and sienna.Her mother’s lips
and bird feather hands.
But …
When she turns her head
just so,
The indigo eyes are
flecked with amber.
The hair,
streaked with gold.
She is not her mother
at all.
—Paul Macelli
Prologue
Christmas 1990
THERE WAS CHEER IN THE HOUSE IN THE HEART of Manteo. From the outside, the large two-story frame building that served as the battered women’s shelter was nondescript. There were no Christmas lights hanging from the eaves, not even a wreath on the door, as if the people who ran the house were afraid to draw attention to it, and Lacey supposed they were. Cruel men had put the women and children here, the sort of men she had no experience with and found hard to imagine. But she could see the fear in the women’s faces and knew those men existed. More than that, she did not really want to know.
Although there was no sign of the season outside the house, inside was another story. Fresh garlands decorated the railing that led up to the bedrooms, and branches of holly were piled on top of the huge old mantel. The scent of pine was so strong it had seared Lacey’s nostrils when she first walked inside. A huge tree stood in the corner of the living room, decorated with white lights and colored glass balls and topped by one of her mother’s stained glass angels. The tree was alive, and Lacey did not need to ask if that was her mother’s doing. Of course it was. Annie O’Neill always insisted on live trees. They had one at home, and Lacey knew both trees would be taken inland, away from the sandy soil of the Outer Banks, to be planted once the Christmas season was over.
She had not wanted to come to the battered women’s shelter tonight. She’d wanted to stay home and listen to her new CDs and try on her new jeans with the rivets down the sides. She’d wanted to talk to her best friend, Jessica, on the phone to compare the gifts they’d received and decide what movie they would see the following afternoon. But her mother had insisted.
“You have so much,” she’d said to Lacey the week before. “You will have already opened your presents and had Christmas dinner with me and Daddy and Clay. These women and their children will have nothing. Less than nothing. They’ll have fear for Christmas, Lacey.” Her mother spoke with great drama, the way she always did. “Their families will be torn apart,” she continued. “Serving them dinner, singing a few carols with them—that’s the least we can do, don’t you think?”
Now, standing behind the long tables and dishing out Christmas dinner to the women and children, Lacey was glad she had come. At thirteen, she was certainly the youngest of the volunteers, and she felt proud of herself, proud of her kindness and generosity. She was just like her mother, whom all the other volunteers turned to for direction. Annie O’Neill was the most important person in the room. The tree in the corner probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for her mother. The buffet tables would probably hold half as much food. Maybe the entire shelter would not be here if it weren’t for Annie. Lacey wasn’t sure about that, but it seemed a real possibility to her.
She smiled at the women as she spooned green beans onto their plates. Six women, some of them still bearing the bruises that had sent them to the shelter, and more than a dozen children filed past the tables, balancing real china plates. Her mother had insisted that all the volunteers bring their good china for the women and their children to use. “They can’t eat Christmas dinner off paper plates,” Lacey had heard her say to one of the volunteers a few weeks before. At the time, she thought her mother was just being silly, but now she could see how much the beautiful plates and the cloth napkins and the glittery lights from the tree meant to these women. They needed every speck of beauty and warmth they could get right now.
Outside, a cold rain beat against the house’s wood siding and thrummed steadily against the windows. It had rained all day, a cold and icy rain, and she and her mother had skidded a couple of times as they drove to Manteo.
“Remember how it snowed on Christmas last year?” her mother had said as Lacey complained about the rain. “Let’s just pretend this is snow.”
Her mother was an excellent pretender. She could make any situation fun by twisting it around so that it was better than it really was. Lacey was too old for that sort of pretending, but her mother could always charm her into just about anything. So, they’d talked about how beautiful the snow-covered scenery was as they passed it, how the housetops were thick with white batting and how the whitecaps on the ocean to their left were really an icy concoction of snow and froth. The dunes at Jockey’s Ridge were barely visible through the rain, but her mother said they looked like smooth white mountains rising up from the earth. They pretended the rain falling against the windshield of the car was really snowflakes. Lacey had to put her fingers in her ears to block out the pounding of the rain in order to really imagine that, but then she could see it—the wipers collecting the snow and brushing it from the car. It fluttered past the passenger side window like puffs of white feathers.
“The first Noel …” Her mother began to sing now as she used salad tongs to set a small pile of greens on the plate of a young girl, and the other volunteers joined in the carol. It took Lacey a bashful minute or two to join in herself, and the beaten-looking women standing in line took even longer, but soon nearly everyone was singing. The smiles in the room, some of them self-conscious and timid, others overflowing with gratitude, caused Lacey to blink back tears that had filled her eyes so quickly she had not been prepared for them.
A tall woman smiled at Lacey from across the table, nudging her son to hold his plate out for some green beans. The woman was singing “Oh Christmas Tree” along with the group, but her doe-eyed son was silent, his lips pressed so tightly together that it looked as though no song would ever again emerge from between them. He was shorter than Lacey but probably around her age, and she smiled at him as she spooned the beans onto his plate. He looked at her briefly, but then his gaze was caught by something behind her, and his mouth suddenly popped open in surprise. Or maybe, she wondered later, in fear. His mother had stopped singing, too. She dropped the good china plate filled with turkey and mashed potatoes, and it clattered to the floor as she stared past the volunteers toward the door of the room. Lacey was afraid to turn around to see what had put such fear in the woman’s eyes. One by one, though, the women and children and volunteers did turn, and the singing stopped. By the time Lacey could force herself to look toward the door, the only sound remaining in the room was the beating of the rain on the windows.
A huge man stood in the doorway of the room. He was not fat, but his bulk seemed to fill every inch of the doorway from jamb to jamb. His big green peacoat was sopping wet, his brown hair was plastered to his forehead and his eyes were glassy beneath heavy brows. Held between his two pale, thick, shivering hands was a gun.
No one screamed, as if the screams had already been beaten out of these women. But there were whispered gasps—”Oh, my God” and “Who is he?”—as the women quietly grabbed their children and pulled them beneath the tables or into the hallway. Lacey felt frozen in place, the spoonful of green beans suspended in the air. The tall woman who’d dropped her plate seemed paralyzed as well. The doe-eyed boy at her side said, “Daddy,” and made a move toward the man, but the woman caught his shoulder and held him fast, her knuckles white against the navy blue
