“No problem,” he said as he picked up another picture and handed it to April. “Look, here we are, all three of us. I remember when this one was taken. Nessa is still crying because we’d just buried Waylon number one.”

Nessa reached into the suitcase and brought out a small pink diary with a key dangling from a faded blue ribbon tied to the clasp. “Was this yours?” She offered it to April.

“Never saw it before, and never had a diary. Do you think it was my mother’s?” April handed the phone back to Flynn and took the diary.

“Only one way to find out. Open the thing.” Nessa put the package of pictures she’d been looking at back in the suitcase.

April slipped the key into the lock, but it broke off when she twisted it. She was on the verge of throwing it across the room when Flynn took it from her hands, pulled out a pocketknife, and sliced through the pink leather strap.

“There you go,” he said. “If it belonged to your mother, you might find something in there to bring you closure about her relationship with your father.”

“Thanks.” April opened the book and read out loud. “‘I am Lucy Anne Anderson, and my mother gave me this diary for my sixteenth birthday. The first thing I want to say is that I’m in love with Everett O’Riley. My mother wants me to like Ernest since he’s such a good boy, but my heart belongs to Everett.’”

She tossed the diary over onto Nessa’s lap. “Oh, my gosh. It’s Nanny Lucy’s. She’ll haunt me if I read any more of that thing. You read it.”

Nessa flipped through it. “There’s writing all the way to the last page. On that one she writes that she buried Everett that day, and that she didn’t shed a tear. She’d gotten the bad boy that she wanted and had paid the price for it.”

“I guess if Grandpa was a bad boy, then that’s where my dad got his genes,” Flynn said.

Nessa turned a few pages back, and all the color left her face. “Oh. My!”

“What?” Flynn asked.

She took a deep breath and read:

God is going to punish me for what I have done. I did it out of anger, and I deserve whatever God lays on me. I just hope I’m not punished through my boys for it. Isaac is so much like Ernest. Please God, let him be a man of God. Matthew is already showing signs of following in his father’s footsteps, so I don’t have much hope for him.

“What did she do?” April couldn’t imagine her pious grandmother doing anything that God would deem a sin.

Nessa scanned a few more pages and then read: