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44
Lizzie
Huntsville,Alabama
1950
Just about everything seemed a little broken when I woke up that Saturday morning.
Cal was trying to carry on as if nothing were wrong, but he seemed tender almost, as if I’d bruised him badly. I still had no idea what to do about it. And Henry had been so late home the previous night I started to suspect he wasn’t really “working late,” as he’d claimed all week. Calvin and I agreed to sit him down for a discussion over dinner, and I still wasn’t sure what we were going to say to him.
I had a lot to worry about with the two men in my life, and whenever I was worried, I was drawn to my garden. That was why I was up with the sun that Saturday morning, hoping to clear out the unwanted plants from a few of my garden beds before the sun grew too hot.
I was pulling on my boots when I heard the explosion in the distance—not so close that I felt I needed to run for cover, but close enough that it startled me. It was probably just a car backfiring—some laborer, leaving for an early shift to beat the heat. Nothing to be concerned about.
I started to work on the garden bed just off the laundry room, near the stairs to Henry’s apartment. If he was working that day, he’d be down those stairs soon. But just a few minutes later, Henry burst into the backyard through the gate that came from the street. He was wearing nightclothes, and there were sweat marks around his armpits.
“Lizzie!” he whispered frantically. “He was chasing me!”
“What on earth are you talking about?” I gasped. I scrambled to my feet and took my brother’s shoulders in my hands. “Are you dreaming again?”
“He came again last night, so I got the gun.” My breath caught in my throat. That sound I’d heard wasn’t a car backfiring. It was agunshot? “He was coming every night! I had enough, that’s all. I told him if he came near you once more, I’d take care of him. I was going to fix it for you, Lizzie, but—” Henry suddenly seemed confused. “But when I got there, they were in bed together, and the little boy came in and...”
I brushed a lock of sweat-soaked hair back from my brother’s forehead, forcing myself to smile reassuringly, even though ice was running through my veins. I needed to calm him down. I needed to know exactly what had happened so I could figure out how to fix it.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I said gently. “You can tell me the whole story, Henry. I’m going to help you figure this out.”
I’d never seen my brother cry before, not even in the very worst moments of our lives. He was sobbing now. He shook from head to toe as if he were freezing. Even his teeth were chattering.
“I still don’t know what he’s trying to do to us,” he said. He was seated on the edge of his unmade bed, rocking back and forth like a child. “But he kept coming around here all the time. And then she came too, with the cake! They are up to something. Iknowthey are.”
Henry was generally tidy, but that was always the first thing to go when his mood was low. I was kicking myself for not checking his room. I had been trying to respect his privacy, but if I’d just come up to his room and seen the filthy way he’d been living, I’d have been able to stop all of this.
There was a tin of red paint sitting on spread newspaper on the floor, with brushes drying on the windowsill. I was confused about that, until I remembered Avril saying someone had been graffitiing the road outside of the Rhodes house. Plates of half-eaten food sat on the table, and scrawled notes were taped to the wall—a dozen or so slips of paper just like the one he’d dropped in my kitchen that day, each one covered with dates and times and seemingly random words. An open box of bullets sat on the little table I’d picked out for him when I was setting up the room.
“She went grocery shopping the lastthreeFridays, but she came home early yesterday. That’s when I knew for sure. How did she know I was in the house?” He stood, his footsteps heavy and frustrated as he walked to the table. He pushed the box of ammunition to the side and scooped up some black-and-white photographs, quickly bringing them to show me. “See?” he said, his tone triumphant and accusatory. “This proves it, Lizzie. They’re up to something.”
I accepted the photographs as he handed them to me. I looked down into the faces of three young children in one. The next was of an elderly woman. And then my stomach dropped as I stared down at what was unmistakably Sofie and Jürgen Rhodes’s wedding photo. They were young and innocent and both beaming as if they couldn’t contain their joy. Cal’s words ran through my mind.He adores her.In that photo, Jürgen Rhodes looked like the happiest man in the world.
I flipped to the next photo, and as I stared down at the final one, I felt a pinch in my chest. An even younger Sofie Rhodes, this time with another young woman beaming at the camera, a Star of David pendant hanging from her necklace. They had suitcases at their feet. They looked like their lives were spread out before them, begging to be explored.
“These are just photos,” I said to Henry. Intensely personal photos. He’d been in their house—riffling through their things. My head spun.
“But don’t you see?” Henry whispered, balling his hands into fists and pressing them to his forehead. “It means something. I just can’t decipher it. They’re going to hurt you—people like that don’t change.”
“When have you had time for all of—” I waved around the mess in the room—the notes on the wall, the photos in my hand “—this? You’ve been working—” I broke off, feeling stupid. I spun toward the nearest notes and my heart sank. These were not Henry’s work time sheets. Some were marked with anSat the top, some were marked with aJ.He’d been following them for weeks. “Oh. Oh, Henry...”
“I knew you’d be upset, so I didn’t tell you I’d quit, but some things are more important than a job in a lumberyard, Lizzie,” Henry told me, stricken.
I should have seen this.I should have known Henry was in trouble—deluded or confused or just plain broken. My gaze went back to the bullets on the table and my heart sank all over again.
“When did you buy the gun?”
“I bought it just before Christmas when I was in a bad way. I was going to—” He broke off, squeezing his eyes shut. “I didn’t buy it for Rhodes.”
“Henry,” I choked out on a sob.No.“I want to hear about that. I want to talk to you about that and tell you how much I need youhere. But right now, I need to know about this morning. Where is the gun now?”
“I dropped it.” He squeezed his eyes closed, frustration on his face. “In the yard. You saw him the first time he came here, didn’t you? That was the only time he let you see him.”
