The Deadly Sister (9 page)

I
’d had an hour to compose myself, but I wasn’t feeling any more collected by the time the detectives arrived. Their police car made a rumbling tread on the driveway, their parking brake an aborted squawk. I heard them chatting with my mom and dad, then the heavy noise of my dad climbing the stairs to fetch me. I opened the door before he could knock. “Where should I meet them?” I asked.

He hugged me. “Dining room okay by you?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Don’t be worried,” my dad said again. He sounded like he was conferring with a legal client. I wondered if this was how he spoke to people he knew were guilty.

Alcaraz and Jamison were meaty guys in badly fitting polyester. Alcaraz had a face that was both pitted from some childhood acne and silky smooth, like an old glazed pot. He stood when I came in, shook my hand like a coworker’s. Jamison had a bent spiral notebook out on the table, next to two mugs of coffee my mom had probably compelled them to accept. The mugs were green running into purple with broken gray veins, all slathered in a clumpy glaze. Maya and I had made them at camp a few years before. Mom, no doubt, had used them to remind the police officers that the suspect they were after was someone’s daughter. Good one, Ma.

“Let’s sit down,” Alcaraz said. He pointed to the chair opposite him. I paused and then lowered myself in. He’d placed me where Maya usually sat, though he couldn’t have known that.

My parents were hovering at the entrance to the dining room. I could sense their fear that they’d be sent away, that the detectives would ask to question me alone. My dad was leaning against the doorway, a comradely look on his face, as if we were all at a company picnic.

“We don’t have to take this one alone, do we, Raul?” Jamison asked his partner.

Raul shook his head. My mom started to sit.

“I’d rather we did,” I said.

Jamison looked to my dad. “No objection, Mr. Goodwin?”

Dad gave me a long, questioning look, then shook his head and led Mom out of the room. Once they’d shuffled away, stunned, Jamison and Alcaraz sized each other up and pencils came out.

“Any reason you don’t want your parents here for this, Abby?” Jamison asked.

“I want to be as open as I can,” I said. “I don’t want to have to think about them at the same time as I’m trying to remember things. Besides, there’s stuff about Maya I’m sure they wouldn’t want to hear.”

They looked at each other hungrily. “Let’s get started, then!” Jamison said. “I’m sorry about Jefferson. Your life
must have turned absolutely upside down in the last week, huh?”

“It’s been crazy,” I said lamely.

“It’s amazing,” Jamison said. “We haven’t found anyone who didn’t feel very deeply about him. He touched so many lives. Had such an impact for such a tragically short life.”

I nodded.

“When did you first get to really know him? I mean, we assume you first met him in school.”

“First day of kindergarten, yeah.”

“But when did he start coming into your home?”

“You’re talking about his tutoring Maya, right? She was bombing classes, cutting school. When did that reach its peak? Gosh. About a year ago. My parents asked me if I knew anyone who could come by and help. Jefferson’s really smart, and I’d heard his family didn’t have much money, so he was the first person I suggested. My parents arranged it all with his parents, and he started coming over a few times a week. They did their work right here at this table. He sat where you are, Detective Alcaraz. Just there.”

He looked at his seat and fixed me an unknowable smile. “How did your sister feel about him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Whatever you take me to mean.”

The key here, I knew, was to get close enough to the truth for it to be believable, but leave out the parts that would implicate her further. I had to tread very, very carefully.

“At first,” I said, “she was just pissed that she was getting tutored. She thought she didn’t need it. She was failing practically every class, but there you go, that’s how my sister thinks. It turns out, though, that Jefferson was a perfect choice. She liked him enough that even if she’d have skipped school the whole day, she’d show up to make her tutoring session.”

“Did she have a romantic connection to Jefferson Andrews?” Jamison asked.

Yes? No? I opted for uncertainty. “I don’t know.”

“Really?” Alcaraz said.

That question let me know that a romantic connection was the reveal they were grasping for.

“Really,” I said, looking him straight in the eye.

“Okay, let’s cut through the bull,” he said. “Your sister is on the run. You can protest as much as you like, but it won’t change the fact that as far as we’re concerned, the fact that she is a fugitive is undeniable. And while she’s on the run, it’s virtually impossible for us to look at her as anything but a suspect. Now, no one’s going out of their way to say she killed Jefferson. But maybe she witnessed something she wished she hadn’t and can’t bring herself to face us. We honestly don’t know. But I have to tell you, the clock is running down. Within seventy-two hours we will present formal charges against her. And then the game changes entirely. Her picture gets distributed to all the police in the state, and most likely the FBI gets involved. If your sister turns herself in, or is turned in, before those seventy-two hours are up,
then we can work with her on the local level. If we find out that she was coerced, or she simply screwed up and is embarrassed to come forward, we’ll do our best to minimize the charges. Three days from now, that offer will be in the past. But we have no way of letting Maya know all of this if we can’t get in touch with her. You see our predicament.”

“We’ve talked to your father,” Jamison said, looking at me sympathetically. The rough skin around his mouth fell into heavy lines. “We know his struggles with Maya, and how she would probably never approach him on her own—”

“But a sibling is different from a parent. We find it hard to believe that you don’t have a very good idea of exactly where she’s hiding,” Alcaraz said. “Don’t try to deny it,” he said, putting up a hand. “Because you do
not
want to start lying to us. We’re not expecting you to give up your sister. All that we want,” Alcaraz continued, “is for you to pass a message to her. Let her know that if she turns herself in immediately, we’ll all do our best to make this end as easily as possible. If she waits until even Friday, she’s dealing with a national investigation of first-degree murder. And at that point there will be nothing we can do.”

I nodded. “If I manage to get in touch with her, I’ll do what I can.”

Alcaraz took a card out of his back pocket and slid it across the dining table. “Keep this in a safe place, okay? And don’t hesitate to call me.”

I slid the card into my pocket. “Are we done?”

They glanced at each other. “For today.”

“Then have a great day.” I spun out of the room.

It made me mad, that they had a plan for me that I couldn’t know about except for the scraps I could infer from their questions. The police had access to information that I didn’t, of course, but it made me furious that they didn’t just tell me everything they knew. Much like it probably made them angry that I clearly hadn’t told them everything
I
knew.

They didn’t leave right away, of course. My mom chitchatted with them in the kitchen, refilling their mugs and asking about Alcaraz’s wife, Jamison’s boyfriend, their webs of children and nieces and nephews. It seemed like aimless chatter, but Mom always had a plan. She kept the conversation focused on what they all shared: family, loyalty, morality. Then my dad joined in. Cheerful, jokey legal talk. Alcaraz brought it back to the murder by asking whether my dad minded if they had the phone company subpoenaed for the records on Maya’s line. I guess my dad said yes, I couldn’t hear. All the while I was sitting in the dining room, sifting through everything I’d said, searching for anything I might have given away. But in the end I was satisfied; I’d done the best I could. The police left, and Mom joined me in there, hugged me where I sat. Her necklace rattled against my head; I smelled her perfume and felt the roughness of her thick bra beneath her shirt. I was really glad for her company.

She left, and as I continued to sit in the dining room, I could hear heavy banging in the basement below. From Maya’s room.

Once the policemen were gone, I opened the door to the basement. “Dad?”

Only more banging in response.

I ran down the stairs. He was hurling open drawers, scattering books and papers and clothes.

“Dad?” I called out, clutching the banister. He still didn’t seem to hear me.

He had finished searching the rest of the room and had worked his way to the bed, lifting the frame so it rested on his back. He didn’t even seem to notice its weight; he looked like a bear raiding some unlucky animal’s nest. “What are you doing in here?” I asked.

“Get out!” he bellowed, not even turning around. Shredded cardboard boxes were piling up at the side of the bed. The
A
volume of the encyclopedia was already tossed to one side.

“You’re scaring me!” Appealing to compassion wasn’t going to get me anywhere, given the state my dad was in, and I should have known it. There would be no stopping him.

“No!” my dad roared. He had found the mushy brown brick under the bed. He turned to me, the drugs held in his hand like some dead creature. “Did you know about this? Was this why you wanted to talk to Alcaraz and Jamison alone?”

I was already halfway up the stairs. “No!” I yelled. “I wanted to talk to them alone because of this kind of stuff! Because of your temper, Dad!”

“Go and wait with your mother. I’ll be there in a minute.”

I lingered.

“Now!”

I fled, eyes stinging. The laundry room was right next to the basement entrance, and I stood there for a moment. Cody, penned in by the dog door, pressed herself against me. She knew something was wrong, and whimpered and stared at me concernedly. There was no way I was sticking around to deal with my dad’s anger. I got why he was mad, what colossal pressure he was under with Maya missing, the tension that must be boiling in him from the conflict of wanting to do the right thing and yet see that his daughter was safe. His rage was coming from a fatherly place, but that didn’t mean I wanted to deal with it. As soon as she realized what was going on, Mom would start working to calm him down, but until she’d succeeded he would be yelling about how everything was my fault:
You should have known your sister better. We’ve done all we could as parents; why haven’t you done better for her?
What he’d really be mad about, of course, would be not having been a good enough father to catch Maya earlier, for allowing her rebellion to get to the point where she was able to stay away for days at a time. But he wouldn’t calm down until tomorrow at the earliest. In the meantime, living in my house would be hell. And I couldn’t handle staying around him, not given the fragile trick I was trying to pull off.

I yanked open the dog gate, grabbed my keys, and
slammed out the door before my parents could ask where I was going. Delighted by this chaotic turn of events, Cody jumped into the passenger seat. I sped to the subdivision exit. As soon as the light went green I peeled out, sped down the service lane, and was gone.

As I did, though, I passed a string of cars—and there, at the head, was a cruiser with Alcaraz and Jamison in front. They turned their heads as I whizzed past. Spotted speeding away by the cops: fantastic.

I
pulled into the mall and left again through a side entrance, turning toward Cheyenne’s house. I spent the whole drive staring into the rearview mirror. The cops didn’t follow me, thank god, but I’d have to be more careful. Now I wished I hadn’t been so curt at the end of their interview. Strong work, Abby.

I phoned from my car and asked Cheyenne to meet me out front. There was a trail near her house that we always walked along whenever one of us had something to discuss. I met her at the start, Cody straining on her leash.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asked right away.

“Great. Thanks. Helpful. Leave off the annoyingness for just a minute, okay?”

“Where have you been, sweet pea?” Mock sweetness. Rock sugar.

“Much better. Just had a major blowout with my dad.”

We started walking. I let Cody off the leash and she immediately streaked away. “What now?”

“The police came by to interrogate me—”

Cheyenne turned pale. “What?”

“It wasn’t that huge of a deal.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Just that I didn’t know any more than my parents did. Then, afterward, my dad got suspicious and raided Maya’s room and found the hard stuff.”

“What hard stuff? You mean hard drugs? Thanks for not mentioning that before. You know, when you weren’t calling me back.”

I waited the five seconds it took for her outrage to fade and then told her about my fight with my dad and more about the interrogation. I finished by apologizing that my mind felt all scrambled these days in the hopes that she’d take pity on me and stop picking a fight.

“And where exactly
is
Ms. Maya now?” Cheyenne asked.

I stopped. We’d been walking along abandoned railroad tracks, and I’d begun to sense that the scrub brush at the edge wasn’t as empty as it looked. “Do you feel like we’re being watched?”

I expected Cheyenne to snort and begin teasing me, but she nodded. “Yeah. I have for a little while, actually.”

I looked back along the hazy tracks to where we’d come from. “Oh my god.”

Right by my car was a figure, solitary and hooded. Almost in the tree line. Not moving. Just staring through the fog.

“Who the hell is that?” Cheyenne asked. “Hello?” she yelled.

The figure just stood there staring, then quietly moved off into the woods.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Don’t be a drama queen. It’s just some loser in a hoodie.”

“There’s no way we’re going back that way.”

“Then we won’t. We’ll loop around the far side.”

We wound up crossing through a fast-food parking lot. Cody emerged from the trees, and I tied her to a bike rack. We went in, got some dinner and coffee, and sat in a booth. I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder, but no one in a hoodie followed us inside.

“Do you think school’s getting back to normal?” I asked, in an attempt to get
me
to feeling back to normal.

“No. Not at all. And other times, totally. Like at lunch. You’d think there’d never been a Jeff Andrews, the way everyone’s back to yelling and flirting and throwing food. But during morning announcements, we hear about nothing else and everyone looks like they’ve just been gassed.”

“And what’s everybody saying happened?”

“We always tell each other the truth, right? Cheyenne and Abby against the world?”

I nodded.

“They’re saying that Maya killed him. Like,
everyone
.”

“Great. Just great. Where do you think that rumor’s starting from?”

“The queen bee, who else? I didn’t think Rose knew about Jeff and Maya, but from the way she’s been acting, I guess she did. Not that she’d ever admit that Jeff was cheating on her. No, in her version, Maya’s a stalker, and Jeff’s the noble gentleman who kept turning her down.”

“And people
believe
that?”

Cheyenne shrugged. “It makes it a juicy story if Maya killed him out of unrequited love, and people love a good story. But does anyone really believe that Jeff wasn’t getting his hands dirty, so to speak? No way. There’s a long train of girls who would testify that he was hardly faithful to Rose.”

“I wonder how Rose could put up with all of that,” I said. “Unless, of course, she suddenly couldn’t.”

“You think
Rose
might have done it?”

“Well, if she’s got enough presence of mind to take time out from her grief to label my sister a murderer…I don’t know. Let’s face it—there are plenty of girls who’ve had moments where they wanted Jefferson dead. It’s just a matter of having an opportunity. I mean, he’s a big guy. But if someone stumbled on him when he was already hurt…What if he said the wrong thing? And all anyone would have to do would be to clobber him once and it would be over.”

“You think he was caught with his pants down?”

“Well, it all depends on whether Caitlin—or whoever the other girl was—stood him up, right? Like, when she showed up after Maya left.”

“Interesting,” Cheyenne said. “Very interesting.”

I was studying her reaction. I wanted to ask her why she had posted on Jefferson’s page. Why she called him Jeff. Whether she’d ever had a crush on him herself. But there seemed to be no way to get to there from here. I sensed
there was something she was holding back, but I couldn’t figure out how to uncover it.

She took a sip of her coffee. The Styrofoam cup puckered under her strong fingers. “It hurts my feelings that you don’t keep me closer during all of this. I want you to share where you’re going, what you’re finding out. You can’t do all of this alone.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But I just can’t talk about all this crap anymore. Tell me about you. Everything about you.”

“I don’t want you to think it’s your fault, but I lost my job at the mall.”

“Oh god, that totally
is
my fault. I’m so sorry.”

“Honestly, don’t worry about it. Because there’s some other great news. But jeez, it feels creepy even to talk about it, with everything that’s happening to your family.”

“Please. Distract me.”

“I got into University of Miami.”

“Cheyenne! That’s huge!” I couldn’t get überexcited, though. She’d long had her heart set on Miami, but it was a private school and cost way more than her parents could afford. Like, many thousands more. She’d been deferred early decision, so we’d started to think it wasn’t going to be an issue, and she’d just go to a state school.

“You don’t need to look so worried. I’ll get the Florida’s Scholars.”

Florida’s Scholars was a bunch of money given to the
valedictorian of every public school, if she stayed in state for college.

“You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “I don’t want people looking at me funny.”

I nodded. But still—Cheyenne was going to her dream school precisely because Jefferson was no longer eligible for valedictorian. I didn’t know whether to be excited or outraged. My body hedged the difference and went for queasy instead.

“God,” Cheyenne said, staring long and hard at the dollar menu. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

“Yes, no, absolutely. It’s incredible news. But you shouldn’t tell anyone. At least not until the current mess is sorted out.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have told you? My best friend?”

“Of course you should have told me. But you know how this looks.”

“Wait!” she barked, spilling her coffee all over the table. Her mouth shut, and we stared at the steaming puddle. Neither of us moved to clean it up. I listened to drops of coffee plunking onto the plastic booth seat as I waited for Cheyenne to continue. “I know you want to keep your sister safe, Abby. But you’re going too far when you turn on the one person who’s always been on your side. First you cut me out, then you slam into me and start accusing me of…I don’t even know what.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of anything. What are you getting so defensive for?”

“There you go, accusing me all over again. You can’t even say you’re not accusing me without accusing me even more. It’s not like I went and proposed myself for Florida’s Scholars. Mr. Roth called them once Jeff was dead, told them we had a new first in class. I didn’t tell him to.”

A tableful of old ladies was staring at us. Even the drive-through girl had frozen while passing a drink through the window. I couldn’t breathe too well, suddenly. “Let’s go, okay?”

“It’s easy for you,” Cheyenne said. “You say you’re not the most popular girl, but you still make friends left and right. But no one really bothers getting to know me. I’ve only got you. So I’m sorry if I can’t let it roll off my back when you turn on me. I’m not like you. I can’t go hang out with someone else for a week. There
isn’t
anyone else.”

“I wasn’t turning on you. Can’t you understand that this is a totally impossible time for me right now? Why are you being so self-centered?”

“
Me
self-centered? You don’t want to get into a self-centered contest, because you’ll lose. Majorly.”

I simply wasn’t ready to fight with Cheyenne today. My resources were stretched so thin. So I did what I thought would get her to stop. “Please,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. Let’s let it go for now.”

“Okay,” Cheyenne said. “I’m sorry.” But she wasn’t. And I wasn’t. Because if either of us had actually been sorry, we’d
have found something else to say to each other. But we didn’t; we just sulked and stared at the dark stain spreading on the tabletop.

Cheyenne left before I did. When I finally mopped up the spill and dragged myself outside, the hooded figure was back, staring at me from across the parking lot.