The drive to Bend took three hours, and Tess spent all of them rehearsing.
She'd traded shifts with Jo β the second swap in a week, granted without comment. She'd told Rob she had a family emergency, which was true in the most technical sense. She'd told Maya she was visiting an old friend.
Aunt Beth's house sat on a quiet street of ponderosa pines, the house she'd lived in since before Tess was born. The porch steps creaked in the same place. Beth opened the door before Tess knocked, as if she'd been watching, and for a moment neither spoke.
Beth Sandoval was sixty-six, widowed six years, her hair gone completely white and pulled back in a knot. She looked at Tess the way people look at a ghost they're not sure they believe in.
"Tessie," she breathed. "Oh, honey. Come in. You're β you didn't call."
"I know." Tess stepped into the front hall, which smelled of cinnamon and old wood. "I need to talk to you, Aunt Beth. About my mother."
Beth's face did something complicated. "Is she β did something happen to Diana?"
"She's at St. Vincent. Early Alzheimer's. She collapsed at a bus stop in Portland three days ago." Tess watched her aunt absorb this. "She's asking for thirty days to explain herself. Before she forgets."
Beth sank into the nearest chair β the armchair by the window where she'd done needlepoint for as long as Tess could remember. "Thirty days," she repeated faintly. "Well. She always did like a deadline."
"She says she has things to tell me. I thought I'd start with you." Tess sat across from her, hands folded, the posture of a nurse taking a history. "October sixteenth, nineteen ninety-nine. The Greyhound station in Portland. Mom left me there at nine in the morning and told me you'd come at noon. You never came."
Beth stared at her hands. "I know."
"I waited until four. A station attendant called the police. I went to a shelter, then to the Ellerys'." Tess kept her voice level. "For twenty-seven years I've told myself you just β forgot, or got the time wrong, or decided a nine-year-old wasn't your problem. I'd like to hear your version."
"I didn't forget." Beth's voice was barely audible. "Your mother called me that morning. From the station. She said β she said, 'Take Tess at noon.' Just like that. Like she was ordering a pizza." A tear slid down Beth's cheek. "I said I would. I meant to."
"But you didn't come."
"No." Beth stood abruptly and went to the kitchen. Tess heard the clatter of plates. When Beth returned she carried two slices of marionberry pie and didn't meet Tess's eyes. "Your father had men watching that station, Tess. A friend of mine worked the lunch counter across the street β she called me at eleven-thirty: two men in a car outside the terminal since eight, and one of them was Ray's."
Tess's pie sat untouched. "Ray's men."
"He'd threatened me before. Said if I helped Diana take you, he'd make sure I regretted it." Beth's hands shook around her fork. "I had two kids in high school, Tess. I was scared. I told myself Diana would come back for you. That she'd never really leave you there. So I stayed home. And by the time I understood she wasn't coming back, the police already had you, and Ray had the emergency custody, and β" She broke off. "I failed you. Both of you."
Tess felt the familiar anger rising, but it had nowhere clean to land β Beth was sixty-six and crying into her pie, and the men in the car were twenty-seven years gone.
"She called you twice a year," Tess said. "Mom. After she left. You talked to her."
Beth went very still. "She told you that?"
"She didn't tell me anything. I'm asking."
A long silence. The kitchen clock ticked. "Yes," Beth said at last. "Twice a year. Christmas and her birthday. She was β she was in Nevada for a long time. Then California. She worked under the table, cleaning houses. She was always asking about you. Always."
"And the letters." Tess leaned forward. "She asked me if I ever got her letters. Christmas letters, birthday letters. Did she send them?"
Beth's face crumpled. "Oh, honey."
"Did she send them, Beth?"
"She sent them to me. To forward." Beth was crying openly now. "Eleven of them, over the years, with little money orders. And I β your father came to me in the spring of 2000. He said if I passed along one more letter he'd take me to court, say I was helping a fugitive. He said he'd tell the judge I was unstable." She wiped her face with her napkin. "I gave them to him. Every one. I told myself you were better off not waiting for letters from a ghost."
Tess stood up so fast her chair scraped the floor. "You gave my mother's letters to Ray."
"I was a coward." Beth looked up at her, wrecked. "I've been a coward for twenty-seven years, Tessie. I'm sorry."
Tess walked to the window and stared out at the pines. Her hands were shaking. Eleven letters. A mother who'd written, and an aunt who'd handed them to the man who'd made them both afraid.
"Why are you telling me this now?" Tess asked.
"Because she's dying by inches and you're the only one who can hear her." Beth came to stand beside her, hesitant, not touching. "And because I can't carry it anymore." She was quiet a moment. Then, very low: "Ask your father what he did with my letters."
Tess turned. "Your letters?"
Beth flushed. "I misspoke. Diana's. Ask what he did with Diana's letters. He kept them, Tess. Men like Ray keep everything. They're leverage."
Tess picked up her keys. At the door she stopped.
"For what it's worth," she said, "I don't think you were a coward. I think you were outgunned." It was the most generous thing she could manage, and it wasn't forgiveness. "But I needed you at noon, Aunt Beth. Remember that."
She drove back over the pass in the dark, Beth's words looping in her head. He kept them. Men like Ray keep everything. Somewhere there was a box, a drawer β eleven letters her mother had written, intercepted and hoarded by a dead man. And a widow in Tigard who'd been married to him for sixteen years.