The Dead of Summer Read online

  “It took nearly a whole year, but he went on a trip cross country. He was gone for two weeks. I knew I had to act then. We left the day after he did…I tracked his route so I knew where to avoid. Then, I packed you up and in the middle of the night, we drove north. And then, we drove east. And south.

  “On the day he was scheduled to come home to Texas, we were in a cheap motel in Chicago. I couldn’t sleep that night, just imagining that he would find us, bust through the door, and drag us back to Texas kicking and screaming. And then, I would never be able to get away again. I walked on eggshells for weeks, driving in an erratic pattern, hoping that I was untraceable. I probably acted pretty stupidly, but somehow, he didn’t find us.

  “When I finally felt safe, we arrived in Novella, this town in the middle of nowhere. I was still looking over my shoulder, frightened every time I went out…”

  “Which is why you refused to leave the house,” I said, my mama’s phobia suddenly making a lot of sense. Everything was becoming clearer. Now the secrets were all out.

  Mama responded with a nod. “I had to change our names, too,” she practically whispered.

  Apparently, except for that secret.

  TWENTY-TWO

  My head whipped around, practically smacking her in the nose in the process. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, I didn’t completely change your name. I thought that would raise too many red flags if I did. It was a lengthy process and it scared me. So I dropped your first name on your birth certificate. And I went back to my own maiden name, hoping your daddy would only be looking for us by the names he knew.”

  “Kennedy isn’t my name?” I asked incredulously. I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. My whole life was a lie. I gripped my comforter in my hands, like holding it would ground me to the earth and I wouldn’t fall off. Anything was possible right then in my head.

  “I always wanted to name you Kennedy anyway, because of Jackie Kennedy, I thought she had such class, but I never even told your daddy that because he would have told me I was stupid. He wanted to name you after his mama. Donna.” She practically spat the name out like it was poison. I cringed. I wasn’t a fan of it, either.

  “So I just wrote in the Kennedy on your birth certificate for the middle name and never told him. When we left Texas, I started calling you Kennedy instead of Donna and you never protested. I reckon you were just too shell-shocked anyway to even question it. When you eventually did ask about your daddy, I blurted out that he had been killed in the war. I don’t even know why I said that. It never occurred to me that you could have checked up on it.”

  “Well, duh,” I blurted out. “Why would I have doubted you?”

  Suddenly, another thought occurred to me. “If you didn’t leave the house, where did you get the money to live?”

  Mama blushed a little. “I’ve been making a little money here and there,” she said, waving her hand in the air, as if the money just appeared out of nowhere.

  “Mama,” I held her gaze with my eyes as if our roles were reversed. She was the child and I was the concerned mama.

  Mama let out a deep sigh. “I’ve been writing.”

  I wrinkled up my nose. “Writing? Writing what?”

  “Articles,” Mama mumbled into her fingers as she chewed them nervously.

  “For?” I waved my hand in the air like a magician. I felt like I was playing twenty questions with a four-year-old. Mama glanced away.

  “Southern Mom.”

  Southern Mom? The magazine that littered the coffee table in our living room? The one I flipped through when I was bored and never saw hide nor hair of my mama’s name?

  “I’ve read Southern Mom cover to cover,” I said, “and your name is not in there.”

  Mama bit her lip and mumbled what sounded like, “Insanie.”

  “Huh?”

  Mama raised her chin and offered me a weak smile. “I’m Sadie.”

  “As in Sweet Sadie?”

  Mama nodded and gritted her teeth as if this was the most embarrassing concept on the planet. Sweet Sadie was a monthly column in Southern Mom. Sadie would tell amusing anecdotes about her kids and the crazy situations she would get in. Sadie was a lovable goofball who screwed up a lot and definitely could not be my mama.

  “Mama, you can’t be Sadie. Sadie has three kids and a husband and a dog named Rover,” I said with a raise of my eyebrow.

  Mama shrugged. “I made it up. The whole thing. Every story I’ve written in that column is made up. Well, pretty much. I did write about the time you shaved your arm hair.”

  “Dear Lord, Mama!” I yelped. “Are you kidding me?” I gazed at the hair on my arms which had grown back even thicker after Lindy had told me to shave it three years ago. “What if people at school saw that?”

  “Oh, Kennedy! Nobody knew it was you! You didn’t even know it was you!”

  “Still!” I was annoyed she had risk embarrassing me like that.

  “I did what I had to do to make money. I didn’t want to have to go out a get a job because then I thought there was a chance your daddy would somehow spot me, find me, track me. . .I don’t know. But he found me anyway. . .” Her voice trailed off again.

  “How did he find you?” I finally asked. It certainly wasn’t because she had left the house.

  A veil of sadness passed over my mama’s face. “Mama Grace,” she said in a small voice.

  “What?” She could have knocked me over with a feather. Mama Grace? My sweet old grandma turned us in? Okay, maybe sweet wasn’t the word for Mama Grace, but I highly doubted she would walk a man like my daddy right to her very own daughter and granddaughter. If my daddy was anything like Mama had been describing him. It just didn’t make any sense whatsoever.

  “Mama, that doesn’t make sense. Why would Mama Grace tell Daddy where we were?”

  “Because I never told her what he was doing. I never told her how he was hurting you or why I was leaving. In fact, I never even told her I was leaving,” Mama mumbled guiltily.

  “So you just up and moved us away without even saying goodbye? Maybe Mama Grace could have helped us! Instead, she never even knew where we were!” Now I understood why I had never gotten any birthday cards or money for Christmas or anything from Mama Grace. Or anyone for that matter. We had just disappeared off the face of the earth. It should have made me feel better; my grandma hadn’t forgotten me as I always thought she did. But somehow it made me feel worse.

  “I didn’t want your daddy to be able to sweet-talk her into telling him where we were. I was so careful about everything.” Her lip quivered. “Believe me, Kennedy. Leaving Mama Grace clueless was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”

  “I guess,” I shrugged. I should be thankful for what she did, but I was still annoyed. And rightfully so—Mama Grace would have never thought my mama was lying about the abuse. Maybe she could have come with us. Instead, I had been stuck alone with my nutjob of a mama for seven years without any other family.

  “I didn’t leave the house, I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I thought we’d be safe. But Sweet Sadie ended up being my downfall.”

  “How? I thought it was anonymous,” I said.

  “It was stupid really. There was some truth in my column. I wrote about a picnic that I went on when I was younger. My uncles were being silly and they were daring each other. They had to see who could eat the most pickled beets in a half hour. The winner got to ask Suzy Mathers on a date. Lenny won and he took Suzy to the county fair where he promptly puked all over her on the Tilt-a-Whirl. My uncle Bobby was right there waiting to take her home. They got married three months later and have four kids. Lenny has never forgiven Bobby.

  “Apparently, Mama Grace was reading the Sweet Sadie column and she got an inkling that it had to be me. She wrote to the magazine’s editors, but they wouldn’t give her my address, just an email address. She started sending me emails and…” Mama paused to wipe a tear away. “I couldn’t help
it. I hadn’t been in contact with anyone in my family for years. I answered her email. Before I knew it, one thing led to another and I told her everything. She felt horrible for not seeing it sooner, but she said your daddy was long gone. He had moved away shortly after we disappeared. She promised she wouldn’t tell anyone where we were, not even my brothers or sisters. Then asked if she could visit and in a moment of weakness, I said yes. She got really excited.”

  “Mama Grace is coming here?” I asked.

  Mama shook her head sadly. “She had a stroke a few weeks before she was supposed to come. She was okay physically, but her speech was severely affected. My sister found the plane ticket and asked Mama Grace what it was about, but she didn’t have the words to explain. All Macie could make out was the name Tracie. She assumed that the plane ticket was to wherever we were living, which was true. She got excited and called your daddy since he had been looking for us for years. He did a little research on Mama Grace’s computer and voila, he was able to find us.”

  I gasped. Now I understood how Mama’s paranoia had been justified. “How do you know this? About him going into Mama Grace’s computer and all?”

  “Mark—your daddy—told me when he showed up at the door that day.” Mama’s eyes got cloudy and she looked away from me to stare out the window. And then I remembered. Mama had effectively distracted me from the case at hand with all the revelations and nostalgia.

  “And then you killed him,” I said quietly.

  “I did what I had to do, Kennedy. When you’re a mama, you’ll understand,” Mama explained.

  “To protect me?” I asked, staring back down at my ragged fingernails.

  “Kennedy,” Mama reached over and stroked my hair. “Everything I’ve ever done has been for you.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  “How did it happened? When did it happen?” I asked as I curled into a ball on the bed, wrapping my body around my pillow. I was ready—I needed to know.

  Mama fixed her gaze on a spider climbing up my wall and disappearing under my poster of a kitty that said “Hang in There.”

  “It was last Monday. I tasted trouble in my mouth when I woke up. You know what trouble tastes like, Kennedy?”

  “Um, no.” Mama was headed off the rails when she started talking about tasting things that weren’t food.

  “Trouble is a very distinct taste. It’s a heady mixture of blood and spit in your mouth and the nauseating aroma of the honeysuckle blooming way too much in your backyard.” Mama stood and ran her finger along my dresser, collecting dust as she went. She sounded like a Jane Austen novel.

  I sighed audibly. I could see how easily Mama had become a writer. “Mama, you gotta get on with the story. Enough with the theatrics.”

  Mama ignored me as she continued to walk around my room, absently picking up object after object and laying it back down in the same place. “I heard the doorbell ring—you had gone out to Lindy’s already—and I went to the door knowing full well he was going to be behind it.”

  “Why did you answer then?” It made no sense to me. Mama didn’t answer the door even when the mailman had a package. Why would she answer it when she knew that danger lurked behind it?

  Mama shrugged. “I can’t explain it to you, baby girl. I felt compelled to open the door and there he was—with a big smile on his face and a bouquet of flowers. Daisies.”

  Daisies. There had been daisies in the vase last week. I thought Mrs. Harris had brought them. Now I knew. Why would she save flowers a man she hated gave her?

  “I wasn’t scared to see him. Maybe I should have been; my skin was erupting into goose pimples everywhere.” She shrugged. “Maybe it was because I was excited to see him after all this time. I always used to get them when I saw him, along with a little tingling—”

  “Okay, Mama, I don’t need to hear all that,” I interrupted her before she went too far off into a tangent again. “Just tell me what happened.” I could tell this flowery language was a diversion. She didn’t really want to talk about what happened that day.

  Mama ran her hands through her hair and sighed with exasperation. Imagine that. She was exasperated with me. “I am trying to tell you what happened Kennedy, but you keep on interrupting me.”

  “I just want to know actions, Mama. Not how he made you feel on a spring day in 1999,” I scoffed. “Just the facts. Like he came in, you hit him over the head and killed him. Then, you dragged his body down a flight of stairs and threw a tarp over his corpse.”

  Mama gasped as she leaped to her feet and clutched at her chest dramatically. “Oh my good gracious, Kennedy!” She sank back down onto the bed. “Is that what you think happened?”

  “I don’t know what happened, Mama! And I won’t know until you tell me!” I practically wanted to shake her right then. My entire body was trembling, as if six years of all my pent up frustration toward her was threatening to blow up at this very moment and explode from my body like lava.

  “Well I’m trying to,” Mama snapped at me. “I told you that your daddy was at the door looking all swell and dapper for a moment, I thought he had come back to me. Not to hurt me or anything, but to tell me he changed and that he wanted me back and that he would do anything…” Mama choked back a sob. “I thought he was going to beg for my forgiveness. And the way he was standing there, my favorite flowers in his hand, that stupid, stupid grin that always cast a spell on me…well, I was pretty sure I would have taken him back.”

  “Mama! What about the way he treated me? The way he treated you? Everything you told me?” I wanted to vomit in my trash can at the thought; I couldn’t hide my revulsion for the man that I never really knew, and the distaste for my mama’s words. I was really starting to think that I wasn’t equipped to handle Mama’s brand of crazy.

  “I’m not saying it would have been a wise choice, Kennedy. It’s just…well, one day maybe you’ll understand. Some boys just have that kind of power over you. No matter how much you tell yourself to not get caught in their spell, well, you find yourself enchanted all the same.”

  She offered me a weak smile and reached over to me to brush the hair off my now flushed face. I was thinking of Carson, of course. The way he made me feel like I had lost my mind, like nothing else in the world mattered when I was in his presence. That must be the way that my daddy had made Mama feel, even after all the crap she knew about him. So I nodded, encouraging her to go on.

  “He stood there, not even saying anything, but I just stepped aside and let him in anyway, just like I let him into my life in the first place. He swept into the house and thrust the bouquet of flowers into my hands forcefully. He clasped his hands around my wrists and I felt like I was in a trance of some sort. Then he leaned down and kissed my cheek.” Mama’s hand moved to her cheek and then she quickly pulled it away, as if the reminder of his lips on her cheek had burned her fingers.

  “He said, and I’ll never forget how chilling his voice was…he said, ‘It’s a delight to finally get in touch with you, my dear. Bet you didn’t think you’d ever have the pleasure of seeing me again, did you?’ And then he told me how he found me. I knew I was probably as good as dead right then.”

  “Why didn’t you try to run out of the house or call someone, Mama? Why did you give him the chance to hurt you?” None of her actions made sense. I was starting to think that no jury in the land would believe what she did was in self-defense. Insanity, yes, self-defense, no way.

  “I really don’t know, Kennedy. I guess I was tired of the lies. I wanted to end it.” I shuddered, only imagining what she meant by end it.

  Mama looked at me just then and I could see the bags under her eyes, the fine lines around her mouth, the way her once plump cheeks appeared as if they were now almost sliding off her face. Mama was a beautiful woman, she was that type of beauty that always would withstand the test of time. But she was getting older…and quickly; it was showing on her face. This ordeal had aged her considerably. Mama sighed and I could see the hopefulness she on
ce had rushing out of her body, like helium escaping a balloon. Suddenly my heart ached for Mama and the pain she must be in…all for me. I reached for her hand and she took it willingly.

  “He came in like a tornado…the way he’s always been. His head was whipping around as he inspected everything in his path, making comments under his breath, snide little remarks that were meant to hurt and sting and get me to lash out at him, but I clenched my teeth and refused to take the bait. He wandered into the living room and studied the pictures on the wall. He was running his fingers along the edge of the frames, slowly, and deliberately taunting me. I ignored him and stood there, kicking myself for letting him in the house to begin with. When we got to the kitchen, I offered him a drink.”

  “Sweet tea?” I interrupted knowingly.

  Mama shook her head. “Sweet tea was too good for that man. I wasn’t wasting my sweet tea on him,” Mama replied, with the most bitterness I had ever heard from her. I sucked in my breath and didn’t say anything, but I squeezed Mama’s hand tighter. My mama wouldn’t deny her dying enemy a drop of sweet tea if she could help it, that much I knew.

  “He asked for a cup of coffee, nice and black like he usually took it. There was a little bit left in the pot, so I poured the remains into my World’s Greatest Mom mug,” she said without a trace of irony. Yes, my mama wouldn’t see the irony in that.

  “He took a sip and practically spit it at me. ‘Still make a crap cup of coffee, I see’ is all he could say. And he smiled. I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from blurting out a sarcastic comment.”

  I highly doubted that. Mama couldn’t have come up with a sarcastic comment if it was written on a cue card in front of her. She was just not hardwired for sarcasm.

  “So instead, I just asked, what he was doing here. He just stared at me for a moment. His eyes looked so cruel.” Mama squeezed my hand tighter at that moment. “And then he finally said, ‘I’ve come to take back what’s rightfully mine. If you had just stayed, well, I wouldn’t have to do this, would I?’ ”