And I lied, too. I told the worst lie of all.
Rebecca, what did you do?
I lied to Darrell when he asked me that.
I lied again to Norm when he asked me the same question later that day. Rebecca, what did you do?
I lied to the judge when I pled guilty and accepted my punishment.
If I hadn’t lied, they never would have stopped looking for you. Rumors would have spread across the state. Questions would have been asked. Sooner or later, they would have found Tom, and they would have found you.
You wouldn’t have the wonderful life he gave you, Shelby.
So I had to lie.
Rebecca, what did you do?
I lied. No matter what it did to me to say those words, I lied.
I told them that I’d buried my little girl in the woods and that they would never, ever find her.
Chapter Forty-One
And now you know the truth, Shelby. That’s how your story began. The rest of it, everything that followed, belonged to you and Tom, not to me. Life passes so quickly, doesn’t it? Yours did. Mine did, too.
I spent twenty years in prison for the murders of my ex-husband and my baby daughter. Don’t feel bad for me about that. I did terrible things, and regardless of what had been done to me, I had no illusions that I should have escaped punishment. I also won’t give you any illusions that it was anything but hard. For months, I did nothing but cry every day, drowning myself in self-pity. For months after that, I became angry and combative with the guards and the other prisoners, and none of that went well for me. And then more months — years — passed in a dreary endlessness of boredom and routines, every day exactly like every other to the point of numbing my brain into a kind of dead despair. The only things that would break up the routine were not the things you wanted. Fights. Bullies. Threats. Twice, there were riots. When that happens, you find yourself craving boredom again.
I spent most of my time alone, but people came to see me from Black Wolf County. They had to drive a couple of hours to get to the state facility where I was housed, but many of them made the trip. Sandra saw me almost every month in the early years, until she moved to the Florida Keys to live on a yacht. After the revelations about Brink, Kip, and Racer came out, the mine settled the lawsuit and paid her and the other women several million dollars. That’s right. Millions. Sandra stuck it out in the cold for a while, but then she decided that she’d had enough of winters. I still get postcards from her. It looks nice down there.
Ben Malloy visited whenever he was home to see his mother. We talked a lot about the Ursulina. I never admitted to him what had happened when I was ten years old, but he remained convinced that I was one of the chosen few who’d seen the beast. I also think — I don’t know, it was just a glint in his eyes — but I think he was the only person who genuinely suspected that I was the Ursulina. That I’d been the one to commit the murders. Not as a woman, mind you, but as the monster I became. He never said it out loud, but I think he would have loved to do a documentary about me.
Norm was my lawyer, so he came to see me, too. Not that there was really much law to be handled after I pled guilty. He reminded me regularly that we had attorney-client privilege between us and that I could tell him anything without fear that he would pass the information along. I knew what he was driving at. You see, Norm never believed that I had harmed you, Shelby. Not for one little minute. He was sure I’d figured out a way to set you free; he just didn’t know how or who’d taken you in. He wanted to help, but I wasn’t going to take that risk. After a while, he realized that I was determined to leave things the way they were.
Will accompanied Norm to the jail a few times, but just as I’d expected, Will left Black Wolf County after college and moved to New York. He only made occasional visits home after that. He became a lawyer like his father and signed on as counsel for a human rights organization. I was proud of him, and I’ve written to tell him that more than once.
There was only one person who didn’t visit me, one man from my hometown that I really missed. Darrell never came. Not once. His daughters all did, and they apologized on his behalf, but I just don’t think he was able to face me. I told you, Darrell saw life and people as black and white, evil and good. Somehow this girl who’d been like a daughter to him had proved to be both, and he simply couldn’t deal with it.
Two years after I went inside, Darrell’s wife passed away of cancer. I wrote him a long note of condolence, but he never replied.
And so it went for me.
Twenty years is a long time. You don’t dare think about the end, because thinking about it only makes it seem farther away. Instead, you live each day, expecting nothing. Eventually, you give up obsessing about what you can’t have and resign yourself to the few things you can have. I decided that I still had a life, even behind bars. I read hundreds of books. I taught myself Spanish. I got a four-year degree in English Literature and then a master’s degree. And I wrote you letters, Shelby. Letter after letter, pouring out my thoughts, hopes, and dreams for you. I never mailed them, of course, but I wrote several times a week throughout those twenty years. If you’d like to see them, I still have them.
Tom wrote to me, too. He had to use a kind of code, of course, because there is no privacy for prisoners. He never mentioned your name; he simply told me about his daughter. It was like keeping you in my life. I was so grateful to him for that. He shared all your landmarks, all your special occasions. Every now and then, he dared to send a photo, too, and you grew up just the way I thought you would.
You looked just like me.
At the age of forty-seven, I rejoined the world and had to figure out how to live in it again.
The first thing I did was take a bus to Mittel County. You were twenty years old then, already working with Tom in the sheriff’s office. I saw Tom in secret on that trip, and he pleaded with me, begged me, to introduce myself to you, but I didn’t think it was safe. There were too many ways for my presence to open up Pandora’s box, even after twenty years, and I wasn’t going to risk upending the life you had. Or his.
But I can remember sitting in a booth at a restaurant called the Nowhere Café, across the street from City Hall. You were in another booth with Tom, whose hair had gone prematurely silver, making him look even more handsome and distinguished, if that was possible. Yes, seeing him made me fall in love with him all over again, and I flatter myself that he still had feelings for me, too. He’d never married. His whole life, he told me, was you — and obviously, the feeling was mutual. I could see that in how the two of you looked at each other. You idolized him, Shelby. You would have done anything for him. That was as it should be.
Being free again, I had decisions to make. Tom said I should move to Mittel County and adopt a false name if necessary. He even hinted at the idea of our being together. I thought about it. Oh, yes, I thought about it. But there are some realities in life. I wouldn’t have been able to be so close to both of you day after day and still keep my secret. Sooner or later, it would have come out. I told myself that I was protecting the two of you, but I guess the truth is, I was also protecting myself.