She rested her hand lightly on my shoulder. “Then tell me what I can do to help, okay? I’m not in your shoes, so I can’t guess.”
“Okay.”
She stood up. “Well, get some sleep. Tomorrow will be better.”
“Right. G’night.”
After Holly left, I locked my door to the hall and latched the screen doors to the porch. It felt strange, for I had never worried about my own safety at Aunt Jule’s.
Reaching for the switch on my bureau lamp, I noticed that my newfound necklace was twisted up. I touched it with one finger, expecting it to swing free from the mirror stand, bit it didn’t. Like my mother’s necklaces, it had been tied in impossible knots.
I didn’t fall back asleep until dawn. Waking late on Monday morning, I found myself alone in the house. Two notes had been left on the fridge for me, one from Aunt Jule reminding me that she’d be out till twelve, and the other from Holly. She invited me to stop by the yearbook office so she could introduce me to her friends. The underclassmen were on a half-day schedule, so she suggested I come at noon.
A list of needed grocery and household items was also on the refrigerator door. When I tucked it in my purse I discovered a second note from Holly that contained a log of bills due and overdue, adding up to a cool $4,000.1 knew that dropping a big check wouldn’t solve the problem — Aunt Jule would continue to be Aunt Jule. But it would relieve the pressure for the time being and give Holly an easier summer before college.
When I left the house Nora was in the knot garden snipping a boxwood hedge with hand clippers. The square garden, started in the 1800s, was once an intricate green design of shrubs, herbs, and colored gravel. When I was a child it had grown into one large mass of green. But Nora must have been cutting back the shrubs little by little each year. Now they looked like lumpy green caterpillars and were starting to trace out a pattern.
“Good morning,” I called to her.
She looked across the outer hedge but said nothing.
“I’m doing some errands,” I told her. “Do you need anything?”
“No.”
I watched her work for a moment. “Nora, why did you lock me in the boathouse yesterday?”
She raked the top of the boxwood with her fingers, brushing off the fresh clippings. “I don’t remember.”
“Why did you run from it? What did you see?”
“I don’t remember,” she insisted.
“The water was stirred up,” I reminded her, “as if a boat were passing by. Did you notice a powerboat?”
Nora shook her head. “It was her. She was making the river angry. She wants to make the river come up.”
“Who?” I asked, though I could guess the answer.
“Sondra. She wants it to go over our heads.”
“No, Nora, it was just—”
“She wants to pull us down with her,” Nora said, her eyes wide, as if she were seeing something I couldn’t “She wants her little girl.”
I gripped my car keys hard. “Listen to me. There is no one sleeping in there, dead or alive.”
Nora’s eyelids twitched violently.
“Wind, tides, boats,” I said, “those are the things that make the water rise and fall.”
She didn’t reply.
“Nora, while I’m out I’m going to visit my mother’s grave.
She was buried in the cemetery at Grace Church — by the high school. My mother is not in the river. She’s not in the boathouse. She’s in a grave in the churchyard. The stone has her name on it to tell you that’s where she is. Do you understand? Do you hear me?”
She turned away and resumed clipping the hedge.
There was no reaching her, no way I knew of. She needed professional help.
I continued on to my car, stopping at the big oak to look at the swing’s rope, which I had left coiled beneath. I studied the knot, then touched it timidly. There was nothing unusual about it. It must have been there all along and I just hadn’t noticed.
It was a quick drive to the bank. High Street had been swept clean after the festival and basked quietly in the morning sunshine. Its main bank was a smalltown miniature of the kind you see in East Coast cities, with bronze doors and Greek columns. I think the teller I got must have been there since it was built. Her fluffy white hair flew in the breeze made by a little desk fan. Pursing her lips, she read my check and driver’s license, then lifted her head to study me, pushing her heavy glasses up her nose, so she could get a clearer view.
“Sondra’s daughter.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re depositing this in the Ingram account.”
I realized that teens didn’t usually write a check as large as mine. “Here’s my bankbook,” I told her, sliding it under the glass. “It has phone numbers and an e-mail address if you want to verify the availability of the money.”
“No. Your mama’s checks were always good,” she said.
I nodded, though I didn’t know what she was talking about. My mother didn’t bank here.
“And always on time,” she added as she started the transaction. “The first of each month Jule would come in to deposit them.”
I looked at the teller with surprise.
“I always wondered why,” the woman continued. “Of course, I figured your mama was being blackmailed, but I wondered what for.”
Blackmailed? I stared at the woman.
“When I told that to folks here at the bank, they laughed.”
Small wonder, I thought.
“When I told the police, they said I read too many paperbacks. But the real reason they didn’t believe me was Jule. She’s golden around here. The Ingram family, they’re like the Scarboroughs, Wisteria’s royalty.”
“I see.”
“Just between you and me,” the teller said, peering at me, her eyes magnified by her glasses, “why was your mama paying off Jule?”
“She was just helping out,” I replied, “like I’m doing.”