“You should talk to the police,” Alec says. “They didn’t seem to know much about what she did on that last day. Or any day, really.”
He’s right. I may be one of the last people to see her alive. And when we met, I could sense something was wrong.
Alec is frowning at my silence. “Was she upset?”
“Yeah,” I whisper. “I think she knew something was going to happen.”
Alec squeezes his eyes shut, and his chin crinkles. “Why did this happen to us?”
I picture the bench where we sat, skin against skin. I see her glance at the river before she carried a clinging Emmett toward his afternoon story time. But there was something else. My fingers curl at the memory, not of touching her skin but of what was left behind on the bench we’d shared.
“What is it?” Alec whispers. “What did she say to you?”
It wasn’t words. Her day planner. She left it behind, and I didn’t notice until she was gone. The ER nurse bagged the yellow book with my purse. It should still be in there.
“I can help you,” I say with a certainty I don’t have but will need to resurrect.
“How?” he whispers.
“Trust me,” I say because I don’t have time to take his hand. Belina is reaching out for mine.
Chapter 5
What a terrible friend.
Forgetting that dead woman’s journal.
You’ll never be able to help Alec.
Never keep this baby alive.
I kick over empty flowerpots outside the sunporch, desperate to find the back door key. Ester is screaming, a wail made worse outside. I can almost feel the neighbors glaring out their windows, wondering why I can’t keep her happy. Their fingers itching to call Jack or maybe child services.
At last the key falls to the concrete with a tinny clink, and I shudder back tears. I gently squat to the ground, holding Ester tight against me. Key in hand, I hurry up the stairs. The glass door slams behind me as I move swiftly toward the living room.
Ignoring my tight nerves at the prospect of unwrapping her, I arrange several pillows into a nest on the floor. I untie the knot Jack made at my waist with one hand, pressing the other hand against Ester. The fabric slowly unwinds from my body as her wail reaches a new volume. I jump at the piercing sound, bobble her, but recover, clutching her tight in my trembling arms.
You should drop her.
Let this all be over.
I gasp, surprised by how the voice is coming after her now too. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, that I won’t listen. I whisper the refusal against Ester’s cool cheek. We can fight this together.
After I stop shaking, I gently lay her onto the pillows. Jack usually handles the bottles and left one ready in the refrigerator. After I warm it, she drinks greedily. She’s not much of a burper, but I bounce her a few times, getting her settled, calming us both.
I take Ester upstairs, and it’s twenty minutes of bouncing on the exercise ball before we’re both calm. I lay her in the bassinet asleep, but she won’t stay quiet for long. I stare at her perfect little face, my heart catching from the fear and love that blooms within me now. I hurry down the stairs. My breasts ache to be pumped. The sinuous pain brings guilt at my inability to nurse.
I decide to endure the needing-to-nurse pain and scramble to the hallway closet. I toss out umbrellas and old shoes and coats we don’t wear until I find the purse I had in the hospital. Jack got my wallet out, and it didn’t occur to me that there was anything else I’d need. My fingers find sunglasses, ChapStick, a half-eaten KIND bar, and loose receipts before I feel the hard spine of a narrow book.
My hands shake so much that I stop. I take long deep breaths and lean my back against the cool plaster wall. I focus on the blank space where our family photo should be.
You can’t even take a picture. No way in hell you can help this dead woman.
Clutching Belina’s planner to my chest, I remember the last time I saw her or would ever see her.
I woke early from light cramps, my mind already spinning about something being wrong. I was relieved to get a text from Belina to meet her at Swan Point Cemetery that afternoon. We’d walked there a lot in the six months we’d been friends. As I waited for her and Emmett, I stared at the forest along the great stone wall that creates a border down to the Providence River. The sloping hills covered in gigantic sycamores and dogwoods and maples and oaks. It’s not a normal burial ground, more of a sanctuary for nature and remembrance. The graves are art, some small and thin, dating back to the Revolutionary War. Others are monuments, obelisks, and great mausoleums. Former governors and the oldest Rhode Island families are buried with war generals and the writer H. P. Lovecraft.
I was reminding myself that my child and I were on this side of the grave when I saw her pushing Emmett. I waddled over, and we strolled down an outer road toward the river.
I told her about the cramps, and she nodded as if understanding. We stopped at one of the largest graves near the water. It’s all white granite with gigantic benches on either side of an enormous angel cast in dark bronze.
She tipped her head, reveling in that late-in-the-day sunshine. “There’s a new moon tonight,” she said. “Everything will be purged.”
I turned to her. “What do you mean?”
“All the curses hidden in the moon’s shadow come out,” she said with a smile. “Have you been cursed?”
“Yes,” I said, not feeling like being teased. “My grandfather. On his deathbed.”
“Oh, meu Deus,” she whispered in Portuguese. “Your own blood.”
I heard his curse, a garbled hiss under the erratic beep of the heart monitor installed in my mother’s house for him by hospice. “I don’t believe in curses,” I said.
Her gaze roamed my belly. “Go to the doctor.” She curled her arm around her own flat stomach. “As soon as you leave here. No one is safe tonight.”
I’m not a big believer in superstition or religion or whatever it was that made Belina so often speak of God and curses and blood. But I could hear the pain in her voice, regret even. She hardly moved as my hand slipped over hers. I squeezed her long fingers, her olive skin chilled against my slightly swollen, warm hands. I leaned my head back like hers, both of us searching for some sun.
In the quiet cemetery, a great canopy of trees above us, I felt what I thought was her loneliness. “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
She shook her head once, sharply, but then her face softened. “I’m tying up loose ends under the new moon.”
“What loose ends?”
“Ask me tomorrow.” She pulled away and stepped onto the bench; she climbed one step, using the giant angel statue’s wing for balance. She stared at the river, her head following the banks all the way to the edge of the cemetery and back up to where a lone mausoleum is built into the hill.
Of course, I didn’t know it then, but it’s where she would be murdered.
But you knew something was wrong.
Too fixated on yourself.
You never really cared about her.
If you did, she’d still be alive.
Belina jumped down and landed in front of me. “Call the doctor,” she said again.
Those were the last words she’d ever speak to me. I watched her check on Emmett, who was waking up from his afternoon nap in his stroller. She rubbed his cheek where the strap had given him a red spot.