“Do you think there’s pictures in there?” Nessa asked.
Flynn left his cake, stood up, and started down the hall. “Let’s see if there are. Could be that we’ll find some answers in the pictures.”
April didn’t think for one second that they’d find anything helpful, but it was worth a try. Still, a shiver chased down her spine at the very idea of prying into that closet.
“Holy smoke!” Flynn yelled when he opened the door and a whole raft of items fell from the top shelf, covering him with quilt tops and crocheted afghans.
“Need some help fighting your way out of all that?” April yelled back.
“Why haven’t we opened this closet before now? And with everything else in the house so neat, why did Nanny Lucy let this become such a mess?” Flynn threw the quilt tops over to the side. “I see a suitcase, but I’m not even going to try to put all this stuff back. We’ll box it up for the garage. Do y’all think she might have put her memories in the suitcase? It looks ancient.”
Nessa rushed down the hall and grabbed up all three quilt tops. “We’ve all got a messy room or drawer somewhere in our places. Mine is a drawer in the kitchen. Evidently Nanny Lucy had a messy closet. This is fantastic. I’ll take care of all this after we see whatever is in the suitcase. I can get these quilted by the time I go to my first craft fair.”
“I’ve never seen it opened, so it never registered to me that there was a closet at the end of the hall,” Flynn said.
“You’re welcome to all of it.” April kept eating her cake.
“I can’t believe we’ve been here a whole week and never opened that closet door.” Flynn groaned when he pulled the suitcase off the shelf. “This thing weighs as much as a baby elephant.”
April remembered the day she had gotten curious and opened the door. She had been about ten years old, and things had spilled out into the hallway that time, too. She had crammed it all back into the closet, but a couple of days later, Nanny Lucy had figured out that someone had been in her things.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Nessa told April.
“I kind of have.” April nodded. “I peeked in the closet once. I can still feel Nanny Lucy’s glare boring holes in my soul when she figured it out. She said that this house was my Garden of Eden. She said that she provided for me, clothed me, and made sure I had a place to sleep. She reminded me that she took me to church so I would know God, but that closet and her bedroom were like the tree of good and evil, and I was never to touch either one ever again. Then she beat the hell out of me for disobeying her about never opening that door and sent me to my room for a whole day. I could only come out to go to the bathroom, and I didn’t get dinner or supper, to teach me to leave her things alone.”
“That was harsh,” Flynn said.
“That”—April covered her face with her hands for a moment—“was minor compared to some of the other things that happened here.” She removed her hands, but she didn’t make an attempt to go help Nessa.
“Well, I’m going through it, piece by piece,” Nessa said. “That’s my job tomorrow afternoon while y’all are at work.”
“Be my guest.” April finished off the last bite of her cake. “But don’t come whining to me when Nanny Lucy scolds all of us in our dreams.”
Flynn shut the door to the closet and carried the suitcase to the living room. He set it in the middle of the floor and sat cross-legged in front of it. “Y’all going to join me?”
Nessa sat down beside him. April left the table and took a place on the other side. “I’m keeping my distance from that thing.”
“She’s gone, April. She can’t hurt you anymore,” Nessa said.
“The whole time I was in that room, I wondered if my mother had looked in the closet and that’s why God struck her dead.”
“You poor thing,” Nessa said. “I remember being sent to my room to pray about my sins. I figured it was me God was going to punish, not my mother, who, I was sure, had a halo under all her big hair.”
Flynn flipped the two fasteners holding the suitcase shut. “And all this time, I thought I wanted to live either with Uncle Isaac because you had two parents”—he glanced over at Nessa and then turned to April—“or with Nanny Lucy because we had so much fun here in the summertime, but I’m beginning to think that I might be less scarred than either of you two.”
April pointed at the suitcase. “I’m not so sure I want to be close when you open that thing.”
“Hey, things were tough around here, but none of it is your fault. You’ve got to make yourself believe that,” Flynn said. “And yes, I’m speaking from experience. I blamed myself for years for not being a perfect son. If I had been, maybe Dad wouldn’t have been a womanizer. Maybe he would have been content to be a single father and go to my academic meets instead of the bars to look for another lady. It took a long time, but I realized all that wasn’t my fault. Nanny Lucy wasn’t well, and you didn’t create her problems,” Flynn said.
“I always thought it was all my fault because I was like my mother.” April sighed. “I’d just as soon take that thing and everything in the closet and her bedroom out in the yard and have a bonfire with it.”
“But there could be answers to all our questions right here.” Flynn eased the top open and let it drop back onto the hardwood floor. “Surprise! If our grandmother had evil spirits locked up somewhere, they aren’t in the suitcase. Looks like old papers and packets of pictures.”
“It smells like roses. Strange that through everything, I still like that scent, but that thing scares me,” April said.
“It’s not evil,” Nessa argued. “Evil smells like hell, like something hot and on fire, maybe like what a house smells like when it’s burning down. This is just an old, dusty smell mixed with the faint aroma of roses. The quilt tops had the same odor. I’ll hang them out on the clothesline tomorrow and air them out.”
“How do you know what hell smells like?” Flynn asked.
“Daddy describes it very well in his sermons.” Nessa reached for a faded manila envelope. “Looks like this might have the important papers April told us about.”
She opened it to find a marriage license for her grandmother and grandfather dated December 18, 1958, a death certificate for their grandfather, and original birth certificates for all three of their children.
“This is history,” Nessa said.
“We all know that she and Grandpa got married, they had three kids, and he died.” April leaned forward enough to peek into the suitcase, but she didn’t stretch out her hand to touch anything.
Flynn had picked up an envelope of pictures and was studying them one by one. “Here’s our answer to one of the questions. My dad is the image of Grandpa. Look at this.” He passed the pictures over to Nessa.
April moved over close to Nessa so she could see, but she couldn’t make herself pick up a single paper. Merely looking at the suitcase made her feel every single stinging lash of that whipping she’d gotten for opening the closet door. “He really does look like Uncle Matthew, and Uncle Isaac looks like that man right there.” She pointed to the best man. So this was what Nanny Lucy had been hiding where the tree of good and evil lived. She wondered if there were pictures of her mother in the suitcase, and if April really looked as much like her as Nanny Lucy had said she did.