Chapter 38
THIRTY-EIGHT
The snow was coming down in heavy drifts now. As they neared home, Marlowe could sense Nate trying to think of what to say next. There were still loose ends to tie up. And he was meticulous.
“Please don’t tell Henry,” Nate said. This was what he had cared about. He had gotten into this whole mess trying to protect Henry.
“Do you really think he doesn’t know?” Marlowe asked.
“He didn’t want her to die. No one did.”
“That doesn’t mean anything now.” Marlowe knew Henry. He had been protected since birth. By the life they all shared, and by his older siblings.
“Liam never knew,” Nate said. “That was what stopped Brierley from getting to the truth. Henry never told Liam about his thing with Nora. Liam might have been scared or suspicious, but he didn’t have anything to point to.”
“Except Enzo’s boots.”
Nate shook his head, his eyes cold and calculating. “You already know that won’t stick in court. All the evidence—if you can call it that—doesn’t mean anything. The detectives’ only hope was to try to break me or Enzo, but they failed.”
“So there’s nothing, then. Only what we know.”
Nate stopped walking, and Marlowe paused beside him. They looked up at the Gray House.
“Not unless you give them something,” Nate said.
Marlowe waited for his arguments. Enzo was dying. Their father probably wasn’t far behind. This might be Frank’s last Christmas. And with his death would come his will. Nate didn’t have to say it. He didn’t have to voice the selfish questions Marlowe was already asking herself.
She would lose it all. If she told the detectives where Nora was, she would lose the Gray House and her family and her home. And for what? To send Enzo to prison for the few years that remained of his life? To implicate Frank? To devastate Glory? To break Henry’s heart?
Nate didn’t say any of that. He didn’t tell her what to do and why she should do it.
He looked back at the Gallagher barn, the snow falling so thickly they could barely make out the red structure.
“Nora seemed to think we were going to leave her behind. We wouldn’t have.
And if she had waited, who’s to say she and Henry wouldn’t have ended up together in the end?
It would have been nice, I think, if that’s how it worked out. ”
She thought of Glory, a girl from a dirt-poor dairy farm who married into money. She was a good wife. Nora could have done it too. Marlowe was briefly repulsed by the sentiment. It wasn’t fair that Nora had to play any sort of game in the first place.
“Stephanie doesn’t know?” Marlowe’s words came out slowly, as if she were speaking in a dream. “And neither do Henry and Constance?”
Nate shook his head.
“But Mom knows,” Marlowe said. That was never a question. Glory Fisher saw all that went on in the Gray House. If Frank hadn’t kept her informed, she would have easily pieced it together on her own.
Nate nodded. “And she’ll take it to the grave.”
Glory was more acquainted with the hard truths of life than anyone else in their family. She probably hadn’t batted an eye. Perhaps it was unkind of Marlowe to think that, but she had seen her mother receive brutal news several times before with no more than a quick nod.
Marlowe started walking again. Nate stood still for a moment before lengthening his stride to catch up. She grabbed the door handle and looked over her shoulder.
“I won’t promise you a thing.”
There was something approaching admiration in her brother’s eyes, as if Marlowe had finally stood up for herself. A modicum of power she could hold on to for the rest of her days. A ghastly consolation prize.
The lights were dim in the living room, but Marlowe could hear Constance and Glory putting a meal together in the kitchen.
She turned and walked downstairs to the basement without a word.
Standing at her open closet door, she stared at the bottle of red wine tucked behind her shoes.
She told herself not to do it. Try something else.
Then she opened the bottle and filled the glass by her bed.
Nora was brave. Nora never gave in to people just because they were older. That was why she ended up dead.
She could imagine how it had happened now: In the early hours, as everyone waited for the police to arrive, Enzo had crept back to wherever he’d hidden the body—the barn, of course, but they hadn’t found her in the dark—and carried her to the wall, while Frank assured the Millers the police would find her, and Mike Cameron threw up in a bathroom, and Liam sat silent and terrified.
While Marlowe tried to remember every last thing Nora had said and done the day before.
Marlowe cried then. She cried for Nora, and she cried for herself. Nora had been right in front of her, all this time, and Marlowe never knew. Or maybe, like Henry, she never really wanted to know.
Truthfully, Marlowe had not spent all her time thinking about Nora.
Unlike Damen and Jennifer Miller, with the immovable yoke of grief atop their shoulders, Marlowe had eventually managed to stare away from the void.
At first, it was for only a few hours here and there.
Then the hours turned into days. And the days turned into weeks.
She felt more guilty about the relief than she did about Nora’s death itself.
Now was her chance to go to the detectives. She could tell them everything. She could make it right.
But would they believe that she hadn’t known?
How had it been possible for her best friend to be sleeping with her little brother right under her nose?
The rest of the town already suspected her and her family.
Main Street would be ablaze with gossip.
Everyone would be disgusted by her. Because of her last name, because of who she was, because of what she had done and what she had failed to do.
She had dug up the body. And now she was part of it.
She would be part of it forever.