The Good Sister (2 page)

Down they go, descending another steep flight to the second floor.

Here, the hallway is much wider than the one above, with high ceilings, crown moldings, and broad windowed nooks on either end. A dark green floral runner stretches along the oak floor and the wallpapered walls are studded with elaborate sconces that were, like most light fixtures throughout the house, converted from gas to electricity after the turn of the last century.

“The same thing was probably done in my house,” Sandra comments as they walk along the hall, “but I’d love to go back to gaslights. Of course, the inspector who checked it out before I got the mortgage approval nearly had a heart attack when I mentioned that. He said the place is a firetrap as it is. Old wiring, you know—the whole thing needs to be upgraded. It’s the same in this house, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure.”

The mid-segment of the hall opens up with an elaborately carved wooden railing along one side. This is the balcony of the grand staircase—that’s what Sandra likes to call it, anyway—that leads down to the entrance hall. Or foyer. (Pronounced
foy-yay
by
Sandra-sounds-like-Sondra
.)

The master bedroom at the far end of the hallway isn’t large by today’s standards. And it isn’t a
suite
by any stretch of the imagination, lacking a private bath, dressing room, walk-in closet . . .

But that, of course, is what Sandra Lutz calls it as she opens the door for the second time today:
the master suite.

The room does look bigger and brighter than it did years ago, when it was filled with dark, heavy furniture and long draperies shielding the windows. Now bright summer sunlight floods the room, dappled by the leafy branches of a towering maple in the front yard.

A faint hint of Mother’s cloying talcum powder and Father’s forbidden pipe tobacco seems to waft in the air, but it might very well be imagined.

The lone floor lamp, plugged into an electronic timer that will turn it on for a few hours every evening, was Sandra’s idea. There’s one downstairs in the living room, too.

“You don’t want to advertise that the house is empty,” she said.

“Why not? There’s nothing here to steal.”

“Yes, but you don’t want to tempt kids or vandals to break in.”

I really don’t care.

“Here.” Sandra walks over to the far end of the room, indicating the decorative paneling on the lower wall adjacent to the bay window. “This is what I was talking about. See how this wainscot doesn’t match the rest of the house? Everywhere else, it’s more formal, with raised panels, curved moldings, beaded scrolls. But this is a recessed panel—Mission style, not Victorian. Much more modern. The wood is thinner.”

She’s right. It is.

“And this”—she knocks on the maroon brocade wallpaper above it, exactly the same pattern but noticeably less faded than it is elsewhere in the room—“isn’t plaster like the other walls in the house. It’s drywall. Did you know that?”

“No.”

There wasn’t even wainscoting on that end of the room years ago. Obviously, someone—Father?—rebuilt the wall and added the wainscoting, then repapered it using one of the matching rolls stored years ago on a shelf in the dirt-floored cellar.

“There’s a spot along here . . .” Sandra reaches toward the panels, running her fingertips along the molding of the one in the middle. She presses down, and it swings open. “There. There it is. See?”

Dust particles from the gaping dark hole behind the panel dance like glitter into sunbeams falling through the bay windows.

“Like I said, it’s about two feet deep. I wish I had a flashlight so that I could show you, but . . . see the floor in there? It’s refinished, exactly like this.”

She points to the hardwoods beneath their feet. “In the rest of the house, the hidden compartments have rough, unfinished wood. So obviously, this cubby space was added in recent years—it must have been while your family owned the house, because as I said, the room was two feet longer when it was listed by the previous owner.”

“When you opened the panel, was there . . . was this all that was inside?”

“The notebook?” Sandra nods. “That was it. It was just sitting on the floor in there, wrapped in the rosary. I gave it to you just the way I found it. I figured it might be some kind of diary or maybe a prayer journal . . . ?”

The question hangs like the dust particles in the air between them and then falls away, answered only by the distant whistle of a passing freight train.

Predictably, Sandra waits only a few seconds before filling the awkward pause. “I just love old houses. So much character. So many secrets.”

Sandra, you have no idea. Absolutely no idea.

“Is there anything else you wanted to ask about this or . . . anything?”

“No. Thank you for showing me.”

“You’re welcome. Should I . . . ?” She gestures at the wainscot panel.

“Please.”

Sandra pushes the panel back into place, and the hidden compartment is obscured—but not forgotten, by any means.

Does the fact that the Realtor speculated whether the notebook is a diary or prayer journal mean she really didn’t remove the rosary beads and read it when she found it?

Or is she trying to cover up the fact that she did?

Either way . . .

I can’t take any chances. Sorry, Sandra. You know “exactly” where I live . . . now it’s my turn to find out the same about you
.

That shouldn’t be hard.

An online search of recent real estate transactions on Wayside Avenue should be sufficient.

How ironic that Sandra Lutz had brought up Sacred Sisters’ proximity to her new house before the contents of the notebook had been revealed. In that moment, the mention of Sacred Sisters had elicited nothing more than a vaguely unpleasant memory of an imposing neighborhood landmark.

Now, however . . .

Now that I know what happened there . . .

The mere thought of the old school brings a shudder, clenched fists, and a resolve for vengeance. That Sandra Lutz lives nearby seems to make her, by some twisted logic, an accessory to a crime that must not go unpunished any longer.

They descend the so-called grand staircase to the first floor. Here, a faint mildewed smell permeates the musty air, courtesy of the damp cellar below. It’s always been prone to flooding thanks to a frequently clogged drain. Earlier, Sandra needlessly pointed out that a vapor barrier, French drain system, and even new roof gutters would help.

I’m sure it would. But that’s somebody else’s problem.

“Shall we go out the front door or the back?” Sandra asks.

“Front.”

It’s closer to the rental car. The need to get out of this old house with its unsettling secrets and lies is growing more urgent by the second.

“I thought you might like to take a last look around before—”

“No, thank you.”

“All right, front door it is. I never really use it at my own house,” Sandra confides as she turns a key sticking out of the double-cylinder dead bolt and opens one of the glass-windowed double doors. “I have a detached garage and the back door is closer to it, so that’s how I come and go.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake, who cares?

“You know, your mother had these locks installed after your dad passed away. She was so afraid to be alone at night.”

Mother? Upset that Father passed away?

Mother, afraid to be alone?

Mother, afraid of anything at all—other than the wrath of God or Satan?

I don’t think so.

“What makes you assume that?”

“It’s not an assumption,” Sandra says defensively, stepping out onto the stoop and holding the door open. “Bob Witkowski told me that’s what she said.”

“
Who?
”

“Bob Witkowski. You know Al Witkowski, the mover? He lives right around the corner now, on Redbud Street, in an apartment above the dry cleaner. His wife divorced him a while back and took him for everything he had.”

Oh, for the love of . . .

“Anyway, Bob is Al’s younger brother. He’s a locksmith. I had him install these same double-cylinder dead bolts in my house when I first moved in, because I have windows in my front door, too. You can’t be too careful when you’re a woman living alone—I’m sure your mother knew that.”

“Yes.”

The wheels are turning, turning, turning . . .

Stomach churning, churning, churning at the memory of Mother.

Mother, who constantly quoted the Ten Commandments, then broke the Eighth with a lie so mighty that surely she’d lived out the rest of her days terrified by the prospect of burning in hell for all eternity.

“A lock like this is ideal for an old house with original glass-paned doors, because the only way to open it, even from the inside, is with a key,” Sandra is saying as she closes the door behind them and inserts the same key into the outside lock. “No one can just break the window on the door and reach inside to open it. Some people leave the key right in the lock so they can get out quickly in an emergency, but that defeats the purpose, don’t you think? I keep my own keys right up above my doors, sitting on the little ledges of molding. It would only take me an extra second to grab the key and get out if there was a fire.”

“Mmm hmm.”

The place is a firetrap . . .

“Of course, now that it’s summer, I keep my windows open anyway, so I guess that fancy lock doesn’t do much for me, does it? I really should at least fix the broken screen in the mudroom. Anyone could push through it and hop in.”

It’s practically an invitation.

Stupid, stupid woman.

Sandra gives a little chuckle. “Good thing this is still such a safe neighborhood, right?”

“Absolutely.”

Yes, and thanks to Sandra’s incessant babble, a plan has taken shape.

A plan that, if one were inclined to fret about breaking the Ten Commandments—
which I most certainly am not—
blatantly violates the Fifth.

Thou shalt not kill.

Oh, but I shall.

It won’t be the first time.

And surely, it won’t be the last.

Entry from the marble notebook

Tuesday, August 20, 1985

Another bad day.

Father visited my room again last night. I’ve decided to start writing it down whenever it happens, because I can’t keep it all inside anymore. I have no one to talk to other than Adrian, and he’s only five years old and I can’t burden him with it.

So this is going to be my Bad Day Notebook from now on. And if I ever get brave enough to tell someone what goes on around here, this will be my evidence.

Chapter 2

O
n steamy nights like this, there’s something to be said for living in a solid old house.

Sandra Lutz is certain that her ex-husband wouldn’t agree, but to hell with him and his newly built waterfront condo and his newly built—thanks to an expensive boob job the SOB denies having paid for—live-in girlfriend.

The old box fan humming on the windowsill above the kitchen sink creates a pleasant, if warm, breeze as Sandra takes a carton of mango Häagen-Dazs sorbet from the freezer.

Really, with all the windows open and the fans spinning, who needs air-conditioning?

Heat waves like this occur maybe once a year in western New York, and even then, this property’s ancient maples shade the home’s gabled roof by day, and the thick plaster walls keep the warm air and humidity at bay.

Plaster walls . . .

That reminds Sandra of the conversation she had with her new client this afternoon in the Addams House.

That’s what all the neighborhood kids used to call the magnificent Victorian over on Lilac Street.

Addams, as in
The Addams Family
, an old sitcom that was popular in syndicated reruns back when Sandra was growing up. On the television show, the family lived in a Second Empire Victorian mansion that was strikingly similar to the one on Lilac Street, with its paired dormers and iron-crested cupola tower poking high above the mansard roof.

The neighborhood streets were lined with old houses, but most of them had been built in the 1900s, not the 1850s. Conspicuous as a tiered butter-cream wedding cake perched on a platter of supermarket corn muffins, the Addams House was a magnet for kids with lively imaginations—especially during the two- or three-year period when the place stood empty after elderly Mr. and Mrs. Normand died without heirs.

Sandra and her friends used to dare each other to sneak inside. As far as she can recall, no one ever went through with it, and eventually, they all became more interested in spin the bottle than in truth or dare—probably right around the time the new family moved in.

Sandra vaguely remembers the parents, having occasionally crossed paths with them: the father worked at the local bank branch where she used to deposit her babysitting money in a savings account, the mother at Russo’s Drugstore where she picked up her asthma inhalers.

The father is long dead and now the mother is, too; their son is an adult, and the Addams House stands empty once again.

Empty, scrubbed clean, aired out, and ready to receive new owners.

There are plenty of similar homes listed—homes that need a lot less work and don’t have the pall of tragedy hanging over them—but Sandra is guessing that the Addams House probably won’t be unoccupied for long this time. Regardless of the sagging market and rust belt location, property tends to move when you have an owner who’s open to lowball offers, eager to sell and move on.

Sometimes that’s the case with an estate property, but just as often, Sandra encounters sellers who are reluctant to close the door on the past—particularly when there are several inheritors in the will. Typically, you have sentimental, nostalgic children or grandchildren, nieces or nephews, locking horns with their calculating, greedy cousins or siblings—or worse, siblings-in-law. Divvying up the contents of any house is always a potential issue, as is setting an asking price, and deciding whether to hold out for it.

None of that here, though. The sole inheritor to the Addams House has been all business, if noticeably skittish—even before the stilted conversation about the rosary-wrapped notebook and the secret panel Sandra had found.

That, clearly, was a touchy subject for him. Why?

The old house certainly has its share of secrets. Most old houses do. In this case, so, apparently, did its final residents.

What the heck was in that notebook and why was it wrapped in a rosary, as if to . . . to . . .

To keep the devil at bay, maybe?

Sandra wishes she’d taken the time to at least glance inside before she’d handed it over to him. She was naturally curious—who wouldn’t be?—and she’d fully intended to take a peek, but she hadn’t gotten around to it before he showed up for the walk-through.

Oh well. For all she knows, the pages are full of prayers from a long ago CCD class, or they’re completely blank.

Why would anyone have hidden it, then?

And why bother to build a new secret compartment? The house is already full of them.

Clearly, the elderly owners were pretty desperate to hide something. Most likely money or jewelry, and the notebook simply wound up there.

Still, it doesn’t make sense. Why not just use one of the existing hidden cubbies?

Because they wanted to keep whatever it was from someone who would already be familiar with the home’s existing nooks and crannies.

Someone—like their own son?

It had to be. The Normands and all other previous occupants of the house are long dead, and the most recent owners were hardly social butterflies who welcomed in flocks of friends or neighbors. Even Bob Witkowski, when he installed the new locks, said he never got past the front foyer.

“The old lady watched me like a hawk through the doorway from the parlor the whole time,” he told Sandra, “just like she used to watch us from behind the counter at Russo’s when we were kids, like she thought we were trying to shoplift condoms or cigarettes.”

“You probably were.”

“Not always! Anyway, I’m not a kid anymore, but she had that same way of watching—it gave me the creeps. She just sat there in her rocking chair with her rosary beads, rocking and muttering her prayers and staring at me.”

Rumor has it that the reclusive family was overtly religious—not unusual in this old Roman Catholic neighborhood, where small front yard grottos housing statues of the Virgin Mary are nearly as prevalent as lofty maples. But according to Bob’s brother Al, who owns the moving company that hauled away the contents of the house, the owners were ultra-conservative fanatics who kept to themselves even before the terrible tragedy years ago—a tragedy Sandra doesn’t even recall.

“It was definitely in the paper,” Al said, “because I remember my mother reading the article out loud to my father, saying what a shame it was, and that we would all have to go to the wake. I was dreading that. Not that I was sad about it—I barely knew them, but I hated wearing a suit coat and tie and my mother would have made me. But then it turned out there wasn’t one, so I didn’t have to worry.”

“No wake?”

“No wake, no funeral. My mother thought that was strange.”

Al’s mother, Sandra remembered now, had been the neighborhood busybody. One of many, actually. But Al always liked to talk as much as his mother did, which meant Sandra was privy to all the gossip he gleaned from his mother.

“Mom thought it was even more strange,” he went on, “when the parishioners wanted to organize a volunteer circle to bring over meals for a while afterward, but the family didn’t want even that.”

“Maybe they heard about those heinous liver and onion casseroles Mrs. Schneider used to make,” suggested Sandra, who had been treated to the volunteer circle’s offerings one summer when her own mother had bunion surgery and was laid up for two weeks.

Al chuckled. “That’s probably it. Anyway, my mother always said, ‘If people want to help you, you should let them do it, because sometimes they need to for themselves, as much as for your own sake.’ But I guess some people would just rather grieve in private.”

Yes. And some people—like the skittish man she met today—leave home and never look back, all but estranging themselves from elderly parents.

Perhaps with good reason. Sometimes a parent doesn’t agree with an adult child’s choices or lifestyle—an ugly divorce, a child born out of wedlock, a same-sex lover . . .

Sandra prides herself on being open-minded; she would never condemn her own children for any of those so-called sins. But she’s met plenty of people who would. So when her client deflected her questions about whether he had a wife or children back home on Long Island, Sandra sensed that he had something to hide, and that his God-fearing mother probably didn’t approve of whatever it is.

She mentioned that to Al Witkowski, whose bushy eyebrows nearly disappeared beneath his graying comb-over. “Yeah, I’ll bet. The mother homeschooled him, so no one ever really knew him, but from what we could tell, he was a real weirdo. Remember the rumors that went around about him?”

“Which rumors?” She wondered whether Mrs. Witkowski had a hand in spreading them.

What Al told her fueled her suspicion and sparked sympathy for the misfit kid her client had once been, and for his widowed mother living out her years in gloomy solitude. No one even discovered the body in the rocking chair until the power was shut off after the electric bill went unpaid. Finally, a neighbor noticed that the windows had been dark—behind the perpetually drawn curtains and shades—for weeks.

Such a shame.

Ugly rumors and past differences aside, you’d think a person’s own flesh and blood would show a bit of remorse about that harsh, lonely death. But no. Talk about a cold fish.

However, a client is a client; a commission is—

Suddenly, the house goes dark.

What in the . . . ?

Oh. The power grid must be overloaded by all the air conditioners running tonight.

The window fan slowly winds down and falls still, its whir giving way to the steady chirp of crickets beyond the screen.

Sandra puts the carton of sorbet back into the freezer, then tugs open a stuck drawer and fumbles around looking for a pack of matches. Wrong drawer. She tries another, and then, growing more anxious by the second, a third—bingo! Matchbook in hand, she feels her way into the living room to light the fat three-wick lavender spa candle on the coffee table.

What are you afraid of? Ghosts?
She can almost hear her ex-husband’s voice mocking her jitteriness.
There’s no such thing
.

Most of the time, Sandra would be in complete agreement. But once in a while, when she shows an old house—or now that she lives in one—she gets that creepy feeling that she isn’t quite alone.

She’s probably just imagining things, not yet used to living solo for the first time in her life.

Again, her thoughts drift to the old woman who died alone in her rocking chair in the Addams House.

This time, along with pity, she feels a shiver of trepidation.

That’s just because you’re alone in the dark. Hurry up and light the candle.

She does; it takes her a moment to realize that a faint glow is falling through the sheer curtains.

Moonlight?

No, it can’t be. There was just a slender white sliver in the sky when she stepped out of her Mercedes on the driveway a little while ago.

Walking over to look out the window, she’s startled to find it closed and locked. So, she realizes, is the one across the room.

That’s strange. She hasn’t been in the living room since she fell asleep in front of the television last evening, but she could have sworn that she left the windows open overnight to ventilate the house.

Who knows? Maybe she groggily closed them all when she woke up and dragged herself to bed in the wee hours.

Maybe?
She must have. There’s no other logical explanation.

Peering through the glass, she sees that the light spilling into the room is coming from the streetlights out front. They’re still ablaze up and down Wayside Avenue, as are her neighbors’ porch lights, their windows bright with lamplight.

So this isn’t a blackout. It’s some kind of power failure affecting only Sandra’s house.

Okay. Old homes
do
have their drawbacks—like old wiring.

And the inspector
did
warn her that the electrical system is not in good shape. A fire hazard, he called it.

She sniffs the lavender-scented air. No hint of smoke. That’s a good sign.

It’s probably just a blown circuit breaker. Too many fans plugged in or something.

Realizing she’s going to have to inspect the ancient fuse panel in the basement, Sandra misses her ex-husband for the first time in months. It would be nice to have a man around the house, even if he is a complete SOB.

There’s always Al Witkowski. He personally oversaw her move a few months ago and said to call him if she ever needs anything.

“Remember, I’m just a few blocks away,” he reminded her, lingering long after the job was done. “Even if you just get sick of being alone and want some company some night . . . I know how that is.”

A teddy bear of a man with a beer gut, the recently divorced Al is definitely not Sandra’s type, and she isn’t in the mood for company tonight. But when she thinks about the damp, still-unfamiliar basement and the spiderweb-draped electrical panel—and the fact that she isn’t sure whether she even has a flashlight in the house, let alone one with working batteries . . .

Yes. She’s calling Al.

Sandra reaches for the cordless phone on the end table before remembering: It’s useless without electricity.

As usual, her cell phone was down to one battery bar at the end of the workday; she plugged it in upstairs when she got home. Opting to conserve what little charge it might have picked up since, she makes her way back to the old wall telephone in the kitchen. A landline comes in handy when the power goes out.

She lifts the clunky-by-today’s-standards receiver to her ear, feeling as though she should be dialing the number of one of her childhood girlfriends. The same phone, but in a burnt orange shade that matched the flower-power wallpaper, hung in her own childhood kitchen. She spent many an hour stomach-down on the speckle-patterned beige linoleum beneath the curly cord, chatting and swinging her legs around in the air.

Sandra’s happy burst of nostalgia vanishes when she realizes that there’s no dial tone on this phone.

Frowning, she presses the metal cradle and lifts it again. Still nothing. She jiggles it up and down. Nope.

That’s strange, because it was in perfect working order when she first moved in. She used it to order takeout Chinese before she dug the cordless phones out of the moving boxes, and she marveled at how long it took the dial to circle back to its original position after each digit. People must have had a lot more patience back in the old days, before the whole world evolved into an instant gratification electronic extravaganza.