The Silent Sister (15 page)

“That sister of yours who killed herself?”

I waited for him to say more, but it appeared he was waiting for me to respond. “Yes?” I said again.

“She didn't,” he said, and he gave his car gas, swinging the tail into the street, then taking off before I even had a chance to register those two words.

 

PART TWO

 

JANUARY 1990

17.

Alexandria, Virginia

Lisa

The glow of the streetlight spilled into her bedroom, and from her seat on the edge of her bed, she saw the outline of Violet's case, the sweet worn black leather shoulder. She looked away. Her father had said Violet couldn't go with her. She'd argued with him. If she killed herself, it made sense that she'd take the violin. She'd never leave it behind. But he gave her a look that told her Violet was the least of their problems and she'd said no more about it.

Powdery snow fell like dust beneath the streetlight and she shivered. She couldn't get warm these days, no matter how many layers she wore. Tonight, her teeth chattered and she felt sick. She hadn't been able to eat in days. Her mother thought it was because of the trial and worried that the jury would take one look at her pale sunken face and bony shoulders and think she was a junkie. “You have to eat, Lisa,” she'd pleaded. “The jurors will think you're on drugs.”

She didn't want to think about her mother tonight.

Her father came to her bedroom door. She couldn't see his face in the darkness. He'd said to leave the lights off in case a neighbor was awake and curious.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She stood up from her bed. “No,” she said, but she picked up her backpack and the bag with the towel and empty hair dye box and every strand of her hacked-off long blond hair and walked past him into the hall. This was the sort of thing you could never be ready for.

He caught her arm and turned her toward him. “You need to leave this here.” He touched the pendant at her throat.

“But I'd be
wearing
it, Daddy!” she said, touching the oval of white jade. Beneath her fingertips, she felt the design carved into the stone. “I never take it off.”

“You have to,” he said. “It's too identifiable.”

Giving in, she returned to her room and unfastened the necklace, but rather than leaving it in her jewelry box, she slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. There was no way she could leave it behind.

Back in the hallway, she followed her father out the front door, pulling her hat low on her head because it was so cold and her hair was still damp.

“Sh!” Her father said, although she hadn't made a sound. He walked ahead of her to the driveway and pulled open the driver's side door of her car. “No lights till we get to the parkway,” he whispered.

She nodded, and he closed the door more quietly than she'd thought a car door could be closed.

His car was behind hers and they both backed out of the driveway slowly, with only the streetlight to guide them. She followed him down the road, the chattering of her teeth echoing inside her head. “Good-bye, Ansel Road,” she whispered. The car filled with the scent of the hair dye she'd used, and she wondered if the same scent was in her bedroom. How long would it stay there? Would her mother notice it when she came home from Pennsylvania? Worse, would the police?

Then she pictured Violet abandoned in her room. She imagined her mother reading the note she'd left. And then she thought about her mother and Riley and Danny up at Granddad's house in Pennsylvania, not knowing anything was going on. “The kids shouldn't be here right now,” her father'd said to her mother when he insisted she get Riley and Danny out of town. “Not with the press hounding us like this.” Her mother had agreed without really knowing what she was agreeing to.

Riley. Danny. Mom. She would never see any of them again. Her heart seized in a way that sent a prickly pain down her arms.

“Don't think!” she told herself. Her voice sounded weird inside the dark car. She couldn't let thoughts of her family derail the plan. She couldn't think of anything except what she needed to do now. Tonight.

Her father had told her his idea only a few days earlier. He'd come into her room in the middle of the night. Sat on the edge of her bed. Presented it to her in great detail and she knew he'd been thinking about it a long time. She listened, first in complete disbelief, then in gratitude that he would do this for her. He would save her. She had a choice, he said: spend the rest of her days in prison or live out her life as someone else. Some other girl who was free as a bird. She didn't see that she had much of a choice at all.

They didn't pass another car as they headed for the George Washington Parkway that ran along the river. That was good, since they were driving blind. The darkness on the road made this eerie night even eerier, and she put on her wipers to brush the dusting of snow from her windshield. Every time they passed beneath a streetlight, she saw the shadow of her kayak fall across the hood of her car and hoped she'd tied it tightly enough to her roof. She'd asked her father to tie it for her because she was too shaky, but he said she had to do everything herself in case the police had a way of figuring out she hadn't acted alone.

When her father turned onto the parkway, he put on his headlights and she did the same. The snow was coming down harder and she kicked up the speed of her wipers. They passed only a few other cars. The fewer the better.

They drove for a while. She knew they were headed for the Belle Haven Marina and then some little road she'd never been on. Her father had it all figured out and she had to trust that he knew what he was doing. They reached the turn for the marina, and she followed him into the driveway that led to the parking lot, but instead of continuing to the lot, he turned onto a narrow road that cut through the woods. His car lights blinked off, and she turned hers off as well, and then it was almost impossible to see. The bushes scraped the sides of her car. After a while, her father pulled his car into the woods, nestling it in a narrow space between the trees. She knew she was supposed to stop driving then. He'd explained all of this to her. So she stopped and waited and he got out of his car and into her passenger seat, kicking the snow off his shoes before letting his feet rest on the floor.

“You're doing great,” he said, patting her shoulder with his gloved hand. “Just great. Keep going now, nice and slow.”

She gave the car a little gas.

“That's it,” he said. “Perfect. We're so lucky with this snow. It's supposed to get a lot heavier before morning and it'll cover our tracks when we walk back to the car. I wasn't sure how we were going to handle that.”

She didn't want to hear that he'd been unsure about anything.

After a while, he told her to turn on her headlights to see where they were. She flipped her lights on and saw the snow falling ahead of her, and beyond that, too close for comfort, the river.

“Perfect,” her father said again. “Stop right here. Turn off your lights.”

Once the lights were off, she couldn't even see her gloved hand when she held it in front of her face. How was she going to do this without being able to see?

He handed her a flashlight. “Keep it pointed to the ground,” he said. “The woods are thick right here, but we can't risk too much light. Can you get your kayak down on your own in the dark?”

“Yes,” she said. She got out of the car, closing the door as quietly as he had back in their driveway, and reached up blindly for one of the straps. She'd taken her kayak off her roof herself a hundred times, but never in the dark and never in the cold and certainly never wearing gloves. It took less than a minute for her fingertips to go numb, and she couldn't get the strap undone. She thought of last summer, before everything happened, when they rented the place in Rehoboth and her mother let her take Riley out in the kayak on the calm water of the Intracoastal Waterway. She remembered Riley's sense of wonder as she waved to the birds. She remembered bending over to kiss the top of the little girl's head, how she let her lips linger against the silky dark curls as she breathed in Riley's scent, still more baby than little girl back then.

Her eyes stung, and her fingers lost their grip on the strap. She pounded her fist against the window. She kicked the door.

“Hey, hey,” her father said, getting out of his side of the car and coming around to hers. He put his arm around her and she leaned against him.

“I can't do this, Daddy,” she said.

For a long moment, he said nothing, just held her and rubbed her back. “You don't have to, sweetheart,” he said. “It's an option, that's all. It's your choice.”

She pressed her forehead into his chest, thinking. Her nose ran and she wiped it with the back of her glove.
My choice.
Her own attorney had told her that her case was unwinnable. She was afraid of prison. She was afraid of those hard women. Those real criminals. She was terrified of being locked up, unable to escape. Unable to breathe. Even when they put the handcuffs on her in her living room that day, she started to scream. How did people stand being locked up with no way, absolutely no way, out? She imagined her mother telling people, “I have three children, but one's in prison.” The humiliation Riley and Danny would face. It was already bad enough for Danny. He didn't understand exactly what was going on, but he knew kids were talking about him. He'd always been a happy, bubbly kid, and suddenly no one wanted to be his friend.

“I'm just scared,” she said.

“I know. Me, too.”

“I want to do it,” she said.

“There's no going back.”

“I know.” She turned away from him and reached up again for the kayak. “I can do it myself.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.” The front strap came free and she started to work on the rear strap, ignoring the numbness of her fingers and thinking of nothing other than getting her kayak in the water.

Her father waited in the car while she carried the kayak over her head to the river. He'd picked a good spot for her to put in. The bank eased down to the water. No nasty rocky drop-off. She risked shining the flashlight into the river and saw that it was already starting to freeze along the bank and was choppy and frothy and wind-whipped farther out. She was afraid she wouldn't be able to shove the boat far enough into the water for the current to grab it, but she gave it a great push and the river ripped it from the bank, just like her father had predicted. With the last of her strength, she tossed the paddle as far out in the water as she could. Then she remembered she was supposed to put her jacket in the kayak. Too late now. She took it off and tossed it hard across the water, but the wind blew it against the shrubs along the bank and out of her reach. She stared after it for a moment, shining the beam of her flashlight on it. Nothing she could do about it now. The snow landed on her throat and she pulled up the collar of her sweater, her fingers barely able to grip the fabric.

Her father checked her car with his flashlight to make sure she hadn't left anything incriminating inside. She took the bag with the towel and empty box of hair dye, but left her backpack in the car, as they'd planned. Her driver's license, her wallet with the pictures of Riley and Danny and Matty—everything was left behind in the backpack. Then her father took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders and they trudged through the thick woods to get back to his car. They could have walked along the road, but he said he was worried about tracks, even though the way the snow was coming down now she thought they'd be okay.

By the time they got back to his car, they were both freezing. He turned on the heat and she took off her wet gloves and held her hands in front of the vent.

“Has to be the coldest night of the year,” her father said.

“You have a jacket for me, right?” she asked.

“It's in the backseat.”

She turned to look in the backseat, but it was too dark. “And a new backpack?” She worried he might have forgotten something. There was so much to remember.

“No backpack. You have a new purse. It's with the jacket.”

“A purse? Daddy, you know I never carry a purse.”

“Lisa
never carried a purse,” he said. “Ann Johnson does.” She was Ann Johnson in all her new documents.

She started to unfasten her seat belt to reach behind her for the purse and jacket, but he put a hand out to stop her. “Wait till we have some light,” he said. “I want to get away from here.” He began carefully backing the car out of the narrow lane. It took forever, and by the time they were again on the parkway and he put his lights on, she was horrified to see that the dashboard clock read two-thirty.

“You're not going to have time to drive me to Philly and be back home by morning!” she said. That had been the plan, and it was already falling apart. He needed to “discover” she was missing in the morning. He was supposed to go to her room to make sure she was up and ready for her nine o'clock appointment with the attorney, and he'd find her gone and the note in her place.

“We're okay,” he said calmly. “I'm not taking you all the way to Philadelphia.” He glanced at her, but it was too dark to read his face. “Don't panic,” he said.

“What do you mean, you're not taking me to Philly? I'm supposed to be on that eight o'clock train!”

“You will be. Don't worry.”

“How?” He was really scaring her.

“Now listen. You remember a man I work with? Tom Kyle?”

“I have no idea who that is!” She knew she'd met a man with that name somewhere, but she was too upset to admit it to her father.

“Well, you'll probably recognize him. We're meeting him at the rest stop on 95 and he'll drive you to Philly.”