Page 128 of The River We Remember

“Nothing could be further from the truth. I did all the seducing.” She smiled, but it was worn and sad.

“Why?”

“I wanted to get pregnant. I wanted to punish my father.”

“For what?”

Fiona had been wearing sunglasses. Now she removed them, and Charlie could finally see her eyes. They were deep green and, in a way, threatening. “What I’m going to tell you, I have told only one other person. I need to know that you’ll keep it to yourself. You can’t use it to defend Noah Bluestone. If you say anything, I will deny it. I will deny it to my grave. Do you understand? And do I have your word?”

Charlie wondered what her word was worth to this woman. What did Fiona know of her, professionally or personally, of her ethics? Although Charlie was still in the dark about so much, there was one thing she understood at that moment: a heavy weight lay on Jimmy Quinn’s daughter and she was desperate to be relieved of it. Across all her years of defending the accused, Charlie had come to understand that was the way of our darkest secrets. As much as we fear their revelation, we pray to be able to bring them into the light, to unburden ourselves to someone who might understand. Charlie wasn’t Catholic, but the ritual of confession had always made sense to her.

“You have my word,” she pledged solemnly.

Fiona turned away and addressed the rest of her remarks to the wind. “When I was twelve years old, my mother became ill. She was diagnosed with ALS. You know what that is?”

“I do,” Charlie said.

“She got weaker and weaker, became bedridden. We had to do everything for her, and we had to do all of the things for ourselves that she could no longer do. My grandmother Quinn helped some, but she was a dry, bitter old woman, and I didn’t like her. Terry didn’t either. So more and more I took on a lot of responsibilities. Adult responsibilities.”

She paused, and Charlie could hear the leaves of the trees around the base of the tower rustling with a liquid sound as if a river were running past. Far away she saw smoke rising where a farmer was burning some kind of debris, and the smoke lay in a long gray smudge across the pale blue sky.

“The first night my father came to my bedroom, I was thirteen. He’d been drinking. He’d been doing a lot of that over the weeks before this, wrestling with something. That night, he came to me smelling of whiskey. He sat on my bed in the dark and explained to me why he was there. He told me that because of my mother’s illness, it was my duty. He told me it would be a special thing that we’d share. He told me it wouldn’t hurt. Promised me. He told me there was nothing to be afraid of. But I was afraid. Absolutely scared to death.”

Her voice was thin and rigid and seemed on the edge of breaking.

“I didn’t understand, really. What child would? I knew it was a terrible thing. I couldn’t tell anyone. But I didn’t have to. They all knew. They all knew and they all looked away. My mother, my grandmother, Terry. They were weak people. In my father’s shadow, we were all weak people.”

Her hands gripped the tower wall, as if she were afraid she might fall.

“It’s a strange thing about adversity, Charlie. You can get used to anything, no matter how difficult, if it’s the same sort of difficulty each time. So I got used to my father’s visits. I even made myself believe that it was, just as he said, something special between us. Because he treated me very nicely, so much better than he did anyone else. Whenever he visited me, he would bring me a gift, an expensive little piece of jewelry. A bracelet, a necklace, a ring. I wore them and offered no explanation for where they came from. Terry hated me, but he never said a word. My mother would look at me when I came into her room, and to this day I’m certain that what I saw on her face was a mixture of grief and guilt, because she was helpless. Or so I thought. Because in the end, she did do something, the only thing she could. She arranged for a distant cousin to come from Germany to help with the work.”

“Marta?”

“Yes, Marta. She was sixteen, the same age I was by then. But she was very different from me. Stronger. Her parents had been important people in Germany but outspoken opponents of Hitler. I suppose they saw the writing on the wall and wanted to get their daughter to safety. Sending her to a family in America must have seemed the way.” She looked down from the height of the observation tower and shook her head. “They had no idea.”

“What happened, Fiona?”

“My mother died a short while after Marta’s arrival. My father stopped coming to my bed. A few months later, he and Marta were married. The following summer, she became pregnant with their first child.”

“Patrick,” Charlie said. “J.P.”

“Her belly swelled. She lost her figure. I saw my father looking at me again, in the old way. By then, I wanted nothing to do with him. I hated him. For what he’d done to me, of course, but also…” She paused. “Also for casting me off in favor of Marta.”

She stopped then, was quiet for a long while, and eyed the distant smudge of smoke as if it were a thing she couldn’t comprehend.

“It was all so complicated, so unbelievable, the things I felt. Mostly I wanted to get away from him, from that place, from those circumstances. So I seduced Bob and got myself pregnant and…”

Now she broke. That great dam she’d built just gave way, and she bent and wept tears that fell onto the white stone. She sobbed uncontrollably, and Charlie wanted to hold her, comfort her but was so unsure of everything at the moment that she simply let Jimmy Quinn’s daughter weep.

At last Fiona wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, then dug into her pocket and brought out a tissue and blew her nose. “It cost Bob terribly, and I’ve always felt responsible for that. But I’ve tried to be a good wife to him. All those expensive little pieces of jewelry my father gave me? I sold them and we used the money for a down payment on our home.”

“Does Bob know any of this?”

“I’ve never told him. He knows there was something bad between my father and me, but neither of us has ever broached the subject.” She looked at Charlie again, her face dark with concern. “When I heard that Marta was ill, I became afraid for Colleen, terribly afraid about what might happen, if it hadn’t already. But I… I still feared my father, feared the past, feared what the future might hold if the truth were known. So I did nothing. Just like my mother and my grandmother and my brother.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I think there’s a good reason my father is dead. And I think you may not have to look any farther than that farmhouse I grew up in.”