Chapter Fifteen #2
Then she looks past me back at the inn and raises her voice to add, “It’s a better version, isn’t it, Frieda?”
Edie grimaces as she makes her way over to us. She’s slow and unsteady on the sand, but she makes it to the third chair I’d set up and grips my upraised hand to settle into it.
“If you’re fishing for another apology, you won’t get it,” Edie grumbles, but Lo only shakes her head before reaching across me to pat Edie’s thigh.
“No, the one was all I needed.”
Edie woke up two days after Lizzie and, to the shock of her doctors, remembered exactly what had happened—maybe not the moment of the attack itself, but definitely what had led up to it.
While I’d been at Hope House that night and Lo had been in her room, Edie had come across one of August’s journals that he’d left behind in the lobby.
She had been curious, wondering what the angle of the book was, wondering what Lo may have said about her and her testimony, wondering if August had figured out who she was.
Instead, she’d found page after page of accusations and grievances and rage, and—most alarming to Edie—sections that talked about Lo in the past tense, like she was dead.
When August came looking for the journal a few minutes later, she confronted him about it.
“My mouth has gotten away from me before,” she’d confessed, almost sheepishly, and I could picture her, face red, hands planted on her hips, asking August what the heck this book was all about.
He’d calmed her, of course, all easy charm and smiles, and then suggested they talk about it outside, less chance of being overheard by Lo.
August had opened the back door and gestured for Edie to walk in front of him.
It was the last thing she remembered, but it wasn’t too hard to follow those particular breadcrumbs.
Had he meant to kill her? Or was he merely trying to pin something else on Lo, bring me even more fully onto his side?
No way of knowing now, of course. Still, it was a relief to confirm that Lo hadn’t been involved.
After hearing Edie’s full story, the nightmares I’d been having about August’s body pinned in the window—his eyes staring and unseeing, the way a flash of lightning gleamed off the shard of glass poking through his neck—finally began to dissipate.
Edie doesn’t work for me anymore—after what August had done, she’ll never be as strong as she’d once been, and her balance is still pretty bad—but she came home to the Rosalie nonetheless.
It was one of the first things I’d had the repair crews work on, getting two bedrooms on the first floor ready for me and Edie.
She keeps making noise about finding her own place, about not wanting to be a “freeloader,” but we both know she’s here for good, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Neither would Lo. After Edie came back to the inn, she and Lo sat down on what was left of the porch and talked long into one evening.
I don’t know what they said, but when they came back in, there was a peace in both of them that I hadn’t seen before, an ease that reminded me that once upon a time, they’d been as close as sisters.
With my mom right alongside them.
I think of her now as I sit between these two women, think of all the secrets they’ve kept, of all the women they’ve been.
Of all the women I’ve been.
The press had always wanted Lo to be one thing—a Teenage Temptress or a Vulnerable Victim—but she’d been both, sometimes simultaneously.
Mom had been a Good Girl from a respectable home—but she’d also fallen in love with a married man, lied about the child he fathered, and, in the process, turned my life and my dad’s into a lie, too.
And Edie had been the Tough Broad, the strong girl with the big voice, who’d also been so scared and hurt and traumatized that when an opportunity had come along to punish the woman she blamed for her family’s death, she’d grabbed it with both hands.
And me? Well, I’d been the Small-town Girl Running Off to the Big City, then the Small-town Girl Returned. A discarded girlfriend, a frustrated and broke innkeeper, a betrayed daughter, a sucker taken in by a charming smile.
But now? I’ve found a new side of myself. A woman who is embracing her family business, her legacy. A woman who is happier outside of the limelight.
And a woman who can keep secrets of her own.
The three of us sit there for a long time, long enough to hear the hammers start up and the distant whine of a buzz saw.
“It was for Ellen,” Edie says, causing both me and Lo to turn in our chairs.
She’s staring out at the ocean, her hand trembling slightly where it rests on her thigh, and a pelican swoops into the water and back up into the sky before she speaks again.
“I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, Lo, but that’s why I did it. Why I lied about seeing you with Landon. Because I knew. I knew what happened that night. The night of Marie.” She pauses to take a deep breath, as if she’s steadying herself. “Because I was there.”
It shouldn’t shock me that there’s still more to uncover about what really transpired that night, but my mouth drops open. I think it shocks Lo, too, an emotion I’ve never seen her wear before, because she takes off her sunglasses and peers more closely at Edie, her green eyes bright.
Edie nods. “I came by to check on her. I was worried about her being alone in the storm.”
“You went out in the storm?” Lo asks, her eyebrows raised. “But Frieda, after … after … well, you were scared if it so much as rained.”
“I wanted to be sure Ellen was okay,” Edie replies quietly, and there’s something in the way she says it—the things implied but unsaid, the sudden shyness of her voice—that lands on me and Lo at the same time.
“Oh,” Lo says, nearly as softly as Edie, and Edie gives her a wry smile.
“Oh,” she confirms, then sighs. “Not that Ellen ever knew it. From the time she met Landon Fitzroy, she was just as crazy about him as you were, Lo, and I knew it would end badly. I knew Ellen wasn’t the type to be okay in that kind of situation for long.
No offense,” she adds to Lo, who only shrugs.
“But I didn’t know about the baby until that night.
That’s what y’all were yelling about when I got here.
You didn’t even see me, and I stayed hidden around the side of the porch.
” She gestures back toward the inn. “But I saw. I saw Ellen hit him first, then you. I saw you try to drag him to the surf, but you couldn’t, probably because both of you looked like a stiff wind would blow you over.
” She gives a snort, then her expression sobers.
“After y’all went back inside, I didn’t want you to know I had been there, but I also didn’t want you to leave Landon’s body so close to the inn.
I thought the authorities would figure it out for sure, that you’d both get the dang chair if he wasn’t moved, so I tried my darndest to get him out to the ocean.
Figured I was stronger than both of you put together, and I was, to be honest. I got him a good ways down the beach, but then the storm started picking up, and I …
I got scared. I hoped it would be enough, and I ran. ”
We’re all quiet for a moment until Lo says, “So you were there in the end. It was all three of us.”
“All three,” Edie agrees. “But then the police started asking questions, and I was so afraid they’d find out about Ellen, about the baby, about all of it, and…”
She blows out a long breath and lets three waves crash against the shore before saying, “I thought if I gave them you, Lo, it would all go away. You always sucked up all the oxygen in the room, and if people were looking at you, they couldn’t look at anything else.
And I—I told myself it wasn’t a lie, not really, because you sure as heck were the one to deliver the last blow, and, well …
the rest of it is what I told you when I got back from the hospital.
I was still angry about my family, still blaming you in some corner of my heart, and I admit, it felt good.
Seeing you suffer consequences for once.
It felt good—until it didn’t, but by then it was too late. ”
Another long silence descends, and I watch Lo as she takes it all in. Then, with another one of those very Lo waves of her hand, she declares, “Well, it’s a good thing you sucked so bad on the stand, else I’d have scorch marks on my backside right about now.”
It’s such a Lo thing to say that Edie and I both begin to laugh uncontrollably, big honking laughs that send a flock of sand plovers scurrying farther down the beach.
Once I’ve caught my breath, I stand, reaching into the pouch of my hoodie, my fingers closing around cold metal. Mom’s bracelet, the one with the “L,” sparkles in the sun as I pull it out and twist it this way and that.
I’d picked it up the last time I’d visited Hope House.
Mom hadn’t been wearing it—it had been sitting on top of the TV, and when I asked Opal about it, she said, “I guess she’s lost a little weight because that dang thing will not stay on her wrist. I keep finding it on the floor every time I put it on her. ”
It’s probably that. A few pounds lost, the cold weather always making jewelry looser.
Probably.
But what if it’s not?
Maybe whatever hold Landon once had on my mother is gone. Maybe, somewhere in her locked brain, she understands that I know the truth now, and she’s ready to be free from it.
I know I fucking am.
Walking toward the surf, I wind my arm back and then throw as hard as I can, the bracelet flashing against the blue sky and the green water, and then, with a faint plop, it vanishes beneath the waves. I imagine it drifting to the wreck of the Rosalie, settling into her shattered hull.
A piece of buried treasure, or maybe a curse, but no longer mine to carry.
“What was that?” Lo asks, and I settle back into my chair as behind me, the Rosalie Inn stands like it plans on being there for another hundred years.
“An offering,” I tell her. “To St. Medard.”
She smiles and takes my hand. After a moment, Edie takes my other one.
“We’ll make a witch of you yet, Ellen Chambers’s Little Girl,” Lo murmurs, and I think of Landon with his demands and August with his grievances, and both their blood seeping into the boards of the inn, of my home.
I squeeze both their hands, these women who knew and loved my mother, these women who know and love me.
“You already have.”