The Almost Sisters(93)
I turned back to Birchie’s house, and immediately the drapes twitched and folded, people backstepping in a hurry. The weakest piece of me wished I’d gotten into the Batmobile and ridden off into the sunset with Sel.
Instead I started walking back to the house. There was a next inside, too, and I had to be there for it. Next was Regina Tackrey, armed with swabs and science, coming to scrape some truth out of my Birchie’s frail body.
22
This early in the morning, the attic was a dry and dusty kind of pre-hot. I could feel almost-sweat prickle my skin as I clambered around the piles of junk. Frank Darian and his boys had dug quite a hole in the back room to unearth Birchie’s trunk. They had stacked decaying furniture and boxes and chests in and among the more familiar front-room landscape. Rachel and I had been searching for that pair of ship paintings Birchie liked for nearly half an hour.
I had to find them, because Cody Mack, of all damn people, was coming to the house at 9:00 a.m. to collect the sample of Birchie’s DNA. Birchie’s sacrosanct routine had been dipped into hell and hauled back kicking over the last few days; we needed to keep her quiet and in places where she felt comfortable and calm. Dragging her off to an unfamiliar lab where a stranger would poke around in her mouth seemed like the short road to another fork stabbing. Tackrey had agreed to collect the sample at our house but insisted on sending Cody. It was a savvy choice; Birchie had donated everything from trauma kits to body armor to the Birchville police force, and Cody was the only officer in town whose Birch bias ran against us instead of for us.
I didn’t want Cody to see that picture of Ellis Birch with his eyes scratched out, like broad hints in the world’s worst game of Clue: Miss Birchie in the dining room with a dirty breakfast fork. Miss Birchie in the parlor with a hammer.
Last night I’d pulled the portraits down and stored them in the attic’s back room, wrapping Ethan but not bothering with ruined Ellis. I’d stacked them on a dresser, Ellis on top, faceup, blind eyes pointed at the vent fan.
Unfortunately, taking down the portraits had left tattle-tale rectangles of brighter wallpaper in the dining room. As Birchie would say, it would not do.
Searching the attic was slow work, both because we had to be careful not to cause a junk landslide and because I felt so antsy. I didn’t really think there were more long-dead relations packed away up here, but at the same time I got a spine shiver every time I peeled a trunk lid open.
Rachel and I were on our own. Jake had rolled out at 7:00 a.m. sharp, wanting to get an early start on the ten-hour drive to Norfolk. Lav went with him. I thought she was scared her dad might poof again if she let him out of her sight.
Rachel pulled a rolled-up area rug off a row of very large, promising boxes. She was doing all the heavy lifting—a pregnancy perk—and she worked much faster than I did, eager to get on the road. Every minute put her farther behind her family, and Lavender wasn’t the only one who didn’t trust Jake left unsupervised.
As I knelt to open the first box, she said, “So I had an idea last night.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. These were dangerous words.
“No, it was a good idea. I think I should tell Dad and Mom about the baby,” she said, dragging the heavy rolled-up carpet back out of the way. “When I get home.”
I looked up from the first box’s jumble of old clothes and weird kitchen gadgets from the 1970s. “My baby? Why on earth!”
“Because you know what’s going to happen,” Rachel said, blowing a strand of hair off her face. “Mom will freak out, worrying about what people will think, and Dad will bluster around trying to solve everything instead of letting her talk.” She propped the rug up against a wardrobe we’d already searched, then came and knelt by me to open the next box. “They’ll fight, and then she’ll cry, and then he’ll stomp off and do fifty hours of penitent yard work. In the end it will be fine. This is their grandbaby, after all. Why should you stress through the fussy bits? You have enough going on.”
I did, actually. I’d had trouble sleeping last night, thinking about the DNA test. All I could do was stand by Birchie’s side. I felt helpless, like I was twiddling my thumbs and watching a huge rock coming at her, fast, to roll over her and ruin her. Then I’d twiddle more and watch the splash damage ruin Wattie.
I couldn’t take one more thing, so I shook my head at Rachel in an emphatic no, saying, “They’ll freak out. They’ll leap right into their car and come straight here.” Why not? Everybody else had.
“No they won’t,” Rachel said. “I’ll say I’m only breaking your confidence because you’re worried about how they’ll react. I’ll make them swear not to mention it until you tell them. See how that works?”
It took me a second to process her idea, but once I did, I saw that it was genius. Evil genius, but still. It gave Mom and Keith time to plan their reaction, and it took a big chunk of worry off me. It was manipulative, and a very Rachel-specific kind of awful, and God, so very tempting. I hesitated, arms buried in heaps of Easter-colored polyester, and she pressed on.
“By the time you get home, they’ll be past panic and deep into supportive.”
“It does sound like the easy way out,” I admitted, but there was no way I could sign off on it. It was Rachel’s style, not mine.