35
A knock at my door interrupted my thoughts.
I called out to whoever it was, “I’m not here. Go away, please.”
But there was another, more insistent knock. “Tandy, may I come in?” Samantha asked.
I didn’t want to see Samantha, or anyone else, but the knob turned and she came in anyway. She sat next to me on my bed.
“I miss them, too, Tandy. I’m sure your mother always wanted the best for you. But you know, she was complicated. A woman of many secrets.”
“What do you mean?” I searched Samantha’s face.
She seemed more shocked by what she’d said than I was. Whatever she had meant, she now choked it back.
“What secrets?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” Samantha said. “Her past. Her mother and father… weren’t good to her. She never told you kids much about all that.”
“You can tell me now, Samantha,” I said. “She’s dead.” I gulped. It was harder to say that than I’d expected.
Samantha just shook her head. It was as if she still didn’t believe it yet, still felt she couldn’t ever tell Maud’s business to anyone. “We have to accept them as they were, with all their faults.” And then she was sniffling, too.
Samantha was the last person to see my parents alive, but I hadn’t thought for a moment that she could have killed them. She had no motive to kill Malcolm and Maud, because she had absolutely nothing to gain. She no longer had a job. And soon, she wouldn’t have a place to live, either.
I looked into her pink-rimmed eyes.
“Do you know who killed them?”
She shook her head.
I said, “I do accept them, Samantha, whoever they really were. I’m going to give the eulogy at their funeral. I wonder what I’m going to say.”