“For him?”Tessa asked, not unkindly.
“No!”Bonnie exclaimed.“I don’t know if I’ll spit on his grave or not, but I want to see with my own eyes that Lucas Shoemacher has been laid six feet under.”
She paused and took a deep breath, as if to steady herself.
“I’m the mayor now.Like it or not, I have to set an example for the town.And I need to be there for his children.I called every one of them to tell them he was dying.I heard the pain in every single one of their voices.”
Sunny understood more clearly now how much it was costing Bonnie to keep her voice level like that.
Bonnie continued, “They buried their father years ago, when he drove them away from Cobbler Cove.Saturday, they have to do it again, and this time they’ll be standing in front of a town that hates their very name for a crime they just found out about, same as us.No place on earth is colder than that hill is going to be.”
Jenna sat back, her hands wrapped around her mug.Of all of them she said the least at these meetings but was listened to the hardest when she did.
She said now in her quiet, gentle way, “Sully asked me last night what I wanted out of all this.It took me till just now to figure that out.”
She paused, looking around the table at each one of them in turn.Then she said slowly and clearly, “I want itover.Five years that fire has run my life.Then I find out this week my life’s really been run by Lucas Shoemacher’s guilty conscience this whole time.Well, he’s dead.The case is closed.The only thing left still burning is whatever fuel we keep feeding the fire.”
She set the mug down.“Hating a dead man is a job with no completion date.I’m giving my notice and quitting that particular job.I’ve got a wedding to go to in a week, and I don’t plan to let Lucas Shoemacher run or ruin one more day of my life.”
Quiet went around the table.And into it, before she could talk herself out of it, Sunny spoke up.“I know what’s going to be on that hill Saturday.I’m the only one here who does.”
Eight faces turned to her.The half-in, half-out chair at the end of the table was suddenly the center of attention, and there was no going back.She realized with a start, her heart slamming, that she didn’t want to go back.She wanted to do this.
“My husband’s name was Winston Perry,” she said.“He was the chief financial officer of a major international shipping company in California.”
Grace, who was sitting to her right, and one of only three people this side of the Rockies who knew what came next, reached out to give her hand a quick squeeze.
Sunny smiled briefly at Grace then looked up at the others.“Over the course of a decade, Winston stole tens of millions of dollars from his company and wrecked the pension funds of hundreds of people who trusted him.”
The diner was so quiet she could’ve heard a pin drop.
“I never had the slightest idea what he was doing.Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.Anyway, when he was caught and convicted, he killed himself rather than go to jail and face what he’d done.It was all over the news.My children’s father was a famous thief and a coward, and I changed their names to my maiden name so they could go to a playground without wearing his name.”
Her voice remained steady, which astonished her.Maybe she was readier to be done with secrets for good than she’d realized.
She continued, “I’ve stood exactly where the seven Shoemachers will be standing.I’ve been the family at the grave of a man whose name I shared and who did a terrible thing.”
The entire group exhaled audibly.
Sunny said with conviction, “I can tell you exactly what the Shoemacher children need because nobody gave it to me.They need one person, just one, to look them in the eye, in public, and treat them like the dead man’s victims instead of his accomplices.”
She took a breath that shook on the way down into her lungs.“This town gave me that grace.For a while, I thought if you all knew about Winston, you would withdraw your kindness and acceptance of me and my kids.But after living here the better part of the summer, I don’t think that’s what any of you would do.”
The women spoke all at once, their voices on top of one another, assuring her they would never hold her responsible for what her husband had done without her knowledge.
When they quieted, she looked around the table at each one of them in turn the way Jenna had.“You’re the reason I know it can be done.So, yes.I’m going Saturday, if you’ll have me on that hill with you.And I plan to look each one of Lucas Shoemacher’s children in the eye and see a victim of their father and not an accomplice.”
For a moment nobody said anything.The old reflex sat up in her and braced for the condemnation.She got ready to see the flinch, the recalculation, the careful half-step back from her.
Tessa, who was possibly the angriest of them all, reached over from her left and took her hand.Rose looked at her the way she would at a fellow actor who’d just laid down a performance laced through with undeniable truth.The others responded with varying degrees of thoughtfulness and their own sets of emotions.
Jenna said practically, in the same voice she’d given her notice in, “Honey, move your chair in closer to the table.You’ve been one of us since you first got here.We were just waiting on you to notice.”
Sunny scooted her chair in.It traveled about twelve inches.It was the longest distance she’d crossed in three years.
Saturday came in hot and still with thunderheads piling up over the western end of the valley.The hill behind the Shoemacher ranch house was brown and baking in the sun.
The family had set out exactly enough chairs for the family, which told Sunny everything about what they expected.The pastor stood at the head of a grave dug by a Bozeman crew because no local backhoe operator had been asked.
