Chapter 4 - THE SUBMERGED TRUTH
The drive to my childhood home took less than ten minutes, but it felt like hours. Rebecca followed me in her car, the gray afternoon sky threatening rain that felt eerily reminiscent of the stories I’d just been told.
When we pulled up to the property, the yellow excavation backhoe was completely silent. Two workmen in muddy boots were standing near a massive crater at the back of the lot, looking down into the earth.
I ran across the damp grass, my heart pounding in my ears.
There it was.
Half-buried in the thick, dark Ohio clay was the rusted, crushed roof of a 1970s Ford station wagon. The blue paint was mostly flaked away, the windows shattered and filled with solid dirt. It looked less like a vehicle and more like a tomb.
“We hit the bumper with the bucket,” the contractor explained, stepping back to give me room. “It was buried deep. The floodwaters must have washed it down the hill and slammed it into the embankment, burying it under the mudslide.”
I stared down at the wreckage. My mother had always claimed the car washed away from our driveway. But our house was on a slight incline. To be buried behind the garage meant the car had been swept down from the upper access road.
“Can you clear the dirt away from the trunk?” I asked the contractor, my voice trembling.
He frowned. “Susan, it’s a rusted mess. We should probably call a tow truck to haul it out piece by piece.”
“Please,” I insisted, gripping the chain-link fence to steady myself. “I need to see what’s inside the trunk.”
Sensing my desperation, the men grabbed their shovels. Rebecca stood beside me, her shoulder pressing against mine in silent solidarity. We watched as the thick, heavy mud was scraped away from the rear tailgate.
After twenty minutes of grueling work, the contractor wedged a crowbar into the rusted seam of the trunk latch. With a loud, agonizing groan of tearing metal, the hatch popped open.
A smell of stagnant water, rust, and ancient earth wafted up.
I climbed down the slippery mud bank, ignoring the ruin of my slacks and shoes. I peered into the dark, cavernous space of the trunk.
It was empty.
No luggage. No emergency supplies. And most importantly, no heavy steel medical oxygen tank.
“It’s not here,” I whispered, looking up at Rebecca. “The oxygen tank isn’t in the car.”
Rebecca slid down the bank to stand next to me. “If she didn’t have the tank, then Uncle Arthur couldn’t have left the house. But my mother’s diary said Aunt Martha was honking the horn and they were leaving.”
“She tried to make them leave him behind,” I realized, the horror of my mother’s panic suddenly crystallizing. “Mom drove to the house. She refused to load the heavy tank because it would take too much time or space. She told Helen to grab Ruth and abandon Arthur.”
Rebecca covered her mouth. “But my grandmother would never do that. She loved Arthur.”
“So they fought,” I continued, staring into the rusted, empty trunk. “Helen put Ruth in the car to save her, but refused to get in herself. Mom panicked as the water started rising. She hit the gas. She drove away with Ruth, leaving Helen and Arthur behind.”
“But Ruth didn’t stay in the car,” Rebecca said, shaking her head rapidly. “My mother was rescued from the second-story window of Arthur’s house by your father. How did she get back in the house?”
I looked at the crumpled front end of the station wagon, buried deep in the mud. The front bumper was wrapped around a massive, petrified tree stump.
“She crashed,” I said, my voice barely audible. “Mom drove away in a panic, hit the access road, and crashed into the embankment. The car got stuck.”
It all made terrible, tragic sense. The rising water. The crashed car. A terrified eight-year-old girl and a panicked woman.
“Mom couldn’t carry Ruth all the way to the church in the floodwaters,” I said, tears finally breaking free. “So she told Ruth to run back to the house. To high ground. She sent a child back into the flood zone alone, while she saved herself and walked to the church.”
It was an act of profound, unforgivable cowardice. She had abandoned her niece, her sister, and a sick man to save her own skin.
“That’s why she arrived at the church dry,” Rebecca breathed. “She abandoned the car before the water got too deep, and she didn’t have to carry a child. She just saved herself.”
I nodded, feeling a wave of intense nausea. “And when my father arrived at the church, he didn’t just see her dry clothes. He realized she had left them all behind. That’s why he went back out in the boat. He was going to clean up her mess.”
I turned away from the rusted grave of the station wagon and clawed my way back up the mudbank.
“Susan, where are you going?” Rebecca asked, scrambling after me.
“Inside,” I said, marching toward my back door, pulling the heavy brass key from my pocket. “My father knew what she did. And I know exactly where he left the proof.”
We entered the house, bypassing the kitchen and walking straight down the hall to the guest room. The house smelled like lemon polish and old memories, a pristine facade hiding decades of lies.
At the foot of the bed sat the cedar hope chest. It was heavy, dark wood, bound in iron straps. It looked like a coffin.
I knelt on the floor and inserted the brass key into the old lock.
It turned with a sharp, heavy click.
I threw open the lid.
The scent of cedar washed over me, but beneath it was something else. A faint, unmistakable smell of dried river mud and mildew.
Laying perfectly folded on the top of a pile of old blankets was a woman’s coat.
It was blue, heavily stained with dark, dried mud. The fabric was stiff and warped from water damage.
But that wasn’t what made my heart stop.
Pinned to the lapel of the ruined blue coat was a handwritten note on hardware store stationery.
May you like
The handwriting belonged to my father.
“I found her in the water, Martha. She was holding on to the bridge, waiting for you to come back with the car.”
