Page 134 of The River We Remember

“I saw immediately what was going on. The illness of my mother’s cousin. What was happening between James and Fiona behind her closed bedroom door. The terrible silence of them all. I understood very quickly the true reason I’d been sent for, not a reason that my mother or father could ever have imagined.”

“Why didn’t you just go back to Germany?”

“Only days after I left, my parents were arrested. Much of my family, in fact. I had no one to go back to. And here in America there was no one I knew. I had nothing and nowhere to go.”

Charlie could visualize her, the girl she was then, lost, trapped.

“I decided there was only one choice and James was it. But I was not going to enter meekly into what he wanted from me. I demanded two things before he came to my bed. I told him I knew about Fiona and that it sickened me and must end. And I told him that I needed a wedding ring. He denied what had been going on with his daughter, but it stopped. And he found the patience to wait until his wife died, which was soon enough, and he put this wedding ring on my finger before he took what I’d promised him. Think what you want of that, but it kept me alive while so many of my people in Germany were being killed.”

“After the war, you didn’t consider returning?”

“To what? I had a child here and another on the way. I had a life. Despite what you may think, it was not a terrible life. James was a bully, yes, but he was not cruel to me. I didn’t allow him to be cruel. To me or my children. I have always kept a sharp eye. James was a man of appetites. Land, money, power, sex. As long as those appetites were fed, he was not a dangerous man.” She’d been holding herself erect. Now Charlie could see her bend a little, as if under a weight. “But then… This.” She indicated her weakened body. “This, I didn’t plan on. To stand up to my husband took strength, and I felt that strength draining away. I could no longer feed his appetite in the bedroom. I began to see the hunger in his eyes and I became afraid.”

The screen door opened and Bridget stepped out. “We’ve set a place for Miss Bauer. Colleen says less than five minutes, Mama.”

“Tell her to give us a little more time together. I’ll let her know when we’re ready.”

“Okay.” Bridget went back inside.

“You hired a girl,” Charlie said. “To help here.”

“I didn’t hire her. James did that. To help me with the house, he claimed. I hoped it was true. Maybe it was at first. But then James—” She broke off, and her eyes searched the distance, as if the right words, like the sun, might be hanging above the horizon. “James attacked her. I intervened and took her home and told her not to return.”

“You said that the hunger you saw in his eyes made you afraid. For Colleen?”

She nodded. “I tried to send her away, did you know that? To a Catholic school for girls in Saint Paul. James absolutely refused. He told me that we needed Colleen here. I could not fight him on this. Then over the months, I saw him slide more often into that hopeless place he sometimes went, and I knew that when he was there he was battling demons, and I was certain I knew one of them.”

“Did you say anything to him?”

“I told him I was sorry for what was happening to me. I also told him that if he ever tried to do to my daughter what he’d done to Fiona I would kill him.”

It was time, Charlie thought, to ask the question that had brought her there. “Marta, what really happened the night your husband died?”

It took Marta some time to gather herself. She didn’t look at Charlie but stared across the fields toward Fordham Ridge.

“Bridget was at a sleepover,” she finally began. “Patrick had a date with his girlfriend. The hired men were gone for the day. It was just me and Colleen and James here. We had an early supper. It was an odd meal, James so quiet. He looked pale. He wouldn’t talk. I thought maybe he was ill. He didn’t finish his food. He just left the table. I watched him walk away, up the lane to the old shack where sometimes he drank. He tried to kill himself there last fall, drunk. Patrick found him with a noose around his neck.”

Which was not news to Charlie. Connie Graff had told her this, and she’d been considering how she might use it in her defense of Noah Bluestone.

“I should have been more vigilant,” Marta said. “But I was tired, so I lay down on the sofa in the living room while Colleen cleaned up from supper.” Her eyes closed, and she shook her head in regret. “God forgive me, I fell asleep. When I woke up, the house was empty and it was almost dark outside. I called for Colleen. She didn’t answer. I found a pitcher of lemonade on the kitchen table and two glasses, but no sign of Colleen or James. I stepped outside and called again. And then I knew something was wrong. I could feel it and I was certain what it was. My worst fear. Why had I been so careless?

“James kept his guns in a case in the den. I took one, the biggest, and loaded it. He’d shown me how to do this, for my safety if I was alone on the farm. I went to the shed. I could see a light on in the window. I threw the door open.” She stopped speaking. Her breath came in choking sobs, and tears began to run down her cheeks, gold in the late afternoon light. “A long time ago, he put a cot in the shack and slept there sometimes when he’d been drinking. Colleen was on the cot, lying there like she was in a deep sleep. He’d taken off her jeans and underwear. He’d removed all of his own clothing except for his undershorts. I screamed. Oh God, did I scream. Colleen didn’t move at all. But James turned to me. Red-eyed and red-faced and stinking drunk. He stared at me, at that big shotgun I held. I screamed at him again, screamed at him to get out.”

The still of the afternoon was profound and the air felt close and Charlie held her breath, waiting for Marta to go on. Although neither of them moved, the chains of the porch swing gave a small groan.

“He spoke to me,” Marta went on. “Two words. Only two. He said, ‘She’s mine.’ As if she was just like his land and his money and his power. He was drunk, yes, but it was not the whiskey speaking. And I knew. I knew she would never be safe.”

“What did you do, Marta?”

She turned to Charlie. The tears down her cheeks streamed onto the afghan, but there was something hard and enduring and powerful in her aspect.

“I shot him.”

THERE ARE MOMENTS that stay with you forever and the details are burned into your memory as if etched with acid. Charlie would always remember the moment of Marta Quinn’s confession, not because it startled her—by then she’d pretty much put together that part of the mystery—but because she understood Marta’s action so clearly and there was, odd as this may seem, a beauty to it. Death is as ordinary in this world as birth or breathing. Though we may fear that journey and what awaits us there, it’s a revelation that will come to us all someday. To Charlie, the truly interesting aspect was the manner of the death itself. That great gaping hole Marta Quinn opened in her husband shattered the sixth commandment, went against all the law of most lands and, in reality, tore a hole in Marta herself. But to Charlie’s way of thinking, it was justice.

“Does Colleen know?”

Marta shook her head. “I don’t know how it went with his first daughter, but with mine, he had knocked her out, drugged her somehow, probably with the Seconal he took for his insomnia. He must have put it in her lemonade. She didn’t see anything, doesn’t remember anything. If she suspects at all, she’s kept it to herself.”