When he didn’t continue for a while, Clelia said, “You saw her at the harbor and brought her home. You and Tella adopted her because you couldn’t have children.”
Erwan glanced at her. “It didn’t exactly happen like that.”
Her chest tightened. “How did it happen?”
He cleared his throat. “The men wanted to get rid of your mother because she’d brought a curse onto the ship.”
“What curse?” she asked through dry lips.
“They said that since they’d rescued her, they didn’t catch a single fish. Overnight, their nets ran dry.”
“They wanted to leave her behind for that?”
“An empty net is a very powerful omen to a fisherman.”
It couldn’t have been only that. “There was something else, wasn’t there?”
He lifted his pipe and took a puff. After blowing out the smoke, he said, “They suddenly had a lot of inexplicable fires onboard.”
She gaped at him. “What?”
“Of course, the mayor at the time didn’t want to hear anything about a child being left behind with no passport and identity. Folks didn’t like the fishermen’s tales, but by sunrise the boat was gone, and the girl was found on the jetty in the harbor, alone. I took pity on her and brought her home where Tella fretted over the scrawny scrap of a person. She bathed her, fed her, and bundled her into bed.
“I immediately realized my mistake. By bringing the child here, I’d given Tella a taste of what she wanted most but didn’t have, and I knew it would be impossible for Tella to let the child go.”
He took a deep breath. “While the town council was trying to sort out the legal and administrative red tape of her fate, someone had to take care of her. Tella did it gladly, seeing that the other women were too superstitious and the only other appropriate candidate would’ve been the priest, but he was almost seventy years old and living alone, barely able to take care of himself.
“At first we thought she was deaf or mute because she didn’t react to anything we said. Tella was a clever woman though.” He smiled. “She persevered by talking to your mother and reading books to her in French and Breton. It took nine months, but one day Katik just opened her mouth and spoke a whole phrase in perfect French. For nearly a year, she’d only listened and observed, and when she finally spoke to us in our language, she didn’t even have an accent.
“By then, she’d gotten used to us and us to her, and God knows how, but we managed to get the legal paperwork done to adopt her. Tella’s family pulled some strings. Your grandmother’s father was, at the time, still very influential in government. Wasn’t easy, but we got it done. Tella was beside herself with joy, calling your mother a gift from God.” He kept quiet for a while.
“You say that as if it weren’t the case.”
“Things happened when Katik was around.”
“Such as?” Clelia asked when he fell silent again.
“Accidents. Bad harvests. Dry fishing seasons. Dead animals. Stillbirths with the sheep and cows.”
Clelia blinked. “Surely you weren’t superstitious enough to blame these things on a little girl?”
“We didn’t. Not at first.”
“What do you mean not at first?”
“There was something else.”
“Erwan, what was it?”
“There were fires.”
It felt like a punch in the stomach. “The stories the fishermen told were true? She could spontaneously start fires?”
Even as she said it and saw the pieces coming together, she didn’t want to believe it. The fires she’d started when she was a child now made sense.
“Things combusted around her when she was angry or sad. Tella and I managed to keep it quiet, hide it from the people, and Tella taught her how to control her emotions until it stopped. It was never an easy road. The villagers don’t forget easily, and they didn’t forget what the Japanese men had said. Integrating her into the community was already tough. We didn’t need for everyone to learn their worst fears were true.
“Besides, Katik didn’t do it maliciously. The firestarting was an involuntary response triggered by a strong emotional reaction. For four years, we practically lived in isolation. Luckily, when she turned ten, the fires disappeared, and we never spoke of it again. The bad omens ceased. Everything went back to normal. We never told a soul.”
“Why didn’t you try to find out what was wrong with her? Why didn’t you try to get help?”
“Tella was worried they’d take Katik away from us. She loved her more than any biological mother could ever love her daughter.”
She covered her face with her hands. For years, she’d managed to ignore the facts even as people reminded her every time they called her a witch, but she couldn’t hide from the truth.
Taking a shaky breath, she asked, “Why are you telling me this after all this time?”
“Joss’s woman is going around the village asking questions about your mother. I wanted to tell you before you heard it from someone else.”
Joss’s woman. She went cold. Shit, she was a cheater. She was a horrible person. The guilt mixing with her anxiety about what Erwan had just told her made her feel sick.
“Why would she want to know about my mother?” Wait. “She thinks there’s a connection between me and the fires.” She stopped breathing. “What does Joss’s girlfriend have to do with it?”
“I don’t know, but if we stay here, we’ll soon find out. She came to the house tonight.”
Her heart jolted. “She spoke to you?”
He shook his head. “I was on the water. I saw her from the boat coming in and anchored in the cove behind the trees.”
“Did she see you?”
“Nay. The dogs made quite a show of protecting the property. She was preoccupied with not getting her throat ripped out.”
She looked around. “Where’s Snow? She didn’t hurt them, did she?”
“Nay.”
“Why did she come?”
“I don’t know. Maybe to ask more questions.”
“You think she’ll come back?”
“I know she will. She left a message on the phone, saying she’ll be back in the morning. From the look of her, I can tell you she’s not someone who’s going to back off.”
She neither wanted to face Joss’s girlfriend, nor talk about her mother. She also didn’t want to go to the police, but there was no other way.
“I have to turn myself in,” she said. “It’s the only way to get to the bottom of this. They can do tests or something, monitor my brain or whatever it is they do to determine if I did it, if I’m capable of doing it.”
“No!” He got to his feet so fast that his chair tipped back and hit the floor with a bang. “If you say anything about what I told you about your mother or what happened when you were just a toddler, you’re signing your death warrant. You didn’t start these fires. Turning yourself in isn’t going to help anything. People fear what they don’t understand. The police don’t know you. They don’t know you’re incapable of hurting a fly. You’ll be blamed, no matter how innocent you are. They’ll take you away. You’ll spend your life in jail or worse, an asylum. They’ll probe your brain and study you like a guinea pig. You don’t deserve that.”