She tossed the diary over onto Nessa’s lap. “Oh, my gosh. It’s Nanny Lucy’s. She’ll haunt me if I read any more of that thing. You read it.”
Nessa flipped through it. “There’s writing all the way to the last page. On that one she writes that she buried Everett that day, and that she didn’t shed a tear. She’d gotten the bad boy that she wanted and had paid the price for it.”
“I guess if Grandpa was a bad boy, then that’s where my dad got his genes,” Flynn said.
Nessa turned a few pages back, and all the color left her face. “Oh. My!”
“What?” Flynn asked.
She took a deep breath and read:
God is going to punish me for what I have done. I did it out of anger, and I deserve whatever God lays on me. I just hope I’m not punished through my boys for it. Isaac is so much like Ernest. Please God, let him be a man of God. Matthew is already showing signs of following in his father’s footsteps, so I don’t have much hope for him.
“What did she do?” April couldn’t imagine her pious grandmother doing anything that God would deem a sin.
Nessa scanned a few more pages and then read:
I’m pregnant, and there’s no way that this child belongs to Everett. It serves him right for cheating on me all these years. I knew there would be consequences for my actions, but why did it have to be this way? I have teenage boys, and I’m in my midthirties. I don’t want this child, but I can’t, in all good conscience, get rid of it.
“My mother didn’t belong to Grandpa?” April’s voice sounded like it was coming from a deep well in her own ears. The room began to spin, and she reached out to grab the leg of the coffee table.
“Evidently not,” Flynn said. “That explains why Nanny Lucy was so hard on herself and on you. She viewed both you and Rachel as retribution for her committing adultery.”
“Does she tell who my grandfather is? Please don’t tell me it’s D. J. Devereaux. I don’t think I could face Jackson if it is.” April covered her face with her hands.
“Why not? You don’t have a crush on him, do you?” Nessa asked.
“No, but we are neighbors, and he seems like a good man,” April answered. “He doesn’t need to know that the uncle he adored had an affair with another man’s wife.”
Nessa flipped through several more pages and finally read:
Rachel was born today, and her father doesn’t even know that she exists, and never will. He’s my best friend April’s husband, and they’ve moved to El Paso. April can’t have children, and wants a family so badly. It’s not fair. I have her husband’s child and don’t want it, but I’ll raise the baby, even though I never wanted another child, especially a girl.
April’s quick intake of breath caused both Nessa and Flynn to turn toward her. “What a mess! No wonder she got so mad at me when I looked in that closet. This is a lot to take in all at once. I know my father’s name, and I have a grandfather. I wonder if he’s still alive.”
Flynn flipped out his phone again, then put it back in his pocket. “We don’t even know the man’s first or last name. All we know is that he was April’s husband.”
Nessa scanned through several more pages and then read:
I was the maid of honor at my best friend’s wedding today. She seems happy with Joseph Wilkes, but that man has a wandering eye, just like my Everett. We’ll pay the price for falling for handsome bad boys. I just know it.
Tears flowed down April’s face. “I didn’t have much of a chance, did I?”
Flynn grabbed his phone again and looked for obituaries in and around El Paso. “I found him. Joseph Ray Wilkes died two years ago at the age of eighty-three. He was survived by his wife, April Wilkes, and all the many children that they fostered over the years after they moved to El Paso.”
“I lived in El Paso for a year or two,” April whispered. “I wonder if he or his wife ever came into the café where I waitressed. I might have waited on one or both of them and not even known I was looking at my grandfather.”
“Does any of this help you?” Flynn asked as he picked up more pictures and then found an old, yellowed newspaper.
“It must seem a little like a dream,” Nessa said.
“More like a nightmare.” April’s words came out breathy, and her voice hardly sounded like her own.
“This is the paper with Grandpa’s obituary in it,” Flynn said. “It just says that he worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad and gives the dates of his birth and death and tells who survived him. It mentions that he had a twin brother who preceded him in death.”
“So there was the wild-boy twin who was our grandfather, and the good-boy twin who died young, and my father is the image, both naturally and spiritually, of Grandpa’s twin brother,” Nessa said.
“He wasn’t my real grandfather.” April wiped at her tears.
Nessa gave her another hug. “We’re all cousins no matter who our grandparents are.”
“How on earth did Nanny Lucy get to be so religious and God-fearing?” Flynn asked. “She had to have a little bit of rebellion in her to go against her parents and marry the ornery twin. Let alone have Rachel.”
“It was the tornado. Think about the timing. The storm came right before she and Grandpa got married, and that turned out to be a disaster, and then there was another storm when Rachel gave birth to April,” Nessa said. “She must have related the storms, both physical and mental, to bad times in her life.” She flipped through the diary again, found the place, and read: “‘I was so afraid when that thing went over our heads that we would die, I promised God I would go to church every time the doors were open, and I would raise whatever children that God saw fit to give me and Everett to respect Him.’”
“Whew!” Flynn wiped his forehead in a dramatic gesture. “I vote that this is enough for tonight. Let’s go to bed and sleep on what we know before we go digging any deeper into that closet.”
“Amen.” Nessa laid the diary back in the suitcase. “I’ll just straighten up the kitchen a bit before I turn in.”
April placed the birth certificates back into the suitcase and closed the lid. “I’ll take care of the cleanup. I won’t be able to sleep for hours anyway.”
“I won’t argue tonight.” Nessa covered a yawn with her hand.
After her two cousins had gone down the hall to their rooms, April stared at the suitcase for a few more minutes. If Nanny Lucy had known that she was going to die, would she have destroyed what was in it? Or had she left it on purpose so that they would understand why she had been the way she was?
“Who knows?” She finally stood up and headed to the kitchen to wash the dirty dishes. “I had a father, and I had a grandfather. I wonder how my life would have been different if they would have been part of it.”
Chapter Fourteen
Nessa awoke with a start and sat up so fast that the room did a couple of spins, and then she realized that she had been dreaming. She wasn’t in a king-size bed, and there wasn’t a bottle of wine in a silver cooler sitting on a glass-topped table across the room. For a split second she was disappointed that Jackson wasn’t there with her. After a kiss that had left her wanting to drag him off to the creek for sex under a tree, one part of her would love to have spent the night with him. The other part reminded her that doing something like that would create great big problems.