Francie: Yes, and I feel terrible about that…like I should have told her to go to the police. She said they were just mad—heartbroken—and she said she could handle them. That was months before she died. I didn’t know they’d moved in down the street from her. I think it’s really, really odd she didn’t tell me that…but when your kids get into high school, you get so busy. I’d sometimes see her at choir functions, my middle kiddo is a year younger than Ned but also in choir. We stood together and handed out programs at the fall concert as people came into the auditorium and we didn’t have so much to say, other than how our kids were doing. And she told me she’d started dating a guy in her neighborhood, Mike, and that he was really great. She stopped coming for coffee nearly a year before she died, and c’mon, that was her fan club, her Lakehaven moms. She made most of us into moms. Why would she turn her back on us?

49

Grant and Iris

It’s all going to fall apart. Nothing can be saved.

The police have arrived to secure the scene, Ponder and Ames both there, and they are questioned. Iris says nothing about the drugs. Gordon says nothing about the drugs. They stare at each other.

Mike says, “I think they’ve all been arguing about Kyle’s confession. There’s something going on between them about the kids, and I do not know what it is.” He looks right at Gordon and Iris both, as if his heart is breaking.

“I’m not saying anything more and neither are my children,” Iris says. She puts her arms around her children and heads back up the trail to her house. She locks the door behind them. Julia and Grant stare at her.

“What have you done?” Julia says. “Ned will never help us now.”

“Ned was never, ever going to help us. We’re all on our own,” Iris says. “He used you. He used you and you let him use you, and I thought you were smarter than that.”

“You had to have the last word, and now Dad will go to prison.”

“Ned’s father is going to get him out of the country and to the UK or Ghana so fast your head will spin. Don’t kid yourself that Ned was about to help us.”

“The tree. Dad wouldn’t hide that pipe in the tree,” Grant says. “Someone else has been hiding stuff there. The pipe wasn’t there before.”

They both look at him.