My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 14

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 14: The Black Rock

Dolores Baptiste walked out of Blackridge on a Tuesday in October.

Thirty-seven years. She was sixty-two years old. She had a bus ticket, two hundred and eighty dollars in gate money, and a paper bag with a toothbrush and a photograph of a woman she used to be.

She told me later she stood in the parking lot for twenty minutes because she didn’t know how to cross

the road.

The world had gotten so fast. Cars that didn’t make noise. Everyone looking at their hands. A boy in a coffee shop asked her what she wanted and there were forty things on the board and she nearly cried and ordered “just coffee, black, please,” and he said “size?” and she said “coffee-sized,” and he laughed at her,

not unkindly.

She rode the bus to Rockport.

Two hours. She’d never been. She got off at the wrong stop and walked three miles with the ocean on her left, past summer houses shut for the season, until she found the white clapboard place with the green

door and the weathervane that was my mother’s.

Chloe’s car was in the driveway. Dee didn’t knock. That wasn’t hers to do.

She went around back.

The field was gold. The oak at the north end had lost half its leaves and the rest were burning. The stone wall ran crooked from the tree to the road, gray granite stacked by someone’s great-grandfather, and she walked along it slowly with her hand on the top course, feeling each stone.

Near the middle, one was black.

Volcanic. Smooth, Completely wrong for Maine. I’d carried it home from a geology trip in college and my mother had used it as a doorstop for twenty years, and I’d set it into that wall the summer before my

wedding for no reason except that I liked knowing it was there.

Dee lifted it.

Underneath was a tin box. Rusted. She said her hands shook so badly she couldn’t get the lid off and had to sit down in the dead grass and hold it in her lap and breathe.

Inside was an envelope. And underneath the envelope, a passport in the name of Dolores Anne Baptiste,

valid ten years, issued by a consulate in Bostor to a woman who’d never applied for it. And underneath the Passport, a bank card, and a folded statement showing a balance of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars

in arr account she’d never opened.

And a one-way ticket. Boston to Lisbon. Open date.

She read the letter sitting in the grass with the sun going down.

Dear Dee,

If you’re reading this, you crossed the road. I’m proud of you

I know you’ll want to give this back. Don’t. The money isn’t Hollis’s and it isn’t Grant’s. It’s mine. It’s forty percent of what I built with my own hands before a man with a nice smile decided it was his. I took it back. I’m choosing where it goes. It goes to the woman who bet against me and then sat by my hospital bed and

never left.

There’s a white house on a cliff outside Lagos. Blue shutters. Terrible plumbing. There’s a boat in the harbor that needs paint and a woman who’s never held a paintbrush trying to fix it. There’s a chessboard on the porch and nobody to play against.

I remember you told me hope was dangerous. You were right. It’s the most dangerous thing they let us keep. It dug through a Bible and walked out a gate and it’s sitting on a porch by the ocean right now waiting for you to lose at chess.

Hope is a good thing, Dee. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.

Come find out.

Your friend,

Elena

She sat there until dark.

Then she put the letter in her coat, and the box under her arm, and walked back the three miles with the ocean on her right this time, and didn’t stop once.

I was on the boat when I saw her,

November. Bright, cold, the Atlantic throwing light like coins. I had paint in my hair and a brush in my hand

and the radio on to a station I couldn’t understand, and I looked up because a gull screamed, and there was a woman at the top of the harbor steps with a paper bag and no idea how to get down.

She saw me.

I dropped the brush.

I don’t remember the steps. I don’t remember the dock. I remember her face when I got close enough to see it, and the way she said “You look like a paper cup, honey,” and the way we both fell apart in front of a dozen confused Portuguese fishermen.

Later. Much later. Two women on a porch with a chessboard between them and the whole ocean in front of them, and Dee moved her knight and looked at me and said, “Sp. Is this it? Is this the plan?”

I looked at the water.

Grant got thirty years. He’d serve them in a cell four feet wider than mine. Hollis took a plea and got twelve. Chloe testified for six hours and then took her daughter to my mother’s house and, as far as I know, has never once picked up a phone to call a man in a charcoal suit.

Margaret Vale doesn’t exist anymore. She dissolved herself in a bank in Lisbon and left the money to a woman named Elena, who was born in Boston and raised a sister and married badly and spent eight years,

four months, and eleven days learning exactly what she was worth.

Everything.

Every penny.

“Yeah,” I said, and took her queen. “This is the plan.”