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1.
Martha Grace Wicks has always liked mystery books. She was never the sort to take a book with her -- and her father would prefer she always took The Good Book with her -- but on quieter days, she would keep company with Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot and Peter Wimsey.
She's twenty-three years old when she first gets to put it into practice. Jeffie called her a whore yesterday and that's not allowed.
She watches her father's prize diamond tumble across her knuckles, the light catching on it. Beautiful, in the way a girl is beautiful, in the way hope is beautiful; in every way her life doesn't shine, the diamond does.
"It's pretty simple," Martha Grace tells her father, and she's nothing like Peter Wimsey but she's learned from the best. "You can swallow this and keep this safe for me, from any thieves who might want to steal Jeffie's future from him. Or I can tell everyone."
Her father holds his hand out towards her, the same hand that Martha Grace has seen do too much. "Gracie," he calls her, because Martha Grace's mother named her Martha after a much-mourned friend, and her father named her Grace because his parents hadn't allowed him to run away to the priesthood.
He'd run there anyway after Martha Grace's mother had been dead sixteen days. It was not the first time he had done something unforgivable. But this would be the last.
"I'll tell everyone," Martha Grace says and she smiles at him, her perfect daughter smile, which has never ever been genuine. But for the first time, her father sees beneath it.
He believes her.
He swallows the diamond.
And Martha Grace's fortune is safe behind a very heavy mausoleum door.
2.
Jeffie is sent to a very good boarding school, courtesy of the leftover money from the Wicks family fortune, and Martha Grace turns her attention to self-improvement. She had nearly worn away to nothing since Simon, that bastard, had gotten Jeffie on her and promptly ran in the face of parental disapproval.
But Jeffie, Martha Grace discovers one unpleasant day, actually believed her father and what he had said about her.
No, it couldn't have been that Martha Grace had found herself pregnant three weeks before the end of high school, and by a Protestant -- Martha was surprised, too, she hadn't known that the first time she slept with Simon. It couldn't have been that her father offered her money, so much money, to keep the brat and let Father Prentice Wicks defy the church and raise his grandson himself.
Of course not. Of course it was Martha Grace's fault.
If it was her fault, it was for trusting him.
And so to make Jeffie shut up, Martha Grace sends a letter to Simon Delacroix, proposing marriage.
Her father's will had promised a nice trust for Jeffie's education so long as he remained a Wicks, but Martha Grace's money is her own and her name is her own.
Simon doesn't want to agree. He's wary of her now, all her sharp edges and hard angles, a woman scorned by the world, who can't even take solace in her ungrateful brat of a son. She's not pretty Martha Grace of ten years ago. Simon's a new man now, with a new future in front of him, rather than the old future he left behind that night when he wouldn't marry Martha Grace and lose everything, but be the father he should have been.
And so she doesn't resort to blackmail. Nothing that crude.
All men have their price, and Simon's is half a million dollars.
3.
Simon isn't Catholic -- the problem of her youth, the tragedy, some might say -- but he's happy to have a wife who is so active in the church. It keeps her out of his business, he says, and laughs at his own joke. He stays late at the office, more often than not. His wife doesn't mind.
She starts introducing herself as Martha, leaving behind both names her father gave her in her transformation into Martha Delacroix, pillar of the community.
This is something she learned from her father. All sins are forgiven if people want to forgive them. Martha's scandalous behavior is all in the past. It's almost like it happened to some other woman, some harlot named Grace who disgraced herself and bore a child to shame her family, who didn't even have the decency to give it away to someone more deserving, who was rightly punished and shunned by all right-thinking people. Grace was a horrible woman. Martha Delacroix bakes the most outstanding pies for the bake sale and is always happy to watch your children or lend a sympathetic ear.
Martha's sole failing is that her husband is a Protestant, but that hasn't stopped her -- her son wants to enter the priesthood. What a wonderful woman Martha Delacroix is. A good woman, one you can rely on.
A good reputation can win battles before they even began. And Martha Delacroix's reputation is flawless.
4.
Jeffie is ordained the year that the cigars and the booze catch up to Simon. Martha starts wearing black and moves back to Chimney Rock. It's a new old start, she laughs. She's starting over again in a place she knows so well, a place that's forgotten her. Martha Delacroix has nothing to do with the growing legend of Grace Wicks, who'd been the terror of her father, the shame of her town, who had vanished one day with her son, good riddance, what a terrible blight on the memory of Father Prentice Wicks, who gave up a fortune in the name of Christ.
No one whispers anything else about Prentice Wicks; Martha listens hard for it but hears nothing. No, he was a saint and his daughter a devil, who must be dead now of sin and disease.
Martha hadn't been faithful to Simon, but he hadn't been faithful to her either, so Martha didn't think it was anyone's business but hers and her confessor's.
But tales grow in the telling, and the cautionary tale of Grace Wicks is so good that there's no reason to dispute any of it. A fallen, ruined woman, pulling down her father into the muck with her.
But they remember that. They haven't forgotten her. Everything Prentice Wicks did to seem a saint, he's still never mentioned now without the name of the daughter he hated.
He will never escape her. Even in death, he is having no peace.
Martha smiles and smiles.
When Father Jefferson Wicks is assigned to the parish, Martha assumes it's nothing less than the hand of God giving her and her son what they should have had in this town all along: a loving, welcoming home.
Martha has learned from her books and there's no danger in a little harmless deceit. Father Jefferson Wicks is the son of the shameful Grace Wicks, everyone knows that. But Grace Wicks has nothing to do with Martha Delacroix. It's simply impossible to imagine. The wonderful Martha Delacroix can't possibly be the mother of this popular young priest; he already has one in the legends of this town.
And so it's easier, if she's not. People would say things if they knew. It would reflect badly on both of them.
No, it's so much better. And if it gives Martha a thrill, like something out of a Sherlock Holmes story, then that only adds to the benefits.
5.
Martha loves the legend of Grace Wicks as much as everyone else does.
Every saint needs a past and every sinner needs a future. That's why they love the downfall of Grace Wicks: she was someone they could despise without fear of it splashing onto themselves, because the legend can only grow, Grace Wicks can always get worse. She slutted around the town. She defiled the church. She did everything and everyone, and isn't it so exciting to hate her, to blame her, to have someone worse than you to feel better about yourself.
Martha is pleased to add more and more details to it. She doesn't know what Jefferson thinks, as he rages in his sermons about the evil ways of women. Jefferson is happy to use his mother's memory to make his sermons and then have dinner with his mother that night.
"I've always wanted to be just like Grandfather," Jefferson tells her casually one day, five years into his new life in Chimney Rock.
And that's when she should have realized. That's when she should have known. That's really, really when she should have stopped blinding herself to the man her son is.
But a mother loves her son, even when she doesn't like him. Doesn't she? Isn't that what a mother is to do?
6.
Samson Holt is the most handsome man Martha has ever seen, and he's a good man, too. Her hands ache now sometimes and she's not as beautiful, and her son is -- no, don't think of how her son is.
Samson is different. Samson is gentle with her, and loving, and funny. He's so funny.
He brings her cuttings from the garden to keep in her office, and he starts the book club with her. She watches baseball with him, drinking all these new kinds of beers that don't even have alcohol, because Samson went dry, a promise he made to Jefferson, that he thinks Jefferson is keeping, too.
Jefferson isn't keeping it, but Martha has kept harder secrets than her son's perfidy.
Martha had been with drunks before and she'd learned not to mind it, when Simon was in a mood and wasn't around, and Martha'd had to find entertainment and companionship and friendship where she could. And she has found it again now, in Samson, a wonderful man, a gift, the joy of her old age. She would love him if he were a drunk, she loves him as a teetotaler. She would love him in any way he could possibly ever be.
She can never tell Jefferson. But it's so easy not to tell Jefferson anything. He'll call his mother a slut four times on Sundays, and then smile at her like -- she wonders sometimes -- he means it.
More and more, Martha doesn't know if Jefferson thinks Grace Wicks is the same person as Martha Delacroix, as his mother.
Does he hate her? Does she hate him?
(How can he say those things, and look right at her, the way he has started looking at people in the pews while yelling about their sins--)
(Oh, he is so like his grandfather. Martha's greatest sin: her son is just like her father.)
7.
When Father Jud Duplenticy arrives, Martha knows he is the end coming to greet her. They want to replace Jefferson. And they should--
But he's her son.
Martha tells Father Duplenticy about Grace Wicks and her disgusting acts, and he reacts with undisguised horror. At her. At Martha Delacroix, telling the most popular story in town, of the harlot whore, shameful daughter of the wonderful Father Prentice Wicks.
No one has ever--
It's getting harder and harder to remember when she was little Martha Grace, knocked up and scared, her father beating her and forcing her to keep this monstrous son she never wanted, who never showed her a moment's kindness, too caught up in himself to see her. And then he kept not seeing her, in favor of crafting her son in his image.
The only time he saw her was when she killed him.
How dare Father Duplenticy come here now, in the final chapter of her life, and reach across the divide with an outstretched hand. How dare he show kindness and understanding and love to this girl everyone hated, including herself.
She had been weak. (She had been scared.) She had been promiscuous. (Maybe so, but so had Simon, but he had been given a future when hers had been taken away.) She had defiled her father's memory. (He had done much worse.) She had been a monster. (But he had deserved it. They all had deserved it.)
That night, Martha Grace goes to bed alone and weeps and weeps and weeps. For love, for God, for the memory of her father's face and how they had betrayed each other.
For the memory of her father's fortune, kept safe all these years while Martha Grace lived on what remained from the cost of that diamond, and then on Simon's money.
When Father Duplenticy then dares her to confess her darkest sin, she has cried all her tears and she is decided.
She will tell Jefferson everything.
8.
But she had forgotten, in that moment, who Jefferson is. What Jefferson is.
In the first few years after her father's death, she had been full of plans for what to do with the money. Even if she never used it, she had planned to tell Jefferson at his wedding, as her gift to him.
Jefferson had never married. When she's thought of it since then, she's thought about giving it to a worthy girl, one who is friendless and like her. She's also thought about leaving it there, a jewel lost to the ages, a mystery for her dog-eared paperbacks.
She hadn't planned to tell Jefferson. Hadn't he done what his grandfather had done and abandoned her for the church? Hadn't he become his grandfather, in time, a little man full of hate for her, who can only rise by standing on her?
But he is her priest and he is her son and she tells him and--
And he's worse than her father. He'd broken his vows, he had fathered a child, he had brought that child back, and he is now choosing that child ahead of the church. He is going to abandon everything, take the diamond, and reinvent himself.
Martha Grace Wicks can not allow that to happen.
9.
She screams. She cries. She holds her knees to her chest and rocks back and forth. Little Martha Grace, the little rich girl, bereft of her mother far too soon, scorned by her father, abandoned by her lover. Who killed her father, who killed her son, who no one ever loved except for Samson, and oh, she's killed him, too. In her selfishness and fear and anger and hatred, she has lost the only person who mattered, the only one to ever listen to her, the only one to ever see her.
She has the diamond and she has nothing else. Nothing.
Is this how her father felt at the end, staring into his fate and not recognizing his daughter in front of him? That confusion he had shown: she feels it now. It is a fog. It is called grief and it is called darkness and it called her soul, looking back at her from her mirror. Her face is the same as it has always been, but the person it reflects is a mystery that cannot be solved by anyone except God.
She will meet Him soon.
10.
She misread the dose on the poison. She was hasty. In burning humiliation and terror, she awakens in the ambulance, hooked up to machines, with Father Duplenticy standing over her.
He smiles down at her, a beautiful smile, a sad smile.
He says something she cannot hear and then the ambulance bumps on the road and all sound comes rushing into her ears.
He called a lawyer for her, who will meet her at the hospital.
Her father's diamond is in her pocket. She can feel the firmness of its sin digging into her flesh. She has no strength to throw it away from her with all her might.
She closes her eyes. She ignores her ears. She breathes simply, in and out, and thinks of a vast desert with Samson on the other side, waiting for her, with Simon, and her mother, and everyone she killed.
She cries for the life she didn't live and for the one she did. For Grace, for Martha, for the girl she was when the world was kind and she still believed in goodness.
It seems so far away.