Chapter 2

For a moment when I woke, I had no idea where I was. No, that's not quite accurate—I had no idea when I was. I knew that I was in my bedroom in my grandmother's house, but the rose-colored walls meant that I must be ten years old and Gran Mae was alive and I would go downstairs for breakfast and Mom would make eggs and Gran Mae would look disapprovingly at me and ask if I wouldn't like some nice low-fat yogurt instead and I would shake my head and eat my egg. Brad would sit across from me, sixteen and already nearly six feet tall, shoveling in three eggs to my one, but Gran Mae never asked him if he wanted yogurt. Sometimes I wished I was a boy.

If I didn't answer her, she eventually stopped talking at me and started talking to Mom, saying that maybe she shouldn't feed me so much. That was easier. I could pretend they were talking about some other girl and it had nothing to do with me. Mom would say that the other girl was growing and needed protein, and then she'd put the pan in the sink and wipe her hands and say that we had to leave for school. Unless it was Saturday, and then Brad and I would watch cartoons and Mom would be at her other job, so we ate cereal. Mom hadn't come to wake me up, so maybe it was Saturday, and I could go watch The Smurfs and The Real Ghostbusters. I wanted to be Egon when I grew up. Egon was cool.

I stared at the rose-pink wall and part of me was ten years old and another part of me was thirty-two and had a doctorate and had written a thesis on the spread of seed weevils through North American sunflower crops. I had a sudden horrible fear that maybe the ten-year-old was the real one and I had just had a particularly vivid dream and now I would have to go and live my entire life all over again. I put my hand to my forehead and said, "Fuuuuck…" which ten-year-old me would not have said.

Gran Mae did not teleport to my location to say, Samantha Myrtle Montgomery, you know what happens to little girls who swear. (Yes, Gran Mae, I know. The underground children get them.) This was proof positive that she was dead.

I sat up, looked down, and saw that I had breasts bigger than my head, which ten-year-old me most definitely did not have. Right. Thirty-two. Did not have to rewrite my thesis. Thank you, Jesus.

I slid out of bed and staggered down the hall to the bathroom. The underground children. Heh. I hadn't thought of that in years. Gran Mae's personal answer to the boogeyman. The underground children got you if you swore, if you disrespected your elders, and possibly if you didn't clean your room, although demands that I clean my room had usually been met with the aforementioned disrespecting of elders, so I wasn't entirely clear on that one.

I pulled open the bathroom drawer, looking for aspirin, and caught a whiff of my grandmother's scent. Something powdery and floral; not roses, but something else. Freesia, maybe. Some of her powder must have spilled in the back of the drawer years ago. How strange that I'd lived in the house for years and it had been our house, not hers. And now, with one coat of paint and a remembered scent, it was like being back at her house all over again.

Getting maudlin,I thought. Must be low blood sugar. Dry-swallowed the aspirin, grimaced, reminded myself for the hundredth time to never ever do that again. Blech. I straightened up and saw a note on the mirror at eye level, in my mother's neat handwriting: REFILL TP BEFORE SAM GETS HERE.

I chuckled. My mother leaves notes to herself everywhere. She is meticulous and keeps a planner for work, but at home, the entire house becomes her planner. My brother and I grew up surrounded by her notes to herself: on the refrigerator, on the bathroom mirrors, on end tables and nightstands and tacked to the back of the front door so she'd remember before leaving the house. I checked the strategic toilet paper reserves and found that they were indeed low.

I looked past the note to my reflection in the mirror. I looked pretty rough by my personal standards, but pretty good for having driven across Texas, so I'd call that a win. I tucked a couple stray bits of hair behind my ears. They wouldn't stay. They never do. My hair is a comb-eating monster that is technically "curly," in the same way that a cassowary is technically a bird. It's factual, but leaves out a lot of the kicking-a-man's-bowels-out-through-his-spine bits. Not that my hair has ever done that. To my knowledge.

I galloped downstairs. My legs still remembered the rhythm of the stairs, tha-thump tha-thump tha-thump, which my grandmother had always said sounded like a herd of mustangs in the house. Brad had started it, but I picked it up from him out of a combination of sibling hero-worship and solidarity, and here I was, thirty-two years old, doing it again instinctively.

"I'm in here," Mom called from the living room. I swung by the fridge to grab a can of something cold and carbonated and admire the notes currently adorning the door. CHECK WATER FILTER FEB/AUGUST. GET MONEY FOR PHIL. DON'T BUY HUMMUS W/ RED LID—EVIL!

I knew that Phil was the guy Mom hired to cut the lawn, who I'd never met, and the water filter seemed self-explanatory. I was contemplating the potential sins of hummus as I stepped into the living room, then I stopped dead and stared.

There was an old painting over the fireplace, one that had hung there as long as my grandmother had been alive. It was oil paint, or at least trying to look like oil paint, and featured an old-timey bride and groom standing together under an arbor of pale pink roses, gazing into each other's eyes with expressions of wistful bliss or blissful wist or whatever the hell you call that particular sappy expression.

This would have been merely tacky if it had been an ordinary bride and groom, but the groom was wearing a military uniform in Confederate gray, which made it tacky and racist. My most vivid memory of the painting was the day that my mother and I moved into the house after Gran Mae died, when Mom took it down from the wall and replaced it with a large woodcut of a fish.

"Mom," I said, struggling with that same sense of double vision, as if I was seeing the bones of my grandmother's house under this one. "What's with the painting?"

"Huh?" She looked around, puzzled. I pointed to the Confederate wedding. "Oh." Her eyes slid away from mine. "Well. Your grandmother loved it, you know…"

"Yes, but you hate it. You called it Lost Cause bullshit. I thought you threw it away."

"I'm sure you must have misheard me," she murmured, looking into her wineglass. "I wouldn't have thrown that away. Not when Gran Mae loved it so much."

She looked so worried that I tried a different tactic. "What happened to the fish?"

Her gaze sharpened unexpectedly. "You remember the fish?"

"Of course. It was a great fish. And there was a hellgrammite in the stones, and nobody ever draws hellgrammites."

Mom's whole face lit up. I don't know how, but suddenly she looked a decade younger and much more like her old self. "I can't believe you remember that! My friend Theo made it in college, and I carried it around for years." She beamed at me. "It's still in the attic."

"We should put it back up."

"Would you like that?" A trace of the worry crossed her face again. "Well, I… well, let's see if I can find it again, maybe we can figure something out…"

"I'd love that," I said, deciding on positive reinforcement. Was I doing this right? I strongly believe that you have to confront your older relatives about racist behavior, but I admit, it seemed this was a much easier position to hold before I actually had to do it. Mom was deeply, profoundly liberal, and the Confederate wedding painting shocked the hell out of me. A couple years back, she'd driven the thirty minutes to Pittsboro to join the protests demanding they take down the Confederate veteran statue. So what the hell was this painting doing hanging on her wall?

"Pizza should be here soon," said Mom. She raised a wineglass in my general direction. "I'll be out tomorrow night. I have a client coming in on an early flight the next day, so I'm going to spend the night in Raleigh. I ordered enough pizza for leftovers, but you might still need to go to the store."

"No worries. I'll make a grocery run tomorrow so I'm not eating you out of house and home. Enjoy your escort mission."

Mom is quasi-retired, but she isn't good at it so she works as a media escort these days. Media escorts are basically people wranglers for minor celebrities, keynote speakers, lifestyle gurus, authors on book tours, that sort of thing. Anybody who has a publicist but not a personal jet. She meets these people at the airport or the hotel, has their itinerary all printed up, and drives them to where they need to be. She also handles emergency laundry, makes sure they've got bottles of water, mails packages, makes sure they eat, things like that. Then she drives them back to the airport and sees them off to the next stop. It always struck me as a weird job, but Mom is very good at mothering strangers and accommodating their various requests, and she can make small talk all day long, which is a skill I did not inherit.

"Anybody exciting?" I asked, meandering into the kitchen and locating the box of wine. "Martha Stewart? Salman Rushdie?" She won't gossip about her charges, but I do get tidbits occasionally. Apparently motivational speakers are the absolute worst. Her all-time favorite was a man who wrote a book on bondage for beginners, who she said was genuinely delightful and made his audience give her a round of applause for all her help.

"No, no. A celebrity chef. He's doing a cooking demo and a radio interview, and he specifically requested a case of Cheerwine."

"His funeral." (I know, I know, many North Carolinians will go to bat for Cheerwine. I am not one of them. The stuff tastes like carbonated maraschino cherries.) "Well, good luck. They can't all be Bondage Guy."

Mom giggled, sounding much happier than she had a few hours ago. "He really was just the sweetest. And he still sends me a Christmas card every year."

"Ask if he's single!"

"He's not even forty."

"So?" I squeezed out a generous portion of the finest Malbec cardboard can buy.

"Someday you'll get to an age where you die a little whenever someone doesn't get your movie references." Mom sighed. "The last time I went on a date, I said something about Silent Running and he thought I meant the one about the Jamaican bobsled team. I could actually feel the gray hairs sprouting."

"Heh." I dropped onto the couch, checked my phone, remembered that there's no signal worth a damn on Lammergeier Lane, and spent five minutes trying to make it talk to the house internet. (Which is also terrible out here, don't get me wrong. Nobody is running cable down rural roads unless they have a pressing reason.) My phone informed me that it was absolutely talking to the internet, it was happy to talk to the internet, it loved talking to the internet, then as soon as I tried to check my email, it told me it had never heard of the internet and wasn't entirely sure it existed. I dropped the phone on the coffee table and tried to remember how to make conversation like a normal person.

"So what was the deal with the vulture?" I asked.

"Oh! Gail, the woman who lives just around the bend at the end of the road? She does wildlife rehab, or she used to, I think. She says a whole flock lives in a tree on her property. A roost tree, she called it."

"That's cool. A lot of people would freak out having vultures living in their backyard." As a biologist, I disapprove of those people on principle. Scavengers are essential to a tidy planet. Do you really want all the deer that get hit by cars to lie around in the ditches for months on end? No, of course you don't.

"She's an interesting person."

Something clicked. "Wait—the woman at the end of the road? Who owns the big property there? Not the one Gran Mae used to call the old witch?"

Mom stared into her wine. "I'm sure she never said anything so unkind."

"Yes, she did! Don't you remember? She was always saying that her garden was a weed pit and…" I trailed off because the expression that had crossed Mom's face was actually scaring me. She had looked worried before, but for a moment, she looked genuinely frightened.

"I said," said Mom, in the tone that she used when I was a small child and was Not Getting The Hint, "I'm sure Gran Mae never said anything like that."

I swallowed. That tone of voice was the parental equivalent of a shotgun being cocked. Mom hadn't used it on me since before I was old enough to drive. "Uh," I said. "Maybe I'm misremembering." But I wasn't. I knew I wasn't.

She slugged back her wine like a frat boy chugging vodka. "I should check and see if the pizza guy is on the road."

"Maybe I'm misremembering," I repeated, trying to sound conciliatory. Jesus, this was strange, though. Mom hanging up Gran Mae's old painting, and now trying to pretend the "old witch" stuff hadn't happened? Gran Mae had hated that woman. I'm fairly certain she only called her an old witch because bitch was not a word that Gran Mae allowed to pass her lips, or anyone else's. (Brad had once engaged a family friend in conversation about his dog-breeding business, specifically to watch her flinch at the dinner table.)

Mom couldn't possibly have forgotten. It was one of Gran Mae's favorite topics of conversation. If you mentioned that Gran Mae's roses were looking nice, she'd tell you it was all down to bonemeal and careful tending, which is what it took to make a garden, not just letting it go wild like some people did. "Why, Father would never have stood for it for a minute, rest his soul!" she would say. And if you even so much as grunted in a conversational manner at that point or, God forbid, said, "Oh?" she'd be off and running about the woman at the end of the road who called her garden "cottage style" but it looked more like a trailer park what with all the junk in it and the weeds everywhere and at that point you might as well just grow geraniums in a toilet and embrace that you had no class at all.

Gran Mae felt very, very strongly that the world was divided into those with class and those without. I can't remember if she believed in the Rapture, but if she had, only the classy would be saved. I don't know what happened to the non-classy in her cosmology. Possibly the underground children got them, or possibly they were just doomed to live out their days in a giant Walmart of the Damned.

I stared at the Confederate wedding and thought dark thoughts. Gran Mae had been racist, in that Southern heavily-in-denial way, where you think watching Oprah counts as having a black friend. When I had been doing my history homework at the dinner table once, she'd muttered that Dr. King was "just a rabble-rouser," and Mom had given me a grim look over her shoulder and mouthed, That's not true.

Fortunately the pizza arrived before I could go too far down that unpleasant memory lane. Mom seemed relieved that I didn't press the issue of the old witch but devoted myself to appreciation of pineapple on pizza.

I had a slice halfway to my mouth when Mom said, "Oh! We should say grace, I think."

I paused. A piece of pineapple slid slowly from the tip of the pizza and landed on the cardboard. "Really?" I said.

We are not a family that says grace over food. Gran Mae always insisted on it, but Mom's Christianity has generally been limited to a fondness for Jesus Christ Superstar. I couldn't remember the last time I'd sat at a table where someone prayed over the food. No, wait, I could—it was when Brad's in-laws came to dinner one time in Tucson and they'd done it, while Brad and his wife and I sat around trying to pretend that we were absolutely devout people who prayed all the time, yes sir, no heathens here.

"I'd feel better," said Mom firmly.

Right. Okay. Brad had said there was something odd going on with Mom, and apparently he didn't know the half of it. I set the pizza slice down and folded my hands.

"Lord, bless us for this food we are about to receive…" Mom intoned.

As a child, when Gran Mae would say grace, Brad and I would stare at each other across the table. This is why one has siblings, after all. Without Brad to look at, I stared at my folded hands and wondered what on earth was going on.

Had Mom gotten religion suddenly? Was that why Brad thought she'd been acting oddly? It was possible. Still, Christianity doesn't make you repaint the house ecru, as far as I know.

"Amen," said Mom. We carried the boxes into the living room and sat on the couch, eating pizza.

"You told me what a hellgrammite was once, but I forgot," said Mom, as we munched straight from the box. "I know it was the larval form of… something." I'd just taken a bite of pizza, so she continued. "Hellgrammite. It sounds like something out of a horror movie."

I swallowed. "Looks like it too," I said. "Very chompy." I made clacking mandible motions at her. "Hellllllgrammiiiiite." Mom grinned and refilled my wine. "The adults are dobsonflies. They're pretty freaky too, if you're not a bug person." Normally I'd have pulled up pictures at this point, but I'd have had to get my laptop out to access the internet. It was probably just as well for Mom's digestion that my phone didn't like the Wi-Fi. Dobsonflies are glorious, but not exactly an entry-level species.

She shook her head, clearly bemused. "You got your father's hair and his sense of humor, and I like to think you got my brains—"

"And stunning good looks."

"—but I have no idea where the bug thing came from."

"Clearly a recessive gene. An extremely cool recessive gene." I considered this. "Of course, I also had to get my love of dirt from somewhere. I spend enough time in it. Did Dad…?"

"I assume he made mud pies as a baby, but no, not that I know of." She smiled fondly. "He used to say that he could kill a plastic houseplant."

Dad died when I was nine, which was why we eventually moved in with Gran Mae. You don't have to feel sorry for me, it's fine. I mean, obviously it sucked, but I lived through it and it's ancient history now. Mind you, I had a counselor at school who always wanted me to talk about my feelings, and my feelings even then were pretty much "yeah, it sucks." I'm not great at performative emotions.

"Well, maybe it was Gran Mae, then," I said. "All that gardening was bound to have involved dirt in some fashion."

Mom's smile slipped and she stared into her wine.

Dammit, I'd said something wrong again. Should I just not talk about Gran Mae? But she'd hung up that damn painting, which might as well have been a portrait of the old woman. And she'd defended her commentary on the vulture woman at the end of the road. That didn't sound like she was upset with Gran Mae. Unless she really truly had forgotten about the "old witch" thing. And she'd painted the house the same colors that Gran Mae had, and was saying grace just like she had…

Good lord, was Mom somehow in belated mourning? For a mother who had died nearly twenty years ago? But why? Granted, she was about the age that Gran Mae had been when she died, that might have shaken something loose, but still… (Now I sounded like the school counselor.)

The thing is, Mom survived the loss of her husband and raised two kids, lived through her childhood with Gran Mae, which could not have been terribly easy, had a career, took early retirement when the factory shut down, and then started a second career. Successfully, no less. Mom is tough. It's easy to think that sweet people are weak, but if you look at all the stuff Mom's lived through, she's nearly indestructible.

Mourning for Gran Mae? Now? Really?

Was this what Brad had meant when he said that she was acting odd?

I refilled my wine from the box and wondered what to do. Did I bring up Gran Mae more, try to see if Mom was having genuine lapses in memory or was just seeing everything through rose-tinted glasses? Did I not mention her at all? I didn't want to upset her. She is a genuinely kindhearted person and a champion worrier. If there was an Olympic sport for worrying, Mom would win the gold and then give it to the silver medalist because she was afraid that they might feel bad for losing.

Either way, I wasn't going to do it tonight. I was tired, and I was probably going to be here for weeks. I had plenty of time to get to the bottom of things, hopefully without upsetting Mom.

"So how about a nice British murder?" I said. Mom turned on the TV and we spent the rest of the evening saying, "Oooh! I bet he did it! Because he's holding a grudge about the car accident twenty years ago!" and, "She had to kill him to cover up the way she'd tampered with the wine bottles!" and thoroughly enjoying being proved wrong.