The gate to the vegetable garden was secured by a rusty padlock. It began to drizzle as Flo searched through the keys strung on the lanyard around her neck. Gate opened, Evie shouldered the pickax and Lulu picked up a spade. When Evie offered her mother a shovel, all Flo had to say was, “I’m not going to help you two dig yourselves into a hole you can’t get out of.”
Faded seed packets tacked to stakes, neatly demarked rows of carrots, sweet peas, tomatoes—both cherry and heirloom—sweet peppers, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, and butter beans; all but the pumpkins had already been harvested. As they followed Flo back through the garden, Evie found it comforting to think there was still a sliver of the universe so tidy and well ordered.
Her mother pointed to a furrow where sweet potatoes had already been taken from the ground. Lulu put a crocodile loafer to the shoulder of the spade and Evie brought down her pick. The drizzle turned into cold, pelting rain.
Four feet down they found what they came for. It took all three of them to pry a five-foot-long duffel bag out of the earth. Wrapped in polyurethane, duct-taped watertight long ago, it clinked as Evie hoisted its weight onto her shoulder and staggered back to the cabin through fading light.
Flo kindled a fire in the Franklin stove with pinecones. Evie dropped the duffel on the kitchen table and Lulu began to cut away the plastic with a paring knife. Evie was just about to unzip it when Flo suddenly slammed her fist down on the kitchen table so hard the salt and pepper shakers jumped, and shouted, “This is a mistake!”
Lulu reminded her gently, “We voted.”
“I know we voted. I’m old, not senile!” Evie reached out to take her mother’s hand, but Flo wasn’t interested in gestures. “If you go up on that mountain, he’s not going to come for you by himself.”
“That’s what I’m counting on.”
Flo muttered an obscenity as Evie unzipped the bag and took out parts of what would soon be a trombone-action 12-gauge shotgun, sawed off at twenty inches. The serial numbers on it and the rest of the weapons in the bag had been removed with a file by her father long ago. The guns were lovingly packed in Cosmoline to prevent rust. Evie wiped off the grease, worked the action, and dry-fired at a lightbulb. Flo looked at her daughter as if she were handling snakes.
Buddy had buried the guns in the garden the night before they came for him. Guns were another thing her father had taught her about. Evie reached back into the bag and began to assemble a second gun, attaching barrel to action, action to stock. Flo didn’t give up. “You kill him, and you’ll spend your life in jail.”
“I’m not going to shoot anybody, and neither is Lulu.” Lulu was relieved to hear that, but Flo wasn’t worried about Lulu pulling the trigger.
“What are the guns for, then?”
Evie wasn’t trying to be funny when she answered, “They’re a conversation starter.”
“Bullshit.” Lulu backed away from the argument and turned on the TV. It was hooked up to the satellite dish on top of the skinning shed. CNN was replaying the president mocking a woman who had recently testified on national television about the terror of being pushed into a darkened room by a pair of young men she thought were her friends. Held down on a bed, she heard them laugh as a hand was clamped over her mouth to smother her screams for help. There were more guns in the bag waiting to be assembled.
Flo grabbed Lulu’s arm. “You know important people, Lulu! You have money and lawyers. You can go to the FBI. You don’t have to do it this way.”
The news cut to sound bites of outraged and indignant US senators challenging the veracity of the woman’s sworn statement, questioning her memory and motives for waiting so long to name her assailants. What right did a woman have to sully the reputation of a man whose success proved he was beyond suspicion? Lulu turned off the TV.
“Flo, if they don’t believe that woman, why the hell would you think they’re going to believe us?” Evie stopped oiling the guns and waited for her mother’s answer.
Flo turned her back and opened the refrigerator. Evie wasn’t expecting her mother to hand her the .22 semiautomatic pistol her father used to stash in the crisper under the celery no one ever ate. It was strangely romantic that after all these years her mother still kept the gun in her husband’s favorite hidey-hole. “You might as well take the Ruger.”
Evie took the pistol from her mother, pulled out the clip, saw that it was loaded, and handed it back. “Keep it, you might need it before we’re through with this.”
PART II
PARTS BUT LITTLE KNOWN
CHAPTER 1
When I was little I believed my mother could fix anything. My faith in her ability to make all things right had to do with her profession. Evie Quimby was a “restaurateur artistique”—a woman whose hands were trusted enough to repair statues for the Louvre. She could reassemble the pieces of a dropped figurine I knew I shouldn’t have touched with an artistry that bordered on witchcraft; make the cracks in precious things that had been mistreated disappear so completely it was easy to pretend no permanent harm had ever been done. Of course, being the one that hid the cracks, my mother knew better.
Her studio was in Paris, on Rue Daguerre in a converted garage on the edge of Montparnasse. We lived above in a gabled attic. When the bell rang downstairs, a pale yellow pit bull, Clovis, and I would run to the window and look down and watch museum curators and antiquity dealers nervously unload the broken remains of goddesses, demons, saints, and forgotten statesmen, all swaddled in bubble wrap. Her specialty was repairing sculpture, ancient mostly, but once I remember seeing a man in a convertible Bentley accompanied by the singed remains of a sculpture of Michael Jackson that had been struck by lightning.
Sometimes, when the bell rang in the middle of the night, Clovis growled and we’d spy from the shadows. In the morning, I’d discover a wooden box the length of a coffin with something beautiful but broken inside that, depending on your point of view, had either been looted or rescued from a war zone. Whether the damaged statue was made of marble, bronze, limestone, diorite, granite, ivory, or unfired clay, my mother always began by laying out the different broken parts of the figure on a steel table as if it were a person who had just suffered great bodily harm. A pair of lips frozen in the promise of a smile cleaved from a face, legs torn from a torso, a nymph’s breast smashed to shards—I would sit in the corner with Clovis and watch her pick up the pieces one by one, memorizing the edges with her fingertips as she puzzled out how to make them whole.
Perhaps because she kept so many other parts of her life secret, she was transparent about her work and installed a glass window in the door so I could always see what she was doing. The epoxies and polymers she used were toxic; when it came time to assemble the broken pieces, she shooed the dog and me out of her studio. Turning on the exhaust fans, she’d pump up the volume on Dorothy Dandridge or Amy Winehouse, then pull on black rubber gloves that came up above her elbows and don a rubber gas mask with canisters sticking out from her cheeks. She looked like an alien.
Through that small window into her solitary pursuit, I would watch her slowly add one part epoxy to two parts hardener. If she got the mix wrong, smoke rose as if from a cauldron. If the damage to a piece was severe, she installed the same kind of titanium rods a surgeon uses to pin broken bones. It didn’t occur to me until much later that the thing she was really trying to fix was herself.