My mother in law Vivian sat on the porch swing of her old farmhouse in the hills outside Asheville, rocking slowly, with the folder of photographs on her knees and the note in her hand. I am Holly Tremaine, forty six years old, and I had driven there that morning with my heart in my throat. The folder held pictures of me, taken from a car, in the grocery lot, at the house of my sister, and at the Parkway overlook. The note said, in block letters, “Half the money, or the accident happens on the Parkway.” Vivian said, “Brent did not write this, honey. I know exactly who did.”
She told me the name slowly, as if each syllable cost her. Dale Tremaine, the older brother of Brent, forty nine years old, who had run a trucking business into ruin and had lived for ten years off the loans of his younger brother. Dale had known about the two hundred and sixty thousand dollars, the half of the savings that I had taken when I left, and he had known that Brent, in the haze of the cocaine, owed the same man in Charlotte a great deal more. Dale had decided that the money should come back to the family, and that he would be the family.
I sat down on the porch step with my hands shaking. I had left Brent because of the drugs and the lies, not because I thought he was wicked. I had been afraid of him for months, and I had taken the money out of terror, with a plan to give half of it back once he was in treatment. The idea that all this time it had been his brother, taking photographs of me from a gray sedan on the Parkway, turned my stomach. Vivian reached out and took my hand in her thin, spotted one.
A note found beside a folder of photographs gave one daughter in law the morning to bring a family back to the truth near Asheville.
I gave my terms to Vivian across the swing, as calmly as I could. “I will not pay Dale one cent. I am taking the folder to the sheriff of Buncombe County this afternoon, and to a lawyer in town. And I would like Brent to hear all of it from me, in a room with a counselor present. If he wants to go into treatment, I will pay for the first ninety days out of the money I took. I will not go back to him, Vivian. But I will not let him be destroyed by his own brother.”
Vivian wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. “Holly,” she said, “I have been ashamed of that boy Dale since he was fifteen years old. I should have stopped him then. I let him steal from his own mother, and from his brother, and I called it family. The photographs, the note, it is all my fault, for never saying no.” She paused. “He is coming here at noon today. He told me on the telephone. He wants to ask me for the deed to this farm.”
We did not have to wait long. At noon exactly, a gray sedan turned in at the mailbox, and Dale Tremaine got out, a big man in a dark windbreaker, who walked up the gravel with an envelope in his hand. He saw me on the porch and stopped. His face went slack. Then he saw the folder in the hands of his mother, and the note, and he dropped the envelope. In one motion he lunged up the steps, snatched the folder out of her lap, and sprinted for his car, with the photographs spilling behind him like leaves. He did not reach the car. Across the yard, from behind the corn crib, stepped three old men in overalls, neighbors of Vivian, who had come over on her call at eleven that morning to help her bring in the last of the squash. They had been quietly waiting on her instruction. One of them, a seventy year old with a white beard, put out a boot, and Dale went headlong into the gravel. The others sat on him, gently, and held his arms while Vivian walked down from the porch. She stood over her son.
“Dale,” she said, in a voice I had never heard from her, “you will go with the sheriff, and you will say what you did. And then you will go home and think about the woman you frightened.” Dale put his face in the gravel and did not move. When the deputy arrived, twenty minutes later, there were forty photographs strewn across the yard, and the three old men stood in a row beside them, with their hats off, like honor guards. Vivian took my arm, and we went up the steps together.
The money consequences were tidy. Dale was charged with stalking and extortion and entered a plea. Brent went into a ninety day program in Black Mountain, and came out clean and ashamed and quiet. I kept my two hundred and sixty thousand dollars, with a quarter of it set aside for his treatment and the remainder invested for my own new life. Brent and I met once, in the office of a counselor, and he thanked me for the photographs, which he said had finally made him look.
In the name of my father Roy, who passed in 2012, I started the Roy Tremaine Fund. It pays for treatment beds, safety planning and legal help for women leaving unsafe marriages, in Buncombe, Henderson and Madison counties. In the first year we placed twenty six women in safe housing and helped forty one with protective orders. One was a young mother from Weaverville who had been followed home for weeks by her brother in law. She sent me a drawing from her daughter of a house with a yellow door.
On a golden afternoon in October, Vivian and I drove the Parkway together, slowly, in her old truck, with the windows down. We stopped at the overlook where the photographs had been taken, and we stood at the rail looking out over the blue folds of the mountains. She slid her arm through mine. “Holly,” she said, “you are still my daughter, whatever the papers say.” I told her I knew. And for the first time in two years, I felt no fear at all.
