Spirit (Blackwood Security, #10.5) - Elise Noble Page 0,33

were important to her, so was the church, and back in those days, unwed teenage mothers were unacceptable, especially in our hometown. So they just sort of…hid Sarah away. She had a room in the basement. Nobody except us knew she was there.”

“They planned to keep her down there forever?” Valerie asked.

“I-I don’t know. I think maybe they panicked, and then it was too late to change the situation. It became normal, having Sarah downstairs. I used to sit with her in the evenings. Sing to her. Mom started homeschooling me so it wouldn’t happen again, but then it did. Two years later, I became pregnant with you, Merry, and this time, Mom realised the truth.” Rhoda balled the tissue up in her hands, then began picking bits off it. “Th-there was a fight. A big one. Even when I was a child, my ears didn’t work properly, so I didn’t hear everything that was said. But Mom didn’t leave the house for months afterwards. And when you were born, Mom said you’d sleep in the room beside mine, not Sarah’s, but we all had to pretend you were my sister and not my daughter. What was I supposed to do? I was fourteen years old, and I didn’t want to put another baby in the b-b-basement.”

“Auntie, you did the right thing,” Mina said, her voice shocked but strong. “Grandma. I mean Grandma. I’m sorry. So sorry that you went through this.”

“Merry, I used to take you to sit with Sarah. You loved her smile. It made you giggle. And you used to tangle your little fingers in her hair.”

“What happened?” Meriah asked. “How did Sarah get out of the basement?”

“She got sick. So sick, but Enoch wouldn’t let us take her to a doctor. Mom had insisted I go back to school by then, and one day when I arrived home, she said Sarah had gone to live with the angels. I overheard her telling Enoch that she’d buried her in the woods.”

“She was abandoned on the altar of a church in Anchorage,” I filled in. “There was a TV appeal for her parents to come forward. You didn’t see it?”

“We didn’t have a TV. Enoch said they spoke the devil’s words.”

“Why did Beulah stay with Enoch?” Meriah asked. “She could have left and saved all three of us.”

“I don’t know for sure. Even after he died, she refused to speak about him. But I think they were both weak in their own ways. And in those days, our old town was ruled by the church, not by the mayor or the governor. The pastor’s word was law, and Enoch was the pastor’s son. If Mom had spoken up, who do you think the folks around there would have believed? DNA testing didn’t exist back then.” The tissue was in tiny pieces on the floor now, and Rhoda started picking at a fingernail. “The day he passed was the happiest of my life. Mom’s too, I think. When the police left, that was the first time I saw her smile. Properly smile.”

“It was the happiest day of my life too,” Meriah whispered. “The night before, he came into my room. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what was happening, or why, only that it hurt and Daddy told me not to tell anybody.”

Rhoda pulled Meriah into her arms, and then Mina hugged both of them. And then it struck me that perhaps we hadn’t so much broken a family apart as pushed them closer together. Rhoda and Meriah were both free of their burdens now.

A small smile played across Valerie’s lips. “Maybe there was a higher power at work.”

“I don’t think so,” Mina said. “I got curious and looked Grandpa up in the newspaper articles at the library. Somebody shot him between the eyes. The police said it was a hunting accident.”

“I heard the shot,” Meriah said, her voice hollow. “And then I heard the back door close.”

Was she saying what I thought she was saying? Bloody hell. This made my family look positively normal, and considering my sperm donor of a father had tried to kill me and my birth mother lived in a rehab clinic, that was a big statement to make. Dan touched my hand in support because she knew exactly what was going through my mind.

“The healing process is always difficult, but you have each other,” she said, her words aimed at the Lewis family. “Never forget that. Is there anything we can do to