They all had their problems. Molly couldn’t stay in town longer than a week for fear she’d never be able to leave. She said coming here was fun for the first few days, that she liked seeing her family. But any longer than that and Stillwater began to feel like quicksand, sucking at her ankles. The fact that Madeline had never escaped their hometown, never gone on to become the Washington Post reporter she’d once hoped to be, no doubt made Molly’s phobia worse.
“I’m not getting anything that’s very heavy,” she said, standing in front of the basement door. “Why don’t you wait in the living room?”
“Is it only one box?”
“No…” There were several and she couldn’t carry them all at one time. It made more sense to let him help her. But she didn’t want to see her problems through his eyes. Especially now…
She’d clean out her storage areas when she was back on stable ground. Maybe once she knew what had happened to her father, she could stop looking back. Then she’d be able to let go of everything she felt so compelled to save. She hoped. One problem at a time, right?
“Is there any need to bring them all up?” she asked.
“There’re two of us. Why not bring up a couple, at least?”
Arguing would draw more attention to something that didn’t really matter, she told herself. Why obsess over what Hunter might think? He was here for only one reason—to solve the mystery behind her father’s disappearance. Afterward, he’d go back to California and she’d never see him again.
“Fine.” Bracing herself for what he might say, she opened the door.
Chapter Nine
A pale light slanted into the basement, reaching only halfway down the window and not all the way to the middle of the room. Madeline pulled the chain on the bulb overhead to banish the shadows, then stiffened as Hunter whistled.
“What is all this stuff?” he asked.
“Just…storage.” Acutely self-conscious, she began stepping over the boxes and baskets piled on the steps.
“What are you storing?” She could hear the creak of the stairs behind her. “Food and clothing for the entire town for a year?”
“There’re some canned goods here.” There were a lot of other things, too—things no one else would bother to store.
Hunter lagged behind as she wound through the walkways, which became progressively narrower. She knew he was inspecting the place, marveling.
Finally, she reached the area under the stairs where she kept her personal mementos, as well as her father’s belongings. This seemed the safest place because it was away from the windows and the moisture that occasionally seeped in, away from the paths where she’d had to shove this or move that.
She motioned for Hunter to take the top box, and grabbed the one underneath. Carrying the boxes made getting out of the crowded basement more difficult than getting in, but Hunter led the way, using his knee to widen the paths. When they emerged into the living room, Madeline shut the door with a resounding bang.
“What’s the point of all that?” Hunter asked, watching as she set her box on the floor by the sofa.
She pretended not to understand. “What are you talking about?”
“You have boxes and boxes and boxes of…what?”
“I told you, storage.”
“What kind of storage?”
“Does it matter?”
“I’m not sure.”
She could feel his gaze resting on her but refused to meet it. Shrugging, she said, “It’s nothing.”
He didn’t press her beyond that, but only because she’d already pulled out a scrapbook.
“What do you want to see?” she asked, sitting crosslegged on the floor and staring at a photograph of herself as an infant.
He dropped down beside her. “That’s your real mother holding you?”
She nodded, noting her mother’s proud smile. Her father stood behind them, talking on the phone.
“She was pretty,” he said.
Madeline had never thought she resembled her mother. And if she did, few people mentioned it. But she remembered her father gazing distantly at her on several occasions. When she questioned him, he’d shake his head and say, “You’re the very image of her,” even though she looked much more like him.
“She had…problems,” Madeline said. She’d intended to say it lightly, carelessly, but there was no concealing the bitterness in her voice.
He took the scrapbook and began turning the pages. “What was she like?”
“I thought she was perfect,” she told him. “She lit up whenever she saw me. She loved me. She was everything to me. Maybe that’s why I feel so betrayed.”
He surprised her by briefly touching her shoulder. Hunter seemed remote, indifferent, but she wondered if there wasn’t a tender streak beneath that “I don’t give a shit” attitude. “It’s only natural to feel that way.”
“I didn’t know it when I was little, or understand what it meant, but she suffered from depression,” Madeline said.
He examined various pages, pausing now and then to study one a bit more closely. “How did her depression manifest itself? Did she weep? Sleep? What?”
“She wept easily, but usually tried to hide it. Mostly she became quiet, subdued. And she wrote in her journal. She filled one spiral notebook after another, then tore out most of the pages and burned them up. I remember standing next to her, watching them blacken and curl.”
“Did your father know she destroyed what she wrote?”
“Probably. But she always did it while he was gone. She knew it’d make him angry.”
“Why would he care?”
“He was frustrated that she couldn’t be satisfied with her life.”
“He felt she should be?”
“He tried to give her everything she needed.”
“Was there anything specific that was causing her unhappiness?”
“No. Depression runs in her family. She was just too fragile, too…weak, I guess.” It hurt Madeline to say it. She didn’t want to believe that about the mother she remembered so clearly, the mother who’d loved her so much.
“How did your father react when she made the decision to end her life?”
“He was disgusted.”
Hunter looked up at her, clearly shocked. “Somehow that wasn’t what I was expecting you to say.”
“You have to understand, he’d been dealing with my mother’s sickness for years and had run out of patience with it. He was disgusted with her even before she took her life.”