Arrowood (25 page)

Would it have been any different, any better, had I known the truth from the beginning? If everyone had?

“Arden!” my mother shrieked as I fled out the door, clutching my muddy boots. “Come back here!”

Snow had started to fall while I was in the house, and the windshield was coated with downy flakes. I started the car and stomped on the gas, my hands shaking on the steering wheel and tears blurring my vision. I caught a glimpse of my mother in the rearview mirror, her mouth wide open, still yelling, though I could no longer hear her. I switched off the ringer on my phone in case she tried to call.

I drove past the outskirts of town and pulled over on an empty stretch of road. Weeds rustled around me in the bitter wind as I bent over and retched. My legs were too weak to carry me back to the car, so I crawled up the slope above the ditch and rolled onto my back. The sky was pale, nearly colorless, the snowflakes blowing in every direction, like those in a shaken snow globe. I lay there, the cold working into me from the ground below and the wind above, until the low whine of an approaching semi urged me up. I didn't want anyone stopping to see if I needed help.

After crossing into Iowa, I parked at a Flying J truck stop in Waterloo and slept in my car with the doors locked and the engine running. When I woke, stiff and hungry, it was well past lunchtime, and I decided to go inside and eat at the restaurant. I sat alone in a red vinyl booth that could have easily held six people, and ordered the lumberjack breakfast. I couldn't remember ever being so thirsty, and the waitress nodded, unfazed, when I requested four drinks: coffee, orange juice, water, Coke.

While I waited for my food to arrive, I pulled out my phone and checked my messages. My mom had called and left a voicemail, which I didn't listen to. Mrs. Ferris had called to remind me to fill out the feedback survey on the open house. There was a flurry of increasingly concerned texts from Ben.
Mom says there's a police car in front of Arrowood…everything okay? Hey, if you can, text back and let us know if you're all right, if you need anything. Mom went over to talk to the cops and they wouldn't tell her anything…we're all getting worried. I called Lauren and she said she hasn't heard from you, either. Where are you??

I texted back and told him that there had been a family emergency and I'd had to drive to my mom's unexpectedly. He replied immediately to ask what had happened, and I stared at the blinking cursor, not sure how to respond.

I opened a packet of Advil and swallowed the pills with juice. Another text popped up on my phone as the waitress delivered a platter loaded with pancakes, bacon, hash browns, and scrambled eggs. The message was from Josh.
Where are you? Call me ASAP. They're looking for you.

The closer I got to Keokuk, the more worried I grew about what would happen upon my return. Had the police figured out that I was the one who had called 911 about Heaney, or had they only gone to my house because Heaney worked there, and his truck was parked nearby? Had he been found alive and taken into custody? What if the police hadn't taken the call seriously, and hadn't sent anyone to Little Belle Isle? Heaney could have called someone to come get him, and he could be looking for me. I didn't regret what I had done to him, though I knew there might be consequences. I was thinking of the woman who went to trial for kicking her attacker in the head more times than were necessary to escape. I had used a shovel. I would tell the truth, that something inside me had shifted, and I had chosen to survive.

I would tell the police, too, about the twins. No one knew the full extent of what had happened except for my mother and me, and I could choose to keep it that way, but after a lifetime of secrets and lies and unanswered questions, I didn't want to hide anything. And there was another reason: Harold Singer deserved to have his name cleared, even if it was far too late to undo the damage that had been done.

I couldn't bring myself to listen to the message my mother had left. I knew she would want me to leave the past buried, and I doubted there was any way to prove, or disprove, her story after all this time. If it was deemed to be an accident, that would likely be the end of it, as the statute of limitations would have run out on anything short of murder, though maybe they would find a way to hold her responsible for all the time and money wasted searching for the twins. There would be news coverage, for sure. There always was when a cold case got cracked, especially one involving missing children. It wouldn't take long, though, for other stories to push it out of the spotlight. Every day, kids disappeared, families were murdered, women escaped from locked rooms after years of indescribable torment. The demise of the Arrowood twins wouldn't hold anyone's attention for long, at least not outside of Keokuk.

It was past dark when I exited the highway at Fort Madison and drove through town to Josh's apartment. I knocked, hoping that he was home. The door opened, and his face flooded with relief.

“Thank God,” he said, throwing his arms around me before I could say anything. It hurt my ribs, but I hugged him back. He let go and stared at me with disbelief. “You're okay. Mostly okay,” he corrected, taking in my appearance. “Come in. Everyone's been looking for you.”

Files were spread out over the coffee table and stacked on the floor, and the apartment smelled like Chinese takeout. He offered me a carton of fried rice. “Are you hungry?” I shook my head. “Here, let me make room.” He cleared papers from the couch so I could sit, and fetched me a glass of water.

Josh sat on the floor across from me. “How badly are you hurt?” he asked. “They found blood at the cabin on the island, but neither of you were there—”

“I'm all right,” I said. The blood must have been Heaney's. I hadn't been able to tell, in the dark, how badly he was injured. Not badly enough that he couldn't get away, apparently. “I'm just a little banged up.”

“I heard on my police scanner last night that officers were dispatched to Little Belle Isle to search for a wounded assault suspect. You know how my ears perk up at things like that.” He shot me an apologetic glance. “I don't know all the details, but my cousin Randy called me a few hours ago, when they figured out it was you who made the 911 call. They still hadn't located Heaney. I got ahold of your friend Ben, and asked if he'd heard from you. He said you'd gone to your mom's. Then he warned me to leave you alone, and wouldn't tell me anything else.”

“Don't take it personally,” I said. “He didn't have anything else to tell.”

“He was worried about you. We both were.” He was silent for a moment, watching me. “Anyway, when you didn't call, I was hoping it was because you didn't feel like talking to me, and not because Heaney had done something to you.”

“I needed time to think.” I'd spent my last hours in the car running through the movie in my head. The gold car. The door slamming. My dream about the twins being safe at home. The memories I was looking for weren't there, any lost footage long since swept from the cutting room floor. I couldn't remember pouring the Mr. Bubble or twisting the handles to fill the tub, though that didn't mean it hadn't happened. If my mother was lying, I would never know, any more than I would recall the truth.

I sipped my water and set it back down. “You said people were looking for me?”

“Yeah. I mean, not like hunting you down. You're not in trouble, that I know of. The police just want to talk to you and find out what happened, make sure you're okay.” He thumbed through the stack of folders on the coffee table between us. “I don't understand why Heaney would want to hurt you. What was going on? Why were the two of you out on the river at night? You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, but—what happened, Arden?”

I'd decided, well before I pulled off the highway, that Josh would be the first one I'd tell. I explained what had happened with Heaney, and tried to hold myself together as I told him what I'd found in the basement. The tarp, the two small skulls. The conversation with my mother. When I finished, Josh got up off the floor and came to sit next to me, carefully wrapping first one arm and then the other around my stiff shoulders.

“It wasn't your fault,” he murmured, his voice low and soothing, his head tilted against mine. “You know that, right? You were just a kid. She never should have put you in that situation.”

Everything I'd been holding back came bursting out, and I wailed into his chest until my throat burned and my tears finally began to slow. I let myself relax against him, let him hold me, and tried to think of nothing more than the intake of breath, the contraction of my heart, the merest elements necessary to survive. When I was ready, I pulled away. “Will you go with me to the police station?”

“I'll go wherever you want,” he said. “You shouldn't go anywhere alone, not until they find Heaney.”

“Do they think he got off the island? I took his boat, and I didn't see any others at the dock.”

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “There could have been other boats stored somewhere on the island, I guess. And it's possible that he's still there, but you'd think there'd only be so many places to hide. All I know is that they checked the buildings, and they didn't find him, only that small amount of blood at the cabin.”

“Were you surprised?” I asked. “That it wasn't my blood? That I got away?” It had surprised me, the strength of my desire to survive.

“No.” He shook his head, and the faintest smile crossed his lips. “Not at all. You're stronger than you think you are.” The smile faded. Josh squeezed my hands in his. “They'll find him.”

I nodded, and we sat there together in silence until I stopped shaking.

“What's it like?” he asked. “To finally know?”

I couldn't explain what it was like to have an answer that wasn't the one I wanted, to know the real reason I had been left behind. Closure, as I had imagined it, did not exist. I couldn't cauterize my wounds as my mother had done. Closure for me meant moving forward with a cathedral of loss inside my chest. I was no longer waiting for the twins. They were with me because I remembered them, and that had to be enough. What I had done as my eight-year-old self I would have to learn to forgive, though I couldn't fathom how I might begin to do that. My guilt was a hole that gaped wider with each passing moment.

We locked up the apartment and I left my car behind, riding in Josh's van to Keokuk, where we walked into the station together.

I stayed at Josh's place, wearing his flannel pajamas, eating pizza delivered from Sorrento's down the street. He clicked away on his laptop, trying to keep up with the message boards on Midwest Mysteries, while I sat in a chair near the bay window looking out to the street below, where a police car would periodically cruise by. Now that the mystery of the twins' disappearance had been resolved, Josh had abandoned his book about the Arrowoods. There were other stories to write, he said, ones that still needed endings. He'd leave the Arrowood story to me.

A week after Heaney attacked me on Little Belle Isle, I received the call that his body had washed up at the dam, though my wait wasn't over until the autopsy results came back and I learned that he had drowned. I went limp with relief. It wasn't known whether he had drowned accidentally, while swimming back to the mainland in the frigid current, or if he'd taken his own life. Either way, Heaney had walked to shore and entered the water on his own, and there was no indication that the injuries I'd inflicted with the shovel had led to his death.

There was no such relief when it came to the twins. I still couldn't reconcile what I had done. It consumed my waking thoughts and my nightmares as I struggled to understand how I could have turned on the water and left them to die.

I'd barely spoken to my mother since the day I drove up to see her in Minnesota, though I finally listened to the message she had left on my phone after I ran out of her house. She had begged me not to tell anyone about the twins. She feared that she would lose the new life she'd built with Gary, the second chance she'd been given when she was born again. I had doubted from the beginning that my mother was a true believer, certain that she'd embraced faith and forgiveness in only the most self-serving ways, but she clung to Gary and his church, finding strength in them, and they stood by her, unwavering.

Josh had gone to see Singer, who had charged him twice his former rate, claiming he was being courted for interviews by
Inside Edition
and
Dr. Phil
. When Josh asked how it felt to be cleared of any involvement in the twins' disappearance, Singer had said, “Too little, too late,” with a few choice curse words thrown in. I wrote him a letter, though I didn't hear back, so I couldn't be sure he read it. He had hinted to Josh that he was considering a lawsuit, though he hadn't figured out on what grounds. I hadn't meant to falsely accuse anyone. It was one more thing that I couldn't undo, that I would have to learn to live with.

Once we knew that Heaney was gone, I returned to Arrowood. The twins were gone, too, their remains sent off for forensic examination before they could be released to me and buried in the Catholic cemetery. I kept the doors of the laundry room and bathroom closed, unable to look at the hole in the floor, or at the claw-foot tub. I tried not to see the news, either, but the story was everywhere, and traffic on Midwest Mysteries hit an all-time high. A lot of people were disturbed by the way my parents had lied to cover up the twins' deaths, and plenty doubted that it was an accident. What made it slightly less painful were the individuals who offered their condolences, strangers who had been haunted by the case and were sorry to learn that my sisters had died.

I was overwhelmed by the reactions in Keokuk. People from the community reached out to me, sending cards, offering prayers, filling my refrigerator with casseroles and homemade pies. Ben came over on my first night back, bringing takeout from Sonic, and we sat together on the leather sofa in the drawing room, talking late into the night, no tension between us, no awkwardness, nothing left unsaid. It felt just like the old days, when we were friends who could tell each other anything.

A few days after my return, Mrs. Ferris stopped by with an enormous arrangement of snapdragons, lilies, and gladiolus that probably weighed more than she did. After setting the bouquet down on the hall table, she enfolded me in an unexpected hug. “I'm so sorry,” she murmured, before letting me go.

“Wait here,” I said. “I have something of yours.” She stood next to the flowers, a quizzical look on her face, and waited as I went to the study and returned with a folder.

“Medical records,” I said. “I found them in Granddad's things. I shouldn't have read them, but I did. I had no idea you'd lost a child.”

Mrs. Ferris stared at the folder, her eyes losing focus. “That was a long time ago.”

“I overheard you talking to my dad once, at my parents' last Christmas party. You told him you hadn't forgiven him. Was it something to do with this?”

She frowned. “I lost a baby. It had nothing to do with your father.”

“What was it, then, that you said he had to make up to you?”

She smiled wanly. “I was angry with your father because he had pulled me back in. Eddie and I were together off and on for a long time, but I put a stop to it completely when your mother was pregnant with the twins. I didn't think I could live with myself anymore. Eddie had a way, though, of weakening my resolve. That's what I was saying at the party—I hadn't forgiven him for dragging me back to him. I hadn't forgiven myself, either. We were both to blame, after all.”

“You said before that the two of you weren't in love.”

“It's true, we weren't. I was. But not him.” She squeezed my hand, her bony fingers warm and strong.

“I want to talk about something else,” she said. “The work you sent me by accident, those hundred pages you wrote about your family—I shared it with the others at the historical society. I hope you don't mind. I was a bit shocked, actually, after you seemed to be struggling so much with the profile. We've been looking for someone to write a new edition of
Legendary Keokuk Homes,
with more of a focus on the families and the stories behind the houses—something we could sell to all the tourists we're hoping to bring in. I think you'd be perfect for it. We'd pay you, of course. Not much, but I'll see what we can work out.”

I had never expected that Mrs. Ferris would be the one to hand me such a lifeline. I thanked her, and she gave me a bittersweet smile.

“I'm truly sorry for everything,” she said. “I still wonder what would have happened if I hadn't gone to meet your father in the carriage house that day.”

“It still could have happened. If Dad hadn't called Mom and gotten into a fight on the phone, she wouldn't have left me alone with them in the bathroom. But maybe something else would have distracted her.”

Mrs. Ferris's forehead creased. “Hmm. She said they were fighting on the phone?”

“Yeah. He called to say he'd be late, and she wanted him to come home. She was angry about him taking money out of their savings account.”

She shook her head. “She might be remembering wrong. I don't think he called her that afternoon. At least, not while he and I were together. There's no phone line in the carriage house.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he called on his cell.”

“Arden, it was 1994. He didn't have a cellphone. None of us did.” Her voice had sharpened.

“He could have called from somewhere else, after he left?”

Her lips pressed into a tight seam, fine lines feathering out around her mouth. She nodded slowly. “It's possible. I thought he went straight home, but maybe he didn't. I don't really know. Not that any of it matters now, I suppose.”

Memory, as I knew better than most, was not reliable, the truth a shadow that reshaped itself over time. Maybe Mrs. Ferris was wrong about the phone call, and maybe she wasn't. Maybe Mom believed every word she had told me. Maybe her version of that terrible afternoon played in her head like an endless film, the same as my version played in mine. Maybe, to her, it was true. Even if it wasn't.

“Do you think she drowned them?” I asked. Mrs. Ferris appeared frozen for a moment, her mouth slightly ajar, eyes unblinking. Then her gaze drifted toward the staircase, to the second floor, where the twins had died.

“It's hard to imagine that anyone could do that and try to lay the blame on an eight-year-old child.”

She hadn't said no.

I thought back to all the water in the house, the leak in the bathtub that led me to the button, the flood in the laundry room that took me down to the basement and the hidden room, the dripping faucet on the third floor, where I had found Mom's medical records.

I imagined my mother in a daze of pills, angry at my father, about the money, about the affair, about her life not turning out as she'd planned. I imagined her filling the tub and watching my sisters slip below the surface. Trying to decide if she could do the same to me, if she could hold me down and still pass it off as an accident. My father coming home before she could find out. Mom hadn't wanted me to come back to Arrowood, or to talk to Josh Kyle about his book. Maybe she had been worried about what I might find, what I might remember.

I had always had a vivid memory of the twins safe in the bathtub that afternoon, though my father had said it was a fever dream. But the other things my mother said—that she had left me alone with them, that I had overfilled the tub—brought no glimmer of recognition. I couldn't recall the smell of the bubble bath, the feel of the metal handle twisting in my palm, the screech of the faucet. I didn't remember any of it. Could that mean that it hadn't actually happened, that my mother had made it all up to cover up her crime? The fortune-teller had told me to trust myself, that the truth would come from within. I didn't believe that I had drowned my sisters. I believed that my mother had done it.

I called her as soon as Mrs. Ferris left, my heart hollowing out like the dark mouth of a cave as the phone rang and rang, dread seeping in. Finally the answering machine picked up, my mother's recorded voice artificially giddy.
You've reached the Swansons! Please leave a message! Have a blessed day!

“Mom,” I said. “It's Arden. I have some questions about what you told me.” I wasn't sure how much to say on the machine. I wanted her to call me back.

There was a clicking sound, followed by Gary's voice grating in my ear. “Arden? It's Gary.” As if I couldn't tell. “I know you're dealing with a lot right now, and I want you to know your mother and I are both praying for you.”

“Is she there? I need to talk to her.” I could hear faint television voices in the background.

“Your mother has suffered greatly for many years,” he said, “and now she's finally giving it all up to the Lord and letting herself be healed. I hope you'll be able to find peace in our Savior as well.”

“Did you know?” I asked. “Before this all came out, did she tell you? What did she say?”

“We're praying for you, Arden,” Gary continued, deaf to my questions. “We're praying real hard.”

She had fooled him, too.

Lauren was the one who suggested selling Arrowood and buying the Sister House.
We could live there together,
she said
. I can rent the upstairs for summers and holidays until I move back.
It could be a Sister House again.
Not newlyweds, not widows, and not exactly sisters, though close enough. Two women starting out.

I hoped that Granddad would have understood. I was grateful that he had given me the house—I never would have found the twins if he hadn't—but I couldn't live there anymore. I'd thought that coming home would fix me, but it wasn't Arrowood that I had been longing for. I'd been drawn back to this dying town at the convergence of two rivers, the place where I had been born, where the Arrowoods had lived for one hundred and sixty years. The place where I had once been whole and might one day be whole again.

The lawyer explained that it would take some time to get Arrowood on the market and find the right buyer, but there was nothing standing in the way of selling it. Courtney offered to guide me through the process of buying the Sister House from the bank, which I could get started on right away, and Ben promised to help with the restoration, to repair the porch and cabinets and floors, to piece it all back together.

It was one of those deceitful winter days, so bright and sunny that you're convinced of its warmth until you step outside and feel the wind's teeth. I had spent the past few months sitting by the radiator in Granddad's office, working on
Legendary Keokuk Homes
and finishing my long-neglected thesis while frost encased the windows and the river froze and snow blew into dunes around the house. The snow was gone now, and days like this made it seem like spring was a possibility.

Mrs. Ferris had come by earlier in the morning to let me know that I was a shoo-in for the teaching position I'd applied for at the Catholic school, thanks in part to the stellar reference she had provided. It didn't hurt, she added, that the school's gymnasium had been a generous gift from my grandparents and bore the Arrowood name.

Now, my coat buttoned up to my neck in the chilly house, I waited, watching out the window for Josh to pull into the driveway. Staked into the dead grass along the sidewalk out front, a red and white Sutlive Real Estate sign shuddered in the wind. Courtney had stood in last month's melting snow in her high heels and pounded the sign firmly into the ground with a mallet. In the flower beds surrounding the porch, squirrels dug up the bulbs Heaney and I had planted before they had a chance to bloom.

Josh took my hand as I climbed into the van and pressed his lips against my cold fingers. He looked worried. “Are you sure you're ready?”

I attempted a smile to reassure him that I was, and he leaned across the console to kiss me, his fingertips trailing along my jawbone, my skin warming in the wake of his touch. We drove through the quiet streets, past the abandoned elementary school and the Sister House, away from the new Walmart and the old factories, to the edge of town, the good side of the Catholic cemetery.