They walked past stones and crosses so old, time and the elements had scoured the engravings down to nothing. Other graves still bore ancient etchings of angels, death’s heads, sailing ships. Helen Woodward’s headstone was at the northeast end of the graveyard beneath a Norway spruce. A great horned owl roosted above, fast asleep in the middle of the day. The ground was covered with pellets of hair and bone. Beth knelt on the grass. Lulu sat beside her.
“It feels so weird to be here,” Beth said. “I don’t know what to say.”
At first, Lulu thought Beth was talking to her, but Beth faced the stone. She traced the engraving of her mother’s name and dates with her finger, leaned close, and whispered.
“Well, I do know. What I want to say, anyway,” Beth went on. “I miss you. Do you know how much I miss you? Are you really here? Be here, please, Mom.”
Lulu looked away, embarrassed. Should she leave? But Beth seemed barely aware of her presence. Lulu looked up into the branches of a nearby white oak, watched a downy woodpecker hop up a groove in the bark as if it were a well-worn trail.
“Dad didn’t do it,” Beth whispered, touching the stone. “I mean, I know what they say, but I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it, Mom. He wouldn’t have; he couldn’t have; he loves us. I think it was those people, only those people, the Andersons. Joshua and Sally—they have such normal names. They look like regular people; Kate and I saw them in court. They look normal, but they’re evil. Dad’s not evil, Mom. He’s nothing like them. He wouldn’t have done that to you. They did it on their own. It was their idea, not Dad’s. You know that, right?”
“Beth,” Lulu said softly.
“Kate believes it was Dad, though. She said it was his plan, and that’s even worse than what the Andersons did. She’s glad he’s in prison. But we’re his family; he couldn’t have told them to tie us up. He would never have let us be hurt. Let you die. Mom, you and I know that, even if Kate doesn’t.”
Beth was sobbing. She braced herself against the stone, as if it was keeping her from falling over. Still on her knees, she put her arms around it, embraced the gravestone as if it were actually her mother, not just the marker of where she was buried. Lulu had tried to pull her away, but Beth had wrenched her shoulders from Lulu’s hands and clung more tightly to her mother’s stone.
Lulu walked to the spot now. The massive Norway spruce was gone, probably felled by a storm. Twenty-three years ago, Helen’s grave had stood alone here. Now it was one of four—Mathilda’s, Ruth’s, and Beth’s. Lulu stared at the newly engraved name, letters scored deeply into the granite:
Elizabeth Woodward Lathrop, Beloved by Her Family
“And friends,” Lulu said, kneeling on the ground, just as Beth had done. She stared at the dates. She and Beth had come here one Saturday in late spring; Beth’s father’s and the Andersons’ trials had lasted all through the winter, and by the time Lulu and Beth had visited Helen, the lilacs had already bloomed and leaves were on the trees. It had been a bright, sunny day.
But now, all these years later, Lulu had come to the graveyard alone, and it was evening. The moon closest to the autumn equinox was the harvest moon, and tonight it would be full. Lulu had waited until this moment to visit Beth for the first time since her death; it seemed not only appropriate but necessary.
She sat still. The cold air had silenced the crickets. The night’s first owl called from a pine up the hill. She turned her head to look and saw the moon. Just starting to come up, it was large and orange and filled the eastern sky. It seemed to rise fast, nearly clearing the tree line, just like the moon in the painting.
“Beth,” she said out loud. “What did we start?” And what would Kate think if she knew? That sliced Lulu’s heart more than anything.
Proof of love, Beth had said to explain her reasons. And proof of the opposite.
Love had its own internal logic. What made sense at the start could spin out of control, turn into a mystery. An adventure of revenge could become tragedy. Had they thought of their act as vengeance? Beth hadn’t called it that. She had wanted to be bold and defiant, to send Pete a message, to take what was hers and, in doing so, reclaim her life.
The moon was a silver disc. Its light dappled through the pine boughs, oak and maple leaves. Lulu stared into the glade beyond the graveyard. She was sure she saw an apparition, a young girl dancing in the moonlight.
She reached into her leather bag and removed a pocketknife, the blade sheathed in bone. She’d had it since she was twelve and taking sailing lessons. The instructor had told the class that all sailors needed to carry a knife at all times, that it could save their lives. The wind had such strong force, filling the sails, driving the boat forward, tightening lines that could trap a person, wrap around a wrist or an ankle, drag a person overboard. With a knife, you could cut yourself free, save your own life.
Lulu held her knife now. So often she had wished Kate had had one with her in the gallery basement. She could have sliced their bonds, rescued herself and Beth and their mother. It had seemed fitting that Lulu had brought this one to Beth’s house that hot day this past July, the week before Beth died. They had stood in the bedroom.
“Why do I feel like a pirate?” Beth had asked, holding Lulu’s knife.
“You’re Grace O’Malley,” Lulu had said. “Rebel woman, pirate queen, a quadrant of the Compass Rose, pillager of idiots, leader of your clan.”
“My clan,” Beth had said, hand on her pregnant belly. Earlier that day, she had let Lulu feel Matthew kick. “And I am about to pillage.”
The dancing girl in the painting by Ben Morrison might have been any of them, but it had always reminded Lulu of Kate. The house looked as if it belonged in Black Hall. The moon cast a spell.
Within seven days, Beth was dead. Lulu knew that what they had done that day had been the catalyst for Beth’s murder. She opened the pocketknife now and cut her finger. She watched four tiny drops of her blood fall onto Beth’s grave. Despite the frost, the earth was still soft, and the blood drained into the dark soil and disappeared, as if it had never been there.
Lulu held the tip of her finger till the bleeding stopped. A few snowflakes began to fall. She stared at Beth’s headstone for a few minutes, focused on the date of her birth: November 21, five days away. The stark realization that Beth wouldn’t be here for it filled Lulu with more sorrow than she’d ever felt in her life. The owl had fallen silent. Lulu imagined she had flown out for a night’s hunting. The only sound was wind in the leaves. She slipped the knife back into her satchel and walked through the graveyard to her car.
48
Tests on the unpainted side of Moonlight came back. Reid sat at his desk in his home office, scanning the data. He was partly surprised by it. He had not expected the blood to be Pete’s—the romantic gesture of a drawn heart wouldn’t be Pete’s style, and besides, since meeting with Winnie, he had taken his focus off Pete. It had started to make sense the blood might be Beth’s—given the hiding place known mainly to her and Kate—but he hadn’t seen the Tallulah Granville component coming. The left side of the heart had been sketched with Beth’s blood, the right side with Lulu’s.