For once, Marilee seemed embarrassed. “I’m real sorry about that. Skye and I wouldn’t have hurt you that way for the world. He wanted to explain . . . to make it easy for you.”
“To make it easy for me.” Gwen Ellen did not make a question out of it, but Marilee answered anyway.
“He honored all the years you’d had together. He didn’t want to hurt you. But we were so much in love, you see.”
I put out a hand to stop her, but Gwen Ellen put her hand over mine. “No, I want to hear. When did you meet my husband?”
“We were on a committee together for the college. To raise funds from alums, you know?”
“Yes, he told me.”
“We didn’t mean for anything to happen, but it was like—electric.” Her face lit up and she gave a happy little laugh; then she pressed one hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be saying things like that to you. But you asked,” she added defiantly, “and we were going to get married. He’d bought me the ring.”
“You think he would have actually married you?” Gwen Ellen’s voice was remote, as if she were asking about two strangers. “He’d have lost the business, you know. MacDonald’s wasn’t his; it was mine. I made him put it in my name after Nicole was born.” She saw me jump, and spoke to me. “I knew about Nicole’s mother. I just pretended Saturday for Laura’s sake. Skye was so ashamed, he had to tell me. It made him feel better, I think.”
She didn’t say how it had made her feel. I stared at her in astonishment and admiration. Never in twenty years had she betrayed him, even to me, who knew her so well.
“Did you also pretend that Skye wanted Laura to have half the company?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t true. Laura had been so touched by her daddy’s change of heart.
“Oh, no. He really did change his mind. He told me on the way to the Mexican restaurant that he’d finally accepted that Laura would be better at running the business than Skell. He said he thought I should leave it to them jointly. Laura could run it and let Skell do something else.” She turned back to Marilee. “Do you understand what I’m saying? If Skye married you, he’d have had to give up the company. Do you really think he would have done that?” She stifled a yawn.
Marilee leaped to her feet. “He
was
going to marry me. He was. You’ll never make me believe otherwise.” She stormed out of the room. “He loved me,” she called back.
“He loved that motor company,” Gwen Ellen called after her.
The back door slammed.
Only then did she turn to me, her eyes full of pain. “He
was
going to marry her, MacLaren. When he got home that evening after work, I showed him the letter and asked who he’d gone with. He admitted it was Marilee, and he said he couldn’t help himself, he loved her. He wanted to marry her. You didn’t know, MacLaren—nobody knew—but Skye’s had other women through the years. He thought I didn’t know, but I did. I put up with it because he always played out of town. This time, though, was different. He said he was real sorry to be hurting me, but he just had to be with her. He said she made him feel alive and young again.” Gwen Ellen lightly touched the haircut that hadn’t made her young enough. “That’s why he told me on the way to the restaurant what he thought I ought to do with the business. He was giving it up. He was planning to
leave.”
Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
“Oh, honey!” Tears stung my own eyes and clogged my throat. “I saw the letter, too. You left it on your dresser, and I was up there looking for Skell’s ferret. But I didn’t realize at the time that the dude ranch trip was the same week Skye was supposed to be in Denver and you and I went on our weekend retreat. Laura said she couldn’t reach him there to get his approval for a new radio ad. That’s because he was in New Mexico, I guess.”
She wasn’t paying attention to me. Her dark head was bent toward the window, listening. When we heard Marilee’s car start, she gave a remote little smile. Then she turned to me and said the oddest thing. “MacLaren, I really wish you hadn’t stayed so long.”
“You killed Skye, didn’t you?” I asked gently. “After you all left the restaurant, he went by some property he was thinking of buying for Hands Up Together. When he got out to look at it, you ran over him.”
The tears that had stood in her eyes welled up and rolled down her cheeks. Slowly she nodded.
She started to talk in a dreary, toneless voice. “I didn’t care a thing about that land, but he just had to show it to me. He was so excited about that project. But when he got out of the car and I saw him standing there looking at the fields, all I could think of was the letter in my pocketbook, and how no matter what he did to me and the children, everybody was still going to say what a fine man he was. Skye MacDonald, benefactor of Hopemore. They wouldn’t care if he left me and married Marilee—not for long, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t care if he had more children. He was killing our family, MacLaren. Yet people would still think he was
fine.
” She pressed a hand to her mouth to stem the torrent.
Do not destroy.
That’s what the last six commandments are all about. Don’t destroy yourselves by working too hard. Don’t destroy trust, love, life, natural boundaries, and truth among you. The commandments aren’t heavy-handed Keep Out signs. Joe Riddley calls them “the manufacturer’s operating instructions for this computer we call life.” Skye violated those instructions. But oh, my dear God, so had Gwen Ellen.
She spoke in a whisper. “I couldn’t let him destroy us. I slid over into his seat, put the car in gear, and ran right over him. Then I backed up and drove away. The whole time I drove back to town, I thought, ‘I can’t live without Skye. I can’t. God, let me die; let me die!’ But I didn’t have the courage to kill myself. When I saw I was on Oglethorpe Street, I decided to go to the church. I don’t know why.”
I did. Sanctuary. The refuge of lost and desperate souls for centuries. “Oh, God, you are our fortress.” The Psalm left my lips in a murmur. I half rose in my chair, wanting to take her in my arms like I used to when she was little, but she waved me back to my seat.
“Let me finish. I have to tell you. I parked in back so nobody would see me, and I wiped the steering wheel real good. Then I slid to my own side, because my prints were supposed to be there. I got out and started for the door, but just then it started to rain. Buckets and buckets, all at once. I didn’t want to track muddy water all over the church, and I was already soaked, so I decided to walk home. This may sound silly, but that walk in the storm felt like a cold, cleansing shower. And I had lots of time to think exactly what I would do and say the next morning. If it had just been me, I’d have gone straight to the police station. But I didn’t want the children to suffer any more than they had to.” For the first time I saw remorse and uncertainty in her eyes. “After I got inside, I threw my clothes in the dryer and took a sleeping pill. When I woke up the next morning, I truly didn’t remember for a few minutes what I had done. I thought Skye was just down at the motor company. And then, I remembered—”
Sobs finally came, terrible racking sobs that wrenched her shoulders and heaved up her grief. “I worked in the yard all morning and felt like I was burying my love under chicken manure. He did bad things, Mac, but I loved him. I truly loved him.”
Finally I could go to her. Kneel down and hold her, murmur senseless things that seemed to comfort and quiet her.
“How did you know?” she whispered into my collar. “How did you figure it out?”
“The ground wasn’t wet under him. It started pouring rain just as we got to Maynard’s, and we left Casa Mas Esperanza not too long after you did. There wasn’t time for Skye to come home, come inside the house with you, receive a phone call, and get back out there. When I thought about how little time anybody had to kill him, it had to be you.” I shivered as I remembered that what had worried Gwen Ellen the day after Skye died was not who could have killed him, but that he had lain all night in the rain.
Outside the window, something crashed.
“That sounded like a car.” I meant to jump to my feet, but I’d been kneeling, and at my age you don’t jump the way you used to. My knees were stiff, my legs tottery.
“Marilee must have hit a tree.” Gwen Ellen said it with no emotion whatsoever. I looked down at her, and she was smiling. “I laced her coffee with half a bottle of sleeping pills. I got a new prescription filled this morning.”
The tea in my stomach rose up in protest. “Oh, honey.” I pressed one hand to my lips, feeling very sick indeed. “You’ll never get away with that. You know I’ll have to tell somebody.”
She reached up and stroked my cheek with tender love. “I knew that, MacLaren. That’s why I put the rest in our tea.”
27
I staggered across the room and bent to grab my pocketbook for the cell phone, but my battery was dead. I’d forgotten and left it on the whole time I was sick in bed. I turned toward the kitchen and hoped I could make it that far.
“Don’t leave me,” Gwen Ellen said sweetly, laying her head against the back of her chair. “Sit down and wait. We won’t feel any pain. We’ll just drift off and sleep forever.”
Gwen Ellen had no notion how nasty a person is who has drifted off to that kind of sleep. She would never expect to be found with her bowels and bladder emptied into her chair. She probably expected Skye to meet her on the other side and wake her with a kiss.
I didn’t believe in Prince Charming; I believed in God. “Help me. Help me,” I muttered as I lurched toward the kitchen.
“Don’t go, MacLaren,” she whimpered. “Don’t leave me alone. It’s getting dark.”
My own eyes were blurring, and I wasn’t sure I could speak. It took three tries for me to punch in 911, and I could barely whisper, “Help, help, help,” when somebody answered.
I leaned over the sink and thrust my finger as far down my throat as I could get it. I gagged, but nothing came out. I’ve never been one to throw up when I’m sick.
What was it Mama used when I ate those pokeberries?
Mustard. I saw the picture in my mind’s eye. Dry mustard. In water.
My legs were spaghetti, so I propped myself against the counter and used my elbow as a crutch, opening upper cabinets as I went. My ears were rushing, and the world was growing dim.
I found the dry mustard and emptied it into a glass by the sink. I didn’t worry if the glass was clean; I had to summon all my energy to turn on the tap. I stirred with a knife from the drainer and downed the entire glass in one long swallow, then stood by the sink and waited for half an eternity.
I felt myself slipping to the floor when my stomach began to heave. With my last reserves of energy, I hauled myself against the sink and flopped over into it. That’s the only time in my life I ever thanked God for the ability to vomit.
I felt only a little better. How much of the drug had entered my system?
I heard a siren wail down the street, turn into the drive, and stop.
“Oh, God,” I groaned. They had stopped for Marilee. They didn’t know we were there.
Again I dragged myself to the telephone. This time I had to sit before I could punch in 911. Three numbers were far too many. Two rings far too long. When the voice came, I croaked hoarsely, “Please, another ambulance. Inside the house. Two of us—”
That’s when everything went black.
“Come on, Little Bit. Come on. You can do it.” Joe Riddley sounded like he thought I ought to be up and doing something, but I was far too weary.
“I can’t.” I turned my head away.
“That’s my girl! Come on. Wake up!” He shook me.
Joe Riddley weighs twice what I weigh. He probably thought he was shaking gently, but my whole head rattled. I could feel my brains jiggling around in there. “Stop,” I grumbled. “That hurts.”
“Open your eyes. You can do it.”
“Don’t wanna.” He didn’t realize my eyelids had been attached to my eyes with glue. If I tried to open them, I’d pull out my eyeballs.
He bent down so close I could feel his whiskers on my cheek. First he gently kissed each eye. Then he took his finger and raised one lid. It went up slick as spit. “Hey. You in there?”
“Yeah. I’m in here.” I just didn’t know where here was. I didn’t have a clue where I was until I recognized the color of the walls. I’d seen enough of that particular shade of pink when Joe Riddley was in the hospital. Everything came back like an enormous wave, knocking the breath out of me.
“Gwen Ellen? Marilee?”
He shook his head. “They didn’t make it. When you feel better, you can tell us what went on. Marilee crashed into a tree and died instantly. Gwen Ellen was found on her sunroom with an empty pot of tea.”
Empty? She must have drunk another cup after I left.
Hot tears squeezed through my closed lids and ran down the sides of my face. Joe Riddley gently swabbed them with his finger. “Don’t cry, Little Bit. Don’t cry.” I could tell he was getting distressed, but I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for Gwen Ellen. I cried for Skye. I even cried for Marilee. Underneath the barracuda suit was a plain little girl who wanted more cards than life had dealt her, and looked for them in the wrong deck.
Joe Riddley got up and left; then I felt a wet washcloth flop onto my face. “Stop crying,” he said urgently. “Stop it.”
I pushed away the washcloth. “I’ve stopped. Get me a towel.”
I dozed on and off for the next twenty-four hours. That afternoon, I knew when Ridd’s wife Martha stopped by just before she went on duty. She squeezed my hand and whispered, “Thanks for sticking around. We all need you, you know.”
I knew when Walker and Cindy came, because I could smell her expensive perfume and his aftershave. Walker leaned over my bed and muttered, “So help me, if she doesn’t stop this detectin’, I’m gonna—”
I opened one eye. “You’re gonna do what?”
He grinned a bit shakily. “I don’t know, but it will be terrible.”