Girl One(53)

“I’m sorry.” I was quiet, sobered. “I didn’t know at all.”

“Your mother is with me all the time. Every time I see this scar, I’m reminded of Margaret. Because…” Patricia hesitated. “Because your mother is the one who set the fire that night, Josephine. She’s the one who burned the Homestead to the ground.”

Cate touched my shoulder. I registered the warmth of the gesture, but I also wasn’t in the room anymore. My mother setting the fire. The fire that had disintegrated the last bonds between the women of the Homestead, that had taken Bellanger away before he had a chance to share the mysteries of our origins with the world. If my mother was behind it, then she’d been the one to take everything from me.

“No,” I said. “It was Peters, we know that. She wouldn’t have done that to Bellanger. Or to any of you. She wouldn’t have done that to—”

Fiona. To Fiona. I thought of that little girl on the film, crying for her mother. My mother hadn’t killed that child. The same woman who’d competently brushed my hair every night, who’d reminded me to wear a coat on cold days, who left me the last cookie in the box every single time, even when I didn’t ask? It couldn’t have been her. No. No.

“She never intended to kill Fiona. I imagine that guilt has been harder on Margaret than anything,” Patricia said. “But it doesn’t change what she did.”

“Ricky Peters confessed.” I stated the fact, solid and immovable. Of course my mother hadn’t started the fire. The man who had set it was behind bars. Even as I said it, I remembered Tom’s pet theory: that Ricky Peters’s indictment was too pat, too simple. That Bellanger was a complicated man with complicated enemies. Well, my mother was complicated too. A headache started at the base of my skull. “My mother testified at his trial,” I said. “So did you.”

Patricia’s smile was small and twisted, like it hurt her. “Yes. I did.”

“Patricia.” Cate spoke steadily. “First you tell us that Margaret is the one who brought Bellanger to the Homestead. Now she killed him?”

I shot her a grateful look, some of our earlier tension wordlessly forgiven.

“We planned it together,” Patricia said. “After Lily-Anne’s death, when Fiona started behaving strangely, everything changed again.” Patricia’s voice shook, and she rested a hand against her neck, steadying herself. “Bellanger pushed us out. He stole the spotlight. He even offered to buy the Homestead from me, my own land, and add it to his investments in Arizona or Nevada or wherever. He’d stop at nothing—he was a cancer.”

Her rage built as a sour heat in my own breastbone. I couldn’t tell if I was angry at her for talking about Bellanger this way, or strangely ashamed, as if she were criticizing me too. I’d inherited his mind, after all. I saw the world through his eyes.

“I didn’t think Margaret understood,” Patricia said. “She thought I was jealous. But one day, she came to me and said she’d discovered certain things. Bellanger was trying to get legal custody of all of you. Not just Fiona, all of you. He’d had us sign contracts back when we were loopy on drugs. We had no lawyers, no real counsel. There were no legal protections for children born to only one biological parent. Children who shouldn’t have existed at all. If anything happened to any of us, Bellanger could have taken you. Your mother hadn’t known until Lily-Anne died and the custody battle came to the forefront.”

Becoming Bellanger’s daughter. Living with his two sons. Bellanger himself reading me bedtime stories by the soft radiance of a night-light. This was a well-worn fantasy, embarrassingly soothing as an outgrown toy. I’d never felt guilty over it before—it was a secret dream, not my mother’s business—but now the memory was mixed with a sharp humiliation, and the tight beginnings of anger. I hadn’t even known what I’d been wishing for.

“Margaret had a plan to end everything so that we didn’t have to worry about Bellanger. She wanted to burn the whole place down. Make it look like it was the protesters. They were the perfect foils, out there every day and yelling about hellfire. I was pulled right back into her orbit. The two of us against the world again. So I stayed with her on the Homestead, even as the other women ran off into their own lives. They could see the writing on the wall. They knew that place wasn’t long for the world, they wanted to find safety and normalcy for their girls while they still could. Then one day, out of nowhere, Margaret told me it was over. She told me to take Isabelle and leave the Homestead.”

“Why didn’t you?” I demanded.

“I had no chance. That very night—the fire.”

My mother had killed Fiona so that she could keep me, and then I’d turned around and abandoned her, and now she’d vanished, a whole chain of loss and want and grasping that had led to this night.

“I testified that Ricky had started the fire,” Patricia said. “I lied to protect us. After the trial, Margaret promised me that we’d be together again. Just as soon as the dust settled, she said. I waited and waited. A year went by. More. She stopped answering my calls. Wouldn’t answer my letters. So I gave up on Margaret Morrow.”

The headache was building now, pounding. Patricia began to say something else, but the twin halos of car headlights entered the room through the crack in the curtains, refracted against the wall, hovering above the mantel before flicking into darkness. Tom. Or the stranger: while we’d been lost in the past, we’d left our present selves open and vulnerable.