The Deadly Sister (8 page)

B
rian and I didn’t speak as we walked, and in our silence I tried to figure out why. He had to be way worse off than me. I had Jitters and Anxiety, my chattery companions since Friday night; he had Gaping Bruised Grief. I wondered if he was worried, too, if he could possibly feel anything thrumming beneath that thick numbness.

The Andrews family lived in a trailer park near the school. It wasn’t like you might expect. The trailers were all pretty large, with multiple rooms and tidy lawns and curled green hoses in plastic holders and gnomes huddled in serious conversations. Of all the trailer parks in the city, it was by far the best. And the Andrewses owned not one trailer but two, one cube visible from the front and the other pitched on the reservoir slope in back. Both were surrounded by big and aggressive ferns.

We passed by the 1950s-style entrance with its metal cursive lettering and headed to Brian’s trailer. The parents used the front one and the boys the back; we could go in Brian’s without anyone else even knowing we were there.

Because their mobile home was on the slope, the boys’ hallway had no natural light, just the occasional dull glow of motion-sensitive bulbs. It was a world apart from the
scrubbed and illuminated upper trailer, which was full of red brick and pots and pans and pastel art purchased from carts in the mall. The boys’ trailer was intimate and closed, like the space under a comforter. Once you pressed through the ferns, you were fully and thickly alone.

Brian creaked open the door to his room. The first thing I saw was a huge TV. On it, a pixelated man was frozen in mid-action. Red bar over his head, he was in the process of sawing away at a horde of monsters. Brian scrambled for the remote. “Sorry. This game’ll let me pause but not save. So I just leave it running. Here we go.” He clicked off the screen.

Slipping into a game world sounded like paradise. But it was weird, the idea that Brian was on day four of his brother being dead and he’d decided to decapitate goblins. I tried to remember the first stage of grief from AP psych. Commitment? No, that didn’t sound right. Denial. That was it. Ah.

As Brian sat in his desk chair I kicked off my flip-flops and sat on his bed. He curled his knees up to his chest and peered at me, soul distant behind his glasses. I swung my hair around to one shoulder. Brian picked up on my flirtation and suddenly looked nervous. I got nervous, too. What the hell was wrong with me, flirting with Jefferson’s brother, and now?

“I really need to—” I stopped speaking. A headache, which had been pulling on me all morning like tide on a swimmer, suddenly surged. I lay back into Brian’s soft sheets, placed his pillow over my face. The pillowcase
smelled like Jefferson, human oil plus a sweet chemical twinge of cheap gel. They must have used the same product, reached for the same plastic bottle along the same stretch of counter each morning. I felt the bed depress as Brian sat down next to me.

The need to connect to a person was filling me, radiating out like a physical force. My cheeks pulled tight and my scalp ached. I forced my hands to stay under my back. I hadn’t ever been attracted to Brian. I wasn’t attracted even then. But it felt exactly like it—I was so lonely. “I don’t know what to do,” I finally said, never removing the pillow so I wouldn’t have to look into his eyes.

Brian didn’t touch me, but I could feel the warmth of his hand hovering over my shoulders. “What don’t you know what to do about?” he asked.

“You know Maya, right?”

“Yeah, sure. Why?”

“She’s missing.”

The mattress lifted, and I opened my eyes to see Brian up and pacing his room. “Are you thinking she had something to do with my brother…?”

“No, of course not.”

“I’m sorry your sister’s missing,” Brian said flatly.

“I don’t expect you to worry about it,” I said. We sat in puddled silence for a while. “But who do you think did it?”

“I’m not even thinking about that,” he said. “Someone neither of us knows. A stranger. Jefferson screwed over plenty of people. It could have been any of them.”

“What kinds of people?”

“I don’t know, tons,” Brian snapped. “I don’t really want to talk about all my brother’s bad history right now, okay?”

I searched the room for something I could use to change the subject. Immediately by the bed, there was a picture of Brian and his brother, outdone by a gleaming frame. They were little kids, dressed as soldiers. Jefferson had obviously pulled older brother privileges and kept the better gear for himself, dressed in fatigues and holding a play rifle, while Brian had a plaid shirt, tighty-whiteys, and a stick. It was sweet but also strange, for Brian to keep a picture of the two of them by his bed. Maybe he’d moved it to a more prominent position now that his brother was gone. The rest of the room: one shelf full of vampire books, another of graphic novels. Velvet curtains. Replicas of medieval weapons hanging over the doorway, two swords and a fancy steel club thing. I was surprised his parents let him keep them after the kids from my school cut each other up sword fighting for some role-playing game last year. It was a huge deal, and a group of parents petitioned to close the local hobby store. One of those TV vans with a tower coming out of its roof was parked outside our school for a week.

“So, the assembly…” I said.

Brian grunted.

I continued. “I mean, what—”

“I hated him. I totally and completely detested my brother.” Brian groaned. There was some little war going on
between two halves of him. “And you should have, too, based on what he put your sister through. So let’s stop pretending that we’re like the rest of the sorry dupes who think he’s some shining star. It’s a tragedy that he’s dead. I’m in total shock, sure, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that some small part of me isn’t glad that he’s gone, that I won’t have him badmouthing me to the whole school, making it his mission to take down every friendship I made, humiliating me and framing me to my parents for all his shit.”

“I had no idea he was doing all those things to you. That’s terrible.”

“No one noticed. I’d have told, but how was it going to help me at all to complain to any of you guys? Everyone already avoids me; I’m not fun, I get it. My parents knew a lot of what he was doing to me, but Jefferson knew how to work them, too. My dad would bitch him out and then within a few hours he’d be patting my brother’s back, like he was actually proud of him for being such an ass to his weirdo little brother.”

I guess I’d already suspected everything Brian was saying, but I hadn’t ever really considered it too seriously, because I was also certain that Brian adored his brother. I’d seen the way he looked at him. He just wanted Jefferson to love and need him back, but since Brian was of no use to Jefferson, he never got anything from him. Cheyenne said once that Brian looked at Jefferson like Maya looked at me.
But that was ridiculous; I knew for a fact that Maya didn’t idolize me. And it’s not like I treated Maya like she was useless. Our situation was way more complicated than that.

In psychology class we learned that sociopaths are highly intelligent people who don’t have genuine emotional reactions to situations but have become so skilled at faking their responses that they can appear normal even as they’re steadily working on some secret agenda. If they seem upset or excited, the emotion is being
deployed
rather than
felt.
It makes them charming but also untrustworthy. I recognized Jefferson as soon as I heard about sociopaths. While Mr. Wachsberger read the description aloud from the textbook I watched Jefferson, looking for a reaction. He’d just finished punching his friend’s leg, and the base of his throat was turning red from suppressed laughter. He wasn’t even listening.
I see you,
I remember thinking.
I see into you, Jefferson Andrews.

“He took people’s weaknesses,” Brian said, “and used them to his advantage. Cheyenne’s vulnerability was schoolwork. Maya’s was romance. Rose didn’t want to suffer the humiliation of a breakup. He knew me best of all, of course, and so he trapped me the easiest. Got me into online gambling, and goaded me into higher and higher priced games until he had to bail me out with his drug money. So that I owed him. That’s what he wanted; that was the end goal. For me to owe him.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

His eyes darted over my face. “I trust you. And I’m miserable—talking should help, right?”

“I’m so sorry, Brian,” I said. “This is just awful, isn’t it?”

He let out a long guttering sigh.

“It’s totally fine if you say no,” I said slowly. “Really, really. But would it be creepy if I told you I wanted to see his room?” I asked.

Brian shook his head. I don’t think “creepy” was ever an issue for him.

The room wasn’t totally shut off, Brian explained, because the crime hadn’t actually occurred there. There was just some police tape, and that was easy enough to duck.

Jefferson had a hot guy’s room. Short gray carpet, orderly shelves lined with drab books and trophies. All his video games had sports leagues’ insignias on the spines. His bed was made neatly enough that the pillows seemed to float an inch over the duvet. At one end of the room sat a glass-top desk with a laptop on it. “Shall we?” I asked, and strode to the center of the room before Brian could answer.

It didn’t smell like Jefferson; it smelled like a room that had been closed off for too long. The air had died. But I twirled in it. A dead boy had lived here. It was a place of gravity and horror and splendor. I expected Brian to say something like “Abby, no,” but he asked me if I wanted soda and then went off to get us some. By the time he came back, I’d turned on Jefferson’s laptop. I had the pictures folder open. One image in particular was filling the screen.

Jefferson and Maya.

She was topless, sitting on his lap. He had on a tank top; it was nighttime on a beach somewhere. His near arm was straining to take the photo, biceps raised beneath his freckled skin. Maya’s cheek was pressed against the edge of his backward Dolphins cap. They were both smiling hugely. I’d never seen her smile at anyone else like that.

“Would you take a look at that,” Brian said, whistling.

I covered the screen with my hand. “They were totally on the down-low. You can’t tell anyone, do you hear me?”

“When was that taken? Do you think Rose knows?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s not worry about it,” and dragged the file to the trash.

“You can’t do that,” Brian said. “This is officially police property or something.”

“It’s your house,” I said. “I don’t see any warrants or whatever. Brian, come on. You care about Maya, too. You know why I’m doing this.” I dragged another file off the desktop.

“Oof,” he said, sitting down on his brother’s bed. “I don’t feel too good.”

I scanned the rest of the folder’s contents and dragged the whole thing into the trash. But Brian’s mentioning the police had gotten me to thinking. They had all sorts of labs to recover data, didn’t they? It’s not as though anything that was deleted was permanently gone. I knew that because we’d paid some guy a thousand bucks to recover my Vanderbilt essay in the fall. So the police would get the
pictures no matter what. Unless I took the laptop. But Brian wouldn’t let me, and even if he did I’d have incriminating evidence in my possession. Or…“Shit!”

“What? Oh no. God, god, oh god.”

A good portion of a two-liter bottle of soda, all over the laptop. A Sprite lagoon with letter lily pads, an ice cube perched on the
P
. The screen clicked dark, with a sound like an old TV shutting off. When Brian lifted the laptop, fluid literally poured out. His arms sagged, the laptop spraying droplets on the carpet. “You did that intentionally.”

“It was an accident,” I protested, purposely lame-sounding, like I’d done something we should totally be laughing about.

“God,” he said, placing the laptop back on the desk and ducking into the bathroom to grab toilet paper. “Who the hell cares, anyway? Do what you want. He’s dead. Nothing’s going to change that.”

“If the police haven’t gotten to the laptop yet,” I said as he sopped up Sprite, “they’ll assume it was always broken. Just play along. And in the meantime, we’ll find out who really did it. Because Maya couldn’t have. And you do really care, don’t you?”

Brian shrugged. But I knew he cared about finding his brother’s killer, no matter what shit Jefferson had put him through. If I were him I wouldn’t be so sure that the police wouldn’t think the computer had been sabotaged, though. But that was his issue. Brian wouldn’t let them link it back to me; I’d make sure of that.

I did a visual scan of the rest of the room, looking for possible evidence. But Jefferson had already done the work for me, by keeping his secret life so under wraps from his parents. He’d covered his own tracks before I’d ever gotten there.

A
s I left Brian’s, I figured I’d head back to school, so I’d be waiting in front when my dad came to pick me up. As I walked I pulled my phone out of my purse; it had been chiming the whole time I was at Brian’s. Each call was bound to be yet another stodgily concerned message from Cheyenne, and I wasn’t ready to deal with her. But I hadn’t expected three missed calls from my dad. Heart pounding, I listened to his messages. School had called and informed him I hadn’t been in classes for a second day in a row.

I texted him to meet me in the school parking lot, and there he was, leaning against his car door, foot thumping. I was streaming excuses when I was still three parking spaces away. “I ran into Jefferson’s brother on my way to first period, and he was so sad, his parents had made him go to school, and he couldn’t deal, so we hung out and talked about stuff. Dad, I should have told you. I’m sorry.”

A family meeting was declared as soon as we got home. Dad led me back into the dark, foreign den. Mom poured me a club soda. I thought the conference would be about how important it was that I go to school (I had a few defenses ready, a couple of them borrowed from the Maya playbook), but as soon as I’d taken my first sip Dad opened with this:

“The police are treating Jefferson Andrews’s death as a murder investigation. Which makes it all the more important that we find your sister. Primarily to make sure she’s okay, but also because if she’s skipped town, it makes it look like she was in some way involved, and we need to plan how to handle it.”

I suspected my skipping school would not make the afternoon’s agenda.

“A detective called here this morning. They want to talk to Maya. I asked them if it was because Jefferson was her tutor, and they seemed to think it was more than that. Was it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think so. I mean, she might have had a crush or something. But he had a girlfriend. It’s not like they were going out.”

“Well, according to the police, your sister was the last person to call Jefferson the night he died. It was a one-minute call, and he called her back. It was the last phone call he made. And she’s missing. That doesn’t look good. At all.”

“So she called him,” I protested. “That doesn’t mean that she killed him. It just means she was connected to him. For all you know, she needed homework help.”

Dad leveled me a glance. We both knew how unlikely that was. “Look,” he said, “we just want your sister to be safe. But we also have to be concerned if the police are concerned. If she doesn’t turn up soon, we’ll all be under intense scrutiny. We’ll have to hire a lawyer. This isn’t my field.”

“Did you let the detective know how little control of Maya
any of us have? Why do they have to investigate the rest of us?”

“The law’s the law,” my dad said. “Your mother and I have responsibilities under it. We all do.”

“The good news,” Mom finally chimed in, “is that we know for sure that Maya is alive. She called Jefferson’s number the morning after the murder.”

Oh. I had been the one who made that call. But of course I didn’t say so. “Well, that looks good for her, right?” I said instead. “No one who killed Jefferson would call him a few hours later.”

“The simple fact of the matter,” Dad said, “is that we need to do everything we can to get Maya to come home and answer some questions. Even if we’re not going to like the answers.”

From the way he was talking, I knew she’d become guilty in my parents’ eyes. It had happened as simply as that. Maybe they didn’t think she was guilty of murder. But she was guilty of something.

“And I’m afraid that’s going to come down to you, sweetie,” Mom continued, nervously massaging her throat. “You have the best shot of all of us. We’re calling everyone we can think of, but you know more about her circle and exactly who she’s friends with. The police will go easy on her if she comes in for questioning on her own. But the more time goes by, the harder it’s going to be. Until eventually they’ll start assuming the worst.”

“Unless one of us finds out who really did it first,” I said.

“Of course,” Mom said, glancing at my father. “But you mustn’t do any investigating on your own, Abby. Promise us you won’t. We don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

That glance between them was pages long. They were terrified about Maya’s well-being, but they’d also given up on her innocence. If she was sunk, they weren’t going to allow their remaining daughter to taint herself.

“In the meantime,” my father said, perching on the windowsill at the far side of the room, “the detectives need to speak to you.”

I tried to hide my fear. “They want to talk to me? Is that normal?”

“Perfectly normal, darling,” my mom said.

“The detective I talked to is named Tay Jamison,” Dad said. “His partner is Raul Alcaraz.”

“Don’t look so worried, honey,” Mom told me. “Answer their questions the best you can. That’s all anyone asks.”

“Just don’t,” my dad said after pausing, “give them any more information than they ask for. Respond to their questions, and that’s it.”

“When do I have to go see them?” I asked.

“They’re coming here,” Dad said. “In an hour.”

“An hour?” I asked. I sounded alarmed, but I was actually relieved. I’d figured I’d end up talking to the police at some point, but I’d imagined having to go down to the station in a cruiser, handcuffed and led into one of those rooms with two-way mirrors.

“Don’t worry,” Mom said. “We’ll be right here.”

“Do you guys think Maya’s okay?” I asked. It was funny—I said Maya but I sort of meant me.

Dad didn’t say anything. Mom said, “I don’t know.” Her role in our family was always to put on a positive spin, and the best she was able to drum up was a simple “I don’t know.” She was despairing. I wanted to tell them, then, that Maya was okay, that Veronica had taken responsibility for her. But they couldn’t know. And, oh god, the police couldn’t know, either. Would I be able to pull this off?

“Do you know that we’d canceled Maya’s tutoring with Jefferson just last week?” my father said. “Did your sister mention it?”

I shook my head.

“Your mother received a call from Mrs. Andrews, telling us that Maya had shown up at their place at three in the morning. That she’d knocked on Jefferson’s window and then on Brian’s, trying to get inside. Mr. Andrews had gone out to deal with her. He said she’d been hysterical, acting erratically, screaming over and over that she wanted to see Jefferson. So the next morning they called me and asked that I not allow her to see Jefferson again. And of course, that’s the first thing that they told the police. I just wanted you to know in case the police bring it up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked softly.

“We didn’t want to trouble you about all of your sister’s doings. But now, because the police already know, you should be prepared.”

“Well, I didn’t know anything about it. That’s what I’ll tell them.”

Dad nodded, more to himself than to me. “That’s right.”

“None of this looks good, honey,” Mom said.

She had no idea.