She makes it sound like I come from a family of recluses. Frankly, I wouldn’t know. And my mom, for all her desire to look like the perfect nuclear family, never really mixed much with people. Gerald was her everything, which is almost as sad as my and Henry’s marriage.
“Not like your big-city life, I guess,” she says. “Must be strange for you.”
I smile tightly. “Charleston had its perks, but I didn’t really get out much the last few years.” When I glance up, she’s staring at me. “But that’s all in the past now.” I don’t really care where I am at this point as long as Henry isn’t here. “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot,” she tells me, pulling out a tub of egg salad and some bread.
I take a breath. “Why didn’t you ever come back? After that first time, I never saw you again.”
Her eyes look sad as she answers. “Your mother wouldn’t have liked that,” she says. “It was for your own good.”
“I was so alone,” I say into my coffee cup. “Meeting you was the only time I felt like I belonged.”
Until Henry. I remember the way he took charge on our first date, ordering for me, answering whenever the waiter asked me a question. I was so naive, so desperate to be someone’s. I believed it was a sign that he cared about me. It was the first time I truly felt valuable. But after we were married, it changed. Instead, I felt like something he possessed. Those early gestures were never about me; they were about him, his need to dominate. Maybe, if Myrtle had been a part of my life growing up, I wouldn’t have been vulnerable to Henry.
She squeezes my hand. “I should have come to find you after Lily died. I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you?” I ask.
Her face crumples and she quickly turns around. “Too many bad memories, I guess.”
9Mushrooms
When the news breaks, I feel hands circling my throat.
The first few days in Crow Lake, Myrtle allowed me to rest. I spent my time in bed, reading books from her stash of racy romance novels, trying and failing not to think of Regis—strong hands and the sandy shadow of his beard—and drinking cup after cup of a questionable tea she kept brewing for me. She made good on her promise to take me to Malone, where I got an overdue haircut, reshaping the long sheet of my hair into something edgy and just past the shoulders with face-framing layers, a new phone, and enough clothes to ride out the summer and fall without worry. And where a rattled doctor confirmed my cracked ribs and gave me an X-ray revealing an avulsion fracture of the fifth metatarsal on my right foot. He offered to write me a prescription for the pain, but beyond that, there was little he could do. After that, Myrtle’s home brew regime began.
At night, we’d sit on the porch in the dark, soaking in the clean scent of fir trees and sipping from our mugs. When I dared to question the bitter aftertaste, she admonished me with a cluck of the tongue. “Family recipe,” she insisted and got up to pour more. But then she would tell me stories about the motel and the guests she’d had over the years—the time a woman delivered a baby in cabin two, and the rock star who stayed in cabin four after leaving rehab, trying to avoid the press.
A week later, she put me to work.
Most days, I dust and make beds, vacuum the cabin floors.I help with laundry—bedsheets and towels—and give a hand in the café whenever I can, carting plates and glasses, wiping down tabletops, washing a few dishes, simple things. We got crutches per the doctor’s orders, but they hurt my hands and I stopped using them. Besides, my foot is healing quickly, hurting much less by the day. Maybe there’s something to Myrtle’s tea after all.
The guests dwindle as September approaches, but we stay busy at the Balsam Motor Inn. The café sees the most business at breakfast. And really,caféis an overstatement; Myrtle doesn’t even keep a menu. She has a blackboard by the front door where she writes what’s available for the day, and a help-yourself spread that she puts out on the small bar every morning—fruit and boxes of cereal, shingles of toast with butter packets, a pitcher of orange juice. But she keeps the waffle iron hot and mixes batter daily. And the maple syrup is in ample supply. At lunch, she offers one kind of sandwich along with peanut butter and jelly for the kids and individual bags of chips. For dinner, there might be a soup or a casserole on offer. Between our guests, people from town with slim pickings, and drivers who are passing by, there’s always a few folks inside. I don’t like being visible to people who might leave and take a mental picture of me with them, but I can’t hide out in her cabin forever while she clothes and feeds me like a child.
A couple of times, I wake in the night and find her gone, the front door open, forest beckoning. Once, I saw her turning down a path in the dark, Ed’s dog, Bart, at her heels. I wanted to follow, but my foot made it impossible to do so quietly. The absences unnerve me, like breaks in a chain, interruptions that should not be there. But I don’t ask her about them.
One night, I bring the picture from her living room out to the porch and hand it to her. “Who are they?”
She wipes the glass with her shirttail and looks at me as I sit down across from her. “Do you remember your grandmother?”
I shake my head.
Her lips purse. She points to the blond woman next to her inthe picture. “She was my sister, Angel. You met her, but I guess you were too little to remember.”
“And the rest?” I press.
She studies their faces. “Well, you know me. This woman behind us is our mother, Laurel. Your great-grandmother. She was remarkable. It’s a shame you never got to know her. And this lady in the pearls is her sister, Bella. The other one is Bella’s daughter, Donna, who has an older sister, Lattie, who’s not in the photo.” Myrtle smiles. “So many years ago.”
She passes it back to me and I run a finger over their faces. “I wish I could meet them,” I say to myself.
But she hears me. “I suspect you will. Eventually.”
THE NEXT EVENING,the news report airs on the small flat-screen television mounted on the wall. Myrtle keeps it on continuously for the guests but mutes it because the noise drives her crazy. We’re dealing with the last of the supper crowd, a whopping total of seven people. Tonight’s special: New York–style chili and saltine crackers. It’s a hit with several of the single men in town. Ed downs two and a half bowls on his own, and I slip him an extra sleeve of crackers when Myrtle isn’t looking. He winks his gratitude. The more food in his belly to soak up the beer, the better. I’m wiping down a table when she turns up the volume on the TV.
“Her body was found next to this firepit, no more than ten feet from her house,” the reporter says, a woman with short black hair and sharp cheekbones. “Like his other victims, she’d been strangled. This marks the Saranac Strangler’s fifth victim and a deadly turn in his MO. Only a couple of weeks since his last murder, the Strangler seems to be ramping up his activities, trying to sate a growing bloodlust. Additionally, this is the first victim found on private property. Is the Strangler getting sloppy? Or growing bolder?”
I feel it strike me like a blunt object, the flash of wet, pale hair,her smell—lavender shampoo and fear. Pee soaking the ground. It’s gone as quickly as it came, but I put a hand to my throat just the same. There is something starkly familiar about this one, though I can’t place it. I think I hear Henry laughing and spin around.
