The Caretakers Read online

  Tessa drops bonelessly onto the sofa as her breath abandons her in a rush. Thoughts of a seventy-year-old tragedy are swept away as Tessa is thrust back into her current and equally horrifying reality.

  While Tessa was busy burying her head in the sand, another video hit the news. She clicks on a link that Anne forwarded and braces herself for the now familiar shock of seeing the nightmare version of Oliver Barlow, a man she thought she knew.

  The darkened screen clears as Oliver backs away and sits on the corner of a bed in what appears to be an anonymous motel room. It could be anywhere. He looks more ragged than ever. The hairs on Tessa’s arms stand on end at the hardened, hateful expression in his eyes.

  “Hello out there. I won’t introduce myself again. I assume I have your attention now.”

  He shakes his head, and one corner of his mouth inches up, then drops, as if maintaining the smirk is too much effort.

  “I have to say, Winters, I’m surprised you haven’t found me yet. You found my dad, sure, but I had to tell you where to look. I’m disappointed in you. Slipping in your old age? I’m not exactly a criminal mastermind. Picked up a few tricks in the pen, sure, but what do you expect when you put a man in a cage with a bunch of lowlifes? But I’ll tell you something. Every one of those lowlifes had more integrity in their little finger than you’ve ever known. They had a code, and they lived by it. That’s more than I can say for you.”

  Sitting with his elbows propped on his knees, Oliver looks away from the camera, then rakes a hand across his face.

  “I’m tired, Winters,” he continues. “Tired of getting my face shoved back in the dirt. My wife left me. Did you know that? Stuck around until the lawsuit played out, but when she realized there wasn’t some big payday coming, she took the kids and, poof, she was gone.”

  His voice is quiet, the anger still there but vibrating on a lower frequency. “Not that they’ll miss me. My kids don’t even know me, Winters. They were babies when I went in, and by the time I got out, they were damn near grown. I’m just some stranger who showed up in their lives. Somebody they had to call Dad.”

  He turns to stare directly at the camera.

  “Not like Valerie,” he says. He doesn’t even pretend to smile this time. “You got to choose what kind of daddy you’d be to your girl. Me? I never got a choice. You took my choices, Winters, and never looked back.”

  Tessa can’t catch her breath. Oliver stands and paces in front of the camera.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, Lloyd, but I’m getting sick of it. I wanted a little bit of peace before this was over, but you’re dragging it out, so I’ll give you a hint. Talk to Tessa Shepherd. She knows. Maybe she’ll tell you . . . if you can get her to answer the goddamn phone.”

  Tessa’s skin tightens and she makes a sound like a wounded animal.

  “Come and get me, old man. If you don’t, I might just have to come to you, and you don’t want that.”

  The phone drops from Tessa’s grip as her hands fly to her mouth. She stares at it lying on the rug between her feet as if it’s a snake that might strike at any moment. But it’s done that already. The venom of Oliver’s voice is still coursing through her veins.

  “Tessa!” Margot shouts as her feet pound through the house. She careens around the corner, her own phone in her hand. “Tessa, have you seen this?” she asks. She’s panting and her eyes are wide. “What the hell is he talking about? What do you know?” Margot demands.

  “I . . .” She shakes her head, trying to dislodge Oliver’s words, but they won’t go. “Talk to Tessa Shepherd. She knows.”

  “Nothing!” she says. “I don’t know anything, I swear!”

  “Well, clearly he thinks you do,” Margot insists. They both startle when Tessa’s phone rings from its abandoned position on the floor. “And thanks to him, so does the rest of the world,” Margot adds.

  Tessa’s heart is racing like she’s run a marathon, but her limbs are frozen in place.

  She stares at the phone until the ringing finally stops, sending the unknown caller to a voice mail box that is probably full by now.

  Tessa shakes her head. “But I don’t know anything. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know why he’s doing this, and I don’t know why he’d say something like that.”

  The phone rings again.

  “The press,” she whispers.

  “Or the police,” Margot says. When Tessa stares at her uncomprehendingly, she continues, slowly, as if Tessa is a child. “Oliver Barlow just turned you into a suspect, Tess. A conspirator. Like it or not, the police are going to want answers.”

  Tessa’s stomach drops. She’d reached out to Bonham PD when this whole thing started. She’d offered to help in any way she could and been summarily dismissed. But the truth was, she’d only called as a salve to her own conscience, knowing full well there was nothing she could do.

  Now, though, Oliver has thrust her in the middle of a situation she can’t control. She moves quickly to the window and checks behind the curtains. Nothing stirs. Everything looks the same, but it’s an illusion. Nothing will ever be the same. Their mother is gone, Valerie Winters is gone, and Oliver Barlow has set the world upon her.

  “I have to get out of here,” Tessa says, as much to herself as to her sister.

  “Excuse me?” Margot replies. “What are you talking about? You can’t just run away from this.”

  “What choice do I have?” Tessa cries, turning back to face her. “If I stay here, you’ll have police and reporters beating down the door, camped out on the lawn.”

  “I’m a grown woman, Tessa. I think I can deal with some reporters,” Margot says.

  “No. This isn’t your problem,” Tessa insists. She pats her pockets, searching for her keys before she remembers they’re in her purse, sitting on the kitchen table. Her bags are packed and waiting in the trunk of her car.

  “Are you kidding me right now?” Margot says, staring at her with her hands perched on her hips.

  “Margot, I can’t stay here!” Tessa says. “I don’t know anything! There’s nothing I can say that will help the police find him, nothing I can say that will bring Valerie back!”

  Margot plants her feet and crosses her arms. “So tell them that,” she says.

  Tessa’s eyes slide from her sister’s, and she hurries back across the room to scoop her phone off the floor.

  “You’re being completely irrational,” Margot says. “The police are going to want to talk to you. If you don’t know anything, you don’t. All you have to do is say so.”

  Tessa stills. “You don’t understand. It’s not that simple.”

  Margot laughs, a harsh, electric sound that crackles in the space between them. “Yeah, Tess, actually it is.”

  The hurt between them shimmers in the air like heat waves. Tessa can feel her mother’s presence in every part of this house, feel the nearness of the past closing in on her. It’s too much to process, and she doesn’t have time.

  “I can’t stay here,” she says, wondering if she repeats the phrase enough, she’ll eventually believe it. Judging from Margot’s face, she certainly doesn’t.

  “You’re being completely—”

  “I can’t face him!” Tessa shouts, admitting the shameful truth to both herself and her sister. Her breath is ragged in her chest, and anxiety is clawing at her, seeping through the cracks in her defenses.

  Margot’s eyes widen, but still she doesn’t understand. “Who?” she asks, shaking her head.

  “Winters,” Tessa says. “Lloyd Winters. I can’t face him, Margot. His daughter is dead. Dead. And she’d still be alive if it weren’t for me.”

  Tessa can barely manage to stand up beneath the weight of blame she carries on her shoulders. The loss of her mother has already shaken her to her core. If she has to sit in a room across from Lloyd Winters’s justifiable accusations, she’ll crumble completely. She’s barely holding herself together as it is.

  “Where are you going to go? Your ap
artment in New York won’t be any better, and you’ll be . . .” Margot trails off.

  What? Tessa wonders. Alone? She’s been alone for so long she doesn’t know any other way to be.

  “Not New York,” Tessa concedes, looking frantically around for anything she might have missed. “Somewhere else. Anywhere else. I just need someplace no one will find me until this blows over.”

  “Blows over? Tessa, do you hear yourself? This isn’t going to blow over. At best, you might convince the police you know nothing. At worst? Oliver Barlow has implicated you in conspiracy to murder!”

  “I don’t know anything!” Tessa cries, hating the pleading tone in her voice.

  “Then tell them that,” Margot insists, her voice gentler, but still firm. “Don’t run from this. Stay.”

  The irony is so big, so utterly absurd, that Tessa might laugh if she weren’t so close to tears. Since the day she walked out the door at eighteen, she’d only ever wanted one thing. It flowed like a hidden underground river beneath every decision she’d made since.

  She wanted her sister back.

  The only force on earth strong enough to keep her away was Margot’s own need to have Tessa out of her life.

  Now Margot is asking her to stay. She can practically hear her mother siding with her sister. “Stay, Tessa. Face this together. You were always stronger together.”

  But that’s not true. Not anymore.

  Maybe it once was, a long time ago, but their dynamic has changed. Tessa isn’t the same girl she used to be. She no longer has the confidence it takes to be strong. And Margot is different too.

  Maybe it’s the loss of their mother, or the cracks in Margot’s marriage. But Tessa suspects it’s more than that. The Margot she knew, that amenable, agreeable girl, content to follow where Tessa led, didn’t survive the fall. The woman who grew in her place is . . . harder. She’s brittle where she used to bend. Her soft edges are sharp now. Sharp enough to slice a person in two.

  Tessa could hide here. She could draw from Margot’s strength, lean on her for support, when Lloyd Winters eviscerates her.

  For a moment, she considers what that might look like. The press, tracking her here. The police at the door, just like the night when they were ten. Margot thrust in the middle of a situation she hasn’t caused. A situation that’s only in her life because Tessa brought it here. Margot forced to deal with the aftermath of Tessa’s guilt and anxiety.

  Tessa’s phone rings in her hand, and they both jump.

  “No,” Tessa says, stabbing a finger at the button to decline the call before the second ring. “I won’t do that to you.”

  She wants nothing more than to bridge the distance between them, to repair that rift in any way she can, but not like this. Not with the shadow of Oliver Barlow, yet another of Tessa’s mistakes, hanging over them.

  She walks past her sister, whose expression has morphed into a blank mask of disapproval. Tessa accepts the stab of regret.

  She picks up her purse from the kitchen table, then pauses at the sight of the manila envelope. Her fingers run lightly across her name written in bold, black lines.

  A piece of their history. A decision to be made.

  She slides the envelope quickly into her hand and turns to brush past Margot again, who is standing immobile with her arms crossed in the hallway, watching her behind shuttered eyes.

  Tessa walks to the coffee table, then leans over and peels back the plastic from the photo album to carefully pull the picture of their mother from the page. The old house, the one Tessa has begun calling the murder house in her mind, tilts crookedly over Jane’s shoulder.

  Fallbrook.

  “Here,” she says, holding up the photograph. “This is where I’ll go.”

  It’s ridiculous. Utterly absurd. But Tessa grasps onto the idea like a drowning woman.

  Margot’s affected apathy slips and her jaw drops. “You can’t be serious.”

  But it’s the perfect solution, and it’s been sitting right in front of them, waiting for Tessa’s befuddled brain to catch up.

  She slides the photo into the envelope, then tucks the entire thing into her purse and slings it over her shoulder.

  “I’ll come back,” Tessa says, unable to hide the hope hidden behind the words. “When this is all over. We’ll decide what to do about Mom’s house and . . . and the other thing . . . but I have to do this first.”

  “This is your idea of dealing with the situation?” Margot asks.

  “Please understand,” Tessa pleads. “I can’t bring this here to you. You have enough to deal with, and I won’t be the cause of more problems.” Problems that extend far beyond what Margot might imagine. Pushy reporters pale in comparison to psychiatric units and the dark days and nights that necessitate them.

  Margot turns away from her, and Tessa walks to the front door. Her hand is on the doorknob when she hesitates. She’s got nothing else to lose.

  “Margot,” she calls. Her sister stops. “Talk to Ben. Please.”

  She has no right to ask her sister for anything, but she can’t help herself.

  “You deal with your mess your way, Tessa. Leave me here to deal with mine. That’s how we do things, isn’t it?”

  The words cut to the bone. But after so many years of silence, of empty wishes, and phone calls that never came, Tessa welcomes the pain. She holds it tightly and breathes it in.

  Then she walks out the door and shuts it behind her.

  Tessa hurries to her car. The address for the murder house is in the paperwork Jackson Smith gave her. She’ll plug it into her GPS and let it lead her down a path she’s never been on while she hides from a present she can’t control.

  Her head is filled with the urgency to keep moving. An echo of her own voice repeats, This is the right thing to do. If she focuses on that alone, she can almost drown out the other voices. The voices of Margot, of her mother, of Oliver Barlow. Of her guilt and her fears. Of the lost and unknown family waiting to be found, whispering things she doesn’t want to hear.

  16

  KITTY

  “’Tis the gravedigger’s bell you hear, lass.”

  Kitty doesn’t realize she’s whispered the words aloud until Deirdre places a bowl of stew in front of her.

  “Speak up, Kitty,” her sister says. “I can’t understand you when you mumble.”

  Steam rises from their dinner as Deirdre settles wearily into the chair across from her. The scents of thyme and parsley, fresh from the garden, mingle in the air, the same as they did when Mam made it.

  “Do you remember the story of the gravedigger’s bell, Dee?” Kitty asks.

  The occasional crackle of the fireplace fills the silence. A pause drags on long enough that Kitty wonders if she even spoke aloud.

  “We need to bring in more wood,” Deirdre says. She doesn’t meet Kitty’s eyes.

  “It was one of Mam’s stories. You remember, don’t you?” Kitty prods.

  Deirdre sets her spoon against her bowl with a clink and picks up a glass of water to take a long drink. She wipes her mouth on her napkin and sets it primly back in her lap, as if they’re dining someplace fancy instead of their own worn, comfortable kitchen.

  “No,” she says finally, then spoons another bite into her mouth.

  Kitty watches her sister chew like an old woman and wonders if that’s true. Perhaps. Truth and memory are slippery animals that creep around them these days, haunting the shadows, then fading away again. While Kitty seeks to capture them, Deirdre steadfastly refuses to acknowledge their existence.

  It’s exhausting, helping her sister maintain her ignorance. Kitty sighs and lets the subject drop.

  “I should bring in a few more logs,” Deirdre says, happy to let her do just that.

  “Aiden can do it when he gets in,” Kitty replies.

  “Who knows what time that will be. I’ll take care of it.”

  “He worries me, wandering every inch of this place day and night the way he does. What if he fa
lls, or . . . I don’t know.”

  “He could fall just as easily here,” Deirdre points out. “He can’t abide being cooped up, Kitty.”

  “You’re no help at all. We should get some chickens. Maybe a goat or two. Give him something to fill his time. A purpose.”

  “Let him be,” Deirdre says. “No need to mother him.”

  As if their conversation has conjured him, Aiden enters the kitchen a few moments later. Kitty rises to fill a bowl for her older brother.

  “Saved by the bell, you are, Denny,” she says.

  Kitty stops, stew dripping from the ladle she holds midair over the pot. She said the words, intending to share with Aiden her plan to tie him down with a goat, but once spoken, they cracked open the delicate shell of the very memory she’s been searching for.

  The words, the taste of Mam’s Irish stew. The warm, welcoming kitchen. Time slips and she holds tightly to the thread of the past. Ignoring her siblings, Kitty wanders out the door, takes a seat in her rocking chair, and lets the memories carry her along. Surrounded by moonlight and night air, lines form in the center of Kitty’s brow, and she waits and watches as her mind plays the sepia-tinted moments, so precious, back to her.

  “Saved by the bell, ye are, lad,” Mam’s voice says in her soft Irish brogue. “Five more minutes and dinner’d go cold.”

  Aiden stomps his boots and leaves them by the door, bright with youth and mischief as he joins his waiting family.

  “Why?” Kitty asks, always curious.

  “Because Mam would have everyone combing the woods if I’m not home in time for supper, little one,” Aiden says, ruffling Kitty’s hair, and her feathers too. She’s growing up, but no one seems to notice.

  Aiden steals a piece of bread while Mam’s back is turned.

  “But why a bell?” Kitty insists. “How can a bell save someone?”

  “It’s a saying,” Aiden says, shaking his black hair from his eyes. “Like a boxing ring, the bell means the round is up and you have time to catch your breath before the other lad starts pounding on you again.”