The Deadly Sister (15 page)

M
aybe Maya couldn’t stand the idea of being by herself after having lived alone for so many days. Maybe she wanted to bond and was finally planning on letting me inside. Maybe that crazy basement room of hers was too depressing. Whatever the reason, she showed up in my doorway as I was preparing for bed. I pulled back the comforter and she slid in.

I got up to pee during the night, and when I came back, I could see Maya’s eyes gleaming. I wondered if she’d slept at all—she’d been tossing all night. “Where did Veronica have you stay?” I asked once it was obvious neither of us would be falling asleep anytime soon.

“One of the art professors at the junior college is on sabbatical,” she whispered. “Veronica had a key to water his plants, so she let me stay there. It wasn’t too bad. There was premium cable. Some hilarious gay porn hidden under the bed.”

We fell into a comfortable late-night silence. “Blake’s looking for you,” I said after a while.

“You met Blake? Jeez, what didn’t you do to try to help me?”

Maya was proud of me, for once, and I wasn’t about to
start unloading my frustrations and jinx it. “I was worried about you. Anyway, Blake claims you have some money that Jefferson owed her. Fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Wow.”

“Do you?”

“No, of course not. I’d be totally gone if I did. Do you think Jefferson would trust me with any of his money? He paid me in drugs.”

“Are you still…getting high?”

“No way. I treated my undercover time as a sort of accidental detox program.”

“Good idea.”

“Don’t start thinking of me as some kind of saint. It’s not like I had much of an option.”

“I guess the only reason I bring up Blake is to make sure you don’t go finding her. It wouldn’t be pretty. She’s mad.”

“I’m not going to go finding anyone. If I have my way, I’ll be hanging out at home for a good long time.”

“No going back to school, huh?”

“Bah. Why start now? Maybe I’ll start studying for my GED again. Except without any hot tutors this time.” She ran a hand through her hair. She hadn’t showered yet, and didn’t seem to have cleaned up for quite a few days. “You know,” she said, “I think Blake could have done it. Killed Jefferson.”

“I’ve thought of that,” I said.

“Think about it. Jefferson was skimming off the top of
their deals. She couldn’t let that go unpunished. She had plenty of excuse to be royally pissed.”

“And did you see those arms?” I said. “Girl is buff. But still, while we’re on the topic, what do you think of Brian being guilty?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to believe. He’s so…quiet. Sweet. But then again, that’s what they always say about killers on the news.”

“What about Rose?”

Maya snorted. “Totally capable. But why would she kill Jefferson? She probably would have killed
me
first. Or done some gory double homicide type thing.”

“Well, you weren’t there. Who knows what actually went down?”

“Who else are you thinking?”

I sighed. I guessed I could’ve offered Cheyenne, too, but that still didn’t seem likely to me, despite the blackmail Jefferson had on her with the plagiarized essays and her new position as recipient of the Florida’s Scholars money. “Nobody.”

“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Maya said sleepily. “I don’t want to keep letting my life revolve around Jefferson. He can’t have even more power over me dead than he did alive. That just can’t happen.”

“Okay,” I said, snuggling close to her. “Then we won’t let him.”

But of course he did. We knew our lives would revolve around him for a long time, possibly forever. It was thanks
to him that we hardly slept that night. It was thanks to him that, somewhere over the course of her dreams, Maya screamed.

The sound woke me up, and I curled around her while I dozed. She quickly fell back asleep, but I never did. I lay there, not daring to move in case I woke her. Poor wild creature, scared and trusting. I could only lie there for so long, though, before my thoughts started skidding and I began to bug out. There was no way I’d be doing any sleeping. I untangled myself from her, placing a pillow against her so she would still think I was there, then headed down the hallway.

The door to our parents’ room was slightly ajar, as was their habit. I peeked in as I went down the hall to the bathroom. I could see Mom on the far side of the bed, her body curved toward the wall, head shrouded by the pillow she kept draped over it to drown out Dad’s snores. I ducked my head inside the door to see whether Dad was there next to her.

He wasn’t.

M
aya,” I said, shaking her awake. “Maya!”

“What?” she groaned, disoriented. “Let me sleep!”

“It’s Dad,” I whispered. “He’s out front, waiting for someone. I think he called the police.”

She sat up, swiped at her face. “What?”

“Get your shoes on, now!” I was already tossing things around the room. Maya grabbed a pair of flip-flops. She was wearing only that, a T-shirt over bra and panties and a pair of flip-flops, as she dashed with me down the back stairs.

I wished I had a few more seconds to think. My mom had made my dad replace the sectional sofa the night before, so we could get out the back door…but what then?

“Where do we go?” I asked, my voice panicky.

“We take your car,” Maya said.

“No,” I said sharply. “My car’s in front, where Dad is. We can’t risk him stopping us.”

It was all decided by a crash. Dad had knocked over a lamp in the hallway. Maya glanced back and screamed. I was vaguely aware of a large shape bearing down on us. I snatched Maya’s arm and pulled us through the back door.

We skirted the pool and made for the fence. I put one
foot against the gray slats and hoisted Maya over. Once she had crashed to the other side I followed. I glanced back while I went over the top and saw Dad surging across the grass.

We landed in a thicket of tall reeds, a creek running among them. We could follow it in either direction, and if we made it a few dozen feet before my dad got there and were careful not to rustle the plants, we had a chance of his not knowing which way we went. Maya broke right, so I followed her.

We crashed through the creek. I could think of nothing beyond raising a foot out of the water when it was too deep, or bending back a branch when it was in the way. All I could hear was the gloop of heels pulling through muck; all I could see were gray dawn sky and the reeds and Maya’s chopped hair and the tattoo above her waistband, the dark flowery void that had once read
Jefferson.

Finally, we slowed and paused, listening for sounds of my dad. There weren’t any. We’d stumbled upon the perfect escape route—Dad could have gotten in his car and followed us if we’d gone out the front; by breaking for the creek we used our only advantage, our small size. As she cleared a fallen log I saw Maya’s bare feet and realized she’d lost her flip-flops. She was bleeding from small scratches along her neck and around her shoulders. I wondered at my own wounds—I couldn’t feel any pain, but that was surely thanks to adrenaline.

“I guess we keep going along the creek?” Maya said. It
was really our only option—the vegetation at the edges had thickened, so there was no shore to exit onto.

It was only when we began to move forward again at our slower pace that I realized it—we were heading for the Bend.

Pulse thumping, I tried to think of a way to avoid it. But taking the creek in the other direction would mean going back by my house and getting caught.

It might have taken me miles to run there that horrible morning, but by the direct route of the creek we would be there within minutes. My mind spun, my movements became jerky. But I didn’t say anything to Maya—what good would that do?

And then we’d arrived. Yellow police tape dragged in the current. The gravel at the edge was mussed where Jefferson had tried to pull himself onto land. Flipper marks streaked the mud at the shore, where the police’s diving teams must have launched to search for evidence.

This was where Jefferson’s last hot breaths had been lost in dirt and sludge. Where he had wondered, dazzled and gasping, at the sudden horror of his own death.

“What?” Maya said. I must have stopped moving without realizing it. She was already past the scene, almost around the corner. “What’s wrong?”

Of course she didn’t sense anything was wrong. She hadn’t been the one to find his body. She didn’t know this was the exact spot where Jefferson had finally given up and died.

“This is where I found him,” I said.

“Oh,” Maya said. It was a warm morning, but she was shivering. “Oh, Jesus.”

She finally noticed the police tape trailing in the current, the upturned soil at the water’s edge. I watched her face collapse in front of me, her large eyes close and only slowly re-open. Then she shook off the moment. “Let’s keep going, okay?” she said.

She was right. I followed her determinedly, tried to stop imagining disintegrated bits of Jefferson mingled in the water, molecules of his blood in the eddies around my feet.

The ravine finally sloped and rejoined civilization. We scrambled up a greenish cement drainage ditch and came out at the empty end of a Home Depot parking lot. “I can’t go out there,” Maya said, sensibly. “I’m almost naked.”

I wasn’t much better—soaked pajama bottoms with a layer of algae and river grass caking the hem, mud-splattered T-shirt—but she certainly looked much worse. At least I had pants on, after all. Besides, I didn’t think she could pull off what I’d have to do. “Okay,” I said, “you wait behind the tree line. I’ll go see if someone in there will let me use their cell phone.”

As I crossed to the store entrance, I couldn’t imagine going through with it, being that crazy girl in the crazy rags crazily asking to use someone’s cell phone. But as soon as I started walking, I
was
that girl. I decided to try the customer service desk first. It seemed more proper, somehow.

The manager on duty was burly and old, with a rim of
bright silver hair circling a bald perfect circle. He had started smiling at me long before I asked if I could use his phone. I pulled my wet shirt away from my boobs.

“Some days don’t go your way, do they?” he said.

“I’d like to make a call.”

“Want to walk me through what you’ve been up to? You been, what, off playing in the creek with some of your friends? You lose your teammates, sweetheart?”

“Hand. Me. The. Phone.”

He stammered as I changed in his eyes from sex novelty to potential killer. He swiveled the phone to me, handed me the receiver. “Dial nine first. And take your time,” he encouraged, retreating to the opposite side of the customer service desk and immersing himself in a laminated flyer.

I stared at the keypad. Oh god. Hadn’t thought about this part. My initial impulse was to call Cheyenne, but that was the first place my parents would look. Veronica’s was the second. I had to take Maya to someone they wouldn’t think of. Someone with experience in breaking the law. Even if it was a big risk.

I dialed, and Keith answered.

M
aya and I looked like hungover mermaids, but Blake and Keith didn’t even mention it. They just ushered us into the backseat and sped off toward their apartment. The only sign they made that even acknowledged our weird state was when Blake ran a finger down a muddy streak on Maya’s thigh and suggested we take showers as soon as we arrived. I let Maya go first—she’d been shivering on the drive over, and I wanted to see her cleaned up and in warm clothes as soon as possible.

Keith, Blake, and I sat on the couch. They’d put a towel down under me so I wouldn’t ruin the upholstery. It was instantly wet.

“So,” Blake said, “you planning on telling us what happened?”

I told her that I’d called Maya back at the urging of my parents, only to be betrayed by our father. That we couldn’t go back. That Maya was—and I didn’t realize it until I said it, not fully—a fugitive from justice, and that I was aiding her. “Abetting,” I said, impressed despite myself by the formal term, by my newfound familiarity with the daily danger of Keith and Blake’s lives.

Once it became clear they weren’t going to kill us, I
decided Keith and Blake were actually a great choice to turn to. Who was less likely to turn in a couple of criminal young ladies, after all, than drug dealers? Christ, what a foursome we made.

They only spoke to me, not to each other, but nevertheless they were holding their own private conversation. Keith transmitted his thoughts to Blake through the long fingertips grazing her shoulder, and Blake responded by quivering her lip or darning her eyebrows. I watched something deflate inside Blake; now that she’d seen how pathetic we looked, she was satisfied that Maya and I weren’t crafty schemers cheating her out of her money. “You and Maya can stay as long as you need,” she said finally, smack in the middle of one of my rambling sentences.

“Thank you! Thank you so much,” I said.

“It’s Saturday morning—back to bed, waffles at noon?” Keith proposed to Blake, smirking. I glanced at the clock—8:50. Not even nine in the morning, and what a full day it had already been.

Maya came out of the bathroom right as Blake and Keith had finished stripping and arranging themselves in bed. She rummaged through a drawer, found a clean pair of Keith’s underwear to put on, and handed me her towel. I thanked her and took it into the bathroom.

The shower curtain rail was white and slimy, the tiles grouted in stripes of green-black bacteria, but how good that shower felt! At first it was just the joy of seeing mud run off
my legs and stopper the drain until it gurgled away, my feet pink and healthy against the vanishing black, and then it was the heat, that cleansing heat. But beyond the amazing physical sensations, it was having time by myself to think, time in which no one was going to start bringing me fresh dramas. In the shower I didn’t have to plan my life. How good it felt to let go, even if for just fifteen minutes.

When I came out, Maya was already snoozing in the bed with Blake and Keith. I opened the drawer she’d sifted through and picked out clean(ish) briefs, a pair of sweatpants, and a soft wrinkled dress shirt. I’d go braless, I guessed. A first for Abby Goodwin.

I stood in the middle of the room, unsure of what to do with myself. Snoring filled the apartment.

Before I’d turned to Blake and Keith, I’d been an agent off the map—I might not have been sure of what to do at each turn, but I never had to worry about being personally implicated in the growing investigation. But now I’d officially done wrong in the eyes of my parents and the police. I couldn’t walk outside openly anymore without risking disapproval or even arrest. I was, in short, experiencing what it meant to be Maya.

Maybe it’s a mark of the guilty that they seek out the approval of the innocent. All I knew—no, it wasn’t “knowing,” it was an emotion, as intense and as undeniable as sorrow—was that I didn’t want to spend the next episode of this tortured story in this hideout with Maya, Blake, and Keith. I wanted to be with my parents, mainly, but since that
wasn’t an option, I wanted to be with someone the world hadn’t condemned. Someone clean.

Making sure no one was awake, I took Keith’s phone into the bathroom and called Cheyenne. She picked up immediately, and I could sense the upset in her voice. As I’d guessed, Dad had already called her to see where I was. She promised to lie to him if he called again. She also promised to meet me downstairs within half an hour. I crept downstairs.

I expected to encounter some rough types while I waited, but apparently nine-thirty
A
.
M
. is an off-hour for druggies. Cheyenne pulled up in her old green jalopy, rolled down the window, and yelled out for me to hop in. I loved how she said it so casually, like we were in a seventies TV show and I should jump through the door window, like we were in a carefree world and I hadn’t called her from a drug den to pick me up because I was a fugitive from the police. (A fugitive from my dad? I didn’t really have my dad and the police distinct in my head anymore. They’d pretty much melded.)

“Where’re we going?” she asked.

“Anywhere but here,” I hooted, keeping up our seventies TV show thing.

“All right, ma’am.”

We hit the road. I told her as much as I could. The structure of my world had twisted so quickly recently that nothing I said was in the right order, nothing was a lie and nothing was the truth. I could see her working to keep
everything straight. But I could always rely on the sorting power of her brain; she figured it all out silently and didn’t need to ask any questions.

“What’s going on in
your
life?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She laughed. “Compared to you, absolutely nothing.”

“Talk to me about nothing,” I sighed. “That sounds great.”

“Okay,” Cheyenne said, tapping the wheel. “Why do you think neither of us have had any serious boyfriends?”

“Oh! Heavier than I was expecting, but okay. I guess because all the guys at our school are lame.”

I knew how unlikely that sounded, though. Really? Every single guy at Xavier High? Cheyenne seemed to see through my exaggeration: She got the constipated look she reserved for boys and dissection labs. “But even guys outside of school, you know? It’s not like our town’s empty. I feel so behind the curve. Everyone else has been having sex since forever, but us…nah. I understand me, I know I’m not that pretty, but you—”

“Um, shut up. You’re totally pretty.”

“I’m serious, Abby. What is it? You’ve had a couple of guys, but you got bored with each one after, what, a month? Three weeks?”

“I don’t know. When I fall, I fall hard. But it doesn’t happen that much.”

“How can you be so sure it will, when it never has before?”

I pressed my head against the window and stared at the scenery. For two people without a destination, I realized, we were driving pretty fast. “Where are we going?” I said casually.

“Hmm?” Cheyenne said, not looking up from the road. “You’ll see.”

“No. Absolutely not. No surprises,” I said. “Stop the car.”

But she didn’t slow down. She made a screeching turn, zoomed up a ramp, and suddenly we were on the interstate.

“Cheyenne,” I said, “where are we going?”

No response.

I swallowed against my rising panic. “Cheyenne, where were you the night Jefferson died?”

“I told you. I was at the mall, closing up.”

“At one in the morning?”

“We were doing inventory.”

“I can’t believe that you’d be allowed to be there that late.”

“It’s funny that you bring that up right now,” she said. “Because you’re right—I lied about where I was.”

“Why is that funny?”

“You’ll find out. Isn’t it crazy how everything comes together at once?”

“No!” I said hotly. “I will not ‘find out.’ You’ll tell me right now.”

“Haven’t you realized where we’re going yet?”

“No,” I said bitterly. I was so not in the right mood for a stupid riddle game. And I was scared.

“Veronica’s. We’re going to Veronica’s.”

“Why?”

She shook her head. I couldn’t exactly throw myself out of a moving car, and I didn’t want to say anything that would cause me to lose my best ally, so I sat quietly and seethed. I would have been terrified if my anger hadn’t been so strong.

Veronica was home, of course. And expecting us—incense was burning in the window. She opened the door as we were approaching.

“Hello, my cherubs,” she said.

“Hey, Veronica,” Cheyenne said.

I blinked, looking from one to the other. “You two sure are chummy, aren’t you?” I said.

“Come on, Abby, let’s go,” Cheyenne said, ushering me inside.

Veronica was up to her usual, offering us mimosas, which we accepted and then proceeded not to drink. She wanted to know the latest updates, and listened gravely. It didn’t quite seem like news to her; she nodded before I’d finished each sentence. “Cheyenne,” I concluded, “is just about to tell me what she was doing the night Jefferson died.”

Veronica looked at her meaningfully. “Really? You are?”

At that moment I could feel my pulse without moving a finger; the edges of my vision surged with each pound of my heart. “Cheyenne,” I asked, “what are you about to tell me?”

She reached under the neck of her shirt and pulled out a
key on a chain, the key I’d noticed in the car the week before. “Shall I?” she asked Veronica.

“There’s no way to turn back now,” Veronica said, a little ticked. “Now that the cat’s out. You could have told her you were here with me and left it at that, couldn’t you? But there’s no turning back now. Go ahead.”

Cheyenne stepped toward the back of the house. I knew where she was headed: the locked room.