Girl One(96)

When I murmured, Yes, Cate slid my dress off my shoulders, tugging the straps loose. Laughing, selfconscious, sparkling all over, I helped her, pulling it free, my hair tousled. I crossed my arms over my chest instinctively, then lowered my arms, letting myself get used to being naked in front of her the way I’d adjust to sudden immersion in cold, clear water. I was pleased and shy to see that Cate couldn’t look away from me. She must’ve caught glimpses of me—camped in little motel rooms, sharing bathrooms. But this was different. This was for her.

Cate reached for me again, and I understood what would happen. My desire was interrupted by a clench of anxiety. “I still don’t really know what to do,” I said.

She laughed under her breath. “You’ll figure it out. Look at the things you’ve learned how to do, these past few weeks.” Her voice changed, huskier. “I’ve been waiting to do this since I first met you, you know that?” And I smiled, and Cate kissed me.

This kiss. This was not like with any boyfriend I’d ever had. It was the difference between not knowing I had my abilities and feeling them grow inside me, shifting and stretching everything about me, my whole understanding of the world and myself, of bodies and pleasure, sliding apart and then coming back together. With Cate, I was real.





44

A ringing, sharp and insistent. I woke up with my arm thrown over Cate, her body warm and damp against me. I looked around the motel room, at our clothes scattered across the end of the bed and the floor. It was edging toward midday, the light both brighter and heavier. No Isabelle.

The ringing was loud enough to reverberate at the back of my skull. It wouldn’t stop. I reached over, scrabbling for the receiver. Cate wrinkled her nose, murmured something. Then her face fell slackly peaceful again.

“Hello?” I whispered.

“Josie?” A laugh on the other end, soft, disbelieving. “God. I didn’t think this would work. I’d been calling every motel in Freshwater. I can’t—is it really you?”

“Junior.” I looked over at Cate, pulling the blanket up over my breasts as if he could somehow see me. “What are you doing, calling here?”

“I’m just so relieved I found you. And that you’re fine.” A pause. “I mean, are you fine?”

“I’m going to hang up—”

“No,” he said quickly. “I did something for you. For all of you. Consider it my way of making things up to you. I know it’s probably not enough. We ended on such an ugly note, but I really do want you to find your mother. I always did. Maybe this can—can fix some of the things between us. Please,” he added, sensing my hesitancy. “Listen to me.”

Part of me missed him too. That part nearly convinced me to hang up.

“You need to know this,” Junior said. “After I left you, I grabbed a flight back home. I need somebody else to hear this because I can’t believe it myself. I kept thinking about that medical examiner Barbara mentioned, Henley, the one who lied about Lily-Anne’s death. It made me wonder what else he was lying about. I reached out to him.”

The man who’d spirited away Lily-Anne’s body and the body of her second daughter, destroying their place in our story. My chest felt tight. “You did?”

“Leland Henley’s his name. He’s retired now. He’s been living a very quiet life. If my mother hadn’t had his information, I’m not sure I would’ve gotten hold of him at all.”

Of course. That explained Thomas Abbott’s uncanny research abilities. Marianne Bellanger must’ve helped Junior find some of the more remote addresses of Homestead survivors. It explained that photograph of my mother and me, moments after my birth. I felt a flare of anger and betrayal again, at how long Junior had been walking alongside me on uneven footing.

“When he heard I was one of Bellanger’s boys, Henley shut down. I told him what I knew about Lily-Anne’s death. He wouldn’t confirm any of it. He told me to stop sticking my nose into things that’d only come back to hurt me. ‘Things you don’t want to know,’ he kept saying.”

“So, an asshole,” I said. “No surprise there.” But my palms were damp with sweat.

“After that call, I went through some of my mom’s records again. I’d been using them for research. My mother kept them under lock and key, never let anyone else look at them. Something was bugging me about the autopsy report. My father’s and Fiona’s bodies after the fire. They were burned badly, pretty much unrecognizable.” I understood the effort it took to say this out loud. It had been a specific ache, the brutality of the loss. Wiping away their physical bodies until they weren’t merely dead, they were erased. Little handfuls of mineralized bones and teeth glowing out of the embers. “My mother kept a copy of the autopsy report,” Junior said. “But I was never able to really look at it closely—he’s my—”

“I know. I get it.” He was Junior’s father. Of course the details hurt. They hurt me too, even now.

“There were only six people on the Homestead grounds when the fire happened and the four of you escaped alive. You and your mother and Patricia and Isabelle. It made sense that the two bodies would belong to my father and Fiona. An adult and a child. But there was someone else making notes on the file—an assistant, I think—and there were all these little objections that Henley ultimately overrode. There’s a note that, uh, that the size of the girl’s femur suggested an older child. Just a year or so older than Fiona would’ve been. Does that make any sense to you? Was Fiona big for her age?”