Always Watching

CHAPTER FORTY

After I talked to Levi, I still felt uneasy, like I was missing something. I didn’t know if Mary had any answers either, but I couldn’t leave Shawnigan without at least asking. Since she had been released, she was back at her farm. But the police were still keeping an eye on her—in case Daniel tried to contact her.

When I pulled in her driveway, she was running a hose to fill up a bathtub in the horses’ corral while they drank. The horses pulled their dripping muzzles out of the water to watch me, their tails flicking at the flies on their hind ends. The air was scented with hot fir trees and dried manure, dust from the gravel road as a truck roared by. In the distance, I could still hear the river, but softer and slower now. I studied the barn, expecting to be assaulted with painful memories, but it just looked like an old building. Harmless in the spring sun.

Mary watched me come closer, a hand stroking the blaze on one of the horses, who was drinking again, its back leg kicking up at the flies on its belly.

She said, “I’m sorry about your daughter.” She didn’t say it, but her eyes told me that she was also sorry about what had happened that day at her home.

I nodded. “I’m sorry about your son.” Despite my feelings toward Daniel and what she’d done, she was still a mother.

“I’ve already told the police everything I know.” She turned back to her task. One of the horses was getting greedy. It nipped at the one beside it, squealing its annoyance. “Cut it out, Midnight!” she said. The horses put their muzzles back in the tub, snorting and playing in the water.

“I’m more interested in what you haven’t told the police. Someone has been watching my house and it could be Joseph. If he is still out there, then your son is also in danger. It would be better if the police find him before Joseph does.”

She was silent, her back still to me.

“Mary, if you know anything, you have to tell me. Too many people have died already, now both our children are missing. This has to end.” I started to cry.

She turned around, squatted low, and sat on the railing, leaning forward slightly and resting her arms on dusty jeans. She was wearing gum boots, and hay was mixed in with her white hair.

She said, “I think about the fire every day, wondering if I’d gone to the cops when you first came here, would they still be alive.” Her face was pale and heavy with guilt. She seemed to have aged another ten years in days.

I wiped my tears away, took some breaths. “We can all play that game with ourselves, but we don’t know what else Aaron might’ve had planned. Did Daniel know Joseph was going to set the commune on fire?”

She shook her head. “He would’ve warned them.”

“And you have no idea where Daniel is now? Or Joseph? Did they have a safe house somewhere?”

She met my eyes. “I don’t know where any of them are. I’m sorry.”

I saw the truth in her face, the sadness, and felt drained by it.

“Levi didn’t know anything either.” I leaned against the railing, watched one of the horses. “I talked to him before I came here. He told me some stuff about my mother, things that happened at the commune.”

I felt Mary studying me. She said, “You look like her, but you’re a lot stronger. She talked about you all the time. She was here the night she died….”

I turned to face her, caught off guard. “I’ve never really thought about where she was going that night. Dad just told us she’d gone for a drive.”

“Kate and I stayed in touch. Not a lot, but sometimes when she was fighting with your dad, she’d come out here and we’d smoke a joint.”

I flashed to an image of the two women, sitting on the back porch, their shared memories of living in the commune surrounding them, mixing with the sweet marijuana smoke in the air, following them wherever they went.

“What was she doing here that night?”

“You’d visited, asking about the commune. It stirred some stuff up for her. She’d felt bad for a long time about what had happened to Finn.” She said the last part like she was testing the waters, wondering how much Levi had told me.

“You knew she was responsible?”

She nodded. “I was with her when Aaron told her what Levi had said. She was really upset—she’d been so stoned that she could barely remember walking off with Finn, but she knew she’d done it. She’d left him somewhere and planned on going back for him, but fell asleep in the field. She wanted to tell the police herself, but Aaron said social services would take you and your brother.”

My mind filled with a memory. Finn’s mother had sobbed and fallen on the ground, screaming that they were stealing her baby. Now I remembered my own mother crying in the background, Mary’s arm around her shoulders.

“Whatever happened to all the marijuana?”

She looked down, eyeing me from the side, still not trusting.

I said, “I’m not going to tell the police if you had anything to do with it.”

She studied my face for a couple of beats, then said, “There was a logging truck driver who used to come by—he liked the girls. We’d give him bales of pot, and he’d sell it for us, keeping a bit of the profit.”

Larry and his red truck. I remembered now, the sounds of air brakes the night Finn went missing. I said, “So he got rid of it before the police came?”

She nodded. “We took it up to the road, and he loaded it on his truck. After that, he wanted a bigger cut. That’s when Aaron decided to leave Shawnigan—he didn’t trust him. So I told him I’d stay behind to keep an eye on things.”

“My mother, she told me she’d wanted to leave after Finn died, but she never explained how my father knew to come get us.”

“She left a note for your father at the store. Told him that she wanted to come home, but she was scared of Aaron.”

“He wouldn’t let her leave?”

“She didn’t ask. When Finn died, we’d talked and she wanted out. She was going to tell Aaron, then I showed her this.” She held up her hand with the missing finger. “That’s when she got in touch with your dad.”

I remembered my father showing up, the rage on his face and the gun in his hand. There was something else I had to ask.

“Did she know that Aaron was molesting me?” My body tensed, braced for the blow.

Mary held my gaze. “Not at the time. But after you came up here and talked, she didn’t understand why you couldn’t remember so much. Later, she started thinking about it more, how Aaron would take you swimming alone, the way he’d touch you, kind of possessive, how you changed that summer….”

I was crying again, wanting to stop the words out of Mary’s mouth, but needing to hear them.

“She figured out that he’d probably done something to you. She was upset—and angry at herself for not protecting you. She was going to talk to you about what she suspected, see if it would help you remember.”

“So she was just speeding?”

“She’d been smoking pot all night, drinking some too, mixing it with those pills she was always taking. I told her she should stay that night, sleep it off and go in the morning. I was making up her bed when I heard her drive off.”

She looked down at her boots, dragged them through the dirt, clearing a spot, like she was trying to erase something. “I heard the next day that she’d had the accident. I couldn’t go to the police, because Aaron had Daniel.”

I nodded, looking at her house. For a moment I imagined I saw my mother on Mary’s porch, walking down the front steps, ready to protect her daughter. She turned and blew me a kiss. Then she was gone.