Mother May I(85)

Part III

Daughters





23




Outside my walls, in the dangerous world, Coral’s letter was moving through the postal system. It passed from hand to hand, being sorted and loaded and carried ever closer, as three slow days crawled past. In the aftermath of our meeting, I didn’t think much about the paper words she’d aimed at me. She’d left a legacy that was far more dangerous. Lexie. I could feel her making her way closer, too.

Lexie was a broad-spectrum anxiety, a darkness stretched so wide on my horizon that I could not see how my family would ever find our way through to normal. I wanted her arrested for her part in Geoff’s death, but she knew I’d given Spence her mother’s poison. I truly believed that Coral was his murderer, but I couldn’t deny that I’d been her instrument. I had obeyed her every command. If Lexie were found, she would tell the police. Everyone would know. My children, my mother, all our friends and Trey’s colleagues. I might go to prison.

Having her loose in the world was worse, though. On Monday the story hit the news, so Lexie must now know that her mother’s plan was incomplete. In the darkest hours of the night, I wondered if Coral were also watching. Did she know she’d failed? Did her daughter feel her distant rage like arrows, slivering through space and time to find her heart?

As of Wednesday morning, the story had stayed local. Nothing national. A political sex scandal and the murder contract a Buckhead housewife had put out on her cheating husband had more traction. Or so Trey told me. I couldn’t bear to watch any of it.

The early reports were calling it a thwarted kidnapping, with no mention of revenge or Lexie or even the Wilkerson family. The press had not made those connections yet, though they still might, when Lexie was caught, or when Geoff’s body was found, or when the police released the information that Coral Lee Pine was also implicated in the murder of Spencer Shaw.

They knew that because I’d told them so myself.

That day, in the wake of the explosion, I huddled on the smoky hillside with Marshall, my son cradled so close. In that moment I could not believe that Coral was truly dead. Back at the carousel, I’d seen her drink, seen her drop to her knees, seen her face mottle and flush, just like Spencer’s at the party. But I had not seen her die. I kept thinking, She was still alive when I left her, even as Trey found a way up the hill to us, red-faced and panting.

He fell to his knees beside me, saying, “Thank God, thank God,” and running his hands over Robert’s soft, bald head, then down his spine, then feeling every limb, just as I had.

When he found no injuries, his short breaths changed to great, heaving gulps. He rocked back on his hips, still holding us. I had no bottle, no binky to offer angry Robert, so I gave him the tip of my finger to suck. I hummed and bounced him, leaning against my husband’s broad chest. I could feel the pounding of Trey’s heart quieting and easing. I don’t know how long the three of us stayed that way, relearning how to breathe in the sweetest moment I’d ever known.

And yet I could not believe that it was truly over.

Marshall had moved away without my noticing. I looked around and found him facing back toward the amusement park, scanning the woods, alert, as if he thought that at any moment Coral herself would come running at us from the carousel.

I told him, “I don’t think she’s coming. She might be dead.”

“Good,” Trey said, vehement, and at the same time Marshall asked, “How?”

“She drank tea. She drank the tea she’d made for Trey.”

Trey said, “We have to get out of here, then. We should go straight down the hillside. Now.”

He was rising, pulling me up as well, already turning toward the downslope, though it was jagged and steep. I planted my feet, bracing against his tug. “No. I have to see.”

By then Robert had calmed enough for me to tuck him back into his car seat. I bent to buckle him in, and Trey picked it up by the handle, swinging it in gentle half circles to soothe him.

“See what?” Trey asked.

“I have to see her. I need to know for certain.” I began hiking perpendicular along the slope, heading back to the carousel.

“No time. We have to get out of here,” Trey said. He and Marshall were following, though. From far away I heard the thin wail of coming sirens. Trey heard them, too. “The police are coming? Already? How?”

Marshall squinted up at the sky. “Gotta be fire trucks. I bet people can see smoke rising off this hilltop for miles and miles.”

I had a different answer, though. “Or Lexie called 911.” She could be close. Close enough to hear the blast, which would tell her that the trade hadn’t happened after all. For Lexie that booming was a bell that tolled Robert’s death and, shortly after that, her mother’s. Right now Lexie Pine thought it was over, but that would not last. I hurried on.

Behind me I could hear Marshall explaining to Trey that it was too late for us to leave. There was only one road out, and it was long. If we passed the firefighters before the first intersection, it would be obvious that we were fleeing the scene. Instead Marshall said we had to get our stories straight.

“You get our stories straight,” I called over my shoulder, my voice sharp. “I have to see.”

“Okay,” he said, hurrying to keep up. “You have to edit the truth. Just a little bit. If either of you says the wrong thing, Bree could end up in jail.”