Chapter 28 #2
“I crawled back into bed. I thought you’d wake me up and tell me what happened. Get the aunts to help. If I’d known it would be the last time I’d see you, I’d have sprinted into the woods and helped you dig the grave.”
“I had to leave; I was so ashamed. The idea of facing anyone was too much.” I gnawed at a chapped piece of skin on my bottom lip. “Casey was dead, and I thought no one would believe it was an accident, not after what I’d done to Shane.”
“You saved me. That’s what you did,” Frances said.
I looked out the giant window to the parking lot, where my car sat, then remembered what was inside. Why we were here. “But what about the helmet?”
“Well,” Frances said. “You were gone. The aunts didn’t know I’d overheard Hattie-May telling you the plan. They certainly didn’t know about Casey—”
“Did you tell them?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t tell them anything, and then a few days later, I was in a dorm room in Chattanooga, where I was expected to be the smart, excited girl I’d presented myself as when I’d interviewed for the damn school.
I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d gone through, and I didn’t have my sister anymore.
“I held it together pretty well…until I got to college. My roommate… You might have read about it—it was a big story—she disappeared.” I remembered the newspaper clipping that I’d seen at the diner. The candlelight vigil, Frances in the background. I nodded.
“They never did find her. Something about that—I don’t know, I kind of snapped. I met Burt soon after and then we were married, and it all spilled out. All of it.” She shrugged. “You have to believe me: Back then I had no idea he had this hatefulness in him.”
The thing was, I did believe her.
When Andrea’s body was found near a creek, it had felt like a message meant for me alone.
I’d known that whoever was behind the deaths and phone calls had known my darkest secret, though I hadn’t understood how.
Hearing that it was Frances, my sister, my baby bird, who’d spilled my shameful secret, it hurt. Bad.
But didn’t I understand being a terrified girl desperate for connection? It wasn’t fair for me to be angry when I’d told Casey about Shane.
“I still don’t understand how Burt got the helmet. I…I don’t even remember what I did with it,” I admitted.
“You buried it,” Frances said, not missing a beat. “Or at least I figured you did. What I saw that morning is imprinted in my mind, and you were pulling Casey and that helmet was strapped to his head.”
Had it been? I couldn’t remember. I was almost certain it had been on the ground next to us as we sat against the greenhouse.
Had I, for some reason, taken the time to put his helmet on him before pulling him through the woods?
Finding him dead had sent me into a state of shock, all those moments and decisions lost to me now, so maybe it had made sense to me at the time, in some strange way.
Maybe I’d wanted to keep him from bumping his head against tree roots as I yanked him across the ground.
I only had patches of the memory of pulling him toward the sandy spot near the creek. Digging his grave.
“I’m racking my brain on how Burt could’ve gotten it, and there’s only one thing I can think of,” she said. “He came with me to Puddle Creek—only once. It was right after we were married, before Burt forced me to go no-contact. We stayed with them at the house and everything.”
“Burt stayed at the house?” I couldn’t imagine it. Burt didn’t fit into my past among the small rooms and papered walls. Among the books and nooks and quilts and crannies that made up home.
“Yeah. It was the first time I wondered if I actually knew him.” She chipped off yet another piece of her cup, which now stood at half its original height.
“Burt took one look at the old house and he didn’t have to say a word.
I knew what he thought. I knew because—suddenly I saw it too, the shedding paint and sagging porch.
The house wasn’t beautiful or magical. It was just old.
Raggedy. I’m ashamed to say I was embarrassed. ”
She looked intently at her fingers as they crumbled the tiny mountain of foam into smaller and smaller pieces.
It littered the table like a miniature snow flurry.
“We were supposed to stay two nights. The first night, I woke up and Burt wasn’t in the bed with me.
I figured he was in the bathroom, so I rolled over and went back to sleep.
The next morning he was back, but instead of us getting breakfast with the aunts as we’d planned, Burt insisted we leave.
He said his dad called and needed his help with something. ”
“Then what?”
“Then nothing. We left.” Her face flushed.
“Didn’t even wait for the aunts to wake up.
The thing is, I remember looking over at him gripping the steering wheel, and I noticed he had dirt under his fingernails.
And I thought, ‘Well isn’t that odd?’ My husband isn’t the type to get his hands dirty if he can help it.
” She sighed. “It always stuck with me, and now I know why.”
I stared at my sister. “That’s it? He was gone during the night and had dirty fingernails? You think, what? That he went into the woods on his own, managed to find the greenhouse, then the creek path and body and dug it up and took the helmet? Frances, that sounds impossible.”
Frances crossed her arms over her chest. “Sounds impossible until you consider he had the helmet.”
She had a point.
“Why though?”
“I’ve told you. Milly, he’s obsessed with you.
I think he wanted to see where you did it.
I never imagined he would have taken something, though.
” She sighed. “I guess in a way it makes sense. Burt was always plotting, always keeping things interesting for himself. Maybe even back then he thought it would come in useful. Who knows how long he’s been planning this?
There’s no doubt in my mind that my husband would’ve grown bored with me a long time ago if it weren’t for what you did that night to protect me.
At least part of his twisted game is about breaking you. ”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Yeah, fuck,” Frances said. “I don’t blame you if you want to take me to get my car and pretend like this never happened. I shouldn’t have pulled you further into any of it.”
“You didn’t,” I said. “He took the helmet. He made the calls. Killed those kids and buried the body where it would get my attention. If this is about breaking me, nothing would break me more than losing you for good, Frances.”
She reached over and squeezed my hand. “You see? You see why it’s too dangerous to let him live? He’s evil—we need to kill him.”
“Wait.” I shook my head. “No. I’m not… We aren’t…” I looked over my shoulder, then back at Frances. My leg squeaked against the plastic chair. I whispered, “We aren’t murdering Burt. We’re following through with the plan.”
Frances’s face hardened. “But Milly, it won’t work.
If he gets arrested, he’ll tell everything.
If nothing else, the helmet proves how dangerous he is!
We’ll never know where Shane is buried, but Burt could lead the police to Casey’s body.
And who knows what other secrets he has hidden?
” She smacked the table. “He has to die.”
“No,” I hissed. “I’m not discussing this anymore. As the only one out of the two of us who has had to live with blood on her hands, I’m asking you to trust me. Killing him is not the solution. You made me a murderer once. I’m not doing it again.”
Frances’s mouth dropped open, and hurt flickered over her face.
Our mother was a killer; there was no disputing that. Hattie-May killed bad men, and Frances believed the rumors that when Ruth was a teenager, she’d killed a man too. I’d killed Shane. No wonder it was easy for her to imagine I’d be okay with murdering Burt. He deserved it, after all.
But I couldn’t. Something inside me—something even deeper than the Sight—told me if I killed again, I wouldn’t come back from it.
I heaved a sigh. “Let’s stick with the plan. We have everything we need now. We might as well see it through and put him behind bars. Whatever happens next, we deal with.”
“It’s not going to work,” she repeated again, quietly. “You’ll see. You’ll see, but it’ll be too late.”
“We have to try.” I remembered the hollow expression she’d worn as we’d walked into her home. “Then, we have to drive to Puddle Creek.”
“I thought we were getting a hotel to recuperate?”
“Yeah well, the leaves never lie,” I said, remembering the reading I gave her in my apartment. How the leaves had shown me Puddle Creek. “We are going to Tennessee.”
Burt knew too much. Frances said he loved games, so I had to take away one of his moves.
I had to move Casey’s body.