Girl One(75)

“My mother and I got rid of him. She went into this mode I’ve never seen before. Dumped him in the trunk. Drove him out to nowhere. Bleached the blood out of the carpet and tiles. We never mentioned it again. Never. Either of us. Not once.”

So he hadn’t been chasing us. I’d been afraid of a specter. Of a man buried somewhere in Minnesota’s wildlands, already rotting down to his bones, just a collection of hair and teeth in the dirt. Nothing. I squeezed my eyes shut. It hadn’t been Ricky Peters; it hadn’t been Bonnie’s attacker; I was left with nobody.

“I wish you’d listened to me,” Bonnie said.

“Yeah, I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said, and laughed, exhausted, everything pressing in. “Apparently Ricky Peters didn’t even kill Bellanger, did you know that? It was my mother.”

Bonnie was quiet for a minute. “No, I didn’t know that. Damn.”

“I’m surprised your mom didn’t say anything. She never liked my mother much.” Although now I felt an unexpected sympathy for Deb Clarkson. Her contempt for my mother seemed less petty, more substantial. A spite with a true grief hidden at the center. The Homestead must’ve meant more to her than I realized, and my mother had taken it all. Maybe I should have listened to Deb more closely instead of assuming she was bitter and frivolous.

“Mommy always said Margaret Morrow ruined everything,” Bonnie continued. “She felt so bad for Bellanger’s family. I didn’t get it at first. But if your mother took their dad away, and then she was the one to kill him too—I can’t imagine what they would feel.”

I didn’t answer for a second. It hit me: Of course. Ricky’s hints made sense now, everything reassembling into a pattern I should’ve noticed already. Bellanger’s family. I’d spent so long benignly ignoring them that they’d slipped past my attention when it mattered the most.

“Oh my god,” I said slowly. “That’s it. That’s who’s after us.” When I’d started this journey, it had felt like there was no good reason to come after my mother. But I understood the lure of revenge. The lit match; Bellanger, his remains charred beyond recognition. A family left in pieces, ignored and unseen. “Bellanger’s boys,” I said. “His sons have been after us all along.”





33

April 24, 1976

My lovely Josephine,

There’s an old song that you may, by chance, hear one day: Come Josephine, in my flying machine. I find it stuck in my head quite often lately. You are my little flying machine. We’re going big places together, you and me, my first and favorite daughter. You’re such a good little helper, curious and patient with an old man. I watch you with the other Girls and see how they look up to you. I couldn’t have asked for a better Girl One, a true big sister in every way. Happy Five Years to you!

I’m sorry I haven’t been around as much. Trust me when I say that I’d rather be at the Homestead. Can you imagine Galileo being called away from his telescope to handle a memo? Edison interrupting that first phone call so that he could tell his wife whether he wanted the pot roast or the Salisbury steak? One day, when you are a famous scientist yourself, you may understand these frustrations! Of all the Girls, you’re the most like me, Josephine. You have that same spark in you. That same curiosity. You see the world through my eyes.

But daily life continues with its usual demands. My son has been struggling with an unfortunate medical issue, and so I must attend to my duties at home. But my heart—my heart is with you.

Your loving father always,

Joseph Bellanger





34

“Junior’s trying to kill us?” Isabelle asked. “Or the other one? What was his name? Billy?” She lolled back on the bed, arms straight out, knees in the air.

“Bobby,” I said. “Junior was the younger one.”

During the space of that conversation with Bonnie, the Bellangers had gone from bit players to the people who might have set everything into motion. The ones who’d set the fire at my house, taken my mother, lured me out of my old life and into this.

Marianne, Junior, Bobby. Bellanger’s family. His other family. Even as an adult, I’d never thought that much about them. Their precedence in Bellanger’s life had been mostly symbolic, proof of his wholesomeness as a family man. Proof that he couldn’t want to get rid of the nuclear family because he had one himself.

“How do we know it’s not both of them coming after us? If it’s even one of them,” Cate added, a caveat. I was trying to be cautious too. Still, it made more sense than anything we’d considered so far: The symmetry of it. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Fire for a fire.

Mother for a father.

“Do we remember anything about his sons?” Cate asked. “Josie, you must remember.”

I shrugged, helpless, frustrated by my failed memory. “Bellanger barely ever brought them to the Homestead. I do remember—okay, maybe—there was a time when they were visiting us. It was weird to have these boys running around. I was upset about something, and one of them—I don’t know which one—he helped me. He was actually pretty nice.”

Cate’s eyes narrowed for a second, a flinch of skepticism. “We need more to go on than that if we’re going to take this seriously.”