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“You’ve been putting it off,” he said. “You came all this way. You should read it.”
She should. Since liberating it, the paper had lived in Danny’s back pocket. Once in a while she thought about it, but she hadn’t brought herself to actually read it.
“What if it says something I don’t want to read?” she asked, taking the envelope from him. “What if he threatens her life or warns her something’s coming for her?”
H could’ve tried to warn her mother. Most of the time, Tess went on believing the car wreck was an accident. Any time her mental barriers fell, allowing the idea of sabotage or other deliberate action in, she quickly erected them again.
Accepting her mother’s death wasn’t easy. It wouldn’t be made easier to learn a trip to the Rotunda might have prevented it.
“You’ll never know unless you read it,” he said.
“She valued her letters. Valued every one of them.” The paper itself wasn’t heavy, yet its significance weighted her palm. “The first day I touch them, I lose them.”
“Chin up, skater girl,” he said, snagging her loose pinkie with his. “They’re only words.”
“Words that could change everything. Change everything I know. Everything I believe. Words have the power to alter every aspect of a person’s very existence.”
There was something sad about knowing H had left the letter for her mother and that she’d never read it. The poor guy may never know that she was gone.
“Not reading them would do that too,” he said. “You wanted to know. We came here because you needed this closure.”
Not like Danny to be so deep, but he was right. Tess nodded and reached for the trailer handle. She paused when he retreated.
“Where are you going?”
“We need beer… and rubbers,” he said, continuing backwards. “You need privacy.”
Appreciating what he was doing, she blew him a kiss and turned the handle to go inside. Living in a single room had its advantages. Tess never felt like they were living on top of each other, or even that Danny was in her way. Though that could be because they occupied the same intimate space so regularly.
Kicking off her shoes, she went to get a knife from the kitchen and slit open the top of the sealed, blank envelope. After putting the knife back, Tess withdrew to the bedroom. Sitting right in the middle of the bed with her legs crossed, she took a deep breath and slid the folded paper out of the envelope.
Unfolding the letter gave her a shock she hadn’t anticipated. Never in a million years… “Oh my God,” she whispered, reading the words written on the thick paper.
Before she was even through with the first page, a heavy tear fell from her lashes onto the sheet, blurring the words. Since losing her mother, Tess hadn’t let herself cry. She hadn’t wanted to open those floodgates.
But as she read the words, absorbed their meaning and tried to interpret them, her mind and heart were too overloaded to resist surrendering to emotion. The tears kept on coming and she kept on reading. Over and over again. The letter meant so much while being completely meaningless. How could it matter?
By the time she slammed the paper down on the bed and launched herself onto her feet, Tess had lost track of any meaning. In the words, in life, in everything she’d ever known. Striding down the trailer and back up, tension radiated from her. She was mad, so mad, and so lost.
Something had to change. She had to do something but didn’t have the first clue what that something was.
She was passing the fridge on the way to the bedroom when the trailer door opened. It could be a crazy masked gunman. If only. Her head was in exactly the right place to take on a maniac like that. Instead, when she spun around to stomp back the other way, Danny was the one pinned under her fury.
Instantly, his smile vanished.
Shoving the grocery bag onto the counter, he came up the trailer to meet her. “What?” he asked, holding her face in both hands. “What did it say? What did he write?”
“Nothing,” she said, her whole body shaking with adrenaline. “He didn’t write the letter… It was from my mother.”
“Your mother? I don’t understand.”
“It was her handwriting; I’d know it anywhere. She is C, she signed it C,” Tess said, searching him with wet eyes. “I think it was him… I think H killed her.”
SEVENTEEN
“WHOA, OKAY, SLOW DOWN,” Danny said, pulling her to the recliners to sit them both down. “H? You think he killed her?”
“Maybe not killed her,” Tess said, her determination heating. “But it’s his fault that she’s dead.”
