My Sweet Annie

43

May 28, 2018

I decided to do it today. I am not getting any younger, and neither is he. I had a choice: ask for the truth, or be content with never knowing.

Royal has never come back to this house. I think the last time he was here was the Christmas before he got married. At first, he was busy as a new husband, and busy with his studies, and then he was busy with his family, and busy with his church. He always said being back here reminded him too much of Mom, because we lost her when she was relatively young, and he loved her so much. He said it was just too painful.

Now I've begun to suspect it's another reason that has kept him away from here for so long.

I called him up yesterday and asked him if I could go and see him. That we needed to talk. I even told him what I wanted to talk about. Anna. It's just as well that Mary Ellen is in a nursing home now because we could meet at Royal's apartment and have a private discussion.

He was as anxious as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. He sounded it on the phone and he looked it when I got there and I knew that he knew I'd found out about the baby at the least.

If only that was all I suspected.

I told him: "I need to know what happened the night you put Francis down."

I wasn't going to tell him why I suspected something else had happened that night. I didn't tell him I'd seen Anna, a ghost, still a girl, haunting our house, our land. A place where she would only linger on if it was the last place she'd lived.

Lord, to look at that man. He had such a bleakness in his eyes. He said he'd tell me everything but he needed a little courage.

I sat in the living room and waited as he went into the kitchen to fix us a drink. He has never been much of a drinker, but every now and then he would have a little whiskey, always neat, because if it's worth drinking it's worth drinking plain. I don't drink alcohol, never have, so he brought me out some lemonade instead.

I don't know why or how it occurred to me, but I reached into my purse and turned on the sound recorder on my phone while he was in the kitchen. I use that gadget all the time to remember grocery lists and painting ideas and whatnot while I am out and about, but I had never used it for something so important before.

He told me it all. Everything that happened. I expected to have to drag it out of him, but maybe it's true what people say. When a man has done something awful, he's all but waiting to confess. My brother is no hardened criminal and no serial killer, but he broke all the same.

Royal asked me if I was going to go to the police. I told him I didn't know. I asked him why he had never said anything to anybody, and he said it was because of his family. Mary Ellen, Ellen, James—now he has grandchildren, too. He asked me not to take them away from him. Told me he doesn't have long left.

I told him I needed time to think. Anna had family, too. She had people who loved her. They've gone all this time without knowing what happened to her.

I didn't tell him that her spirit is restless, and that she needs peace.

Lord, I wish I could give her that peace. I wish I had it in me to call the police right now and turn my brother in for what he did. But I don't.

He's my only brother. There are so few of us. His children are adults, but I still can't bear the thought of putting them through what I went through as a girl, sending their father away to prison, taking him away from them.

Did my father mean to hurt people? Did he really understand what he was doing when he did it? Was he a bad man? I don't know. I don't think so.

And Royal...he was just a boy.

Ten years. Fifteen years. That's the absolute best he has left. Can I send him to prison for the rest of his life?

I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to tear these pages out and burn them. Delete that recording with everything he said. Try, somehow, to talk to Anna, to set her spirit to rest.

Oh, Anna, I wish I could offer you justice. I wish I could offer you more. I don't know what's right. I only know what is within my power.

This has all made me physically sick. I am so tired I am dizzy with it. My head is aching like nothing before. Perhaps I've caught the flu on top of all this.

I need to lie down. I will figure this out in the morning.