This Place of Wonder (87)

And I realize I have no idea where to start. “Um. This is kind of hard. But . . .” I take a breath. “I’ve wanted to write a feminist piece about you for at least two years, and I came here to interview you, give the world a story that would show that you, not Augustus, were the impetus behind the Peaches and Pork empire.”

She just looks at me. Her face is bare of makeup so I can see her freckles, and her lashes are as light as her hair. Her lips are pale. Her expression is weary. “And? I don’t really have time for this right now.”

“I did some research. On you, on your life. I, um, talked to your first boss, Trudy, and she knew your . . . original . . . name.”

Her attention is more taut now, her back straighter as her eyes narrow. “That’s none of your business. My story belongs to me. Only to me.”

“Except that now I know it. Maybe not all of it, but most.”

She waits.

“I know that you grew up in Thunder Bluff, that your mom died when you were fourteen, that you got pregnant there, and Rory was a year old when you disappeared.”

“So what?”

“I think you poisoned him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. They just did an autopsy and found nothing.”

“I actually meant your stepfather. They found him dead in your house and you had disappeared.”

A hush falls between us. She looks down, then back at me. “And what if I did? Are you going to write that into an article and get famous while I go to prison?”

“No,” I say. I’m not even surprised. “I’m not going to write the story at all. I don’t think you deserve that.”

She closes her eyes, and her fingers are tightly woven together. “You grew up in foster homes. I don’t know what it was like for you.”

I frown, wondering what she’s getting at. “It wasn’t great, but it was mostly okay.”

She nods, looking at her hands, then back at me. “You’re not broken. He usually chose broken women, so that’s what I kept seeing when I looked at you. But you’re strong. Whole. Maybe that’s what he needed, in the end.”

I blink. It would be disastrous to weep right this second. I say nothing.

Meadow sighs and looks toward the sea. I see that she’s struggling to contain her emotions. “My stepfather raped me repeatedly for two years, even when I was pregnant.”

I swallow. “I’m so sorry.”

Another long silence falls and I feel something in her shift. She turns to face me. “Augustus was sick,” she says at last. “Really sick. Leukemia. He probably only had three months left and it would have been brutal and long and you would have suffered, too. All of us would have.”

The knowledge of what she is implying moves like an electric eel through my body, stunning me. “What are you talking about? You killed Augustus?”

She takes a breath. “It wasn’t like that.”





Chapter Forty-One


Meadow


Oleander is a flowering plant that used to grow in wild profusion all over California. At our house in Thunder Bluff, the entire backyard was framed by hedges of it, red and pink, that bloomed in careless abandon for decades. They’re beautiful, but also deadly—touching the leaves can cause dermatitis, and eating a flower will kill you. People dismissed them as a nuisance plant, and ranchers railed over the periodic poisonings. Now the plants are dying, thanks to a parasite, leaving gaping holes wherever they were, and people mourn them.

A hearty crop of oleander still lives at the back of the old bunkhouse at the farm, protected by some unknown confluence of things—they’ve never been attacked, so the flowers provide a splash of color against the old wood, so picturesque I’ve seen dozens of workers and visitors stop to snap a photo.

When I was young, my mother taught me to make a tincture of almost anything. In my sixteen-year-old desperation, I made a tincture of oleander from brandy steeped and refreshed for two months. I wore rubber gloves, and threw the used plants away carefully in a dumpster where nothing would eat it by mistake, not that many creatures can bear the bitter taste. I wasn’t sure how much it would take, but in the end, my tincture proved to be quick and deadly.

This season, I worked stealthily, cutting leaves and flowers only under cover of night, like an old folk witch. Augustus watched as I pressed the plants into a dark blue mason jar and covered it with vodka, his dark eyes taking in the process at every step. The fresh cuttings, the vodka, the shaking and stirring of the material.

In the end, I extracted a small bottle’s worth with an eyedropper, taking care to dispose of the rest like the toxin it was, as if it were turpentine or gasoline. I wrapped the small bottle in a length of linen and tucked it in my pocket for the trip down the hill.

We’d agreed on a Friday night, after everyone had gone home. He opened the side door of the restaurant to me so the cameras wouldn’t pick up my arrival, and when I came in, we embraced for a long time without speaking. “Are you sure?” I whispered.

“Yes.”

We ate the meal he’d prepared, all his favorites and mine—pork chops with caramelized peaches, fresh peas, and bread I’d made the night before for this very celebration, spread with herbed butter. We drank wine, and ate a decadent upside-down cake that had been one of the first things he’d ever made. He took off my blouse and kissed my breasts reverently, and I touched his body, every inch, kissing him gratefully. Touching his hair.