Pastor Jeff swallows his mouthful and echoes my thoughts. “Maybe.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re not a Zen priest, you know.”
“I do,” he intones, exactly like a Zen priest.
“You can pass judgment.”
“I could if I had any basis for one.”
“Jesus, Jeff—”
“You’re right, Nora,” he interrupts because he knows it’s time to stop teasing when he’s driven her to blasphemy. “It could be the lawsuit. It could be there’s evidence you’re about to uncover, and they’re here to better bury it. It could be Russell and the firm have got them scared finally. Maybe. But I think it would be prudent not to get your hopes up.”
“I don’t give a shit about prudent, Jeff.”
“I noticed.” He smiles at me from inside his coffee. “Maybe you’re on to something. Or maybe they’re going to find whatever they’re looking for before you do. Or maybe there’s nothing to find.”
“Of course there’s something to find,” Nora scoffs. “We’re not pretending they fucked us. They did fuck us.”
This. This is Nora’s religion. I have solo Saturday mornings. Pastor Jeff has God, the Catholic Church, and any number of other denominations he borrows from liberally in order to meet his congregants’ needs and practices. Nora’s faith is just as fervently held, just as life guiding and path determining, and for the same reason: she believes in her soul it will save her.
And this is her central tenet: They did fuck us. Therefore there must be evidence of this fact somewhere. Therefore she has only to find it. Then justice will be served, the wicked unmasked and punished, the good and faithful rewarded for their patience and fidelity.
Why else do people believe in God?
One
We are not girl detectives. We’re not plucky like that. We can’t hide. Maybe this would be true anyway—there are three of us—but there’s also Mirabel’s inability to walk, Monday’s inability to lie, my inability to go places without them. The lack of places to go. Under our folded clothes, our dresser drawers are all lined with Nancy Drews—Monday likes to keep them there because their spines are yellow—but Nancy’s got skills, resources, and horizons we can only dream of. Suffice it to say, some kind of teen-spies thing where we get wigs and fake mustaches and sit outside the library pretending to read a newspaper (Petra would say “surreptitiously”) is not an option.
Last night, in response to our mother’s mania, Mirabel suggested a fact-finding mission, but it’s not even fact finding. More like information gathering. Situation determining. It doesn’t make sense to think we’ll find the elusive, conclusive proof Mama and Russell have been searching for for entire lifetimes—our entire lifetimes—simply by befriending River Templeton. If her lawyer can’t, what chance do her teenage daughters have? So let’s just say we’re getting there first. Not before anyone else in town—no one will care as much as my mother, and everyone knows it. Getting to the Templetons before the Templetons get to us.
It’s overcast, which makes it seem dark still, dawning, and drizzling hard, almost raining, so it feels closer to floating, or maybe sinking, than riding bikes. Monday and I fly down Baker, the hill steeper than it is on foot and slippery with wet, just the hint of fall in our noses. The wind and rain tease our hair. Snaggled grass whips our legs. Our tires throw up gravel and pebbles like popcorn. We close our eyes for a moment, two, and I could not stop now if I wanted to. If I had to.
And then—like a sign spontaneously generated by flying too fast downhill—the road curves up again past the cemetery. It’s tragic but apt that this is the one place in Bourne that’s as it should be. It has soft, deep-green grass and meandery paths between sprawling trees. There are all these old, weathered gravestones because, hard as it is to remember, Bourne’s citizens died even before Belsum came to town. It’s hilly, and at the crest of a ridge are the showy monuments: giant angels, giant crosses, tombs that look like houses that would be cramped to live in but are probably plenty roomy if you’re dead, the same few family names over and over—Grove, Alcott, Anderson—town founders, our ancestors, our history. We used to ride by fast so we could hold our breath as we crossed, but now Monday slows as we pass, and I see her eyes seek and find our father’s grave.
This is the part of Bourne’s cemetery that is not as it should be. They had to dig it too fast without making any kind of plan. Mrs. Shriver says that when demand is greater than supply, it makes the economy stronger, but in our cemetery, it just made things overcrowded and chaotic. Maybe that whole supply-demand thing only applies to the living. And it’s sad, which makes sense for a graveyard, but ours is sadder than most because the years on either side of the hyphens are too close together. Bourne was not prepared for all our sudden dead. Maybe no town ever is, though.
Our dad lucked out. He is under a giant oak tree. Some of the trees in Bourne go straight to brown in the fall now, but his still blushes as if embarrassed. It’s already pinking a little as we go by. Monday closes her eyes too long, and I know, I know she doesn’t like to be touched, but I’m worried she’ll crash. I reach out and tap her arm as lightly as I can, but she still snatches it away from me like I burned her.
Her eyes snap open. “Why can it not be yellow?”
“What?”
“His tree. Many trees turn yellow in the fall. His turns red. It is not fair.”
“No,” I agree, “it is not fair.”
We continue down the hill, brake into the curve on Main, stand to pedal hard over the slight slope by the Do Not Shop, wobble off the end of the pavement and through the gravel, climb up across the bridge and over the ravine and pull, breathless and sticky-damp from drizzle and sweat, into the empty parking lot of the library.
Well, almost empty.
The moving vans are gone, but there are two cars. One is a shiny, black BMW, new, immense, almost uncomfortable to look at. (Petra would say “carnal,” “corporeal,” “lascivious,” “lubricious”—it’s weird how many vocabulary words there are to describe kind of gross and inappropriate cars.) The other is the same, only gray. Cars in Bourne are mostly not the shiny luxury variety. More like dented, rusted, ancient pickups or sad sedans with doors of different colors. Or tricked-out, million-year-old wheelchair vans.
Heaped at the far end of the lot are a dozen of those squat little library stools, some of them tipped over, like maybe they were bowled out the front door, their casters spinning uselessly up at the sky.
“Motherfuckers,” Monday curses.
Monday never curses. Which makes me think we can go home now. That word coming out of that mouth says it all really. My mother will be disappointed when we return without a single shred of new evidence, our holsters empty of smoking guns, but my mother is used to being disappointed. It was a dumb plan anyway. I’d maybe buy that River’s just a kid and can’t keep a secret. It’s that he has any confidences to betray that’s hard to believe. When you’re obsessed with something, as my mother is, it’s hard to remember that everyone else isn’t obsessed with it too, but I think about how healthy and whole and normal River seemed—oblivious, ignorant—and I’m certain we already know all we’re going to. We can leave now. But before I can explain this logic to Monday, the front door opens.