Lisa grabbed Annie’s hand. “Oh, Annie . . . That’s going to make such a difference to the kids.”
Instead of becoming steadier, Barbara appeared to be wilting. “We want our younger residents to know how much we care about them.” She gazed toward Lisa. “And how much we’re willing to do to keep them on the island.” She looked down at the table, and Annie had the unsettling feeling she was about to cry, but when Barbara lifted her head, her eyes were dry. She nodded to someone in the room. Nodded again. One by one, the grandmothers she’d conspired with rose to their feet and joined her.
Annie shifted uneasily in her chair. Barbara’s lips quivered. “We have something we need to tell all of you.”
Chapter Twenty-four
ANNIE’S UNEASINESS ESCALATED. BARBARA GLANCED helplessly at the others. Naomi ran one hand through her cropped hair, leaving a rooster tail behind. She took a step away from the rest. “Annie didn’t give up the cottage voluntarily,” she said. “We forced her out.”
A confused muttering rippled through the audience. Annie shot to her feet. “Nobody forced me to do anything. I wanted to give you the cottage. Now am I wrong, or do I smell coffee? I move to adjourn the meeting.”
She wasn’t a property owner, and she couldn’t move to adjourn anything, but her need for revenge was gone. The women had done something wrong, and they were suffering from it. But they weren’t bad women. They were mothers and grandmothers who’d wanted so much to keep their families together that they’d lost sight of right and wrong. For all their flaws, Annie cared about them, and she knew better than anyone how easily love could make people lose their way.
“Annie . . .” Barbara’s natural authority began to reassert itself. “This is something we’ve all agreed we need to do.”
“No, you don’t,” Annie said. And then more pointedly, “You really don’t.”
“Annie, please sit down.” Barbara was back in charge.
Annie slumped into her seat.
Barbara briefly explained the legal agreement between Elliott Harp and Mariah. Tildy gripped the edges of her scarlet bomber jacket and said, “We’re decent women. I hope all of you know that. We thought if we had a new school our kids would stop leaving.”
“Makin’ our kids go to school in a trailer’s a disgrace,” a female voice in the back called out.
“We convinced ourselves the end justified the means,” Naomi said.
“I’m the one who started the whole thing.” Louise Nelson leaned heavily on her cane and looked toward her daughter-in-law in the front row. “Galeann, you didn’t mind living here so much until the schoolhouse burned down. I couldn’t stand the idea of you and Johnny leaving. I’ve lived here all my life, but I’m smart enough to know I can’t stay without family nearby.” Age had weakened her voice and the room fell silent. “If you leave, I’ll have to go to the mainland, and I want to die here. That made me start thinking about other possibilities.”
Naomi shoved her hand through her hair again, pushing up a second rooster tail. “We’re all getting ahead of ourselves.” She took over, laying out what they’d done step-by-step, sparing none of them. She described sabotaging Annie’s grocery delivery, vandalizing the house. All of it.
Annie sank lower into her seat. They were making her look like both a heroine and a victim, neither of which she wanted to be.
“We made sure we didn’t break anything,” Judy interrupted, dry-eyed but clutching a tissue.
Naomi detailed hanging the puppet from a noose, painting the warning message on the wall, and finally, firing the bullet at Annie.
Barbara dropped her gaze. “I did that. That was the worst, and I was responsible.”
Lisa gasped. “Mom!”
Marie’s lips pursed into a buttonhole. “I was the one who came up with the idea of telling Annie that Theo Harp had been hurt in an accident so she’d leave the island with Naomi. I’m a decent woman, and I’ve never been more ashamed of myself. I hope God forgives me because I can’t.”
Annie had to hand it to her. Marie might be a sourpuss, but she was a sourpuss with a conscience.
“Annie figured out what we’d done and confronted us,” Barbara said. “We begged her to keep quiet so none of you would find out, but she wouldn’t promise anything.” Barbara held her head higher. “Sunday I went to see her to beg her again to keep our secret. Right then, she could have told me to go to Hades, but she didn’t. Instead she said the cottage was ours, free and clear. That it belonged to the island, not to her.”