Burying Water (Burying Water #1)(100)

“Then act like it and arrest yourself and that damn son of yours for what you’ve done.”

“Just let me explain.”

“Oh, you’ll get your chance, don’t you worry. But you can sit out there and stew for the night.” Her slippers slide across the worn wood plank floor as she shuffles back to take her seat.

“They know you don’t have a phone to call the police,” I mutter. Neither do I right now. Mine is sitting in my purse in Amber’s car, where I left it.

“Don’t matter.” She goes back to rocking and sewing, as if she can’t hear the heavy footfalls back and forth across the front porch.

“How long do you think they’ll stay out there for?”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “All night.” She gestures with a nod up at a picture above the old piano in the corner. A boy of maybe nine stands in the center of the barn, his cowboy hat on, a long stick in his hand and his shoulders pulled back. Dark eyes pierce the person behind the camera. “That’s Gabe, there.” She chuckles. “After Earl attacked me, I mostly stayed in my room. Stopped going down to see the horses for . . . a good three years. Being in that barn was too hard.

“Every day, Gabe would track down my father and ask him when I’d be back. He didn’t understand at the time. My father just kept telling him, ‘Not today.’ But people talk around this town and I guess Gabe must have started hearing things. What things, I can’t imagine because I didn’t tell anyone anything. I refused to talk to a soul about it. I guess they just started making things up on their own.

“Anyway, one morning, my father came down to the barn and he found little Gabe pacing up and down the center of the aisle. When he asked him what he was doing, Gabe told him he was on guard for bad guys. That was in June, just after school let out, and every single day for that summer, Gabe paced up and down.

“Eventually, I started going down to the barn again. I missed being around the horses. I couldn’t breathe, those first few steps inside bringing the demons with them. But then I saw the path Gabe had worn into the floor. If you look hard enough today, you’ll still see it.” She turns her focus back to her quilt. “I don’t think Gabe could be anything other than what he is.”

She flips the quilt around on her lap and reaches for her signature black tree, already cut out and ready to be stitched on.

“Why the tree?”

She doesn’t answer right away, her focus on positioning and pinning it in place, and I finally assume she’s ignoring me.

“It was one of the first days of warm weather after an unusually cold winter. I was fifteen, and I decided I’d pull my bike out of the garage and go for a ride down the road before dinner. Just to the other end of our fields. It’d be too dark if I waited until after.” She switches out the red thread on her needle for black. “I didn’t think anything of it when I saw Earl’s truck pull over on the side of the road ahead of me. I didn’t think anything of it when he told me that he had found the perfect tree to climb nearby . . .”

I hug my knees tighter to my body, listening to Ginny reveal to me what I know she hasn’t told another living soul.

“When I realized what he wanted—what he thought I wanted—and I tried to run . . . he got really mad. Irrationally so. Turns out he wasn’t such a kind, nice man, after all. He had a very dark side.” She pauses. “It wasn’t until he was about halfway through that I noticed the big white oak tree watching over us. So I started focusing on that, instead. On its height, and its bare branches. Pretending that I was just lying in the grass on any regular spring day, and that if I watched closely enough, I’d get to see it wake up; I’d see the leaf buds sprout.” She shifts a pin out of the way of her needle. “It made it easier to deal with.”

“What happened to Earl?”

Her nostrils flare with a deep inhale. “He just stood for the longest time, staring at me as I lay in the grass, crying, a dazed look on his face. Then I watched him head toward his truck. I thought he was leaving. I wasn’t in any shape to pick myself up and run. But he didn’t leave. He reached into the back of his truck,” Ginny makes the hand motion as if reenacting it, sending shivers down my back, “for some rope. I thought that that was it. I was a goner. He was going to kill me right there, under that big tree. He walked past me without a word, slung the rope over his shoulder, and began climbing the tree, all the way up to the first branch. And then I watched him hang himself from it.” Her mouth crests downward in a frown. “He was an unstable fellow. History of mental illness. Of course, my father had no idea about that when he hired him. But I guess when Earl’s own demons went to sleep and he realized what he had just done to me, his guilt got the better of him.”

“Oh God, Ginny . . .” I mutter softly.

She goes on. “When time for dinner came and went and it started getting dark, my father came looking for me. He found my bike and the truck on the side of road. It wasn’t hard to spot a two-hundred-and-forty-pound body swinging from the tree. That’s how he found me. Lying under that tree.

“I guess you could say I lucked out. There was a very brief police investigation. I refused to give them any details. I figured they didn’t need more than what they had between the body and my medical report from the doctors. There was no point. Earl was dead. They couldn’t punish him. The most unfortunate thing about the entire situation is that the great big tree—that gave me my escape, that helped serve justice to the man who wronged me—never did bud any leaves that year. Or any other year. It just up and died. White oaks aren’t common in this part of Oregon anyway, so the fact that it was even growing out here was something. And then to just die like that? Unheard of.”