Caleb’s eyes drifted to me. “Sam, get the kid so I can place Mrs. Stone under arrest.”
Sam holstered his gun, reluctantly moving toward us. Annie’s fingernails scratched around my neck as he reached to pull her from my arms. She screamed.
“June Stone, I am placing you under arrest for the murder of Nathaniel Rutherford,” Caleb began.
Sam tried to take hold of Annie again, and she wrapped her legs around me, hands tangling in my hair.
Eamon’s fist flew through the air, catching Sam in the face with so much force that he went to his knees, gun hitting the ground. He wrenched Sam up by the collar, throwing him back.
I ducked, tightening my arms around Annie, one hand holding the back of her head as she cried into me. The distinct click of metal was what made them stop swinging. From where I was crouched, I looked up over Annie’s hair to see Caleb with his gun drawn. Now it was pointed at me.
Eamon still had Sam by the shirt, and I could see him thinking it—wondering if he could get to Caleb before he pulled that trigger.
Margaret’s feet were moving slowly in my direction, and I peeled Annie off of me, handing her over before I stood.
“Mama!” She was looking at me now with wide, terrified eyes.
“It’s okay, baby.” I smiled through tears as Margaret carried her, screaming, into the house.
“Go inside, Esther.” My voice wavered.
She didn’t move, looking from me to Eamon.
Eamon had his hands lifted in the air now, Sam standing between him and Caleb. There were a few seconds where I didn’t know what he was going to do. Charge him? Kill him? Get the two of us in the truck and run?
A sharp, familiar tingle raced up my spine, spreading until an unmistakable feeling settled inside of me. The sensation made me still, and a cold wind bled into the hot air, twisting around the place where I stood.
Caleb’s voice drew on, indecipherable as the world stopped turning. And it did. Time stopped, and I could feel it—that same pull of gravity. The bloom of brightness behind my vision. That floating feeling that filled my body. Slowly, I turned my head toward the fields, knowing exactly what I would see there.
The red door.
It stood among the dahlias, their heavy blooms rocking back and forth. The frame of the door looked like it had just sprung from the earth, the bronze handle glinting beneath a tangle of vines bursting through the door’s cracks.
The flash of sunlight on the cuffs in Caleb’s hand made me blink again, but I could only faintly hear him talking. It was like the sound of running water now, and the only thing that pierced that resonance in my head was Eamon’s voice saying my name.
“June?”
I blinked, eyes heavy. He looked at me over Sam’s shoulder, his brow furrowed as he studied me.
He followed my gaze in the direction of the fields, but he couldn’t see it. None of them could. No one, except Esther.
She stared at me, one hand balled in her skirt, and once Eamon saw her, he put it together. He glanced again to the field. It was empty to him, but he knew.
“Is it there?” he asked, voice tight.
Caleb looked between us, suspicion gathering behind his eyes. “Is what there?”
I nodded, throat aching. I couldn’t speak.
Eamon swallowed. “Go.”
I stared at him as two tears fell in tandem down my cheeks. He was telling me to leave. To save myself. But if I did, I’d never be able to come back.
“Go,” he said again.
In a fraction of a second, two paths unfolded before me. The one I’d seen in those memories of Mason, something I’d always secretly wanted. And then there was this one, with Eamon. A simple existence in the little house on Hayward Gap Road in the time I actually belonged.
It was such an easy thing—that choice. I’d already made it.
I smiled, meeting his eyes for another second, before I turned, walking straight toward Caleb. I could hear Margaret crying inside the house.
“June.” Eamon’s voice rose, his breaths coming quicker now. “June, don’t.”
But I was already holding my hands out in front of me. I locked eyes with Eamon as Caleb fit the handcuffs around my wrists.
“I love you.” My mouth moved around the words, but I couldn’t hear them.
“June!”
Caleb pulled me toward the car, and I closed my eyes, trying to breathe through the cry that was climbing up my throat. He put me in the back seat as Esther stood on the steps, staring helplessly.
The door slammed closed, and then the engine running.
I could feel Eamon being torn from me as the car pulled onto the road. He was the knotted rope that had pulled me from one time to the next.
I didn’t look back out that window as we reached the hill. I didn’t want to see him or the house or the farm grow small. There were none of those things where I was going.
Instead, I let my eyes fall on the field, where the flowers grew, a calm flooding through me.
The red door was gone.
Thirty-One
“You lied, June. And now you’re goin’ to pay for it.”
The tone of Caleb’s voice was flat as we turned right onto the river road, away from town. When Sam’s car went the opposite direction, my stomach turned.
Caleb’s hands gripped the steering wheel, his frame swaying left to right as the car rocked over the uneven road. I could feel him looking at me in the rearview mirror now. Those were the same eyes that had bored into me across the table at the police station. The same ones that had followed me at the Midsummer Faire.
Caleb knew he’d won, and he wanted to watch, second by second, as I realized it.
“The truth has a way of makin’ itself known, doesn’t it?” he said, reaching into the glove compartment for a amber glass bottle. It looked like whiskey. “My father taught me that, and it’s somethin’ I’ve never understood about people. It doesn’t matter how small the town is or how well you cover things up, there are always traces left behind. There’s always someone out there who saw somethin’ or knows somethin’ or heard somethin’。 It’s only a matter of time before it washes up.”
He took a long drink from the bottle before he turned the wheel, taking us onto one of the county roads that wound deep into the hills. The sweet, oaky smell of the whiskey filled the car.
“I never liked you. Mostly because I had to keep an eye on my father once you came to town. He was erratic, possessed by this idea that you weren’t who you said you were. I have to say, I agree with him, June. So, imagine my surprise when I found that picture of him in your house.” His hand gestured to something in the front seat.
I leaned forward just enough to see it. The stack of papers he’d taken from my bedroom were sitting on the closed folder beside him, the photograph of Nathaniel and Susanna, our parents, on top.
“I had to ask myself. Why would this woman have that photograph?”
“Susanna was family,” I said.
According to what the town knew, that was true. I was a relative of the Farrows from Norfolk, Virginia, just like she’d been.
“Maybe. Or maybe there’s more to it than that.”
I met his eyes in the mirror.
“This picture got me thinkin’。 All this mystery about that shoe and no one being in total agreement about exactly what you were wearin’ that night. I hadn’t thought about the photographer.”