Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents

the same mistakes. And she hadn’t. By God, she hadn’t.

She had made new ones.

We didn’t raise him to be this way, mothers would tell her during parent-teacher conferences, and June would think, Of course you did. What did you think would happen to a boy who was given everything and made to work for nothing?

She had secretly blamed them — or perhaps not too secretly. More often than not, there was a complaint filed with the school board by a parent who found her too smug. Too judgmental. June had not realized just how smug until she saw her own smirk reflected back to her at the beginning of a conference about Grace. The teacher’s eyes were hard and disapproving. June had choked back the words We didn’t raise her this way and bile had come into her throat.

What had they raised Grace to be? A princess, if Richard was asked. A perfect princess who loved her father.

But how much had he really loved her?

That was the question she needed answered. That was literally — and she used the word correctly here — the last thing that would be on her mind.

Richard sensed the change in her posture. He stared at her over the paper. “What is it?”

June’s brain told her mouth to move. She felt the sensation — the parting of the lips, the skin stuck together at the corners — but no words would form.

“Do you want some water?”

She nodded because that was all she could do. Richard left the room. She tilted her head back, looked at the closed closet door. There were love letters on the top shelf. The shoe box was old, dusty. After June died, Richard would go through her things. He would find the letters. Would he think her an idiot for keeping them? Would he think that she had pined for him while he was gone?

She had pined. She had ached. She had cried and moaned, not for him, but for the idea of him. For the idea of the two of them together.

June turned her head away. The pillowcase felt rough against her face. Her hair clung to wet skin. She closed her eyes and thought of Grace’s silky mane of hair. So black that it was almost blue. Her alarmingly deep green eyes that could penetrate right into your soul.

“We’re almost out of bendy straws,” Richard said, holding the glass low so that she could sip from the straw. “I’ll have to go to the store later.”

She swallowed, feeling as if a rock were moving down her throat.

“Does it matter to you if I go before or after lunch?”

June managed a shake of her head. Breathing, normally an effort, was becoming more difficult. She could hear a different tenor in the whistle of air wheezing through her lips. Her body was growing numb, but not from the morphine. Her feet felt as if they were sliding out of a pair of thick woolen socks.

Richard placed the glass on her bedside table. Water trickled from the straw, and he wiped it up before sitting back down with the paper.

She should’ve written a book for wives who wanted their husbands to help more around the house. Here’s my secret, ladies: twenty-one years in a maximum-security prison! Richard cooked and cleaned. He did the laundry. Some days, he would bring in the warm piles of sheets fresh from the dryer and watch television with June while he folded the fitted sheets into perfect squares.

June closed her eyes again. She had loved folding Grace’s clothes. The tiny shirts. The little skirts with flowers and rows of lace. And then Grace had gotten older, and the frilly pink blouses had been relegated to the back of the closet. What had it been like that first day Grace came down to breakfast wearing all black? June wanted to ask Richard, because he had been there too, with his nose tucked into the newspaper. As she remembered, he had merely glanced at June and rolled his eyes.

Meanwhile, her heart had been in her throat. The administrator in June was cataloging Grace the same way she cataloged the black-clad rebels she saw in her office at school: drug addict, whore, probably pregnant within a year. She was already thinking about the paperwork she’d have to fill out when she called the young woman into her office and politely forced her to withdraw from classes.

June had always dismissed these children as damaged, halfway between juvenile delinquents and adult perpetrators. Let the justice system deal with them sooner rather than later. She washed them out of her school the same way she washed dirt from her hands. Secretly, she thought of them as legacy children — not the sort you’d find at Harvard or Yale, but the kind of kids who walked in the footsteps of older drug-addled siblings, imprisoned fathers, alcoholic mothers.

It was different when the errant child, the bad seed, sprang from your own loins. Every child had tantrums. That was how they learned to find their limits. Every child made mistakes. That was how they learned to be better people. How many excuses had popped into June’s mind each time Grace was late for curfew or brought home a bad report card? How many times did June overlook Grace’s lies and excuses?

June’s grandmother was a woman given to axioms about apples and trees. When a child was caught lying or committing a crime, she would always say, “Blood will out.”

Is that what happened to Grace? Had June’s bad blood finally caught up with her? It was certainly catching up with June now. She thought of the glob of red phlegm that she’d spat into the kitchen sink six months ago. She had ignored the episode, then the next and the next, until the pain of breathing was so great that she finally made herself go to the doctor.

So much of June’s life was marked in her memory by blood. A bloody nose at the age of seven courtesy of her cousin Beau, who’d pushed her too hard down the slide. Standing with her mother at the bathroom sink, age thirteen, learning how to wash out her underpants. The dark stain soaked into the cloth seat of the car when she’d had her first miscarriage. The clotting in the toilet every month that told her she’d failed, yet again, to make a child.

Then, miraculously, the birth. Grace, bloody and screaming. Later, there were bumped elbows and skinned knees. And then the final act, blood mingling with water, spilling over the side of the bathtub, turning the rug and tiles crimson. The faucet was still running, a slow trickle like syrup out of the jar. Grace was naked, soaking in cold, red water. Her arms were splayed out in mock crucifixion, her wrists sliced open, exposing sinew and flesh.

Richard had found her. June was downstairs in her sewing room when she heard him knocking on Grace’s bedroom door to say good night. Grace was upset because her debate team had lost their bid for the regional finals. Debate club was the last bastion of Grace’s old life, the only indication that the black-clad child hunched at the dinner table still belonged to them.

Richard was one of the debate-team coaches, had been with the team since Grace had joined, back in middle school. It was the perfect pursuit for two people who loved to argue. He’d been depressed about the loss, too, and covered badly with a fake bravado as he knocked, first softly, then firmly, on her door.

“All right, Gracie-gray. No more feeling sorry for ourselves. We’ll get through this.” More loud knocking, then the floor creaking as he walked toward the bathroom. Again, the knocking, the calling out. Richard mumbled to himself, tried the bathroom door. June heard the hinges groan open, then heard Richard screaming.

The sound was at once inhuman and brutally human, a noise that comes only from a mortal wounding. June had been so shocked by the sound that her hand had slipped, the needle digging deep into the meat of her thumb. She hadn’t registered the pain until days later when she was picking out the dress Grace would be buried in. The bruise was dark, almost black, as if the tip of June’s thumb had been marked with an ink pen.

The razor Grace used was a straight-edge blade, a relic from the shaving kit that had belonged to June’s father. June had forgotten all about it until she saw it lying on the floor just below her daughter’s lifeless hand. Grace didn’t leave a suicide note. There were no hidden diaries or journals blaming anyone or explaining why she had chosen this way out.

The police wanted to know if Grace had been depressed lately. Had she ever done drugs? Was she withdrawn? Secretive? There seemed to be a checklist for calling a case a suicide, and the detectives asked only the questions that helped them tick off the boxes. June recognized the complacency in their stance, the tiredness in their eyes. She often saw it in the mirror when she got home from school. Another troubled teenager. Another problem to be dealt with. They wanted to stamp the case solved and file it away so that they could move on to the next one.

Washing dirt off their hands.