The Sound of Glass (35 page)

The rear gate slid down and clanged shut, and then the beeping sounds of the truck reversing came from the driveway, but neither one of them looked over.

Merritt collapsed into the rocking chair beside Loralee’s, then carefully unfolded the letter and began to read.

July 25, 1955

My darling Henry,

You will never see this letter; yet I feel compelled to write it. It is my farewell letter to you, the last words I will ever address to you whether or not you see them. Today our mutual misery will be over for eternity. Or at least until we meet again in the next life, wherever that will be. I will admit that I haven’t planned much further than today.

I love you, Henry. I have since the first moment I saw you. But, you see, I hate you almost as much as I love you. And I know you must feel the same way, because when I count the bones you have broken of mine, like a lover counts petals from a flower with, “He loves me; He loves me not,” I always come up with a different answer.

I cannot live with you any more than I can imagine living without you. But we have a daughter now, and it is her protection that has charted my course. I could not bear to see you lay a hand on her, and know that I was responsible for not protecting her.

My handwriting is shaky, but still legible. As you know, it’s not because of nerves—I’m quite calm now that I know that I’m going through with this. It’s because two of my fingers are numb because of nerve damage received when you slammed my hand in the car door because I didn’t exit the car fast enough for you. That
was the proverbial last straw as I envisioned the tiny hand of our daughter suffering a similar fate.

It was an easy thing, especially for a bright girl who always did well in science, to make a bomb and set an alarm that would detonate after your arrival in Miami, after it is securely stowed in your trunk and you are driving away to your next adventure with your latest lover. It was an easy thing to pack it with your toothpaste and shaving cream, then place it in your suitcase, tucked in among your neatly ironed and folded clothes. Just as easy as it will be to latch your suitcase after I’ve placed this letter inside and hand it to you, then watch you stow it in the car trunk. It will be easy up until the moment I watch you drive away from me for the last time.

You are my beloved, and always will be. Forgive me.

J

Loralee stared at Merritt, wondering whether she’d ever seen skin so pale, so bloodless. “You know who wrote that?”

Slowly, Merritt nodded. “Yes,” she said, carefully folding the letter like the edges were giving her splinters. “My grandmother.”

EDITH

OCTOBER 1993

E
dith finished the tiny stitches on the Eton tie, knotting it off by hand. It was perfect, the dimensions proportional to the real height of Henry P. Holden. She’d been to his interment, and that of that poor woman from Pittsburgh. Or was it Poughkeepsie? It had been nearly forty years, and some of the details were getting foggy. Both unclaimed victims had been buried at the same time in separate graves, at the charity of the parishioners of Saint Helena’s.

The names had been printed in the newspaper, and when she’d seen Henry’s name, recognized it from the luggage tag, she knew she had to go. She’d almost called the funeral home to suggest bringing a fresh suit of clothes, but then realized that she couldn’t. Not ever. But she’d remembered to ask the undertaker how tall he’d been, so that when she made his doll replica, it would be exact. That was how
she knew how long the tie needed to be and where it would fall when she’d placed Henry in his seat on the plane.

But the funeral for the man she’d never met but knew so much about had been years before—before C.J. had grown up to be just like his father. Before Cal was born and then Gibbes. Before Cecelia had died. This last was what had convinced Edith that she couldn’t be a passive bystander anymore, quietly working in her attic to solve a crime from bits and pieces of discovered wreckage. Her silence since the crash and the discovery of the suitcase and the letter had been just that—passive. But Cecelia’s death had pushed Edith to reach out to Henry’s widow—the faceless woman whose first name began with the letter J. Not to condemn her. Never that. Edith knew too well what J. Holden had been through. Knew how each beating had diminished her, had warped her thinking to the extent that she could place a bomb on a plane and not expect anything to go wrong. Could not anticipate anybody else getting hurt. Nobody except somebody who’d lived that life, who’d felt her own psyche lessened, would know that.

No, Edith had reached out to Mrs. Holden to let her know that she was not alone. That she—and Cecelia—and doubtless countless others formed an odd sisterhood. One where the members survived in secret and sometimes even enacted a revenge that was as stealthy as the violent acts they’d been forced to endure.

Edith slid open the makeshift drawer she’d created beneath the sea-glass table for odds and ends. Among the rubber bands, buttons, paper clips, and glue, she kept one large envelope identical to the one she’d already sent to Henry Holden’s widow.

Every once in a while, Edith toyed with sending her another letter. Maybe she hadn’t received the first one, the one with the handkerchief Edith had taken from the suitcase and the note from Edith explaining that she knew how the plane crashed. How the killing of innocent people had been an accident but the death of Henry P. Holden was not. That the secret would forever be safe with her.

Using her thumb and forefinger, Edith picked up the small dopp kit she’d painstakingly made, with tiny replicas of combs and razors and little soaps made from slivers she’d taken from C.J.’s bar of soap he’d left by the sink. With a tiny dab of model airplane bonding glue, she stuck the dopp kit in Henry Holden’s lap.

Over the years, while working on her plane model, putting each piece together as it was discovered buried in the marsh or in a farmer’s field, that one niggling fact wouldn’t leave her alone. Henry Holden’s suitcase hadn’t contained a dopp kit, although there’d been an indentation among the tightly packed items just big enough for one to fit. It wasn’t until Edith had read a newspaper report about the plane’s two-hour delay at LaGuardia that it had begun to make sense to her.

Technically, the dopp kit shouldn’t be on Henry’s lap. But she was vain—vain about her attention to details and the small objects she’d made for the kit. As long as she knew that it was wrong, that the actual dopp kit had been obliterated, vaporized in the first second of the blast by the bomb neatly tucked inside of it. Luckily for Edith, it hadn’t been in the suitcase, where it was supposed to have been. If it had, she never would have found the suitcase in her garden. Instead, Henry Holden had retrieved the dopp kit after his dutiful wife had dropped him off at the airport and presumably given him a chaste parting kiss. He had retrieved it because he was going to Miami and was—possibly? probably?—going to see somebody where a closer shave might have been required. Something he could take care of once they were in the air, in the tiny onboard bathroom. So he’d taken it out before checking his suitcase to be loaded beneath the plane.

The dopp kit, so carefully packed by his loving wife, just like the rest of his things, had stayed in the overhead space, ticking away, while Henry and the other forty-eight passengers and crew on board waited at La Guardia before finally taking off again two hours past the time they were supposed to.

Edith often found herself during the day timing how long exactly two hours seemed to be. She’d make a note of the hour, and then get busy with a task, looking up periodically to see how long it was. She supposed that sitting in a plane during the boring hours in flight must have seemed interminable to Henry and his fellow passengers. But she found herself often wondering whether, had they known that those two hours would be some of their last minutes, the time would have passed by so much more quickly.

Two hours
. It haunted her. And oftentimes she wondered whether those two hours haunted Mrs. Holden, too. Wondered when she’d realized her horrible mistake, her flaw in reasoning that had killed so many innocent people. The simple fact remained that if the plane had not been delayed, they would have reached Miami on time. And Henry would have been driving away from the airport—alone?—with his suitcase and dopp kit in the trunk of the rental car at the time the bomb was supposed to detonate. Or perhaps he would have opened the dopp kit midflight and discovered the little extra item his loving wife had packed there. Yes, it haunted Edith. Almost as much as she imagined it haunting Mrs. Holden.

The mistake in judgment was the only justification that Edith had as to why she hadn’t told the police when she’d finally figured everything out. The death of all those passengers had been an accident. The death of Henry P. Holden had not been; albeit, in her opinion, it had been justified. Cecelia’s death had simply firmed her conviction.

“Edith!” Cal shouted from somewhere in the house, followed by a loud slamming of a door that Edith felt all the way up in the attic. He’d started calling her by her first name shortly after his father’s death, when he’d assumed the role of man of the house. She didn’t like it, but didn’t make the mistake of letting him know.

Edith turned off the lights in the attic and hurried down the steps to the upper level. Ten-year-old Gibbes stood in the hallway holding his book bag, still wearing his school uniform, having just returned home, his eyes wide.

“Edith!” Cal shouted again, something dangerous in his voice. He’d been working in the garden, digging holes for her new rosebushes. It was his day off from the firehouse, and he’d wanted to do physical labor to work on his muscles. She’d planned on hiring somebody, but the roses were already there, waiting inside burlap bundles to be planted.

“I’ll be right there,” she called, then froze as she listened to his heavy steps in the hallway below, and the sound of something solid being dragged against wood floors.
Dear God, no.
He wasn’t supposed to be digging near the bench. But maybe he’d decided that that was where the roses should be, despite what she’d told him.
No, no, no.
Panicking, she turned to Gibbes. “I need you to go to your room and shut the door and lock it. Don’t come out until I tell you to. Do you understand?”

Gibbes nodded and ran toward his room, but turned back. “What if you need me?”

“Don’t come out.” She kissed his forehead, then headed down the stairs, pausing only a moment until she heard the lock turn in Gibbes’s door.

She thought she could smell the moist earth and the acrid odor of rot before she reached the bottom of the stairs, then nearly gagged on the stench and her own fear when she saw Cal in the foyer holding the suitcase, a trail of dirt leading from the kitchen.

When he saw her, he slid the suitcase toward her, the metal hinges scraping the wood floor. “This is from that plane, isn’t it?”

His voice was low, and to an innocent bystander it wouldn’t have been threatening. But it made Edith’s skin feel as if ants had dug a hole and begun to march beneath it.

There was no point in lying. Edith had found that agreeing with Cal regardless of whether he was right or wrong was the best way to go. “Yes. It fell in my garden the night the plane exploded.”

“Then why is it
here
? Why didn’t you give it to the
police
?” He had a way of emphasizing his words to make sure you understood
that you had done something wrong and he was about to call you on it. And that he expected retribution for your wrongdoing.

For all the years she’d carried her secret, she’d never once imagined she’d be having that conversation. After she had mailed the handkerchief and letter, she’d kept nothing of the suitcase’s contents, nothing to give her away. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten about it; it was more like knowing that the family silver was in the dining room breakfront without actually looking at it.

She cleared her throat, trying to figure what half-truths she could tell him. Because his sense of justice and rightness, of punishment and retribution, were still tangled up in his childhood belief that everything was black-and-white, good or evil, right or wrong. There were no shades of the truth. Unless she could somehow manage to make him believe that justice had actually prevailed. She looked down at where the suitcase lay on the ground, smelling the tart scent of fresh soil, and saw the name tag. Her eyes met Cal’s and she knew he’d seen it, too. Had probably already memorized the name and address just as she had. She still knew it. Could recite it without having to think very hard.

Keeping her voice calm, she said, “I didn’t think his widow wanted the police to have it.”

He reached down and gripped the name tag, then wrenched it loose with a single hard tug. He looked at her with an expression that was half triumph, half sneer. “Is she the one? The one who put the bomb on the plane?”

She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. But she had experience with that and was able to stop herself from reeling, keeping her eyes on his. “Yes,” she said calmly. “How did you know?”

He took a step toward her and she dropped her eyes, but didn’t move back. “I know what you’ve been doing up in the attic, Edith. I saw the mangled bodies and the blown-apart plane, even though you tried to hide it from me. I even made my own LEGO airplane so I could pretend I was working alongside you, helping to solve the
mystery. And I saw the shoe-box model you made of a woman in her kitchen making a bomb with sticks of dynamite and an alarm clock. You destroyed it, didn’t you? Right after Mama died you destroyed it. It’s just taken me this long to figure out why.” He thrust his finger at her, jabbing her in the chest. “I assumed you’d demolished all the evidence so nothing could ever be proved. But I was wrong.” His face was half jeer, half incredulous disappointment.

Edith kept her voice calm. “The damage had been done. People died, but it was an accident, Cal. You do know that, don’t you? She didn’t mean to blow up the plane—that wasn’t meant to happen. She was sick in her head. You don’t understand what happens to a woman’s mind—a woman who’s been beaten and belittled for so long that she can’t think straight anymore. She can only think in the present, and not anticipate things going wrong—just the single focus of ending her torment. And all those people who died—there was no way to bring them back. I wanted that poor woman to find some peace, although I don’t know whether she ever could.”

Edith knew before he spoke that her words would not sway him.

“No matter what you say, or what trials you think you’ve been through in your life and at the hands of my grandfather, nothing,
nothing
justifies you being an accessory to murder. Yes, that’s what you are. A
murderer
. You knew the plane’s explosion wasn’t an accident, and you found out who had caused it. But you kept it to
yourself
.”

She broke her own rule and raised her voice. “Because I felt a kinship toward her. She left a letter in the suitcase. He hurt her, Cal. Like your grandfather hurt me. Like your father hurt your mother. Except she had the courage to make it stop.”

Without warning, he reached up and slapped her hard on the face, knocking her down. “You don’t even know her first name,” he spat.

She looked up at him and wiped the blood from her cut lip. “I didn’t need to. Because I could have filled in the blank with half a dozen names. Like Cecelia.”

Cal took a step toward her, and she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see the next blow, but refused to shrink back.

“Grandma?”

Gibbes’s voice came from the top of the stairs.

“Don’t come down here, Gibbes. Not if you know what’s good for you,” Cal called out.

Edith opened her eyes. “Go back to your room, sweetie,” she managed, tasting blood in her mouth. “I’m all right.”

Cal looked down at her, his eyes softening as if seeing her for the first time and wondering why she was on the ground and bleeding from her lip. He knelt beside her and tucked her hair behind her ears, then pressed his forehead against hers. She realized that he was crying, his tears warm and sticky on her face.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.” He pressed his forehead against hers even harder, as if he could melt inside her and disappear.

She reached up and placed a hand on his cheek. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”

“I can’t . . . I can’t let this go. You know that, right?”

“Please don’t, Cal. Let it be. I have carried this knowledge on my shoulders for all these years. Let it die with me. No good can come of it.”

He took her head in both his hands, and she felt the power in them and the gentleness, too. He’d always been that way, ever since he was a little boy playing fire and deciding that everybody would live, and that the perpetrator was caught and blame and justice correctly attributed. It was a fatal flaw in his character, the thing that would one day destroy him.