“It must have hurt my dad to hear that,” I said.
“Your dad was honest with her and told her that Barrett never reported her call or the numerous ones after that. She kept in touch with the sheriff through the years, though after a while with nothing being found, she stopped calling, and as she put it, finally moved on with her life. She has no idea what happened to her husband. After they divorced, he simply disappeared, and she didn’t care. He had sworn up and down to her that there was no reason for anyone he was dealing with to hurt Rita. He didn’t owe them money and had caused them no problems. She admitted she didn’t believe him and blamed him for their daughter’s death.”
“So, you learned the same as my dad did?”
“Ye of little faith,” Amy said.
I should have known better. Amy could get anyone to confide in her. Could be she had inherited a bit of her dad’s charming nature. The only difference? Amy was genuine, her dad wasn’t.
“Women talk more easily to other women, especially if there’s a shared experience. It could be an unwritten rule, female instinct, or an inbred understanding that women share. Anyway, she told me that now thinking back to that time she believes that somehow Rita had discovered that her dad was not only doing drugs but was selling them as well, since months before that father and daughter had grown distant. She tried even further to make sense of it, and I suppose assuage the guilt she felt, by suggesting that Rita confronted her dad and he threatened her, perhaps with harm to Travis. It was around that time she spotted a bruise on her daughter and her husband carried on about Travis hitting her and how he was going to see he’d never do it again. She recalls Rita warning him to leave Travis alone or else and she thought her daughter feared her dad getting hurt. She now believes it was a threat that Rita would reveal her dad’s involvement with drugs.
“That all happened about a month or two before the murder. Betty cried and told me how ashamed she was for being so blind to what had been going on in her own home. She didn’t understand how she had failed to see the signs, or she wondered if she had seen them and chose to ignore them, not wanting her comfortable lifestyle destroyed. Her husband was always an overachiever, always wanted the best of everything, always wanted the perfect house, the perfect family, and she fell right in line never seeing what it was doing to him and his family.”
“I can’t imagine living with that burden. How do you not see what’s going on with your husband in your own home?” I asked, trying to comprehend it.
“My mom saw it and chose to ignore it,” Amy said. “And she made excuses for his prolonged absences, saying he needed time alone. I didn’t realize until I was older that she was afraid of losing him and so she made an excuse for everything he did. In the end, she lost him anyway.”
I didn’t want to hurt her, but I had to be honest with her. “She never had him to begin with, Amy. Noah is a narcissist. He cares for no one but himself.”
“I know but there’s still that little girl in me that longs for her daddy who taught her to swim, ride a bike, and called me sweet stuff.”
I heard her sniffle.
“Too many lies in Rita’s home and mine as well. How do you find the truth when it’s cloaked in lies?”
Cloaked in lies.
Amy’s words echoed through my head as I entered the attic. This murder was cloaked in lies starting with Sheriff Barrett to his son, to Marsh, to Mr. and Mrs. Carson, and even to Rita herself.
If thirty-five years ago the truth had come out, there would have been a good chance of the murder being solved, and Travis found along with the unknown female. But no one spoke up. No one spoke the truth. Pete Carson had made a quick exit out of Willow Lake under the guise that he and his wife couldn’t live with the memories… another lie.
What had my aunt said about lies?
The first lie is a seed that grows all too quickly until it becomes massive with no way to control it, then it consumes you. Don’t ever plant such a seed, dear Pepper, or you will live to regret it.
My aunt had planted such a seed when she had fallen in love with Ian’s uncle Max, a married man. From her and Max’s love letters I can’t say my aunt regretted it, perhaps it was what the lie did to others that she regretted.
One look at the attic and I wondered if I had gone completely insane in deciding to have it renovated. There was a lifetime of my aunt’s things to go through. Then I smiled. It would be like having my aunt right there with me sharing her amazing life.