“I don’t know, but if he did it and Jemima knows, she won’t tell. She loves him too much to ever turn him in.”
“It could work the other way, too,” Will said softly. “Jemima getting rid of the competition.”
Sucking in a breath, Anahera said, “I get the feeling she’s too passive… but Jemima also loves Vincent. Desperately.”
Her words hung in a disturbing pocket of silence.
Up ahead, the firefighters were smothering the last embers. It helped that the cabin had been wet from the rain, and though it had blazed hotly for a short period, there hadn’t been enough fuel for it to keep going once the place was drenched with firefighting foam. Now it sat there, a crumbled ruin frothing with white.
57
Anahera didn’t sleep that night and, come dawn, she left Will’s bed without waking him. It had taken painstaking care, but he needed his sleep after the long drive the previous day and the hours he’d spent at the site where the cabin had once stood—writing everything up and making calls that had woken more than one person.
One of those calls had led eventually to a fire investigator. The other man had agreed to come to Golden Cove today, see if he could confirm their suspicions of arson.
Anahera needed to say good-bye to her home first, needed to say good-bye to her mother.
Throat thick and body reclad in the same clothes she’d worn the day before, she pulled on her boots and walked out of the house. She made no attempt to take the police SUV—a walk would do her good. Fog rolled around her ankles and a cool morning wind whispered across her cheeks as she strode along the road heading to the beach.
The small stops she made left her hand wet and color in her grasp.
When she heard an engine behind her, she glanced back—and wished she hadn’t.
Jason Rawiri brought his truck to a stop next to her. “Heard about the cabin,” he said, his jaw grizzled gray but his hair black. “I’m driving out to see.”
The invitation was unspoken.
Anahera wanted nothing from him, but neither could she allow him to go there alone, not after what he’d done. Ignoring the passenger-side door, she hauled herself up onto the bed of the truck and sat with her back to her father as he drove on through the fog.
Thankfully, it was a relatively short drive.
Jumping off the instant they arrived, Anahera walked to the ruins of the small home where her mother had been happiest. She didn’t attempt to go into the debris—if there was anything for the arson investigator to find, she didn’t want to contaminate the evidence. Anahera didn’t need to enter to see that it was all gone.
Burned down right to the foundations.
Gone with it was the last place in this world where Anahera had felt the echo of her mother’s footsteps. There was no grave; Haeata had told Anahera she wanted to be cremated when she died, her ashes scattered into the ocean.
Anahera had followed her mother’s wishes.
She placed the wildflowers she’d picked beside one corner of the foundations. Then, filling her lungs, she sang a waiata—singing in the tongue of her people again for the first time since she’d found her mother’s body… and cracking the hard, scarred shell that encased her soul. And because she knew her mother was in a better place, she sang it not as a lament but as full of piercing hope even as her eyes burned and her chest ached.
Only after the last echoes had faded from the air did she turn and meet the eyes of the man who had abused her mother until even Haeata’s gentle and warm spirit couldn’t take it. “I want nothing to do with you,” she said calmly in MÄori. “I have no forgiveness in my heart for you and I never will. Forget you ever had a daughter.”
He was old now, her father. So many lines on his face, so many cracked veins from his drinking days, his bones pushing up against the sinewy brown of his skin. He’d been bigger before, with a thick neck and thicker arms, a physically strong man who’d yelled for his dinner, yelled for Anahera to shut up, yelled for his wife to bring him a beer or he’d give her a busted lip. Now he was smaller, grayer, more pathetic, but Anahera would never forget what he’d been.
“Your mother wouldn’t have wanted this,” he said.
“No, you don’t get to bring her up. You lost all rights to her the first time you beat her, the first time you kicked her, the first time you made her less than a person.” She saw him flinch at her unvarnished words, but she wasn’t about to hold back.
He’d never held back his fists or his kicks or his words. “You’re the reason she was living alone in this cabin so far from town. Even if you didn’t push her, you’re the reason she lay at the bottom of the ladder for three long days before I found her.”
Anahera had been studying then; she shouldn’t even have been back in Golden Cove that day, but, homesick, she’d decided to surprise her mother. As always when she first stepped through the door, a part of her had been braced to discover that her father had finally beaten her mother to death.
What she’d found had been far worse.
Haeata crumpled at the bottom of a fallen ladder, the glass front of a framed picture of her and Anahera smashed on the ground beside her, and her dried blood a dark stain against the wood.
All those dreams of happiness gone. Just like that.
Later, the authorities had told her that her mother’s heart had given out, but they hadn’t been able to meet her eyes when she asked if it had been before the fall or after. They’d wanted her to believe Haeata had died quickly and without suffering, but it was equally possible that she’d lain there too hurt to summon help but conscious and in pain.
Her mother’s heart hadn’t always been weak. It had been destroyed by stress, by fear, by the constant anguish of living with a man who treated her worse than he would a stray kurÄ«. “I’d like it if you got off my property.” She didn’t take her eyes off him. “And don’t come back or I’ll have you charged with trespassing.”
A twisting flash on her father’s face, his hand fisting by his side.
“Yes,” she said softly in English, “leopards never do change their spots.”
Angry red rising under the darkness of his skin, Jason jumped back behind the wheel of his truck and reversed out of the drive in a grinding screech of rubber against stone.
Only after she was certain he was gone did Anahera turn back to the ruins and allow her tears to fall. Those tears were for her mother, for all the dreams that Haeata hadn’t been able to realize, for all the pain she’d suffered in her forty-one years of life. And for all the dazzling hopes she’d had for her daughter.
“AuÄ?, aroha mai, mÄmÄ, aroha mai,” Anahera said, the words of apology a rasp and the smell of burned wood in her throat. “I’m so sorry I came so close to giving up on life. I promise you I won’t do it again. I’ll fly again, get out of this damn town.” Rubbing away her tears, she went to the cliff edge and watched wave after wave crash onto the sand in a natural symphony as haunting as those she’d heard in the great performance chambers of Europe.
At the sound of footsteps on gravel, she turned expecting Will. He might’ve been out cold when she left, but she knew he wasn’t a man who slept much. But it wasn’t Will walking toward her. “Vincent,” she said, trying not to think about those bonfires on the beach and how eagerly he’d crouched by the kindling. “What are you doing here?” At the same time, she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of a vehicle.