He flinched. “Huh?”
“You’re the one. It’s why you came here today. You sent me the notes. And you cut the picture of my mother out of her high school yearbook.” The baby was blessedly still, as if waiting for Maddie to say her piece. “You don’t want me here.”
Bud harrumphed, the way he had at the potluck. “Lady, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t do herbal tea or books, and I sure as hell don’t write notes to anybody.”
“I don’t believe you.” She reached for her phone to call Chief Lawrence.
Then Bud stood up and adjusted the collar of his flannel shirt that must have seen better days a few decades earlier.
“I’ll say it again,” he said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I only stopped by to extend my good wishes to you. And to ask you how it feels to have Rex Winsted as the father of your baby. Seeing as how his father killed your mother. And got away with it.”
With that, Bud marched off, disappearing among the other shops along the harbor.
And Maddie’s world came crashing down.
Several minutes passed before she could think clearly. When she did, she reasoned that Erikson’s announcement was a lie. A twisted fabrication by a man who’d been dumped by his teenage crush.
Unless … was he telling the truth?
Even worse … did Rex know?
His father killed your mother. And got away with it. Could it be true?
And … had Rex known all along? Rex … the man who was so intent on them not having secrets?
Surely others would have known. The accident was forty years ago, but, as Maddie was so often reminded, the Vineyard was an island. She doubted that the grapevine was any less effective then, before the internet. Secrets had a way of spilling over and spreading, the way the tidal water seemed to like flooding Five Corners.
Finally she stood up, looked out over the harbor, and held her baby belly while crying silent, aching tears. How could she pretend to live a snow-globe kind of life if her baby’s grandfather had killed her grandmother?
It was unimaginable.
Unless it was a lie.
Please, God, let it be a lie.
She had to learn the truth. But she couldn’t ask Rex. Not yet. Not until she knew more.
Which meant she’d have to confront the one person who might know more than she’d ever let on to Maddie. After all, Grandma Nancy had been in the cottage, only steps away from where Hannah was killed by the nameless, faceless hit-and-rundriver … only steps from where, in just a few hours, Maddie would open her little bookshop.
Or not.
“Who killed my mother?” Too antsy to sit on the sofa, Maddie was standing by the fireplace, leaning against the mantel that held Hannah’s painting of Maddie and Grandma walking the beach at sunset, the tiny pottery bowl with the daisy painted by a four-year-old Maddie, and the cracked, ragged quahog shell—one of many that had spilled from Hannah’s tin bucket on impact, the lone shell Grandma had salvaged from the street corner on the harbor where her daughter had died.
Grandma sat facing her, staring into the fireplace, her eyes glossy but vacant as she squared her shoulders and postured defiance.
“How would I know? It was a hit-and-run. And why are you asking me this now?”
Maddie’s cheeks flared. “Was Rex’s father driving the truck? Did he kill her? Has everyone on this bloody island covered up the truth?” She had stopped trembling while she’d racewalked from the bookshop up to the cottage. Even her voice wasn’t shaking. It was as if her determination had overridden her emotions.
But Grandma seemed equally determined. Leaping to her feet uncharacteristically fast and, surprisingly, without faltering, she barked, “It was atourist, Maddie. You know that. Whoever it was got on the boat and slithered like a snake back to the mainland, back to who-knows-where. Nobody knew his name. But everyone agreed he must have thought his life was more important than a poor Wampanoag girl’s. If you don’t believe me, go down to theGazette. It’s all there in the newspaper files.”
Grandma began to pace on her toothpick legs. “I thought you were a smart woman, Madelyn. But why are you accusingme of knowing something different, like I’m some kind of criminal? I’m an old lady whose daughter was killed decades before her time. Did you for one minute think about how reminding me of the worst night of my life would make me feel? I’m ashamed of you, Madelyn. Your mother would be, too, if she’d lived long enough to see you doing this to me.”
Then Grandma stomped off to her bedroom and slammed the door, leaving Maddie standing numb, weighted with unanswered questions and now also with guilt.
And then there was a knock on the back door.
“I know who sent the notes.” Rex stood on the steps.
