12
As it always did, Bryn’s entrance changed the energy in the room. Whatever plans Jill and I had for checking out The Glass Coffin receded into the background as Jill helped her stepdaughter off with her coat.
“You look a little pale for someone who just had a walk,” Jill said, touching Bryn’s cheek.
“I changed my mind about the walk,” Bryn said. She stepped in front of the hall mirror, removed her red cashmere beret, and smoothed her hair.
Jill tried a laugh. “At the risk of sounding like a mother hen, where were you?”
“Taking care of business,” Bryn said. She frowned at her reflection, leaned forwards, and removed a speck of mascara from the corner of her eye. “We don’t have to worry about Tracy any more,” she said. “She’s out of the picture.”
Jill hung up Bryn’s coat. “Care to explain?” she asked.
“There’s nothing to explain,” Bryn said. “Dan says I should start taking responsibility for my own life. Tracy was a problem, and I took care of her. I’m supposed to keep a journal too, and I found the perfect one in the gift shop at the hospital.” She opened her purse and removed a notebook splattered with Van Gogh sunflowers. Bryn grazed Jill’s cheek with her lips. “Okay if I get into bed and start writing?”
“Absolutely,” Jill said, but after Bryn left, she looked bemused. “I seem to have become redundant,” she said.
“No more redundant than the parent of any other seventeen-year-old,” I said. I peered more closely at her. “Bryn isn’t the only one who looks a little pale,” I said. “Why don’t we make an early night of it too? The movie will still be there tomorrow, and you can have first dibs on the stack of books I got for Christmas.”
“All right,” Jill said, “but I get the one with the biggest print and the prettiest pictures.”
I was soldiering through the pivotal chapter of a novel about coming of age in London, Ontario, when the doorbell rang. I kept reading, hoping that someone else would get the door. No one did. Guessing the identity of the person pressing the button wasn’t a stretch. As I pulled on my slippers, I cursed young love and a son so addled by passion that he’d forgotten his keys. But when I opened the door I wasn’t faced with a post-tumescent Angus. My caller was Claudia, and she was steaming mad.
She didn’t wait to be invited in. “Where’s Jill?”
“In bed,” I said.
“Get her down here,” Claudia said, and her tone made me understand why she could make Willie quake.
“She’s sleeping,” I said.
“That’s more than any of the rest of us will do tonight. Wake her up.” Claudia pulled off her boots, threw her coat on top of them, and strode into the living room. Willie, recognizing his mentor, lumbered in and sidled up. When I went to get Jill, she was already at the top of the stairs.
“You’ve been summoned,” I said.
Jill drew her robe around her and tied it. “What’s going on?”
“You’ll have to ask Claudia,” I said.
Claudia didn’t wait to be asked. The moment she spied Jill, she attacked. “We kept the facts about Bryn’s birth secret for all these years,” she sputtered. “What in God’s name made you think you could just spring it on her today?”
“I thought she was old enough to handle the truth,” Jill said gently.
“Do you know what she did with ‘the truth’?” Claudia asked. “She came down to the hospital tonight and told Tracy and me she was starting a new life and there was no place for us in it. You can imagine what that attack did to Tracy. She was so distraught she had to be sedated.”
Jill was coldly furious. “Poor Tracy – having to be sedated. What about all the days and nights when Bryn was distraught? Where was your compassion then, Claudia? More to the point, where were you and your sister- in-law?”
“You don’t know anything about us,” Claudia said. “You breeze in with my brother, have tea with my mother, smile at the rest of us, remove the lynchpin from our lives, waltz out the door, and leave us to cope. You’re the one who’s going to have to cope now, Jill. That daughter of whom you are so very proud has some secrets of her own. Nasty secrets.”
“Bryn doesn’t have any secrets from me.”
“Really,” Claudia said. “So you know that just minutes before Evan died, his daughter told him she wished someone would kill him.”
Jill’s face was bloodless. “No,” she breathed.
“There’s more,” Claudia said. “After Bryn expressed her heart’s desire, she picked up that hunting knife of yours and said how good it felt in her hand, how powerful it made her feel.”
“You’re lying,” Jill said.
“Other people heard her. Tracy and Felix were there – so was Evan. That’s what made him walk out into the snowstorm. He was trying to protect your future as a family. He knew Bryn was hysterical. It wasn’t the first time she’d been like that, but he wanted her to have a chance – we all wanted that.” Claudia rubbed her temples with her fingertips as if to erase the memory. “It was probably the single unselfish thing my brother ever did and look what it got him.”
I could see Jill was badly shaken, but she was fighting for control. “Let’s stick to the facts,” she said. “There was a scene between Bryn and Evan. Adolescent girls fight with their fathers – that’s a fact. And Bryn had more reason than most to be angry with her father. That’s another fact. Everything beyond that is speculation. And Claudia, I’ve learned not to deal in speculation.”
“Really,” Claudia said. “Then why did you go racing out towards the maze the second I told you Bryn had taken off? Why was there blood all over that cloak of my mother’s? And why was the handle of the knife that killed Evan wiped clean? You were doing a little speculating yourself, weren’t you, Jill? And you came to exactly the same conclusion I did. You thought Bryn killed Evan, and you were covering her tracks exactly the way the rest of us were.”
For an agonizing moment, the two women eyed each other.
When, finally, Jill broke the silence, her voice was a whisper. “What are you going to do?”
The simple question seemed to extinguish Claudia’s fire. Her response was as tentative as Jill’s. “I was planning to go to the police, but now…”
“But now you realize that would be totally destructive.” Jill clasped the other woman’s hands in her own, pressing her advantage. “Claudia, your duty is the same as it’s always been – to put Bryn first. Evan’s dead – nothing will change that. But the police don’t have anything. If we all stick to our stories, they never will. I’m begging you. Let’s salvage what we can. Help me save Bryn.”
In all the years I had known her, I’d never seen Jill abase herself. The sight was wrenching, and I turned away, hoping that the worst was over. It wasn’t.
“I can talk to her,” Jill said, “convince her that the best thing for all of us is to continue to be part of your family. She has her heart set on New York, but there are weekends and holidays. We could get a place near you in Toronto. You and Tracy and Caroline could be there for Bryn – always.”
“Will you get me my own two-wheeler too?”
“I don’t understand,” Jill said.
Claudia looked at her with pity. “That was a joke,” she said. “My way of saying I’ll do what you want.”
Jill’s relief was palpable. “You won’t regret it.”
As Claudia put on her coat and boots, I was frozen, stunned by the enormity of the devil’s bargain I had witnessed. But when she put her hand on the doorknob, I moved. “Do you have a cell number?”
“Doesn’t everybody?” Claudia asked.
I handed her a pen and paper and she wrote out her name and number. I checked her signature, satisfied myself that it didn’t match the handwriting on the note, and bid her good night.
When the door closed behind Claudia, Jill sank onto the cobbler’s bench in the hall. “Don’t start on me, Jo,” she said.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I said. “And there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t already know. Jill,
