Page 69 of The Storm
The press had always wanted Lo to be one thing—a Teenage Temptress or a Vulnerable Victim—but she’d been both, sometimes simultaneously. Mom had been a Good Girl from a respectable home—but she’d also fallen in love with a married man, lied about the child he fathered, and, in the process, turned my life and my dad’s into a lie, too. And Edie had been the Tough Broad, the strong girl with the big voice, who’d also been so scared and hurt and traumatized that when an opportunity had come along to punish the woman she blamed for her family’s death, she’d grabbed it with both hands.
And me? Well, I’d been the Small-town Girl Running Off to the Big City, then the Small-town Girl Returned. A discarded girlfriend, a frustrated and broke innkeeper, a betrayed daughter, a sucker taken in by a charming smile.
But now? I’ve found a new side of myself. A woman who is embracing her family business, her legacy. A woman who is happier outside of the limelight.
And a woman who can keep secrets of her own.
The three of us sit there for a long time, long enough to hear the hammers start up and the distant whine of a buzz saw.
“It was for Ellen,” Edie says, causing both me and Lo to turn in our chairs.
She’s staring out at the ocean, her hand trembling slightly where it rests on her thigh, and a pelican swoops into the water and back up into the sky before she speaks again.
“I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, Lo, but that’s why I did it. Why I lied about seeing you with Landon. Because I knew. I knew what happened that night. The night of Marie.”She pauses to take a deep breath, as if she’s steadying herself. “Because I was there.”
It shouldn’t shock me that there’s still more to uncover about what really transpired that night, but my mouth drops open. I think it shocks Lo, too, an emotion I’ve never seen her wear before, because she takes off her sunglasses and peers more closely at Edie, her green eyes bright.
Edie nods. “I came by to check on her. I was worried about her being alone in the storm.”
“You went out in the storm?” Lo asks, her eyebrows raised. “But Frieda, after… after… well, you were scared if it so much as rained.”
“I wanted to be sure Ellen was okay,” Edie replies quietly, and there’s something in the way she says it—the things implied but unsaid, the sudden shyness of her voice—that lands on me and Lo at the same time.
“Oh,” Lo says, nearly as softly as Edie, and Edie gives her a wry smile.
“Oh,” she confirms, then sighs. “Not that Ellen ever knew it. From the time she met Landon Fitzroy, she was just as crazy about him as you were, Lo, and I knew it would end badly. I knew Ellen wasn’t the type to be okay in that kind of situation for long. No offense,” she adds to Lo, who only shrugs.
“But I didn’t know about the baby until that night. That’s what y’all were yelling about when I got here. You didn’t even see me, and I stayed hidden around the side of the porch.” She gestures back toward the inn. “But I saw. I saw Ellen hit him first, then you. I saw you try to drag him to the surf, but you couldn’t, probably because both of you looked like a stiff wind would blow you over.” She gives a snort, then her expression sobers.
“After y’all went back inside, I didn’t want you to know Ihad been there, but I also didn’t want you to leave Landon’s body so close to the inn. I thought the authorities would figure it out for sure, that you’d both get the dang chair if he wasn’t moved, so I tried my darndest to get him out to the ocean. Figured I was stronger than both of you put together, and I was, to be honest. I got him a good ways down the beach, but then the storm started picking up, and I… I got scared. I hoped it would be enough, and I ran.”
We’re all quiet for a moment until Lo says, “So you were there in the end. It was all three of us.”
“All three,” Edie agrees. “But then the police started asking questions, and I was so afraid they’d find out about Ellen, about the baby, about all of it, and…”
She blows out a long breath and lets three waves crash against the shore before saying, “I thought if I gave them you, Lo, it would all go away. You always sucked up all the oxygen in the room, and if people were looking at you, they couldn’t look at anything else. And I—I told myself it wasn’t a lie, not really, because you sure as heck were the one to deliver the last blow, and, well… the rest of it is what I told you when I got back from the hospital. I was still angry about my family, still blaming you in some corner of my heart, and I admit, it felt good. Seeing you suffer consequences for once. It felt good—until it didn’t, but by then it was too late.”
Another long silence descends, and I watch Lo as she takes it all in. Then, with another one of those very Lo waves of her hand, she declares, “Well, it’s a good thing you sucked so bad on the stand, else I’d have scorch marks on my backside right about now.”
It’s such a Lo thing to say that Edie and I both begin to laugh uncontrollably, big honking laughs that send a flock of sand plovers scurrying farther down the beach.
Once I’ve caught my breath, I stand, reaching into the pouch of my hoodie, my fingers closing around cold metal. Mom’s bracelet, the one with the “L,” sparkles in the sun as I pull it out and twist it this way and that.
I’d picked it up the last time I’d visited Hope House. Mom hadn’t been wearing it—it had been sitting on top of the TV, and when I asked Opal about it, she said, “I guess she’s lost a little weight because that dang thing willnotstay on her wrist. I keep finding it on the floor every time I put it on her.”
It’s probably that. A few pounds lost, the cold weather always making jewelry looser.
Probably.
But what if it’s not?
Maybe whatever hold Landon once had on my mother is gone. Maybe, somewhere in her locked brain, she understands that I know the truth now, and she’s ready to be free from it.
I know I fucking am.
Walking toward the surf, I wind my arm back and then throw as hard as I can, the bracelet flashing against the blue sky and the green water, and then, with a faintplop, it vanishes beneath the waves. I imagine it drifting to the wreck of theRosalie, settling into her shattered hull.
A piece of buried treasure, or maybe a curse, but no longer mine to carry.
“What was that?” Lo asks, and I settle back into my chair as behind me, the Rosalie Inn stands like it plans on being there for another hundred years.
“An offering,” I tell her. “To St. Medard.”
She smiles and takes my hand. After a moment, Edie takes my other one.
“We’ll make a witch of you yet, Ellen Chambers’s Little Girl,” Lo murmurs, and I think of Landon with his demands andAugust with his grievances, and both their blood seeping into the boards of the inn, of my home.
I squeeze both their hands, these women who knew and loved my mother, these women who know and loveme.
“You already have.”
