Sleeping Beauty (23 page)

***

Neill watched her face as they rode up in the elevator. She was so wrapped up in her thoughts that he wasn't sure she'd even noticed that they were almost back to their room. He'd watched her tonight, too, seeing the way she opened up to the warmth of his brother's family, talking to his niece and sister-in-law, holding the baby, her eyes soft and tender as she looked down at him.

The need to see her holding his child had caught him by surprise. He'd never given much thought to having children of his own, putting it in the category of maybe, someday. But he wanted to see Anne's belly round with his baby, wanted to hold a child that had been born of the love he felt for her, the love he was nearly sure she returned.

He opened the door to their room, stepping back to let her enter first. Watching her cross the room, he thought of how pretty she looked and of how much he loved her. He opened his mouth to say one or the other and was amazed by what came out instead.

"Anne? Tell me about Brooke," he said softly.

Anne had been about to set her purse on the table. It hit the floor instead, and she stared blankly down at it for a moment, gathering her thoughts, telling herself that his question didn't really mean what it so obviously meant. She bent to pick up the purse, taking her time, trying to still the nervous chatter in her head. Setting it on the table, she turned to look at him, her expression calm, faintly surprised.

"What do you mean?"

"I know what happened to her, Anne."

Shock flared in her eyes, and her head jerked back as if recoiling from a physical blow. There was a thick, painful silence, and, when she spoke, her voice sounded thin in her own ears. "What do you...how did you find out?"

"I looked it up at the library."

"The library?" It seemed ridiculous that he could have leamed about her sister's murder in such a prosaic way. "Were you looking for something else?"

For an instant Neill considered letting her believe that. She could hardly blame him for stumbling across the information, could she? But he wasn't going to lie to her about something that was so important to her.

"I went there to find out what had happened to your sister," he admitted steadily and felt something twist in his chest at the hurt in her eyes. He wanted to go to her, put his arms around her and hold her until that look went away. But this time, he was the one who'd caused her pain, and he was just going to have to live with that guilt

"Why?" She sounded bewildered. "Why would you want to know about something that happened so long ago?"

Neill slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans as protection against the urge to take hold of her. "It was obvious that whatever happened to her was still very much a part of your life. When that guy tried to mug you, you were more terrified that people would find out than you were by what had happened. You said that you didn't want anyone to know, because they'd remember and look at you. You even started to say Brooke's name." He shrugged. "It wasn't hard to guess that whatever you were afraid of had something to do with her death."

"Why didn't you ask me about it?" Anne's mouth felt numb, the words hard to shape. She hadn't realized until now how much she'd counted on him not knowing about her sister's murder. Freed of the burden of his knowledge, she had been able to be someone else, someone whose life wasn't defined by her sister's death. Finding out that he knew about the murder made her feel like she'd been caught out in a lie, as if he must have known all along that she wasn't what she was pretending to be.

"I did ask," he reminded her gently. "You said she was dead and that it was a long time ago. You told me you didn't want to talk about it, so I went looking. I'm a writer, Anne. Research is a big part of what I do for a living."

"And you felt you had the right to pry into my private life."

Neill's brows rose at the sharpness of her tone. He wasn't sure what he'd expected, but it wasn't the anger that darkened her eyes to stormy gray. Then again, he would rather deal with anger than tears.

"Since it was in all the papers at the time, it wasn't exactly private," he said evenly. "And it was obvious that, whatever had happened, it was still very much a part of your life, a part of who you are. I wanted to know what it was."

"Did it ever occur to you that it was none of your business?" Rage bubbled up in Anne's chest, a sharp acid heat. His knowledge was a betrayal. "You had no right." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she spun away, hands clenched at her sides. "No right."

Looking at her rigid back, Neill searched for the right words to make her understand why he'd felt as if he did have the right to know what had happened to Brooke. Before he could formulate them, Anne spoke again.

"She was murdered, but we never use that word,'' she said casually, the way she might have commented that it looked like rain. "My family, I mean. When it comes up, which it almost never does, no one ever says, "Brooke was murdered! We just say she died." She swung around to face him, her mouth quirked in a humorless little smile. "You know that routine George Carlin does about the seven dirty words? In my family, murder is number eight." She looked down, smoothing her fingers over an invisible wrinkle in her skirt "Funny, isn't it? As if using a different word changes what happened."

"What did happen?" Neill resisted the urge to go to her, to pull her into his arms and tell her not to talk about it anymore, not to even think about it. There had already been too much of that in her life.

"You read the newspaper reports. You already know what happened."

"I'd rather hear it from you."

She hesitated, then shrugged, as if it didn't matter to her. "The papers were pretty accurate. Jack was supposed to pick her up after school, but he was late. When he got there, she was gone. He figured she'd gotten a ride home with someone else. He and some friends went out for hamburgers. My parents thought Brooke was with him, so no one knew she was missing until Jack got home." Anne folded a series of tiny pleats in the fabric of her skirt, then smoothed them out again. "I was ten when it happened. I remember my father started making phone calls. I can still hear the strain in his voice, and I couldn't understand why he was so upset, because Brooke was all the time spending the night with a friend. When I asked if something was wrong, my mother hushed me and sent me to bed.

"It was two weeks before they...found her. I was so scared but no one would tell me anything. And then, suddenly my parents were saying Brooke was dead, but no one would tell me what had happened to her. Just that she'd died. I suppose they thought I was too young to be told what had really happened."

So instead they'd left her at the mercy of her imagination,
Neill thought. And their well-intentioned silence had probably frightened her more than the truth could have.

"It must have been terrifying for you!" he said, keeping his tone neutral.

"I suppose." Anne moved over to the window, staring blindly out at the lights of the city as she tried to order her thoughts. She'd never talked about this. The topic had been forbidden in her family, buried away like a guilty secret. It was only in the last couple of years, after she'd moved into the cottage, away from her mother's control, that she'd even let herself think about it.

"They quarreled the day before it happened," she murmured, almost as if talking to herself. "My mother and Brooke. They were always quarreling about something. When I got older, I could look back and see that it was because they were so much alike. My mother is the original steel magnolia, velvet over pure steel. Brooke didn't bother to coat the steel in quite such a pretty cover. My mother wanted her to be a debutante—all virginal dresses and soft voice. Brooke wore red spandex and blue jeans.

"They clashed constantly, especially after Brooke started dating. I didn't understand much of it at the time but, over the years, I've pieced together what was happening. Brooke was sleeping around—or my mother thought she was. My room was next door to Brooke's, and I remember hearing them fight over the fact that Brooke was taking birth control pills. It was just after her sixteenth birthday. She was furious that Mom had gone through her room, and Mom was saying that she wasn't going to let her daughter act like a slut.

''They went back and forth, and Brooke finally shouted that if Mom didn't get off her back, she was going to go fuck the whole football team. It was the first time I'd ever heard anyone say that word," she mused. "I didn't even really know what it meant, but I looked it up in the dictionary afterwards."

Anne fingered the edge of the drape, her eyes distant, focused on the past. "Mom slapped her. It was such an ugly sound. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but I just sat there, frozen in place, afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. Brooke didn't cry. I don't think she said anything at all. She just left. She didn't come back that night, and I heard Mom and Dad arguing in their room. I couldn't hear what they were saying. I didn't want to hear. I remember lying in bed, wondering if Brooke had run away, wondering if Mom would love me more if Brooke wasn't there anymore. But Brooke came home the next day, and everything went back to the way it was before, except that, after that, she and Mom fought constantly. They fought about Brooke's clothes, about the boys she dated, about her grades, about where she was going to go to college. It was so constant that, after a while, I stopped hearing it.

"The day before...it happened, they quarreled over me. I was ten, and Brooke did my makeup. Mom was furious with her. With us. She accused Brooke of trying to turn me into a slut, too, and told me to go wash my face. I told her not to be mad at Brooke. We were just having fun. She grabbed my shoulder, and I can still remember the way her fingers dug into my skin."

She reached up to touch her shoulder, as if touching an old bruise. "She looked at me like she hated me, I've never forgotten the look in her eyes." She was silent for a moment, and then sighed and spoke softly. "The next day, Brooke disappeared. For a long time, I thought it was my fault.''

Neill stared abruptly, but Anne shook her head before he could speak. ''I know it wasn't I figured that out a long time ago, but children are so egocentric, and, at first, when we thought Brooke had run away, I thought it was because she and Mom had fought about me. And when they...found her, all I could think of was that sometimes I'd wished she'd go away so Mom could love me best."

She turned to look at him, her smile holding a rueful amusement for the child she'd been. "There's nothing like a ten-year-old girl for conjuring up guilt. If we'd been Catholic, I probably would have decided to enter a convent As it was, I did everything I could to make up for Brooke's death. For a long time I tried to become Brooke, only I was going to be the good Brooke, the one my mother had wanted her to be. I got straight A's in school, and I wore clothes I knew my mother would approve of. I guess I'm still wearing them," she murmured, smoothing a hand over the soft peach-colored skirt.

''And I didn't date. I don't know. ..I still don't know if Brooke was promiscuous." She frowned a little. "I don't think she was. I know she and David dated for most of her senior year. I don't want to think that she was...careless with her favors. But I made sure that I never was. Not that I had to beat the boys off with a stick," she added with a self-deprecating smile. ''Since everyone knew what had happened, they all treated me with extra care. I don't think there was a boy in the whole school who would have dared to try and get out of line with me. The couple of dates I did have, they treated me like I might shatter if they breathed too heavily in my direction!" Her laugh didn't quite conceal the hurt she'd felt. "It didn't matter, really, because, no matter how hard I tried to fill Brooke's shoes, I didn't have her looks or her personality." Anne sighed, remembering. "She was so beautiful."

Neill thought of the pictures he'd seen. Brooke had looked like exactly what she had been— a girl teetering on the brink of maturity. She'd been very pretty, with the promise of beauty, but without the character to back it up yet. But he knew Anne wouldn't believe him. In the years since her death, reality had been blurred, and Brooke had become the prettiest, the brightest, the most charming girl ever to have lived. He'd seen it before, the need to almost deify a loved one once they were gone, as if remembering their faults—their humanity— might be somehow disloyal.

"Anne, you can't spend your whole life trying to make up for your sister's death."

"No, I know that. It took me awhile to figure it out, but I finally did."

She was suddenly aware of a deep exhaustion.

She'd let herself feel more in the last two weeks than she ever had in her life. Maybe saying that she'd ''let" herself feel wasn't quite accurate, either, because, from the moment Neill had come into her life, she hadn't really had any choice. He'd stirred something in her that she hadn't known existed, made her want things she'd never even let herself think about before.

And now, somehow, she'd told him about Brooke, something she'd never talked to anyone about, not even Lisa, who was the only person she knew willing to mention Brooke's name. Now it was out in the open, and she felt drained and almost dizzy, as if the things she'd said had been a weight inside that was suddenly gone.

''I'm...very tired," she said slowly. "Would you mind very much if I went to bed now?"

Neill saw that she was nearly swaying on her feet and crossed to her in two quick strides, catching her up in his arms.