“It smells like roses. Strange that through everything, I still like that scent, but that thing scares me,” April said.

“It’s not evil,” Nessa argued. “Evil smells like hell, like something hot and on fire, maybe like what a house smells like when it’s burning down. This is just an old, dusty smell mixed with the faint aroma of roses. The quilt tops had the same odor. I’ll hang them out on the clothesline tomorrow and air them out.”

“How do you know what hell smells like?” Flynn asked.

“Daddy describes it very well in his sermons.” Nessa reached for a faded manila envelope. “Looks like this might have the important papers April told us about.”

She opened it to find a marriage license for her grandmother and grandfather dated December 18, 1958, a death certificate for their grandfather, and original birth certificates for all three of their children.

“This is history,” Nessa said.

“We all know that she and Grandpa got married, they had three kids, and he died.” April leaned forward enough to peek into the suitcase, but she didn’t stretch out her hand to touch anything.

Flynn had picked up an envelope of pictures and was studying them one by one. “Here’s our answer to one of the questions. My dad is the image of Grandpa. Look at this.” He passed the pictures over to Nessa.

April moved over close to Nessa so she could see, but she couldn’t make herself pick up a single paper. Merely looking at the suitcase made her feel every single stinging lash of that whipping she’d gotten for opening the closet door. “He really does look like Uncle Matthew, and Uncle Isaac looks like that man right there.” She pointed to the best man. So this was what Nanny Lucy had been hiding where the tree of good and evil lived. She wondered if there were pictures of her mother in the suitcase, and if April really looked as much like her as Nanny Lucy had said she did.

Nessa flipped the picture over and read, “‘Me, Everett, his fraternal twin brother, Ernest, and my best friend, April, on our wedding day. Ernest and April were our witnesses.’”

“I never even knew that we had a great-uncle,” Nessa said.

“She only mentioned him one time to me. She said he was a preacher, but he died a year after the wedding when a rattlesnake bit him,” April told them.

Nessa giggled under her breath. “My dad got a double dose of religion. First from going to church with Nanny Lucy all the time, and then from the uncle that he looks like. And I bet you’re named after her best friend, April.”

“Could be, but I always figured that she just named me that because I was born in April, and she didn’t want to come up with a name,” April answered.