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Of course he knows where it’s located.
He’s been here before.
When he eventually does enter her room, I have to clamp a hand over my mouth to keep from crying out. All this time I’d secretly hoped I was wrong, that it wasn’t him, that despite Mary’s suitcase and those typed pages, it couldn’t possibly be true.
But his presence erases all doubt.
My father finds Virginia immediately. It’s not hard. Her legs, incapable of moving on their own, jut from the dark corner into which she’d been dropped.
“Hey, Ginny,” he says. “It’s been a long time.”
His voice is calm, warm, flirting with amusement. The voice of a man seeing a long-lost love. Under different circumstances, it could almost be considered romantic. Right now, though, it’s chilling.
“Let’s get you off the floor,” he says.
My father bends down, lifts Virginia into his arms, and carries her to the bed. He did the same thing for my mother in her waning days, gently moving her from the living room sofa to their bedroom. Watching him do it now with Virginia cracks my heart wide open. Making it worse is the knowledge that such tenderness comes from a man also capable of horrible deeds.
“You still know how to surprise a fella, Ginny,” he says as he places her on the bed. “I’ll give you that.”
My father eases himself onto the edge of the bed and, to my surprise, takes Virginia’s hand in his.
Her right.
I hold my breath, waiting for him to tell me he knows I’m here and that I should emerge from the dark. Instead, he talks only to Virginia.
“All those years I thought you were dead. Hung with a rope. Isn’t that how it goes? Now, unlike everyone else, I knew Lenora didn’t do it. I knew you’d done it to yourself. Either way, you were dead all the same. That’s why I never left town. I never felt the need to hide. I certainly didn’t think I had to worry about you telling anyone what really happened. So I stayed. Started my own business. Met a wonderful woman. Had a daughter.”
My blood runs cold as he says it.
He knows I’m here.
Now he’s reminding me whose side I’m supposed to be on.
“I felt bad about what happened,” he tells Virginia. “For what it’sworth, I did love you. At least, I thought I did. And I intended to do right by you. But we were so young, and I was so scared. When your father told me the baby was gone and offered me that money, all I felt was relief. At last, there was a way out of the situation, even though I knew it would hurt you. And I do think about him sometimes. Our son. I think about him and hope he’s happy. I don’t think that would have happened if we’d stayed together. It wouldn’t have lasted, Ginny. We were too different.”
My father gives Virginia’s hand a gentle squeeze, as if to drive the point home.
“As for your mother, I didn’t mean to hurt her, Ginny. I swear. But something in me just snapped and I couldn’t control it. I’ve thought about that night a lot. Not a day goes by when I don’t regret what I did. But I learned to live with it. And I knew that, as big of a mistake as it was, I wouldn’t be punished for it. Then that nurse of yours came to the house asking if I’d agree to a blood test.”
Somehow I manage to keep from gasping. It sits, bubble-like, at the back of my throat. I swallow it down as the realization that prompted it settles over me.
Mary had been to our house.
That’s where she went that Sunday night. Not to the lab, but to see my father.
While I was there.
She was the woman I’d heard talking to my father. Not a girlfriend he didn’t want to tell me about. But Mary, bearing an even bigger secret. When I heard him sneak out the next night, he was actually on his way here.
“She told me she knew that I’d worked at Hope’s End when I was sixteen,” my father continues. “She knew I’d had a relationship with Virginia Hope and that I was the father of her child, who was taken away but might have had a kid of his own who now wanted to know who his real grandparents were. That’s when I realized you were stillalive. The only person she could have learned all that from is you. God, you should have seen her. So smug. Acted like she was so smart. Yet she didn’t know half of it.”
“But I know all of it.”
Unlike the gasp, I can’t keep myself from saying it. I know too much to stay hidden and have heard too much to remain silent. Stepping from my room into Virginia’s, I see my father’s hands move to her neck and give a little squeeze.
“Stop right there, Kit-Kat,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt you. And I think you know that. But I will hurt her if you come any closer.”
The sight of his hands—so large and so strong—around Virginia’s throat stops me cold. But I don’t show fear. You can sense fear. He taught me that.