Seven Sisters - Earlene Fowler [118]
I nodded, not answering.
“You’re a very clever girl, Benni Harper,” she said, picking up a smooth wooden letter opener, running it back and forth through her strong fingers. “And persistent. I knew once you got your teeth in this I would have a hard time forcing you to let go. So . . .” She set the letter opener down and blinked her eyes slowly. “Blackmail’s an evil thing, wouldn’t you agree?” she asked, her mouth set in a grim, pale line.
I nodded.
“So anyone who would commit it would also be evil and deserve to be punished.”
I shifted forward in my chair. Was she going to confess to Giles’s murder? Reveal it was someone else? Was she covering for someone? That has always been a possibility. “Who are you talking about?”
She stared at me, her eyes as steady and reflective as a knife blade. She didn’t answer my question, but instead said, “I have a story for you. Do you like stories, Benni Harper?”
Without thinking, I held my breath, mesmerized by her control. Her every deliberate movement, her unblinking eyes, reminded me of an ancient, battle-scarred rattler poised to strike.
She started talking, her voice cold and emotional. She told me a story that had I not already talked to Amanda, I would have never believed. A story about a terrified seven-year-old girl who watched her mother gently place a pillow over her little sister Dahlia’s face, pressing down until her sister kicked and kicked her tiny legs in desperation to breathe. Then picking the baby up and running out in the hall and down the stairs calling for help, calling for someone to call the doctor, the beloved family doctor. How she saw her do it again and again, placing the pillow so lovingly, so gently over her sister’s tiny face. Each time, stopping just in time to call for the doctor. The little girl told no one, but held the secret tight inside her chest, not believing her mother capable of that, not a mother, not her mother.
Then Dahlia died, and at the funeral she heard her mother whisper, My babies are together again.
Every night the little girl prayed that God would make things all right. That Daisy and Dahlia would not be dead, that the memories in her head of the pillow being held over Dahlia’s face by her mother’s delicate white hands would go away. A year later when another set of twins was born, the little girl was relieved because she believed that God had answered her prayers and that her mother had been given another chance. But she watched her mother, followed her constantly, until her mother said in her soft, gentle voice, Don’t be always hanging around me, go play like your sisters, get some fresh air, let me be with my babies. Then the new twins, Bethany and Beulah, died, too, first one and then the other. Her mother both times came running out of the nursery crying for help, calling for the housekeeper to call the doctor. At the funerals, Cappy could not stop staring at her mother’s delicate white hands.
“Then it was over,” Cappy said, her voice emotionless and dry as a desert. “My mother never bore any other children, and she went on to become a great advocate for the welfare of children in this county. Without her, thousands of children would be much worse off, even dead, for lack of medical care. My father used his political influence to help her achieve her goals. I left home at seventeen to follow the rodeo and didn’t come back until after Father died and Mother needed me to run the ranch.”
I sat quietly—horrified. Horrified by the story of a sickness I still couldn’t imagine, by the matter-of-factness with which Cappy told her story, and with the fact that a seven-year-old would have to carry a burden like that, a burden that twisted her own thinking and loyalties to the point of murder.
When I could finally speak, I asked, “Do your sisters know?”
“Yes, I told them years ago. But we agreed