“Thanks, Mom.But I need to do this, and it won’t be for long.And then”—she smiled—“my options will expand.Maybe I’ll get a promotion and a raise, things that will open evenmoredoors.”
Her mother observed her, looking strained.“And what about poor Jeremy?Does he truly not factor in at all?”
Emily kept her gaze, though she felt a flush rise, unbidden.“It’s not that he doesn’t factor in,” she said with a shrug.“It’s nothing to do withhim, really.I like Jem very much.But it’s any man, it’s marriage.I’m just not ready.”She swallowed hard, but pressed on, finally voicing the thing she’d been too afraid to tell her mother for five years.“I don’t want it.At least, not yet—but maybe never.I don’t know.”She paused.“I have an opportunity here, and I need to take it.For my own sake, and for yours, I think, and Nana’s, too.I’m the first university-educated woman in our family.I think I can be the first professional one, too.The first published one.Don’t you think that opportunity is worth the risk?”
As Emily took in the soft lines around her mother’s eyes, she saw both concern and understanding.She wondered what her mother was seeing as she scanned her face.Her own nervousness was reflected, certainly.
Bess exhaled in a sigh weighed down with the relentless conflict of motherhood.“I suppose it is,” she said.“And I have to trust that you know what you’re doing.”
Emily nodded.“I do.”
CHAPTER 11
RACHEL
Bayfield, Ontario—May, 1996
Gravel crunches beneath the wheels of Rachel’s blue Toyota as she pulls into her driveway and turns off the ignition.She drops her shoulders from where they’ve been hitched up, as though trying to become one with her earlobes.She’s just worked an unexpected fifteen-hour day, and she’s exhausted.
The records search in the Millgate office turned up a big fat nothing.They’d combed the boxes for hours before Rachel was comfortable declaring that there was no administrative error to explain the presence of the body.Julie hadn’t messed up, and Rachel’s glad for her.But it now means that the case is very much active.Fisher interviewed and then dismissed the landscaper, standing guard over the body before he was relieved by another officer to keep watch during the night shift.Green’s threats to the owners of the surrounding houses had held out for a while, but when it was declared a crime scene, the yellow tape went up.The police presence continued, squad cars piling up in the parking lot as the neighbours looked on with macabre excitement.One of them, of course, immediately told Green she’d seen a suspicious-looking man in that part of the cemetery a decade ago.They’ll take her statement for the sake of procedure, but this sort of thing happens all the time: you always get some random “witness” who likes to think they have the Golden Tip that’ll blow a case wide open and render them a hero.Rachel’s had twenty-six of those in the Cooper case alone, and none have come to anything.
Once Rachel had confirmed the lack of record for the body in the cemetery office, she’d phoned Green, who contacted the Ident team down in London to come assist with identifying the remains before the forensic archeologists removed them to the lab in Toronto.Rachel spent the entire afternoon supervising as they took photos of the remains and casket from every conceivable angle and collected soil samples from the grave and surrounding area.Rachel always finds evidence collection a tedious but exciting process, knowing every phial and photo will—hopefully—get them one step closer to solving the case.
Around seven-thirty, the evidence had finally been loaded onto the truck headed for the Toronto lab, at which point Rachel drove back to HQ, sweaty and hungry.She’d returned her squad car and then headed home, deliberately avoiding her desk to retain ignorance of whether the voicemail light was flashing on her phone.She didn’t want to hear from Tamara Cooper, but knew she probably would at some point soon.Tamara would want to hear from Rachel’s own lips that the body wasn’t Stacy’s and Rachel would have to tell her so, which would deliver both a crushing blow and overwhelming relief to the girl’s wretched mother.What a multiheaded Hydra information could be.
She takes a deep breath now and exits the car into the gathering dusk, taking a moment to survey her gardens before she goes into the house, a two-storey yellow-brick beauty that sits up on the cliff overlooking Lake Huron.
Rachel has lived here as long as she can remember, aside from the year she turned seven, when Mary had moved them to Etobicoke for six months, chasing some man who said he loved her but drank as though wishing for an early death.Simon, Rachel thought his name was, but it didn’t really matter.All the men blur together in her mind now, all versions of the same kind: unemployed and manipulative and angry, except when they wanted to charm, and that always frightened Rachel more than the rage did, because you never knew when the spell would bebroken, along with a couple of her mother’s fingers or ribs.The only name Rachel was ever interested in was her own father’s, though her mother didn’t know who he was.
It was a party.We were drunk.How should I know his name?
When Children’s Aid finally intervened and Rachel’s grandmother had taken official custody of her, she’d moved back to Bayfield, where attendance at school was a requirement and they ate healthy meals off a clean table at regular times.As much as she had dreamed of her grandmother’s house during those lonely, frightening nights in Etobicoke, it had taken Rachel a while to settle in again, to acclimatize to the comfortable rhythm of routine and predictability.
She stoops to get a full whiff of her bubblegum-pink Hermione peonies, which are coming into bloom and can be smelled from as far away as the road when the wind blows in from the lake.She’d planted these with her grandmother on her eleventh birthday, when Dora gifted her the yard at the front of the house so that she could grow the flowers she was always asking to plant, the roses and marigolds and sunflowers she admired in the books borrowed from the little library over on Main Street.Dora didn’t fuss much with flowers.Her specialty was herbs and vegetables.Her raised beds still fill most of the backyard, from the porch almost out to the wrought-iron fence on the edge of the cliff, where the rocks and weeds cascade down the slope to the lake.Rachel tends to them regularly.
Peonies, for a happy life, Dora had told her when they first planted the young bush.Or at least something close to it.
Rachel breathes in the citrusy perfume of the peonies, and tears prick at her eyes.The charm for a happy life her grandmother had tried to wield in planting the peonies had mostly come true in the years Dora had been alive, and Rachel knows that it wasn’t the peonies themselves, but the woman who planted them that had worked magic in ensuring Rachel’s relative happiness.
She moves now to inspect the climbing roses.Still buds, but they should be in bloom soon, if this sunny streak continues.The breed thatcreeps up and down the cedar arbour is the fiery-red Impatient rose she’d planted at sixteen, which she’d thought—in the throes of self-importance and sexual frustration—had so accurately captured the feeling of the age.She still loves them, but her adult preferences lean toward the more subdued hues, the white rose of York with its soft-pink edges, the buttery-yellow Charlottes.
When Rachel went away for a while after her grandmother’s death, she’d found the most successful rehabilitation came in the form of her daily garden therapy.She didn’t wear gloves, preferring to use her own fingers to dig into the damp soil as she planted seeds for tomatoes, beans, marigolds, and glorious yellow sunflowers in the institution’s garden beds.When her anxiety attacks were at their peak, nothing calmed her down like gardening.The rhythm of it kept her hands busy and stilled their fidgeting as she drilled down into the dirt, filled it with seeds, and covered them with nurturing soil.She pulled weeds and imagined each individual stem as a problem or intrusive thought that she was able to physically yank out at its root and discard.But the best part, over the longer term, was the satisfaction of the process, of seeing the bright green shoots just breaking through the surface of the soil, then growing over weeks or months into a full multicoloured flower garden, or all the ingredients required for a crisp salad.
The seeds are buried in darkness, her therapist at Pineview, Lynn, had told her.But then they break through into the light.
In short: The act of gardening was nothing more or less than the act of hope.
You don’t see the flower on the same day you plant the seed, Lynn had reminded Rachel on some of the hardest days of her stay.Lynn was big on mantras, but Rachel has enfolded that one into her life ever since, because it helps her to look forward and not back.She can’t let herself get pulled down into the darkness again.
The sound of a car on the street behind her causes her to turn.A black SUV has stopped in front of the house.A middle-aged woman in the passenger seat points as a man leans over from the driver’s side.The womansays something to him, but when they notice Rachel, her finger drops to her lap.She gives Rachel a fleeting, embarrassed look as they speed away.
As if her day could have been any more tiring, now there’s been a Gawker.It’s what Rachel’s called all the people who have performed this same nosy ritual over the years.They want to see where it all happened, the events they’d read about in the local and national papers.Rachel’s reframe would like to believe that they slow down to marvel at the sprawling garden beds, the verdure of the yard that Rachel takes such pride in.
But she doubts it.In her experience, every time you try to assume the best of people, they almost always disappoint.
Doing her best to shake it off, Rachel walks around to the back porch and unlocks the kitchen door.The house is cool, though a little dark, even in the summer months, thanks to the shade of the large oaks and maples overhead and the screened windows on the west side of the house that welcome in the breeze off the lake.Dora always said air conditioning was for shopping malls and grocery stores and not for a person’s home.She believed heat made a person feel alive, and couldn’t understand why people who spent at least six months of the year in a deep freeze that burned their cheeks were so swift to cool things down once the summer sun finally made its reappearance.
The house was indeed so comfortable that the lack of AC hadn’t ever bothered Rachel, save on two scorching nights—one when she was ten, the other when she was seventeen—where the very air felt bogged down with sweat and fire.On those occasions, she and Dora had retreated out onto the back porch and slept in the chaise longues beneath the stars as a chorus of crickets and the rhythmic rush of the waves lulled them to sleep.
