behind me.
“Hey, Chicken,” I said, my voice pitched unnaturally high.
“What you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said.
She was in her pajamas, and her hair was wild and unbrushed. She tilted her head, and her mouth skewed to the side, and for a horrified second, I wondered how long she’d been standing there and what she might have seen. But then she said simply, “Can we make cookies?”
My heart unclenched, and I managed to say brightly, “How about I call Aunt Astur and see if she wants to make holiday cookies with you?”
She smiled wide, the gap from where she’d recently lost her two front teeth gaping.
“Go get ready,” I said, my heart pounding and my mind spinning wildly.
She scurried off, and I picked up my phone again.
Meryl was gone, and the image was still except for the falling snow dusting Bart’s body.
I looked at the flat rock and knew Meryl had chosen to stand there for a reason.
She’d shot him from the exact spot Bart had left Nick’s dead body all those years ago.
My heart ached with love and hurt as I continued to watch the silent scene, then the camera switched off and the screen went dark.
“Ready,” Ivy said.
I turned to see her in the elf outfit we’d bought the week before, red-and-white striped leggings and a sparkly green dress.
Half an hour later, she was skipping through the door of Blue House, and I was on my way to Moosewood.
I arrived at Meryl’s to find no trace she’d been there except faint boot prints in the snow that led from the pond to her backyard, evidence the weather would erase within the hour.
Snow and hail whipped around me as I followed the trail to the inlet. Bart’s body was buried in several inches of powder when I reached it.
I turned him over, entirely unprepared for how it would affect me.
His eyes were open, and a pool of blood stained the ground where he’d been lying, a great deal of it.
But what destroyed me was his expression.
His face, relaxed in death, looked so unlike the man and boy I’d feared that, for a second, I wondered if it was him.
His jaw had softened, and his brow was smooth and unworried under his soft, dark hair.
It filled me with deep, profound sadness, wondering who he might have been had my grandfather not done what he did.
“We are all born good until life takes its toll,” Boodo once told me.
Fighting back my emotions, I set about the grisly task I’d gone there for.
I unbuttoned his coat—one, two, three, four.
The coincidence of the number of buttons was not lost on me.
I pulled the hem of his clergy shirt from his waistband, then up over his wide belly.
Turning my mind off as best I could, I retrieved the kitchen knife I’d brought with me from my bag.
For a long time, I held it over him, unsure I could do it. The blizzard whipped around me, and only by closing my eyes and picturing my daughter did I draw the strength I needed to drive the blade down. His frozen skin resisted, and the knife barely went in an inch.
Bile rose in my throat as I pulled it out.
Closing my eyes, I did it again, the second time rising up high on my knees and bringing it down with all my force. The knife sunk to the shaft, and I cried out. I wrenched it toward his gut as tears poured out of me. It took a dozen yanks to rip his belly open to his navel.
The task destroyed me, and I staggered to the water, fell to my knees, and threw up as sobs poured out of me.
When I recovered enough to straighten, I flung the knife sidearm into the pond. It skipped half a dozen times across the crystalline surface before cracking through the thin ice and sinking.
I returned to the body, grabbed it by the wrist, and tugged it toward the water. He was extraordinarily heavy, and I needed to stop several times to manage it, my lungs heaving with my brittle, frozen breaths.
When I stepped into the water, my mind went white with the cold. The freshly frozen surface gave way as I pulled him deeper, his heavy boots dragging along the bottom. When the current took hold, I released him.
I staggered back to the shore, my body convulsing violently from the cold. On hands and knees, I crawled up the bank, turning back just as the last of him disappeared, his right gloved hand the last of him to go.