Follow Me (52 page)

As it turned out, the world didn’t cooperate, and neither did her daughter, who late the next morning came out from her bedroom,
poured herself a bowl of cereal, and as she ate her breakfast casually asked her mother why she’d gone back to Tauntonville
after she’d said repeatedly that she would never go back.

Sally pretended that she’d been invited to visit her sister, which seemed to satisfy the girl. But then she decided to change
the subject and say that she was concerned about all the time Penelope spent with Abe. “That Abe,” she called him, infuriating
her daughter and provoking her to remind her mother that she was twenty-one years old, she wasn’t a baby, and she could make
her own decisions when it came to love.

There, she’d used that word —
love.
She didn’t mean it, she wasn’t worldly enough to mean it, Sally thought. No, she mustn’t love Abe, not that way, but Sally
couldn’t say so.

The best she could do was to make up distractions to keep the two apart. In the weeks left in the summer, she paid for her
daughter to spend a few days in Niagara Falls with her girlfriends from high school. She took her on a trip to the Thousand
Islands. She took her shopping and spent money extravagantly. When Abe called, she didn’t relay his messages.

If only that woman named Sylvia would provide her with the information she sought. A whole week passed, and Sally didn’t hear
from her. Another week passed, and another. It was plenty of time for Penelope to get used to the feeling of
love,
and still Sally had no hard evidence in hand. She had to put a stop to the romance, but that was impossible. She had no justification
for interfering, unless she made up some damning lie about Abe, and she didn’t want to do that, for then when she actually
said something that was factual, she wouldn’t be believed.

As it happened, she didn’t see Abe Boyle again for a long while. Her daughter went back to school, and Abe was mostly out
of town, driving long hauls around the country. Sally waited to hear from Sylvia. And then came a turn of events that she
had long since given up expecting.

That September, Arnie Caddeau’s wife passed away in her sleep. The office of Kennedy, Kennedy and Caddeau closed for the day
so the lawyers and staff could go to the funeral.

Even with the group from the office, the family and friends gathered for the funeral were dwarfed by the expansive sanctuary
of the church; Sally sat in a rear pew, adding her own private prayers to the eulogies, pleading with the spirit of Arnie
Caddeau’s wife to forgive her. The closed coffin glistened in the mottled light shining through stained glass. Arnie sat in
the front pew. Watching his shoulders shaking, Sally felt her own impurity so overwhelmingly and understood the inerasable
effect of time so completely that for a moment the idea of ending her own life seemed attractive. Yet the lure only served
to remind her of eternal damnation, for if she died at this point, whether by her own hand or by natural causes, she wouldn’t
have the chance to make reparations. Without reparations, there would be no salvation, not for a woman of such foul spirit.
She would be rendered as she herself had rendered, she would be repaid double for her deeds…

Pestilence and mourning and famine —

She shall be burned with fire —

Blood will flow as high as a horse’s bridle —

Folly is the garland of fools —

Help!

Who said that?

Help me!

She didn’t want to go to hell. She wanted to disperse like the spirit of Arnie Caddeau’s wife into heaven’s rainbow light,
up through the saints crowding the windowpanes, to be freed from the consequence of her mistakes once and for all. But if
she was going to be spared, she had to repair the damage she’d caused and help those who needed her help.

As the organ wheezed into a hymn, Sally watched Arnie’s shuddering shoulders. He was sobbing because he had never stopped
loving his wife; he was sobbing from the agony of secret shame. It was terrible to have to sit in the back of the sanctuary
and watch him endure his torment alone. Sally wished she could comfort him. He needed her, and so did her daughter and her
son, even if they didn’t yet know it. They needed her strength to get through their different losses.

It was all so confusing. She had always intended to live a righteous life. In the midst of any decision, she’d always thought
she was doing what was justified and necessary. But how could she know, how did anyone know what the repercussions would be?
Without the ability to see into the future, everyone was like Arnie’s wife, working blindly on a scarf, which for the lucky
ones grew longer and longer and for the unlucky ones became tangled in knots.

Sally was of the unlucky order, having inadvertently tied together strands that should have remained separate. Now it was
her duty to untie those strands and rejoin them properly so they were connected in a complementary way, fortified by their
place in the pattern rather than lost in a mess.

She went home instead of following the hearse to the cemetery. She doubted that Arnie would have wanted her at the burial.
She made herself a cup of tea and stretched out across the bed. For the next hour she paged through
Daytime TV,
scanning the recaps of the soaps while tears soaked her cheeks. She thought about how sorry she felt for Arnie’s wife. She
felt sorry for Arnie, and she felt sorry for herself. She felt sorry even for those characters on the soaps who were slated
to suffer terrible fates.

She was back at her desk the next day, but Arnie didn’t appear or call in to say when he planned to return. He didn’t show
up at the office through the rest of the week, not until the end of the day on Friday, when he came in to collect his mail
and begin to catch up on his work. He barely acknowledged Sally at first. Later, though, when she brought him some reports,
he caught her from behind and wrapped his arms around her. “My dearest love,” he whispered, burying his face in her hair.
There was the familiar stinging guilt in his voice but also a sound that Sally heard as relief. “We’ll be all right?” she
whispered back. She regretted inflecting the words with uncertainty and so repeated them firmly, as a statement: “We’ll be
all right.”

“Yes,” he said.

A promise was contained in that brief exchange. It would take time, but they would learn to give up the furtiveness. They
would allow their love for each other to be acknowledged by others, without fear of condemnation. They were too worn out by
guilt to worry whether a love that had thrived for years in secret could survive out in the open. It was comforting just to
look forward to the future and feel confident of the resolution.

Still, she was absorbed by the portion of her life that remained unresolved and hidden from others. She continued to tear
through the mail each day looking for a letter from the woman named Sylvia. She grew annoyed by her desire to hear the phone
ring.

She called the county clerk’s office and then declined to leave a message with the stranger who answered. Another week passed
without any news. One afternoon in late October, she decided she needed some fresh air. She would have gone to Sam’s for a
drink, but it was Sunday and Sam’s was closed, so instead she got in her car, and on a whim she drove out to the pier at Canton
Point, where the river empties into the lake.

It was late in the day and the sun hung low in the sky, burning red through a gauzy mist rising from the lake. There was no
one on the pier, though up toward the end someone had left a chair unfolded, with a fishing rod leaning against it, along
with an open tackle box and a bucket full of lake water so black with silt that it was hard for Sally to count the wriggling
trout. She bent over to look more closely, counted three fish tails, or four, she wasn’t sure, and then saw a filmy eye just
beneath the surface staring helplessly. The eye of a small trout, it must have been, though Sally was immediately reminded
of the creature she’d seen years earlier in the state park, that water fairy with its expressive face and two tiny hands that
had gripped the rock, its humanlike features just an illusion, according to her sophisticated daughter, who blamed her mother’s
penchant for irrational belief on her lack of education. Penelope didn’t fully remember what they’d seen in the park, but
she was sure her mother was wrong to rely on a fantasy to explain a mystery. Now the dusk was tricking Sally again, coaxing
her to believe in something that was impossible and to ignore the usual measures of reality.

She could have examined the fish in the bucket more carefully if she’d wanted to confirm what she was seeing. She could have
reached in her hand and caught the trout and lifted it out of the murky water. Then there would have been no question about
its features. But she didn’t look more closely for a reason she’d later explain was perfectly simple:
there wasn’t time,
she’d say, an easy excuse for the vagueness of her vision and a defense against the inevitable skepticism.

A minute later she was heading back along the pier when she saw the fisherman come out of the public restroom by the parking
lot. She increased her pace and was stepping onto the pavement when she passed the man, a heavy middle-aged man in baggy overalls,
with the lower half of his face wrapped in a brown beard. He offered an affable hello, and Sally returned his greeting with
a nod. She hurried on so quickly that as he reached his chair and discovered that the entire contents of his bucket had been
dumped into the lake, she was already in her car, turning the key in the ignition.

It took Myra’s sister-in-law Sylvia more than two months to produce a letter verifying that the son of Daniel Werner indeed
had been adopted through the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. It was an official-looking letter, on stationery with the watermark
of the county seal, and stated that the letter would serve in lieu of the original document, which had been destroyed in the
fire of 1957, to affirm that a binding Relinquishment had been voluntarily signed by the birth father, Daniel Werner, in the
presence of witnesses from the Werner family and a Notary Public, at the Peterkin county clerk’s office in August of 1949.
The original Relinquishment passed the parental rights of Daniel Werner to the Diocese of Pittsburgh, the letter stated. And
since the letter did not specifically mention the name of the new parents, Sylvia had gone to the trouble of including a copy
of the Decree of Adoption for the same child, who was identified as the boy legally relinquished to the Diocese in August
of the same year. The Decree of Adoption was dated September 9, 1949, and signed by the adoptive parents, Redding and June
Boyle.

Sally couldn’t have guessed that by concocting a story to coincide with her hunch, the entire Werner family was spared from
having to acknowledge their complicity in guarding the secret of the murder. And she would never have to learn that her real
son was beaten to death by Daniel Werner and then buried by him in an unmarked grave on Thistle Mountain.

In defense of the Werner brothers, it should be said that they didn’t know the truth about the child’s fate until years after
their cousin killed him. Their uncle, who had helped Daniel bury the baby and then given him the money to leave the region
for good, had confessed only to their father, Dietrich Werner. Dietrich had immediately confided in his wife. And though she
waited until after her husband’s death, she had eventually confided in her sons. So it was an old secret by the time Sally’s
brothers learned it, and they received the news as more evidence of the wages of sin rather than as information about a crime
that deserved an official investigation.

When their sister had arrived in Tauntonville, the Werner men feared that they would be unfairly accused of abetting the crime,
and they demanded that Myra Werner deal with the problem Daniel had made for them. When Myra heard that Sally thought she’d
located her son, she must have decided that this would be a convenient solution. With her sister-in-law’s help, she assembled
the proof that Sally sought. Between the false account of a Relinquishment and a copy of Abraham Boyle’s real Decree of Adoption,
she made sure that her brother wouldn’t be held accountable for a murder that had happened by accident, when he was helplessly
drunk. And Sally would never go looking for her son’s grave.

Because Sally understood the necessity for sturdy proof in this important matter, she compared the papers to similar legal
documents on file at Kennedy, Kennedy and Caddeau. And then she drove to Pittsburgh and made an appointment with the adoption
agency of the diocese. After an initial meeting with the assistant director, she spoke with the woman who had sent the copy
of the Decree of Adoption to the Peterkin clerk’s office. Sally wasn’t allowed to see the file, but the woman assured her
that there could be no mistake with the document. The date was correct? Yes, the date was correct. And the names? It was an
official document signed by a judge, the woman reminded her. Of course it was accurate. But were there, by chance, any other
two-year-old boys in the care of the agency at the time? The woman perused the record of adoptions: there was only one adoption
involving a two-year-old boy for the period from January of 1947 to December of 1950, and that boy was Abraham Boyle.

By the time she was in her car leaving Pittsburgh, Sally believed that she’d found what she was looking for. Just as the letter
from Sylvia had said, the child relinquished by Daniel Werner of Tauntonville, Peterkin County, in August of 1949 was the
same child adopted by the Boyles of Pittsburgh that September. And he was the same young man whom fate had brought to the
city of R. He was the same young man who had taken to opening the unlocked front door of Sally’s house and calling,
Anybody home?

Actually, he hadn’t come around for several months, not since her daughter had returned to college. Sally inquired about him
in her phone conversations with Penelope. Her daughter, who thought her mother had taken a dislike to Abe, responded vaguely,
and Sally wondered if this indicated that her daughter’s interest in him had waned. When Sally came right out and asked, Penelope
explained what should have been obvious: she was busy with her studies, and he was busy with his work. When Sally asked if
she was dating someone else, her daughter snapped back, telling her mother not to pry.