Chapter Thirteen
“Who wants to see where I used to live?” Talia asks, flipping her turn signal as she brakes for another light, this one at the intersection of Main and Fourth Street.
No reply from the kids. In the rearview mirror, she sees Hayley is still wearing earbuds and focused on her phone, and Caleb is still asleep.
“Ben?”
“Hmm?” he asks, absorbed in his work email.
Or, no, when she glances at the screen, she sees that he’s doing a New York Times puzzle.
She bites back what she really wants to say. “Yeah. It’s tough today.”
“Hmm?”
“Wordle. I did it this morning. It took me all six guesses to get it.”
He looks up. “Don’t tell me anything about it.”
“I won’t. But we’re almost there, so you might want to put that away. I want to show you my old house . . . unless you’re not interested?”
“Why would I not be interested?” He snaps the laptop closed. “Of course I’m interested.”
She makes the turn onto Fourth Street. She can see it now, midblock, beyond the newly restored or newly built homes that have replaced the decrepit ones from her childhood. Back then, the three-story Victorian with twin cupolas and a fish scale mansard roof had ranked high among the eyesores.
Now it’s a stately painted lady in shades of cream, rose, and moss green. She points it out to Ben.
“That’s where you grew up? The way you and Natalie always talked, I thought you were dirt poor.”
“We were.” She slows and pulls up at the curb. “We lived in a third-floor apartment, and it didn’t look like this back then. All the houses on the street were run down and neglected.”
“Like that one?”
He points at the house next door. Though it, too, was built in the nineteenth century, it lacks architectural embellishment, as devoid of charm and character as Talia considered Mr. and Mrs. Winterfield themselves.
“That was my friend Caroline’s house,” she tells Ben.
“The one who disappeared?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. I don’t know if you mentioned that she lived right next door.”
Her parents still do, but the house doesn’t look occupied. Earlier in the summer, they were overseas on a church mission. Maybe they still are. Or maybe they’re visiting their older daughters.
Eve and Joanna, twins, married right out of college to seemingly interchangeable guys named Jim. They moved away soon after Caroline went missing, and of course, Mary Beth was long gone by then.
That left Caroline’s parents alone in Mulberry Bay.
Talia was forced every single day to confront Caroline’s physical absence and its impact on her parents. She saw the lights on at all hours, saw Mr. and Mrs. Winterfield grimly coming and going, heard them talking, praying, and sometimes weeping through the open screens at night.
Once, in the beginning, Natalie sent her over there with a meal. Talia remembers it clearly—cutting across the yard with a foil-wrapped tray, hoping she’d find no one at home even though the cars were in the driveway.
Mrs. Winterfield came to the door immediately, almost as if she’d been watching for her. Or no, watching for Caroline. Or for someone to come and tell her that her daughter had been found alive—or not.
She must have been desperate for answers.
Did Talia comprehend that even then, long before she became a mother herself?
Maybe. But now that she is a mother . . .
Well, now she can’t comprehend how she managed to carry off the charade all that summer. How she could have handed over the casserole and asked Mrs. Winterfield if she’d heard anything, as if she might know more than Talia did.
Maybe she’d reminded herself that the Winterfields had been terrible parents, convinced herself that they deserved to suffer. That if they’d been better parents, their daughter—their daughters—wouldn’t have done what they did.
Or maybe she simply hadn’t questioned any of it. Caroline’s secrets. Her own lies.
“This must be hard on you.”
Ben’s comment jerks her back to the present.
“I mean, being back here, seeing where you used to live,” he says. “It must make you miss her even more. It makes me miss her, and I’ve never even been here.”
Confused, she looks over at him.
He’s pointing at her house, not the Winterfields’. He’s talking about Natalie, not Caroline.
“I wish we’d visited her up here the way she wanted,” he goes on. “It’s my fault. I thought Florida was a more appealing vacation option than upstate New York. Beaches, Disney, golf . . . I was thinking of myself, and of the kids. I’m really sorry we never got here while your mom was alive.”
Uncertain whether to let him accept full blame for not visiting, she shrugs. “We were always so busy with work, commuting, the house, the kids. My mom understood that.”
“Still, we should have come back.” Ben reaches across the console between them and touches her arm. “But I’m glad we’re here now.”
She forces a smile. “So am I. It’s going to be a great weekend.”