Chapter Sixteen
SIXTEEN
The afternoon stretched on with Marlowe anticipating a knock at the front door from the detectives.
She pictured Damen Miller digging out their card from where he had shoved it in a drawer, dialing their number as her car vanished from sight.
He would tell them the Fisher daughter was bothering him—that the family was acting strange. He knew they were hiding something.
Her parents weren’t acting strange at all.
They sat down for a quiet dinner. Enzo stayed upstairs.
He was sleeping almost fifteen hours a day, like a cat.
Marlowe picked at the shepherd’s pie. It was her dad’s favorite.
Back when Glory was a young, overwhelmed wife, Enzo had taught her how to cook dishes far more elegant than the simple fare she’d grown up with.
Though Glory was wealthy enough that she didn’t need to cook for herself, she wanted to be a talented hostess to impress the New York elite Frank moved with—a social class to which she was determined to seamlessly belong.
Marlowe crumpled the napkin in her lap and then took a quick sip of wine.
“Dad,” Marlowe said. “Did you know you were going to buy the Gallagher property when Leroy died?”
“Marlowe.” Her father’s head jerked back, his fork suspended in the air.
“I just don’t understand Harmon’s threats,” Marlowe said. “Or this so-called feud.”
“There was no feud.” Frank set his fork down and folded his hands together, speaking slowly, as if he were explaining something to a child. “Harmon was disturbed.”
“They all were,” Glory whispered. “But at least Leroy, Tom, and Dave did their best.”
Leroy’s best was a rope wrapped around a rafter.
When she was young, Marlowe had thought it was such a horrific avenue.
It happened in November of 1995, when the Fishers were in the city.
Glory and Frank didn’t believe in watering things down for their children.
It was important that Marlowe and her brothers knew the truth of the world.
“He hung himself in the barn,” Frank had said.
Marlowe’s shock was mirrored in Nate’s face. She remembered Henry’s gasp, and repeatedly asking, “Why would Leroy do that? Why was he so sad?”
“Suicide is a weakness of character,” Frank had said. “There are other ways to deal with one’s illnesses.” His pragmatism often teetered on the edge of callousness, and Marlowe had learned long ago that his sense of compassion had limits, especially when it came to matters of personal suffering.
“It’s a shame,” Frank had continued. “Leroy could have gotten help.”
Thinking back, Marlowe could recall Leroy’s sadness. It was palpable. She had seen it with her own eyes, felt it in his silences. Even before his death, he had already been a ghost. She wished she understood where all this sadness started.
Marlowe blinked, pushing away the memory, and the dim light of the dining room came back into focus. The clink of silverware, the scrape of Glory’s chair. Frank reached for his glass and took a long sip, his expression unchanged.
“Nobody planned for it,” he said. “But I let Dave know that I was there to help after Tom also went. He needed the money, but he wasn’t ready to sell.”
It wasn’t long—a mere four months—after Leroy’s suicide that Tom Gallagher swallowed enough pills to join his brother in eternal rest. Once again, Frank and Glory told their children.
Frank seemed at a loss for how to explain it.
Leroy was always silent and sad, but Tom was so steady.
He did the hay in the summer, took the cows out, brought them back in.
Climbed up on his tractor, climbed down.
He made it through one last winter and, at the brink of spring, gave up.
Marlowe didn’t like thinking of it now. Tom was different from Leroy. Tom had talked to them when they were kids, joked that Marlowe would be taller than her mother, chuckled over their games, and shown them the Bend.
There was no point in pressing Frank any further. It didn’t matter why or when he decided to buy the Gallagher land. It wasn’t a crime to want something. Frank Fisher hadn’t done anything nefarious. He had simply waited them out.
After helping Glory clear the dishes, Frank headed to his study.
Marlowe pulled a stool out from the island, facing the sink.
It had taken years of plotting, but Glory and Frank eventually knocked out the back wall of the original kitchen, expanding it to twice its size.
They were able to fit a double-top stove, all the cabinet space Glory could possibly want, and the island with a cavernous farmhouse sink.
Glory was bent over it, the sleeves of her button-down rolled up, hot suds up to her elbows.
If Marlowe tried to help, Glory would nudge her aside.
Only Glory knew how to do it right. Only Glory knew exactly how to load the sleek German dishwasher that she had spent months researching before commissioning an extravagant overseas freight service to deliver and install the unit.
As Marlowe watched Glory scrub, her mind drifted back to an earlier version of her mother, before the farm, before Frank, before all of this.
Glory ran away once. At twenty, tired of scraping by on a struggling farm, she boarded a train to New York with a carpet bag.
She took a typing course, shared an apartment with three other girls, and became a secretary.
It was 1976, and the city was both thrilling and dangerous.
She used to joke that she didn’t even know she had legs until she arrived in Manhattan.
Glory kept a framed photo in her closet of her and her roommates, arms slung around each other, dressed for work on a city sidewalk. In it, Glory wore a plaid skirt with a matching blazer and a crisp white blouse—clothes her mother never let her wear on the farm.
Frank had told the story of their meeting enough times that Marlowe could picture it. He was a successful lawyer, and she was the secretary who could type three times faster than anyone else in the office.
Glory wasn’t a great beauty, she didn’t come from an esteemed family, and she wasn’t particularly well read or sophisticated.
But she was sharp, efficient, and had a certain world-weariness that set her apart.
Frank grew up in Boston, courting girls from well-heeled families like his own.
At Princeton, he took out girls from Smith and Bryn Mawr on the weekends.
Girls who played golf or squash and could quote poetry and owned beautiful hats.
He didn’t realize it until he met Glory, but she was exactly what he had been looking for.
“She walks tall,” he’d say. Whenever he described her, he always quoted Catullus—the line about a statuesque woman who, for all her elegance, lacks a grain of salt. “Glory,” Frank liked to say, “was salt of the earth.”
Glory claimed her mother had told her once, “You’ll never be beautiful, so be smart instead.”
Marlowe wondered if, when Glory met Frank—handsome, rich, and twelve years older—that voice was echoing in her head. Be smart, Glory. Be smart.
They married within a year. Frank’s career took off.
By the time Nate was born, they were discussing a country home.
It was Glory who wanted something near where she grew up—not too close, but within driving distance.
Not for her family. She visited them, of course, but Marlowe knew that wasn’t the reason.
She hated the farm enough to leave, but something had always pulled her back.
She loved the land, but she wanted it on her own terms. She didn’t let it slip away from her like the other dairy farmers did. She wasn’t capable of such resignation.
Marlowe watched the sponge raking across the pan, held fast in Glory’s red-fingered grip. She ran the water scalding hot, always barehanded.
“Mom.” Her voice cut through the silence. “What did Harmon say? What was he threatening?”
“Nothing.” Glory rinsed the pan and set it aside, reaching for the next dish. “He was pretending he knew something, but there weren’t any specifics.”
“Do you think that Brierley missed something back then?” The question had been bouncing through Marlowe’s head all day. “Something important.”
“That man missed many things,” Glory said. “Or else he would have found her, wouldn’t he?”
Glory no doubt believed that if she were a detective in charge of the case, she would manage it with perfect precision. She bent to set the dish in the rack, then closed the dishwasher door with a smooth, practiced motion.
“This isn’t good for you, Marlowe,” Glory said. “Dwelling on all this.”
“I’m not dwelling.” Marlowe slid her finger over the condensation on her glass. “Someone has been killed. Don’t you think we should be talking about it? The detectives seem pretty interested in what we have to say.”
“And so we will answer them—and that’s it.”
“But Nora—” Marlowe stopped, unsure how to finish the sentence.
“I hate speaking about that night. It’s not just because of what happened to her, but because of what it did to you.
” Glory shook her head. “I am the lucky one; I got to keep my daughter. I don’t have the right to complain, and yet I watched you fall apart and for a moment I thought I was going to lose you too.
It broke you, Marlowe. Don’t think I didn’t see every crack.
Don’t think I didn’t wish every day I could somehow bear the pain for you. ”
Her mother folded a floral dishrag into a neat rectangle and hung it on the oven handle. Marlowe had seen Glory cry only once, when looking at an old photo of her father years after he died. But Glory had untold depth. Marlowe knew it was there.
“I survived,” Marlowe said. “I put myself back together. Maybe not perfectly, but I did.”
“But that girl,” Glory continued, a pained expression contorting her face. “I don’t know what was happening with her, but I was concerned—about Nora’s path, but also the road she might lead you down.”
“What do you mean?” A defensive urge pinched at Marlowe’s throat. Nora wasn’t a bad influence with loose morals. Her parents should have known that. They had watched Nora as a child.
“I know what it’s like to grow up out here. How small everything can feel.” Glory released a heavy sigh. “And for some young people, that feeling—being trapped—it gets to them. They rebel. Pick up vices. Act recklessly.”
“You think Nora was upset with her life?” Marlowe’s stomach tightened at the insinuation that Nora had gotten involved with drugs or bad people. “We were only teenagers. We were happy.”
Glory studied her face and then rounded the counter and placed her hand, warm and slightly damp, on Marlowe’s cheek. “Go to sleep. This will be over soon.”