The Winters(86)
“I want it all to come down, so we can never come back here again,” she said.
We held hands and watched the flames take everything except for Rebekah’s greenhouse. The glass panels directly attached to the house were stained with licks of smoke, but otherwise the structure remained undamaged.
We heard the sirens before we saw the lights. The two officers who had come earlier that morning got out of their car and separated us. (Thinking back now, those few hours, each of us telling them our own version of events, might have been the longest we spent away from each other for the better part of the year.)
At that point, I wasn’t yet aware how Dani had arrived at Asherley that morning. She was always doing that, taking off, running to and from places. So I assumed she had just walked out of detox and got into a cab. Later, when they reunited us, she told me Gus had picked her up and taken her as far as the gate, unable to drive any farther because Max had changed the security code. Dani assured him she could walk from there, afraid to get Gus into more trouble than she already had. When she heard me screaming in the boathouse, she said she knew Max would kill me, and she took her target practice gun from the cabinet in the anteroom. I tried to imagine being a fifteen-year-old girl, running towards a murderous scream with a gun I intended to use, and I could not. Dani Winter became the bravest person I had ever known.
Dani hadn’t come to Asherley that day to kill her father. She only intended to quit rehab, pack her stuff, and flee to Louisa’s pied-à-terre until the first big chunk of her inheritance came through on her sixteenth birthday. She said an image had resurfaced, one so disturbing that even drugs could no longer blot it out. The image was of her father in the greenhouse, rolling a blanket into a shallow grave, a tuft of Rebekah’s unmistakable blond hair jutting out from one end. She remembered it the way Max had told me it happened. So we concluded that Dani had stumbled downstairs before the tranquilizer Max had laced her water with had taken full effect. That image became buried in a watery dream she’d have for months after Rebekah’s death, one that eventually dissolved, until the day they discovered me in the greenhouse with Maggie and everything flooded back to her: the heat, the other woman, the fight, the car speeding off, Max’s visit to Dani’s bedside, Dani creeping downstairs in a semi-drugged state in time to see her father bury Rebekah’s body in a hole he’d dug in the ground. When I told her, in a quiet moment, who that other woman really was, that she was not a lover but her birth mother, a young, troubled woman who had come to Asherley looking for her, Dani wilted in my arms.
“My mother,” she cried, inconsolably. “She came for me. She loved me.”
“Yes, she did,” I said, stroking her dirty hair. “She loved you very much.”
“He killed everyone who ever loved me.”
“No, he didn’t,” I said. “Not everyone.”
There was one place where our stories didn’t dovetail, didn’t knit themselves into one cohesive narrative. I was certain Max had told me he had gone upstairs twice that night, the first time to check on Dani, giving Dani’s mother the opportunity to lunge at Rebekah with the shears. The second time it was to drug Dani back to sleep so he could deal with the aftermath of Rebekah’s murder and the fatal car accident. But Dani was certain he’d come upstairs only once, which, in her version of events, put Max in the greenhouse when Rebekah died, and who murdered her in doubt. He had, after all, more reason to kill Rebekah than Dani’s mother did.
Rebekah’s fatal error had been leaving the entirety of her fortune to Dani, and Max was running out of money, hence no prenup. He didn’t want me to see there was really nothing to divvy up in the event of a divorce. His fake Instagram account primed the pump of Dani’s instability. The dress swap provided a breakdown both public and indisputable. Dani couldn’t damage Max’s reputation by loudly contesting a conservatorship this time. Everyone who mattered, who might affect his reputation, or his reelection, saw plainly that Dani was unhinged, maybe even dangerous, and that poor Max, a loving, caring father, was just trying to get on with his life.
Though I believed Dani, there was no way to prove Max murdered Rebekah. So it remained a theory, but one to which Gus adhered because, he said, Dani’s mother was not capable of violence. He knew this, he said, because she was his older sister. This news was both shocking and welcome. In fact, the picture Max had found on his wall was of his sister as a child, not Dani, though the resemblance was uncanny. Gus admitted that he only ever took the job at Asherley because he knew his sister had left Dani there. So for years he kept one eye on his niece and the other on the long driveway in case she returned, not believing, like his family in Bethpage, that she was dead. He told us her name and talked about her hopes and dreams, painting a picture of a complicated young woman who was much more than just the cartoonish junkie Max described. The biggest regret of his life, he said, was staying away that hot night, when Rebekah had insisted. She knew Dani’s mother was coming by for what she thought would be another payout, one she was willing to make, even if Max was not.
Some of these things I learned firsthand, some through bits and pieces I read online, because ours was a story that had captured the world’s attention, everyone being sick to death of politics that year. I learned new things, too, about Rebekah that were contrary to everything Max had said. She was, according to most reports, an excellent mother, and I began to believe this, because Dani believed it. Maybe children’s memories are pliable, but their feelings aren’t. Dani told me she felt loved by Rebekah, deeply, she said, so therefore she was.