“I know my birthday,” Roma said.
“I know you do,” Pearl said. She sat back a bit and moved just a bit closer to Neil.
Roma studied the marriage license. Then she held it out to me. I did the math in my head. “Nine months and two days,” I said.
Pearl nodded. “There was no shotgun at our wedding, Roma. And you weren’t there either, my dear.”
I handed the document back to Roma. Her gaze went from it to her mother and back again. “I thought that…” She let the end of the sentence trail away.
Pearl reached across the space between them and patted her daughter’s knee. “I’m sorry, sweetie. If I’d realized, I would have shown you that years ago.”
“So why did you marry him if you didn’t have to?” Roma asked. She seemed more relaxed now.
Pearl leaned all the way back against the sofa cushions. “I was the good girl. Tom was the bad boy.” She and Neil exchanged warm smiles and their obvious connection seemed to somehow chase away a lot of the tension in the room.
“I got straight A’s and sang in the church choir,” Pearl said. “He was handsome, charming and just a little reckless. It was exciting at first.” Her smile faded. “Then it got old.”
Roma leaned forward, both elbows on her knees, chin propped on her laced fingers. “Why did you stay?”
“I didn’t,” Pearl said. “The night before Tom disappeared, I left him.”
20
“You left him? Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Roma asked. There was no anger in her voice, just curiosity.
Pearl folded her hands in her lap. “Because he was your father. I didn’t want you to ever believe his mistakes were somehow part of who you were.”
“But where did you—where did we go? I don’t remember being somewhere else and then coming back to Mayville.”
Something changed in Pearl’s expression. Her eyes were suddenly wary. “We didn’t really go…far,” she said.
I knew what she wasn’t saying. “The Ladies Knitting Circle,” I said.
Pearl turned her gaze to me and her cheeks were tinged with pink. “I’m not sure what you mean, Kathleen,” she said slowly. Roma was looking at me as well.
“I know that The Ladies Knitting Circle didn’t actually knit very much. I know that Anna Henderson and a few of her friends were helping women in”—I hesitated, looking for just the right word—“difficult circumstances.”
“You mean like some kind of underground railroad?” Roma said.
I nodded. “Yes.”
She looked at her mother for confirmation and after a moment’s hesitation Pearl nodded as well. “I was going to take you and disappear, with some help from Anna and the others.”
“Pearl, who told you about The Ladies Knitting Circle?” I asked.
She frowned. “You know, I don’t remember. I’m sorry, Kathleen. That’s a long time ago.”
“Why then?” Roma asked. “What happened? What changed for you?”
Pearl shrugged. “I don’t have an answer for that, either. So much happened in such a short amount of time, there are some blank spots in my memory. I can tell you that we were about to be kicked out of the little house we were renting. We were behind in the rent and Tom hadn’t kept up the place. He was in a dark, ugly mood that night. He decided he was going to drive over to Red Wing to buy beer. I knew he’d be gone for a couple of hours. I knew Anna would take us in. I grabbed some things and walked over there with you.”
She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “We hid out at Wisteria Hill for close to a week. I thought Tom would look for us—you for certain—but he’d disappeared. They found his car abandoned out by the highway and it looked like he’d decided to hitchhike.”
“You didn’t wonder why he didn’t come back?” Roma asked.
“No,” Pearl said with a shake of her head. “It sounds silly, doesn’t it? I didn’t want…I didn’t want to run away, change our names, and always be looking over my shoulder. With Tom gone, I felt I could stay. Every day that went by, life got better. Eventually I saved enough money to divorce him and start again.” She smiled once more at Neil.
“Someone found Tom’s car abandoned out on the highway?” I asked.
Pearl nodded. “Sam Ingstrom and another man on their way to a landscaping job found it early the next morning. You know where the road turns off to Wild Rose Bluff? It looked like Tom had run out of gas.”
All roads may have led back to Wisteria Hill, but Sam Ingstrom seemed to be doing the driving, so to speak.
Pearl’s expression turned thoughtful. “I’ve been thinking about those days since Tom’s body was found and I think now that he had to have died that night after I left. And before you ask, there’s no way Anna or any of those women had anything to do with it.”
I had to agree with her. I’d seen pictures of Anna Henderson and of Rebecca’s mother, Ellen. They’d both been tiny women. How could they have killed Tom out behind the house? Based on what I’d heard about Wisteria Hill in those days, there was always someone around and it wasn’t like he would have obligingly bent down so they could hit him over the head.
Even if he’d been killed elsewhere, there was no way Anna and Ellen could have carried Thomas Karlsson’s body across the field behind the carriage house, up onto the ridge, then dug a hole and buried it. Why would they? And even if they could have come up with a way to move the body of a man twice their size, someone would have seen something or heard something.
Pearl and Roma had been hiding at Wisteria Hill. Carson was coming and going. Everett was there. Rebecca was at the house a lot with her brothers. It wasn’t like the women could have killed Tom—for whatever reason—rolled him up in a rug and carried it on their shoulders across the yard without anyone noticing.
“Do you have any idea what might have happened?” I asked.
“I truly don’t know,” she said. “I mentioned that Tom worked for Idris Blackthorne for a while and I can tell you that those woods behind Wisteria Hill were a short cut to a hunting camp Idris had. And there was another camp nearby, more of a shack really, where some of the men in town used to go to play poker and get drunk. The fact that it was so close to Idris’s place made it very convenient. Tom was pretty much a regular at those games for a time, until he got caught cheating.”
“So…so he could have gone to see Idris Blackthorne or gone to the poker game, ended up in some kind of…altercation with someone and…” Roma didn’t finish the sentence.
“I think there’s a good chance the remains being found where they were has more to do with the people Tom was associating with and probably nothing to do with Wisteria Hill, other than it was a convenient spot for someone to dispose of a body,” Neil said.
Pearl nodded in agreement. “I’m sorry all of this happened, Roma. And I’m sorry that I lied to you about Tom. I didn’t think there was any harm in letting you think well of him. And for what it’s worth, I never saw him as happy as he was the day you were born. Not before. Not after. Not even when they won the state championship.”
Roma swallowed and nodded. “Thank you,” she said, her voice a little raspy with emotion.
Pearl smiled at her daughter. Then she looked at me. “How did you know about The Ladies Knitting Circle, Kathleen?” she asked.
“You know that we’re celebrating the centennial of the library this June?” I said. Neil had gotten up for the coffeepot and I held up my cup for a refill, smiling my thanks at him.
“Roma told me.”
“As part of the celebrations we’re planning some displays about the history of the town as it ties in to the history of the library. I found a reference to The Ladies Knitting Circle in an old journal and one of my staff—Mary Lowe—told me more about the women.”