I closed my eyes again and whispered, “Please.”
“They don’t deserve to know you, honey. They don’t deserve to have your light in their lives. I don’t know what Dad was thinking and I loved my father. The whole world feels strange without him in it because he was such a big part of mine. But he’s wrong about this. I feel it in my bones.”
“It’s beautiful here,” I said quietly, opening my eyes and staring into the fire.
“I know.”
“Peaceful,” I told him.
“I know that too.”
“I need to do what he wanted me to do, Pat.”
“And it annoys me, but I know that too. So now I’ll say, we’re here. We’re always here. I don’t care if we’re most a continent away, we can be there or we can get you back here if you need us. All you need to do is call.”
My heart was in my throat when I said, “Thank you, sweetheart.”
I heard him clear his own throat when he replied, “Call Kath later. But don’t tell her I browbeat you because she’ll make me sleep on the couch.”
Kath was a woman and a mother. Kath didn’t browbeat and Kath wasn’t a big fan of when Pat did (he still did it and thus sometimes found himself on the couch).
She had other weapons in her arsenal to get what she wanted.
And she was using them.
I had just so far been immune.
“I’ll call her. And I’ll also say thank you for being all you are and caring so much. But I’ll be fine.”
“We’ll see.”
We would.
We said our goodbyes and rang off.
I put the phone down, the glass beside it, prepared more cheese and bread and poured more wine while I chewed it.
I did this thinking about doing what I should absolutely not do.
But the conversation brought it all steaming full force into the present, into that lovely room in a lovely inn in New England.
So I went to the closet and opened the empty suitcase I’d stowed there after I’d unpacked (this something Patrick found amusing, if we were to stay somewhere for two days or more, I always unpacked).
The big envelope was in there.
I shouldn’t have brought it. In my more fanciful imaginings, I considered a certain someone finding I was there, ordering a police raid and discovering it.
Of course, that wouldn’t happen.
At least the last part of it.
I went back to the bed, pulled the two manila folders in the envelope out, and I set them on the bed.
I nabbed my wine and turned back to them.
I opened the thinner one.
There was an eight by ten picture paper-clipped to the inside, front left, of my brother leaving a lovely, shingle-sided home and walking to a blue Subaru parked in his drive.
The last time I’d seen him was at my mother’s funeral. The last time I’d spoken to him was at my mother’s funeral. Or, I said very little to him. What he’d said to me was that I wasn’t welcome at the gathering at Mom and Dad’s house, and I should feel my due respects were paid by attending her service graveside.
Patrick, who had been standing at my side, had been livid.
We did not go to the gathering.
Dad had died nearly two years before Mom did. Regardless of the fact he was a fitness fanatic, ran nearly daily and watched everything he ate, he’d had a bad heart that had led to a succession of strokes, the last one killing him.
Mom’s death had been uglier.
She’d slipped, fallen and hurt herself badly in her greenhouse, cutting her arm on a pair of shears, nicking an artery and bleeding heavily. She’d dragged herself to the door and nearly through it before she’d passed out with the pain and blood loss. It was winter and it was during a cold snap.
And it was ghastly, my mother freezing to death (or bleeding to death, no one knew which came first).
I’d been in shock not only losing her, but losing her before I could make amends (or find some way to convince her to allow me to make amends, and I’d lost Dad the same way), but also her dying in such a distressing manner.
Patrick knew that, so because of that he was even less thrilled that Caylen, my brother, had been so awful to me.
But it was awful of me to think that it was pure Caylen when, not two months after Mom died, he’d divorced his wife (because Mom would have lost her mind, her brilliant, genius, perfect eldest child doing something like leaving his wife and legally severing ties with her), and he’d left.
He’d then done something else very Caylen, moving across the country, leaving not only his wife but his two kids behind.
He was a software designer and a good one. The company he worked for had headquarters outside of San Francisco. But he could work anywhere.
So he did, in a remote town in Maine one hundred miles north of Magdalene.
It would seem I wasn’t the only Webster child who liked solitude.
His children flew out to visit him once a month. He flew to visit them once a month too. Apparently this was working for all of them and mostly, according to the PI, because my brother’s children could just about stomach four days a month with their father. More was not as easily tolerated.
I skidded the papers out in a fan on the bed. Papers, which were the reports from the private investigator that Patrick had hired, that stated, as well as all of that, my brother hiked, he fished, he sailed, he biked, he worked.
He did whatever Caylen wanted to do.
I took a sip of wine, swallowed it, and then I took a very deep breath, my gaze going to the second, thicker folder.
Patrick had told me about his private investigator and what he’d done three weeks before he’d died. He’d given me the envelope with the folders in it then as well.
I hadn’t touched it until over a month after he’d gone.
Now, the second folder, everything in it I’d read so many times, I’d lost count.
And I opened it again right then.
Paper-clipped to the inside, front left of that folder was an eight by ten picture of a tall, dark-haired, extraordinarily handsome man walking down a sidewalk I now recognized as being on Cross Street, the main street of Magdalene.
He had a child on his hip.
She had on a little cream hat that had little cat ears coming from the top sides of it, the insides of the ears pink, at the front of it at her forehead was a pink nose with little black yarn whiskers knitted to the sides. She had a little pink, puffy jacket on. And she had little cream mittens on her hands with little gray kitty faces on the outsides, pink noses and ears.
She had dark hair flowing from under her cute hat.
She had amazing hazel eyes.
Her name was Janie.
And in that picture, she had been two.
She was now four.
My eyes slid to the man.
Coert Yeager, the sheriff of Derby County Maine (said “darby,” like the English pronounced it).
A man I knew almost all of our acquaintance as Tony.
Since the now-Sheriff Yeager had left Denver, or nearly since he’d left, Patrick had had him followed.
Not constantly. Patrick didn’t set a PI to stalking him. But reports were expected every quarter.
And they were received.
Thus I knew Sheriff Yeager came to Derby County, to Magdalene, to accept a post as a deputy at the sheriff’s department. A much different post in this small, picturesque tourist town on coastal Maine than the dangerous undercover police work he did in Denver.
I also knew he wasn’t fond of his boss and he made this publicly known by running against him eight years into his tenure as a deputy. The campaign was acrimonious but apparently enough of Derby County’s citizens didn’t like the old sheriff that Coert had become the new one, beating his boss by a slim nine percent margin.
The second election against the same opponent he’d won by forty-one percent.
His last election he’d run unopposed.
He was known as good-natured, perceptive, dedicated, hard-working, sharp and just.
I further knew that he’d dated, lived with and become engaged to a beautiful woman named Darcy, who, after six years, the last two with his ring on her finger, he’d ended things with. She was hurt, bitter and moved to Marblehead, Massachusetts to escape him.
I understood that last part.
Boy, did I understand that.
He’d then dated, lived with but didn’t become engaged to a beautiful woman named Kim, who, after four years, saw the writing on the wall after what had happened to the one before.