She wanted to talk, Hunter could tell. She seemed weary, desperate, as if looking for a safe haven she’d never been able to find. He had to pity her, she seemed harmless in so many ways. And yet he recognized the opportunity she afforded him. “Maybe it’s time to finally sort it all out,” he said.
She straightened abruptly. “There’s nothing to sort out. I—I want you to leave. I can’t deal with the past anymore. It’s over, do you hear me? It’s over. I only did what I—”
“You did what?” he asked. Like Clay, she knew more about Barker’s disappearance than she was telling.
Her eyes rounded in fear. “Nothing! I did nothing!”
She was growing agitated, panicky. To calm her, he turned the conversation in a different direction. If he could keep her talking, he might eventually learn what she wanted to reveal yet was so desperate to hide. “Did Lee ever talk about his first wife?”
Her mouth parted as if this question surprised her. She seemed to examine it, looking for traps, then answered hesitantly. “He talked about her occasionally.”
“Did he seem to miss her?”
“No. He never had anything good to say about her, although I begged him not to malign her in front of Madeline. No child should hear such things about her mother.”
“What ‘things’?” he asked.
“He hated Eliza, pure and simple.”
Hunter had sensed as much from what Eliza had recorded in her journals and even in the sermons Barker had given. Often focused on self-denial, self-reliance and strength through adversity, each sermon seemed to tout a virtue Barker did not believe his wife possessed. One sermon actually went so far as to say that anyone who suffered from depression was afflicted by God for the sin of ingratitude.
Eliza didn’t come across as a particularly strong individual. But she’d always managed to care for her daughter, which was unusual for someone so consumed by despair. He had to respect that. And she was fiercely determined to protect Madeline. Hunter thought he knew from what—but he needed more than his own conjecture if he wanted to convince anyone else.
“Hate is a pretty strong word,” he said.
“There’s no other way to describe it,” she responded. “He said she let him down in the worst possible way. That she was stupid and weak. The only time I ever heard him curse was when I tried to get him to tell me some of her better qualities. He couldn’t come up with one. Instead, he called her a…” She lifted a hand that sported several large, sparkling rings, probably as fake as the gilt around her mirrors. “Well, I’m sure you can guess.”
He took a stab at it. “Bitch?”
“Worse. Much worse.”
“Can you give me a hint?”
She shuddered as if it was too abhorrent to contemplate. “It doesn’t matter. You get the idea.”
Irene couldn’t even say the word, and yet her preacher husband had used such terms to describe his first wife, who was the mother of his child?
Hunter was pragmatic when it came to people. He put no one on a pedestal, realized that preachers had the same appetites, desires and weaknesses as everyone else. But after reading Barker’s fiery sermons and knowing what kind of hell Madeline’s father preached about, Hunter could hardly imagine him speaking in terms much more vulgar than bitch. But if Barker was so hypocritical in this regard, it followed that there’d be other inconsistencies, as well.
“Wasn’t he afraid you’d repeat what he said?”
“Who’d believe me?” she said with a laugh.
“What made you approach him about his ex-wife in the first place?” he asked.
Irene fingered the necklace at her throat. “I did it for Madeline, of course. I wanted her to have something positive to identify with. The poor girl was struggling to figure out if her mother was the loving person she remembered or this monstrous figure Lee made her out to be.”
“He couldn’t see that he was making the situation even harder on Maddy?”
“He didn’t care. The less she loved her mother, the more completely he could replace Eliza in his little girl’s esteem.”
That sounded like Antoinette. “How selfish,” he murmured.
“I’ll be the first to admit that Eliza Barker had problems,” Irene said. “You only have to read one of her poems to see that. But no one’s all good or all bad. There are so many people in this town who worshipped her. They must’ve had some reason.” Her voice turned wry. “Lord knows it’s not that easy to impress folks around here.”
He felt the deep loneliness in that statement. “You would know.”
“Yes,” she said sadly.
“Why do you think he was so ungenerous with Eliza?” he asked. “Because of the hurt he felt over her suicide?”
“The hurt?” she scoffed. “He wasn’t hurt. If anything, he was relieved to have her gone.”
The vehemence in her last phrase surprised Hunter. It surprised Irene, too, judging by the frightened look that suddenly claimed her pretty features. “But we never argued over Eliza,” she said. “We never had any real problems.”
She’d been grilled about her own complicity in Barker’s death so often that she was afraid to make any negative comment, especially one spoken with such passion. “I understand that,” he told her.
At his response, she seemed to calm down, so he ventured another question. “Did he keep any pictures of her?”
“No. He destroyed any he came across. But I managed to save a few, and let Madeline keep one between her mattresses. She pretended she didn’t care if she had it or not, but I know she did. She felt angry and lost, that was all.”
“At least she had her father,” he said, just to see how Irene might react.
She glanced at the window again. “You’d better go.”
“I have just a couple more questions—”
“I’ve got to be at work by noon. And all of this happened a long time ago. Sometimes it’s better to leave the past alone.”
“Even if there’s a chance Barker killed his first wife?”
She swayed as though the shock of what he’d just said had hit her like a physical blow. “I—I…what?” she stammered.
“You heard me.”
“It was a suicide.”
“It appeared to be a suicide,” he conceded. “But I don’t think Eliza would’ve left Madeline. She was too determined to protect her.”