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  Her Mother’s Secrets

  May 16th, 2011

  Violet had been pretty once, in high school, before Skeeter Johnson shot her in the face and ruined her life. Now she’s come back to her hometown to bury her mother, and as she digs through her mother’s papers, she discovers secrets—secrets about her mother…and Skeeter Johnson.

  A mystery story by Edgar-nominee Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Available for 99 cents on Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords and in other e-bookstores.

  Her Mother’s Secrets

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Violet had one year of pretty in her life — 1976 — and at the time she had been too concerned about her weight to notice. She remembered, vividly, obsessing about her fat thighs. She was so obsessed, in fact, that she never wore shorts or miniskirts, even though she weighed 115 pounds, and had, at that point, thighs six inches in diameter.

  She discovered her year of pretty twenty-one years later when she was going through old photographs in her mother’s house, preparing it for sale. Her mother had died of pneumonia two days before, and left Violet the task of dealing with everything, the estate, the house, and the daily phone calls from her mother’s friends, asking for a memorial service. Her mother had expressly asked for a conventional funeral, and Violet had had to explain that wish again and again.

  The pictures were a revelation. She sat on the middle of her mother’s floor, boxes strewn around the orange shag carpet, her grandmother’s rocking chair a hand’s reach from her side. The television was off, unusual for that time of day in that house, and she had changed the radio station from her mother’s soft jazz station to the town’s only oldies station. The music somehow added to the memories, made them jar against the images in front of her.

  She remembered that time so well, feeling gangly and dumpy and flawed. She remembered using Noxzema at night and Stridex in the morning, remembered hours in front of the beveled mirror in the bathroom playing with her hair, remembered shunning makeup because she was too terrified she’d put it on wrong.

  The photographs said she hadn’t needed makeup. The girl that looked back at her was not the one she remembered. This girl was slender, with dark brown hair in a stylish cut, clear gray eyes and a skin that appeared flawless.

  Not like she remembered.

  None of it was as she remembered.

  None of it at all.

  ***

  The pretty had left her in 1977. Her boyfriend, Skeeter Jackson, had been holding a gun. It went off. The bullet hit Violet on the right side of her face, missing the brain — fortunately — but destroying the eye, and shattering the bones in her cheek. Reconstructive surgery had helped — she didn’t have to wear a patch or anything — but it didn’t hide the unnatural smoothness of her skin, or the immobility of the glass eye.

  She had grown used to her face, but most people were startled by it. By, her husband once said, its appearance of normality far away, and its strangeness up close.

  He had liked the strangeness, even at first. It was one of the things she loved about him. That, and his unusual calm. His great warmth. His strength and his protectiveness.

  Her mother used to say, It’s amazing what gifts tragedy brings us.

  “What a pile of crap,” Violet muttered, just as if her mother were still alive and listening. “What an absolute pile of crap.”

  ***

  She didn’t want to show Tom the pictures, but she did within minutes of his arrival at the house. He was a big man, broad-shouldered with an athlete’s build that belied his bookish nature. He carried brochures and papers from the auction houses and cleaning services in town, and set them, surreptitiously, on the kitchen table. Then he had tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, looked at her face for a moment, and pulled her close.

  She wasn’t going to show him, she resolved then. She didn’t want him to know what he had missed.

  But he wanted to know what disturbed her so, thinking it was her mother, assuming it was her mother, and Violet had said — no, yes, no. Ah hell, and pulled the pictures from the box.

  They were different sizes — the school photo was large, and the rest were snapshots from various cameras, made at a time when that determined the size of the print. He gave each photo due consideration, studying it as if it were a window into another world. Then, when he finished, he gave each photo to her.

  Her first prom, when she stood beside Skeeter, her robin’s egg blue dress revealing a trim delicate form that matched her delicate features. A laughing girl, sitting in a tree, the delicacy buried in bell bottom jeans, sweatshirt jacket, and wide crinkly smile. The same girl, same tree, different jeans, different mood, brow furrowed as she concentrated on a book.

  With each photo, her hand shook. Tom’s familiar face, with its sun-wrinkles and age-softened skin, seemed unfamiliar as he looked through the pile. Then he stopped at her graduation photo, taken only weeks before the shooting.

  Her auburn hair was in a pageboy without bangs, the ends turned under her ears. She wore no make up — she didn’t need any, not with her naturally rosy cheeks, her pink bow-shaped mouth, and her perfect skin. The green dress with its soft collar made her wide eyes look green as well.

  Beautiful. She had been beautiful, not pretty. Tom would finally get to see what he had lost.

  He wrapped an arm around her as if he had heard the thought. Then he set the photo down, and pulled her close, kissing the top of her head. He put a finger beneath her chin, lifted her face to his and pressed his lips against the smooth skin near the glass eye, the place where she had no feeling at all.

  Yet she felt that kiss through every inch of her body, all the way to her soul.

  ***

  The funeral home was two blocks from her mother’s house. Violet walked to the visitation, enjoying the warm summer twilight, the faint hint of roses in the air. Her mother had liked winter, and had said just before she died that she was sorry to miss another one. But Violet liked summer, with its heat and its flowers and its greenery. They had differed on so many things, but Violet knew that she would miss those differences for the rest of her life.

  She had spent most of the afternoon, finishing preparations for the visitation: viewing the body, making certain that her mother looked as normal as possible — whatever that meant — setting up the guest book, and making sure the flowers were arranged properly. The funeral home had been built in the 1960s and still reflected its origins. None of the decorations looked proper against the blue wall paper and the blond wood.

  Not that her mother would have cared. Her mother always understood the importance of making do. She had been a single mother long before such a thing was fashionable, working two jobs and trying to raise a daughter in a somewhat normal environment. Violet had hated it all, her mother’s haste, the slap-dash meals, the hard-fought home. More often than not, her mother dropped her at school while still wearing her robe and curlers. Violet always asked to be let out a block away so that no one saw.

  Someday you’re going to regret always thinking about how things look, Violet Marie, her mother had said a week before the shooting. Two months after, she had apologized, as if the injuries were her fault.

  Even though Violet was early, there were still half a dozen cars in the funeral home parking lot. Her mother had been well known and well liked in this small Wisconsin town near the Minnesota border. She had been the first woman CPA, the first woman to head an accounting firm, the first woman president of the Chamber of Commerce. The last illness had happened not because her mother was elderly, but because she hadn’t been paying attention to her
health. She had been too busy on a new project — helping the church buy a building big enough to house the town’s first homeless shelter.

  At least Tom was at the funeral home. He had brought his suit coat with him, so that he wouldn’t have to go to the house and change. He had thought people would arrive early, and they had.

  He had been a saint through all of this, something she wouldn’t have expected. He had once told her that he hated funerals, hated the ritualized grief. Then his father had died, and he had learned why the rituals existed. Tom thought of things she wouldn’t have considered, because he had experienced a parent’s death already.

  She let herself in the double doors, shocked at the darkness of the entry. The artificial lights were on, but they did not compare to the fading summer light outside. Piped-in piano music played hymns that Violet thought might be appropriate — her mother had only liked big bands, jazz, and swing tunes, and Violet couldn’t play those here, not in this somber place. The air smelled of lilies and death.

  The guest book stood beside the door to the small chapel, and inside, her mother’s open coffin was bathed in a yellow light. Three people stood before it, their gray heads bent over the open end as if they were praying. Tom sat in a pew, watching them.

  She glanced at the guest book, saw seven names besides hers and Tom’s, and didn’t recognize any of them. That didn’t surprise her; she had spent her youth here, but had been gone for twenty years — except for short visits in which she saw only her mother. Her mother had tried to keep her up on the news, but it soon became clear the Violet care about any of it. Gradually, her mother only told Violet about the changes, and Violet had listened with half an ear.

  She slipped into the pew beside Tom. He put his hand over hers, and together they watched as most of the town came to pay their respects to her mother. They heard stories about her mother’s good works, about her sharp words, and about the battles she had fought and won. Only one person was tactless enough to mention the unwanted pregnancy and the mystery of Violet’s father, and the kind way the event came up didn’t bother Violet at all.

  Toward the end of the visitation, she found herself in the foyer, surrounded by grieving people she only dimly remembered, and nodding to their words of comfort. She hadn’t cried yet. She doubted she would, not in this place and probably not in the church during the following day’s funeral. Instead, she planned to mourn her mother when she returned home, to the safety of her own house, and the comfort of the things she found most dear.

  Tom was talking to the funeral home director, double-checking the arrangements for the body to be transferred to the church the following morning. She could hear their voices faintly beneath the conversational hum around her.

  Then the door opened to reveal some final guests. Violet had been watching Tom; she hadn’t see who had arrived, but the growing silence caught her attention.

  The man standing on the threshold was tall and well-formed with a short professional cut to his dark hair. He wore an obviously expensive charcoal gray suit with hints of black, and his diamond cufflinks caught the artificial light. He looked as adult as a thirty-eight-year-old man could, and yet she didn’t see him that way. She saw him as he had been, a reed-thin boy, so thin that he had looked as if a single blow to the stomach would break him in half. His hair had been long and scraggly, the home cut overgrown already, a scuffed and cracked leather jacket around his shoulders, and his jeans dirt-caked and full of holes.

  Skeeter Jackson. The boy who shot her.

  ***

  The crowd parted to let him through. He ignored them, ignored the guest book, and instead walked down the aisle toward the coffin. No one followed.

  Violet didn’t move. It felt as if every muscle had frozen. She was facing the chapel so she could see him, and the people she had been talking to had turned slightly so that they could see him as well. Tom was across the room, frowning, looking worried. He would be at her side in a minute. He would be at her side and she would be safe.

  Skeeter — surely no one called him that any more; they probably used his real name, such a tame name: Stephen — stopped in front of the coffin and bowed his head. He stood there for a long time, undisturbed, the posture clearly that of a man who mourned. Skeeter had never been one who could hide his emotions. She remembered him, fiery and quick-tempered, just as quick to smile.

  She remembered the gun in his left hand.

  He took something from his suit coat, and her muscles locked tighter. But all that emerged was a flower wrapped in cellophane. She squinted. It was a lilac branch. Lilacs were her mother’s favorite flower. Where had he gotten that? There were no lilacs in Wisconsin in August. It must have cost him a small fortune.

  He removed the cellophane, stuffed it in the right front pants pocket on his perfect suit, and then carefully, gently, set the branch in her mother’s coffin.

  No one spoke, but someone gasped. Tom was frowning at her. She had gasped. Tom excused himself from the funeral director and made his way to her side.

  Skeeter’s hand lingered in the coffin for a moment, almost as if he had caressed her mother’s still face, and then he turned. His dark eyes met Violet’s and held them. Tom came up behind her. She could feel his warmth through the thin material of her dress. He put a hand on her shoulder, claiming her.

  Skeeter didn’t seem to notice. He walked up the aisle, his gaze remaining on her. People parted so that they wouldn’t have to get near him, or perhaps so that they could better see the coming interaction. Her throat locked, and the tears that had threatened since her mother’s death suddenly seemed quite close.

  It seemed to take him forever to come up that aisle. Finally he stepped into the foyer and stopped in front of her. His clothes were different, but his posture was the same: feet spread slightly in fighter stance, arms down, palms open, as if he were ready for anything that came at him. He smelled faintly of lilacs, and she realized that the branch he had placed her mother’s coffin hadn’t been hothouse grown. It had been fresh.

  “Violet,” he said, and his deep, rich warm voice — a musician’s voice with all the timbre and lyricism that implied — made her shiver. Tom’s grip tightened, and she knew what his face looked like without even seeing it: guarded, protective, warning.

  Skeeter paused just a half moment — or had it merely seemed like that to her? Then he said, “I’m sorry.”

  She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She wasn’t even sure what she would say, what she wanted to say. The moment stretched into an eternity, her gaze on Skeeter’s just like it would have been so long ago.

  “Thank you,” Tom said finally.

  Skeeter looked up at him as if seeing him for the very first time. Then he slipped around the people who had gathered, and went out the main doors.

  “Who was that?” Tom asked softly in Violet’s ear. But she couldn’t answer him, not here.

  The funeral home director turned to her, the fake compassion on his angular face unable to mask the interest in his eyes. “Would you like me to removed the flower, Mrs. Davies?” he asked.

  The room remained silent. Everyone was still watching her, waiting, hoping to see — what? A breakdown?

  “Mrs. Davies?” he asked again, as if she couldn’t hear him even though he was only a few feet away. “Would you like —?”

  “No,” she said. Then she too slipped through the crowd and headed into the hot August night.

  ***

  He was standing beside a sleek black Jaguar — not new, but an older model, one of the classics. His head was bowed and the yellow beams from the halogen streetlight above him painted streaks of gold in his shiny hair. He was holding a cigarette, rolling it over and over in his fingers like a magician would, a gesture she had seen countless times in other men’s hands, a gesture that always made her think of him.

  “I haven’t held one of these in seventeen years,” he said. “What is it about you, Violet, that makes me want a smoke?”

  He hadn�
��t looked up, yet he had known she was the one standing before him, the uncanny connection between them unbroken by time. The cigarette flowed from index finger to middle finger to ring finger and back again.

  “I stayed in touch with your mother,” he said. He raised his head. In the strange light, he looked even more like a boy. “There’s a few things you should know. She —”

  “No,” Violet said. “I didn’t come out here to talk to you.”

  He looked surprised by that, by her vehemence, by the bitterness that filled every word.

  “Then why did you come?” he asked at last.

  “To get away from them.” She glanced back at the funeral home. It seemed as if she had been running from other people’s gazes ever since she was seventeen years old.

  “And your husband?”

  “What about him?”

  “Were you getting away from him too?”

  How could she explain life with Tom, the safety and security he gave her, the feeling of being completely and utterly loved? How could she explain the difference between that and the heady excitement, the razor’s edge of danger that she had once felt with Skeeter?

  She had been very young. Foolish, even.

  She took the cigarette from his hand, brushing his warm skin. He glanced up at her, obviously surprised at even this casual touch. She dropped the cigarette and then ground it beneath the thin sole of her shoe.

  “Don’t ruin your life for me, Stephen,” she said.

  He stared at her for a moment, then smiled, that crooked sideways smile that even now made her heart lurch. “Don’t worry, Violet Marie,” he said. “Once was bad enough.”

  ***

  The house was still sticky with the afternoon heat. Violet opened the windows and set a fan before the patio doors, hoping to bring some cooler night air inside. Tom remained at the funeral home, although she expected him at any moment. She would apologize when he came, and offer him some sort of explanation, although what kind she wasn’t yet sure.

  She went into the guest room and removed her dress, hanging it on a padded hanger that dated from the forties. Her hands were shaking. She had spoken to Skeeter Jackson. Finally, after all these years, she had found enough courage in herself to speak to him, to exchange words, to touch him. She felt sixteen again, and giddy with fear and excitement. How did he inspire that in her even now? She taught high school English to students she called “kids,” who were so young that she considered them unworldly and naive. They called her “Mrs. Davies,” and considered her so old she once heard an eleventh grader ask another when she had died.