squirrel finally gave up its tirade and disappeared into the treetops, she moved on, coming at last to the mausoleum itself.
There was a seventh chair at the table now, and the broken pillar had at last been repaired. The addition of the chair and the new pillar had changed the feel of the monument, as well as its looks. No longer did it have an air of mystery to it, as if it were filled with unanswered—and unanswerable—questions. There was a completeness to it, as if the addition of the chair for Amy Deaver Sturgess had closed the family circle around Samuel Pruett Sturgess. Now he sat with his wife at his side, and his four sons flanking them. But directly opposite him now, providing a kind of symmetry, was his only daughter’s chair. And beyond her chair, the new pillar blocked the view of the place where the mill had stood for so many decades.
No longer would Samuel Pruett Sturgess spend eternity gazing at the source of both his wealth and his guilt. Now he would sit with his completed family, his long-denied daughter acknowledged at last. For Carolyn, the mausoleum had finally lost its feeling of the grotesque, and had become a place of peace.
She paused there that morning, then moved on down the trail that would eventually lead to the river. But that trail was no longer an overgrown tangle of weeds and fallen trees. It had been cleared and widened, and neat stone steps had been carefully installed to look as if they’d been there forever. So well had the work been executed that even the week after they had been laid the steps had blended perfectly into the hillside.
Carolyn came to an intersecting path, and turned left, following the well-worn trail she had once used nearly every day. Since spring, though, she had found herself coming here less frequently. Indeed, she realized as she came into the little meadow where both Beth and Tracy were buried, it had been almost two weeks since she had been here last.
Now, as she slowly approached the graves that lay flanking the slight depression where Amy’s bones had once been buried, she remembered the funeral that had taken place here last summer.
There had been no question of separate funerals for the two girls—they had been bound too closely together by their deaths.
Almost all of Westover had been there that day, and both Carolyn and Phillip had come to realize that their tragic loss had not been totally in vain. Though nothing had been spoken, there was a feeling that the funeral for the two young girls marked a turning point for the town, a final severing of its ties to the past, a laying to rest of the last vestiges of resentment toward the Sturgesses and the other old families who had once controlled the lives of the townspeople.
After the service there had been a reception on the front lawn, for even the mansion itself had not been large enough to hold the crowd. And as Carolyn and Phillip had moved through the throng of people, accepting the condolences that were that day genuinely offered, they began to sense the healing that was taking place.
It was that night that they had decided to build a park on the site of the mill, and donate it to the town. Then, during the weeks when the park was being built and the charred remnants of the mill were being obliterated, they had discussed the naming of the park.
It was Phillip who finally suggested they dedicate it to the memory of Alan Rogers, and Carolyn had immediately concurred. It seemed fitting that the Sturgess name would no longer be associated with that part of Westover.
Carolyn gathered a few wildflowers, and placed them as she always did between the two graves where Beth and Tracy lay. As always, she wondered fleetingly what had really transpired in the basement of the mill the night the girls had died, but she had never asked Phillip what he’d seen in the little room beneath the loading dock, nor had he ever volunteered to tell her. Though she knew in her heart that it was a fiction, she liked to believe that they had simply gone out together on what was intended to be nothing more than an adolescent adventure, an adventure that had gone disastrously wrong.
The truth, she knew, was something too painful for her to bear.
She turned away from the graves, and started back to