The Good Sister

Dedication

For Laura Blake Peterson: after two decades together, you aren’t just my agent or even merely a friend—you’re family. Thank you for everything, always—but especially for conjuring the concept that started the creative wheels turning for
The Good Sister
.

And for my guys: Mark, Brody, and—with great maternal pride—my college man, Morgan.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my editor, Lucia Macro, and the gang at HarperCollins (too many of you to safely name names without missing someone—please know that your daily efforts on my behalf are most appreciated); to my indispensible agent, Laura Blake Peterson, and the gang at Curtis Brown, Ltd.; to Carol Fitzgerald and staff at Bookreporter.com; to Peter Meluso; to John Valeri; to my ever-widening circle of family and friends; to the many supportive fellow authors whom I would include in the aforementioned circles; to librarians and booksellers everywhere, particularly the Donovans at my hometown Book Nook; to my loyal readers, whose endless enthusiasm helps me keep writer’s block at bay; and to my Facebook Gang for helping me with research and brainstorming—particularly Sherrie Saint, Michelle Mathews Gullo, and haberdashers everywhere. Finally . . .

thx to my son brody staub 4 hlpng me get the txt mssgs rightttttt

Contents

Chapter 1

T
hat it had all been a lie shouldn’t come as any surprise, really.

And yet, the truth—a terrible, indisputable truth that unfolds line by blue ballpoint line, filling the pages of the black marble notebook—is somehow astonishing.

How did you never suspect it back then?

Or, at least, in the years since?

Looking back at the childhood decade spent in this house—an ornate, faded Second Empire Victorian mansion in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city—it’s so easy to see how it might have happened this way.

How it
did
happen this way.

There is no mistaking the evidence. No mistaking the distinct handwriting: a cramped, backhand scrawl so drastically different from the loopy, oversized penmanship so typical of other girls that age.

Different . . .

Of course it was different.

She
was different from the other girls; tragically, dangerously different.

I remember so well.

I remember her, remember so many things about her: both how she lived and how she—

Footsteps approach, tapping up the wooden stairway to this cupola perched high above the third-story mansard roofline, topped by wrought-iron cresting that prongs the sky like a king’s squared-off crown.

“
Hellooo-oo
. Are you still up there?” calls Sandra Lutz, the Realtor.

“Yes.”

Where else would I be? Did you think I jumped out the window while you were gone?

Sandra had excused herself ten minutes ago after finally answering her cell phone. It had buzzed incessantly with incoming calls and texts as their footsteps echoed in one empty room after another on this final walk-through before the listing goes up this week.

The entire contents of the house are now in storage—with the exception of the rocker where Mother went undiscovered for weeks.

“I don’t think that chair is something you’d want to keep,” Sandra said in one of their many long-distance telephone conversations when the storage arrangements were being made.

Of course not. The corpse would have been crawling with maggots and oozing bodily fluids, staining the brocade upholstery and permeating it with the terrible stench of death.

Presumably, someone—surely not the lovely Sandra—tossed the desecrated rocking chair into a Dumpster.

Everything else was transported to the storage facility somewhere in the suburbs.

As for Mother herself . . .

I’d just as soon someone tossed her into a Dumpster, too.

But of course, the proper thing to do was arrange, also long distance, for a cremation.

“We have a number of packages,” Glenn Cicero, the undertaker, said over the phone, after remarking that he remembered Mother from all the years she worked part-time at Russo’s Drugstore as a pharmacy clerk.

“Packages? She’s not just in one . . . urn? How many are there?”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I was talking about funeral packages. It just depends on how you want to set up visitation hours and—”

“No visitation. I live almost five hundred miles away, and I can’t get up there just yet, and . . . there’s no one else.”

Pause. “There are no other family and friends here in the Buffalo area who might want to—”

“
No one else.
”

“All right, then.” He went over the details, mentioning that there would be an additional seventy-five-dollar charge for shipment of the ashes.

“Can you just hold on to—”
It? Her?
What was the proper terminology, aside from the profane terms so often used to refer to Mother—though never to her face—back when she was alive?

“The remains?” Cicero supplied delicately.

“Yes . . . can you hold on to the remains until I can come in person?”

“When would that be?”

“Sometime this summer. I’m selling the house, so I’ll be there to make the final arrangements for that.”

The undertaker dutifully provided instructions on how to go about retrieving what was left of the Dearly Departed when the time came.

The time is now here, but of course there will be no trip to Cicero and Son Funeral Home. Mother’s ashes can sit on a dusty shelf there for all eternity.

As for the contents of this old house . . .

“I’m sure you won’t want to go through it all just yet,” Sandra Lutz said earlier, handing over the rental agreement, with the monthly payments automatically deducted from Mother’s checking account, and a set of keys to the storage unit. “Not when the loss is so fresh. But empty houses are much more appealing to buyers, and this way, at least, we can get the home on the market.”

Yes. The sooner this old place is sold, the better. As for the padlocked compartment filled with a lifetime of family furniture and mementos . . .

Good riddance to all of it.

Well . . . not quite
all
.

Right before she answered her phone, Sandra took a Ziploc bag from her pebbled black leather Dooney & Bourke satchel.

“These are some odds and ends I came across after the moving company and cleaning service had finished in here. I didn’t want to just throw anything away, so . . . here you go.”

The bag contained just a few small items. A stray key that had been hanging on a high nail just inside the cellar stairway door, most likely fitting the lock on a long-gone trunk or tool chest. A dusty Mass card from a forgotten cousin’s funeral, found tucked behind a cast-iron radiator in the front parlor. A tarnished, bent silver fork that had been wedged in the space behind the silverware drawer.

And then there was . . .

This
.

The notebook, with a string of pink glass rosary beads wrapped around it twice, as if to seal it closed.

According to Sandra Lutz, the notebook, unlike the other relics, hadn’t been accidentally overlooked. Someone had deliberately hidden it in one of the old home’s many concealed nooks.

“I stumbled across it last night when I stopped by to double-check the square footage of the master bedroom,” she reported. “I noticed that there was a discrepancy between the measurements I took a few weeks ago and the old listing from the last time the house sold, back in the late seventies.”

“What kind of discrepancy?”

“The room was two feet longer back then. Sure enough, that’s exactly the depth of the secret compartment I found behind a false wall by the bay window. I was wondering whether you even knew it was there, because—”

“The house is full of secret compartments. My father always said that they were used to hide slaves on the Underground Railroad.”

“That’s the rumor about a lot of houses in this neighborhood. Probably because we’re just a stone’s throw from the Canadian border, and there was considerable Underground Railroad activity in western New York. But I don’t think this would have been an actual safe house.”

“Why not?”

“Because historical documentation shows that there just weren’t very many of them in Buffalo. Slavery was abolished in New York State years before the Civil War started, so escaped slaves who made it this far either stayed and lived openly, or they were taken from rural safe houses into the city and directly across the border crossing at Squaw Island.”

Sandra added quickly, as if to soothe any hard feelings from her announcement that the home hadn’t served some noble historic cause, “I’ve always admired this house though, and wondered what it looked like inside. Did I mention that this is my old stomping grounds? I grew up a few blocks away, and I just moved back to the neighborhood.”

Yes, Sandra mentioned that over the phone several times, and in e-mail, too. She also had no qualms about sharing that she’s a recent divorcee living alone for the first time in her life.

“I bought a fabulous Arts and Crafts home on Wayside Avenue, just down the street from Sacred Sisters High School,” she prattled on, as if she were revealing the information for the first time. “Not that I went to Sisters, even though it was right in the neighborhood; I went to Griffin instead.”

Ah, Griffin Academy: the upscale, all-girls Catholic boarding school. No surprise there.

“Anyway, when I saw the house on Wayside come on the market, I snatched it up. It might not be as big or as old as this one, and it doesn’t have any secret compartments, but it does have all the original—”

“The notebook—what were you saying about finding the notebook?”

“Oh. Sorry. I guess I tend to ramble.”

No kidding.

If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a motor mouth.

Sandra shrugged. “I was just going to point out that the secret compartment where I found it was different.”

“Different how?”

That was when Sandra’s phone rang. She checked the caller ID, said, “Excuse me, but I have to take this one,” and disappeared down the steps.

Now she’s back.

And now that I’ve seen what’s in that notebook, I really need to know what she meant about “different
.”

“Sorry about that. I thought that call was only going to take a minute.” Slightly winded from the climb, Sandra adds, “Those stairs and my asthma are not getting along today! Oh, it’s warm up here, isn’t it?”

The windows are open, but there’s not a breath of cross breeze to diminish the greenhouse effect created by four walls of glass on a ninety-degree July afternoon.

Looking not the least bit overheated, Sandra fans herself with a manila folder—gently, though, so as not to send a hair out of place. A perfumed, expertly made-up fortysomething blonde wearing a trim black suit, hose, and high-heeled pumps, she’s probably never broken a sweat outside the gym or had a bad hair day in her life.

When she introduced herself, she pronounced her first name “Sondra.” Most locals would say it
Say-and-ra
, the western New York accent stretching it out to three syllables with a couple of distinct flat A’s. Not her.

“I’m
Sahndra
,” she said as she stepped out of her silver Mercedes on the driveway to shake hands. Heat shimmered off the blacktop, yet her bony fingers were icy, with a firm, businesslike grip. “It’s so nice to finally meet you in person. How was the drive in last night?”

“The drive?”
Oh, so we’re doing the small-talk thing. Let’s get it over with.
“It was fine.”

“Did you come alone, or bring your family?”

Is she fishing for information, or did I tell her I have a family?

There had been so many questions through their two months of long-distance phone calls and e-mails, it was difficult to keep track of what Sandra had been told—truth, and lies.

“I came alone.”

“It’s about nine hours, isn’t it, from Huntington Station?”

Huntington Station. Not Long Island, not Nassau County, not even just Huntington, but Huntington Station. So damned specific.

“I went to college in the Bronx, at Fordham,” Sandra mentioned, “and my boyfriend back then was from Long Island. Levittown. A nice Irish boy—Patrick Donnelly . . . ?”

She paused, as if to ask,
Do you know him?

Question met with a cursory head shake, she went on, “Well, anyway, I know exactly where you live.”

She has the address, of course, to which she’s been FedExing paperwork for a couple of months now.

Sandra went on to inquire about the suburban Marriott she had recommended for this weekend stay. After being assured that the room was satisfactory, she said, “Be sure and tell the front desk manager, if you see her, that I referred you. Her name is Lena.”

“Friend of yours?”
I’ll be sure to steer clear.

“Oh, I’ve never met her, but she’s a dear friend of a client’s sister.”

And so it became clear early on that Sandra Lutz is the kind of woman who not only tends to ramble on and make dreary small talk, but who also remembers the most mundane details about people she meets in passing.

That characteristic probably serves her very well when it comes to her line of work, but otherwise . . .

Someone really should warn her that sometimes it’s not a good idea to pay so much attention to other people’s lives.

Sometimes, people like—people
need
—to maintain more of a sense of privacy.

“I try not to take calls when I’m with a client,” Sandra says breezily now, pocketing her cell phone, “but that was an accepted offer for a house that’s only been on the market for a week. I thought it would be a hard sell, but it looks like this is my client’s lucky day. And mine, too. Let’s hope all this good fortune rubs off on you. Now that we’re finished looking the place over, we can—”

“Wait. When you said the compartment was different, what, exactly, did you mean?”

Sandra’s bright blue eyes seem startled at, then confused by, the abrupt question. “Pardon?”

“When you found the
notebook
behind the
wall
”—
Careful, now. Calm down. Don’t let her see how important this is to you
—“you said the compartment was different.”

“Oh, that’s right. I meant that it wasn’t original to the house. Here, let’s go downstairs and I’ll show you what I mean.”

She leads the way down the steep flight to a noticeably cooler, narrow corridor lined with plain whitewashed walls and closed doors. Behind them are a bathroom with ancient fixtures, a couple of small bedrooms that once housed nineteenth-century servants, and some large storage closets that are nearly the same size as the bedrooms, all tucked above the eaves with pairs of tall, arched dormers poking through the slate mansard roof.

The third floor hasn’t been used in decades, perhaps not even when the second-to-last owners, a childless couple, lived here.

When Mother and Father bought the house, they found that the first two floors were plenty large enough for two; large enough, even, for four.

And then there were three . . .

No. Don’t think about that.

Just find out where the notebook was hidden, and how much Sandra Lutz knows about what’s written in it
.