She kept that stub for twenty-seven years. It lived in her wallet, then in a tin, then in the lining of every bag she owned, until the edges went soft as cloth. She never threw it away. It was the last thing she ever bought for her daughter, and she carried it like a wound that had learned to look like a pocket.
Chapter 10
What Beth Didn't Do
The drive to Bend took three hours, and Tess spent all of them rehearsing what she would say to her aunt. By the time she pulled into the gravel driveway of the little house with the juniper out front, the rehearsal had collapsed into a single sentence, and it was the one she said at the door.
"You were a coward."
Beth Sandoval, sixty-six, stood in the doorway in a cardigan with flour on the sleeve, and she didn't flinch. "Yes," she said. "Come in, Tessie. I've been waiting twenty-seven years for somebody to say it to my face."
The kitchen was warm and smelled of baking. Beth poured coffee and sat down across from Tess, and she folded her hands on the table the way people do when they're about to confess.
"October sixteenth," Beth said. "Ray came to my house that morning. Seven o'clock. I'd never seen him like that β not drunk, not shouting. Cold. He said, 'You help Diana, you lose the house.' He knew about the call. Sal must have told him Diana phoned me." She looked at her hands. "The mortgage was in his name, did you know that? He'd co-signed it when my husband died. One signature and he could have taken the roof off my head."
"Your car was fine," Tess said. It wasn't a question.
"My car was fine. I was too scared to drive." Beth's voice cracked. "I sat in this kitchen from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, Tessie, with the keys in my hand, and I was too scared to drive. When I finally got in the car β two o'clock, do you hear me, two β I drove halfway to the highway and turned around, because I was sure Sal was behind me. I went home and I threw up in the sink. And your mother was standing in that station with a suitcase, waiting for me, and I never came."
Tess had imagined this conversation a hundred ways, and in every one of them she had been merciless. She had pictured herself standing in this kitchen at nine years old, waiting, while her aunt sat here with the keys in her hand. She had pictured every birthday Beth had missed, every recital, every night in the Ellery house when she'd lain awake wondering what was wrong with her that nobody came. But Beth's terror was real β it sat at the table with them, twenty-seven years old and still breathing β and Tess found she had no cruelty left in her that morning, only the flat exhaustion of someone who has finally heard the truth and discovered it doesn't fix anything.
"The letters," Tess said. "You handed them to Ray."
Beth nodded, tears moving down her face without sound. "He came to me after the first one arrived. He said if I ever helped her again β if I ever so much as mailed her a birthday card β he'd make sure I lost everything. And I believed him, because I'd seen what he did to Diana." She wiped her face with the floury sleeve. "So I gave them to him. Every one. Eleven letters. I'm sorry, Tessie. God, I'm sorry."
"Then how did she know about honor roll?" Tess said. "The violin recital. Me learning to drive. She wrote that you told her."
Beth was quiet for a long moment. Then she got up, went to a drawer, and took out a small address book with a cracked plastic cover, and slid it across the table.
"I called her," Beth said. "Twice a year, for twenty-seven years. Christmas and her birthday. From pay phones, then from a prepaid cell I kept in the glove box. Ray never knew. I couldn't go to her, I couldn't help her, I couldn't even mail her a card β but I could call, and I could tell her you were all right. Honor roll. The recital. The driving lessons. All of it." She pushed the address book closer. "That's how she knew. I was a coward about everything except that."
Tess opened the address book. The pages were soft with age. Names, numbers, most of them crossed out. And on the last page, in Beth's handwriting, circled twice in red ink: Ashford β police.
"She asked me to keep it," Beth said. "Years ago. She said if anything ever happened to her, if she ever forgot β she was already forgetting things, Tessie, even then, little things β she said someone should know where to find the man she gave the film to. I kept it. I kept it for twenty-seven years, same as she kept your ticket stub."
Tess looked up sharply. "What did you say?"
Beth blinked. "She told me once β on the phone, years ago β that she kept your unused ticket stub from that day. The second ticket to Reno. She said it was the last thing she ever bought for you." Beth's mouth trembled. "She cried. It was the only time in twenty-seven years she cried on the phone."
Tess closed the address book and held it in both hands. Outside, the juniper moved in the wind. She thought about the shoebox, and the money orders, and the false bottom of the music box, and the folded letter dated October 15, 1999 that she hadn't opened yet. Everything was connecting now, piece by piece, like a fracture knitting β slowly, and not without pain.
"Why are you giving me this now?" Tess asked.
"Because she's forgetting," Beth said simply. "And somebody has to remember for her. It might as well be us."
Tess drove home with the address book on the passenger seat, and for the first time in twenty-seven years, she did not feel like a woman who had been abandoned. She felt like a woman who had been fought for β badly, imperfectly, by frightened people who kept failing and kept trying anyway. It wasn't forgiveness. She was a long way from forgiveness. But it was something else, something with weight, and she carried it home carefully, like a thing that could break.