Chapter 18 - The Fracture in the Living Room
We found Caroline sitting in the dark of the cottage in Lititz.
She had not turned on the heat. The temperature inside the small parlor was so low that our breath plumed in the air between us. She was wearing her heavy winter coat, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the small braided rug beneath her feet.
On the coffee table rested an open bottle of rubbing alcohol, a roll of medical gauze, and James’s old service revolver from his two years as a borough constable in the late eighties.
"I tried to make the potatoes right," she said when the door swung open. Her voice was like dry leaves being crushed under a boot. "I always used unsalted butter. Because the salt made your blood pressure rise. And when your blood pressure went up, the pressure behind your ear grew worse. You'd hold your head and cry, and then he’d get that look in his eyes."
"Why didn't you run, Caroline?" I asked, stepping into the room. Marcus stayed by the door, his frame blocking the exit. "You were twenty years old. You didn't have his name yet."
Caroline looked up. Her face was gray, the skin around her eyes sunken and discolored.
"My brother was sixteen," she said softly. "Nathan. He was sixteen, and he had been caught breaking into the surveyor’s shed behind the courthouse, looking for copper pipe to sell. James caught him. He told my father that if I didn't come live at Duke Street, if I didn't take care of the house and the boy, he’d send Nathan to the juvenile facility at Glen Mills. Nathan wouldn't have survived three months in that place. He was soft. He liked to bake bread. He liked books."
She pointed a trembling finger toward the shoebox in Marcus’s hands.
"I recorded him," she whispered. "Every time he came home with the smell of lime on his boots, I turned on the machine. I hid the tapes in the flour bin. I hid them in the linings of the curtains. When he hit you with the platter... I knew it was the end. Because the thirty-fifth year was coming. He was never going to let you reach January fifteenth."
"He was going to kill me before the trust vested," I said.
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"The platter wasn't an accident," Caroline said, her voice dropping to a terrifying, flat monotone. "He spent three weeks sharpening the edge of that porcelain on the whetstone in the garage. He filed down the bottom rim until it was as sharp as a cleaver. He waited until you sat in Margaret’s chair. He waited until you took the first bite."
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