The Good Sister (20 page)

“Only you think that.”

“We all have our quirks.”

Not Thad. Not really. Not potentially embarrassing ones.

And this woman—Amy Janicek—she doesn’t seem like a quirky person, either. Or the type who would give someone a pass for a minor—or major—digression.

“Sorry—I don’t want Thayer to tear up your lawn,” she explains as Jen crosses the yard toward her, “and I don’t want to shout it and be overheard.”

Uh-oh. Shout what?

Did she find out, somehow, about the trouble at Sacred Sisters? If that’s the case, she’s probably wondering about Carley’s integrity, questioning whether she should be allowed to continue babysitting the Janicek children.

What am I going to say if she asks about the suspension?
Jen wonders as she reluctantly crosses the grass toward the tall, wiry woman whose straight, shoulder-length blond hair, pulled back in a navy visor, is just a shade dull enough to be courtesy of genetics and not a salon.

Amy wastes no time getting to the point. “I hate to even bring this up, because I’m a mom, too, and you might feel that it’s none of my business, but when I saw you out here, I realized I can’t just walk on by without mentioning it.”

Immediately on the defensive, Jen wonders how she even found out about it in the first place.

“I mean, if it were my daughter, I’d want to know. I figure you would, too.”

Jen decides to play dumb. “Want to know what?”

“I was just walking Thayer over by the entrance to the development—I wear a pedometer and it’s exactly a mile from here down to the end of that new road where they’re about to start building—and I saw your daughter going into the woods.”

“What?” Startled, Jen immediately looks back at the house, at Carley’s bedroom window. Did she sneak out somehow? Is that why she didn’t answer the phone earlier, when Frankie called?

No, that can’t be. Jen saw her after she got back from the nursery, and anyway, Frankie would have come down to tell her if she found the house empty. So what the heck is Amy talk—

Wait a minute . . .

“Which daughter?”

“Your younger one.”

Jen’s heart flutters a bit, as if deciding whether to sink or not. “Emma.”

“Yes, Emma. She was going into the woods.”

Terrific. Jen glances at her watch and sees that her youngest should have been home from school twenty minutes ago. She was so busy worrying about Carley—and all right, planting pansies—that she completely lost track of time. Caught in the act of running a loose ship while Emma was in the woods doing God only knows what.

Jen feels sick inside, pretty willing to bet she wasn’t bird watching or foraging for morels.

“She wasn’t alone,” Amy informs her.

No. No, of course she wasn’t.

“She was with Gabe.”

“Gabe? Who—”

“The boy who moved in next door to us.”

Oh. Right. The new neighbors.

In another lifetime, Jen made a sponge cake to welcome them, but brought it over to Debbie’s instead . . .

Debbie . . .

Nicki . . .

Carley.

Dominoes falling again.

“What were they doing?” she asks Amy, who is distractedly wrapping the dog’s leash around her hand to keep him close as he tries to tug her away.

“In the woods?”

“Yes. In the woods. What were they
doing
?” Jen realizes, as she repeats the ridiculous question, that of course Amy doesn’t know the answer to that, but she can probably take a wild guess . . .

And so can I.

Dammit.

Motherhood is starting to feel like Whac-A-Mole. No sooner does she manage to stamp out one problem than another pops up.

No . . . it’s not like that at all. She hasn’t stamped out any problems.

Okay, so maybe motherhood is more like pulling weeds. They’re everywhere, all the time. Even when you think you’ve eliminated them, the taproot is there, just beneath the surface, waiting to sprout again.

My girls . . . my little girls . . . how is this happening?

“I really—I have no idea what they were doing.” Amy shakes her head. “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have—”

“No, it’s fine, thank you for telling me. I’ll talk to Emma when she gets home.”

“All right. I mean . . . I’d want to know, if it were my own daughter,” Amy says again, but Jen can tell she’s thinking that it never would be her own daughter.

No, because we never think that, do we?

We assume that our kids are the good ones, the perfect ones who aren’t going to sneak around or get into trouble at school or . . .

Or worse.

Again, her mind goes to Debbie and Nicki, and the nightmare she had last night.

“Are you okay?”

Opening her eyes, she sees Amy Janicek peering at her, looking concerned.

“Thank you. Really. I appreciate the heads-up.”

“No problem. The thing is—” Amy breaks off to scold the dog, still straining at the leash, “Thayer, stop that! Sit!”

Imperfect Thayer ignores her, nose to the ground, sniffing, pulling.

“The thing is, he’s— Thayer!” After a brief tug of war, Amy shakes her head and allows the dog to jerk her onto the grass. “I’m sorry. He’s just bad news.”

For a moment, Jen thinks she’s talking about the dog. Then she realizes—Gabe. Gabe is bad news.

“In what way?” she asks.

“No supervision whatsoever. The father is never home. I only met him once, in passing, when he was leaving and I was walking the dog, and I welcomed him to the neighborhood. He wasn’t friendly at all. He didn’t bother to thank me for the casserole I dropped off with the son on the day they moved in—didn’t seem to know anything about it, didn’t even know where my dish was, and it was one of my good Corningwares. I need it back.”

“And the son . . . ?”

“Comes and goes at all hours. He dresses like a bum—I know kids dress down these days, but come on. You live here in this development, you can afford a decent wardrobe right?” Not waiting for an answer, she shakes her head, adding, “There’s just something shady about him. They’re from New York City, did you know that? I told my kids to steer clear of that side of the yard, because you just never know what— Thayer, stop that! Sit!”

“What else do you know about Gabe?” Jen asks. “I mean, is there anything specific . . . ?”

Other than assumptions you’ve made based on things he might not be able to help.

She’s feeling prickly, listening to Amy’s rant.

Then again, that boy—Gabe—might have lured her innocent eighth-grader into the woods and, for all she knows—

“He’s just bad news,” Amy says with a shrug, unwinding a length of leash to allow the dog to graze further onto the lawn. “What does he want with a girl Emma’s age?”

Jen shakes her head, mouth set grimly.

“I didn’t mean to upset you, but—”

“You didn’t upset me. I just—I’d better get inside. My sister is here visiting, and Carley is . . . she’s . . .”

She’s a good girl. She is.

“Oh, tell Carley I may be calling her to babysit for a few hours tomorrow night so that Pete can take me out to a nice dinner. I really need a break. It’s been a crazy week.”

Yeah. Tell me about it.

For a moment, she considers informing Amy that this isn’t a good weekend for Carley—without mentioning, of course, her best friend’s suicide or the suspension from school. She’ll just say they’ll be busy tomorrow helping her mother with the Saint Joseph’s Day cooking, an annual task Carley has always looked forward to.

Then again, that might prolong the conversation, and Jen is eager to get rid of Amy. She merely says, “I’ll tell her,” and is grateful when Amy turns away at last, pulling the dog back out onto the pavement.

“Have a great weekend,” she calls over her shoulder.

Jen doesn’t bother to reply.

Entry from the marble notebook

Thursday, February 6, 1986

Father came into my room last night.

Before he left, he told me that he signed me up for my road test. When I told him I’m not ready to take it yet, he said you have to sign up way in advance and that it isn’t scheduled until March. He said that leaves us plenty of time to practice driving, and the way he said it . . .

Whenever I drive, he sits so close to me that I can smell his breath and it makes me gag. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. Sometimes, when he’s sitting on the passenger side, I’m so tempted to turn the wheel really, really hard and drive him right into a tree. There are so many huge old ones right next to the street in our neighborhood. It wouldn’t be hard to do. I could pretend it was an accident.

But God would know. And He would punish me in hell.

Sometimes, I wonder how much worse that would be than anything else I’ve gone through.

Chapter 11

T
o her credit, Aunt Frankie waits until they’ve ordered dessert—peanut butter fudge ripple cheesecake for Carley and tiramisu cheesecake for her—to bring up what happened at school.

Carley was starting to think—hope—that the topic wouldn’t come up at all, but she should have known better. That’s the whole reason they’re here, isn’t it? It’s why Aunt Frankie drove all this way on a Friday afternoon, and why Mom and Dad and Emma didn’t tag along for dinner.

Even if they had intended to come, the plan probably would have been derailed by the latest trouble with Emma. Carley has no idea what her sister did this time, but she heard Mom downstairs yelling at her like crazy when she got home from school. Carley was curious—it sounded a lot worse than the usual battles between her mother and sister—but not curious enough to emerge from her room to investigate.

At last her mother was focused on something other than Carley, and she didn’t want to risk drawing attention back to herself.

She stayed behind closed doors, reading, until Aunt Frankie knocked and said it was time to go. As they left, she could hear Emma slamming things around in her room. Dad was just pulling into the driveway, and Mom was sitting in the living room waiting for him, grim-faced.

If Aunt Frankie knew what was up with Emma, she didn’t bring it up during the drive over, and Carley didn’t ask. She has enough problems of her own.

Aunt Frankie had told her she doesn’t have to discuss it if she doesn’t want to. She probably wouldn’t have wanted to, if the subject had come up at the beginning of the evening.

But she gradually relaxed as they talked about other topics. Movies, music, books, celebrities—Aunt Frankie can have an effortless conversation about absolutely anything. That’s always been one of Carley’s favorite things about her, but it’s especially the case tonight.

What a relief to spend time with someone who isn’t scolding her, or peering nervously at her—both of which her parents did in the past twenty-four hours, before Emma got into trouble again.

Even now, Aunt Frankie is totally casual as she leans back in the booth, takes a sip of her cappuccino, and asks, “So . . . your mother tells me you’re suspended for cheating?”

Carley nods. What is there to say to that?

“What the heck happened? You’re smarter than that, babe.”

Too relaxed—or maybe just too weary—to be defensive, Carley can only agree with a shrug. “I know.”

“Did you go in there planning to cheat, or was it something that—”

“No! I would never
plan
it. I would never cheat on purpose.”

“So you cheated
by accident
?”

“Not exactly. It was . . .” She hesitates, wondering if she can trust her aunt with the truth. “I really don’t want to get into this with my mother. She’d freak out.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s always worried about what goes on at school, and—I don’t want her to get involved. It was really my own fault. It’s just . . .”

“What happened, Carley?”

“I was sitting there during the test and I couldn’t focus and time was running out, and then out of the blue, someone threw me a note with the answers. Only it was a setup. They were mostly the wrong answers, copied off this girl who’s failing math.”

“Who threw the note?”

“I have no idea.” Actually, that’s not entirely the case. She has some idea. It had to be someone sitting close enough to not only toss her the note, but to copy the answers from Wanda Durphy’s test paper. Kendra Hyde, maybe, or Melissa Kovacs . . .

Aunt Frankie shakes her head, looking disgusted. “So basically, someone baited you, and you took it?”

“Exactly. My guard was down, because . . .” Because she was upset about Nicki. But she doesn’t say it. That’s no excuse for what she did. She should have known better; she doesn’t need to hear Aunt Frankie tell her that.

“Because Monday was your best friend’s wake,” Aunt Frankie says gently. “Right? Did the other girls know about that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It doesn’t matter. They wouldn’t care anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because they hate me.”

“Who hates you?”

“Everyone.”

“ ‘Hate’ is a strong word. I’m sure they don’t—”

“You have to hate someone to do what they did to me.”

The awful story spills out of her—about how they elected her Spring Fling princess, as a joke. Only Carley didn’t know it was a joke for the first few days. She tells her aunt how happy she was, and how happy her mother was, too.

“We were going to go shopping that weekend to buy a dress for me to wear. Mom couldn’t wait. And I don’t even like to shop, but I . . . I couldn’t wait, either. And then I was in the locker room, changing for gym, when I heard these two girls talking . . .”

Even the memory of it makes her queasy. She can still hear their voices. One of them was Melissa Kovacs. She was whining to the other girl, Renee, about how this thing had gone far enough, and she was missing out on all the fun that leads up to being Spring Fling princess . . .

At first, Carley thought she was just jealous that she hadn’t been elected.

Then Melissa said, “It’s time to tell Princess Carley that everyone wrote her name down as a joke.”

“You’d think she’d have figured it out by now.”

“You’d think she’d have figured it out the second they read her name over the intercom. I mean, come on! Since when is a fat, zit-faced klutz royal court material?”

Emotion jams Carley’s throat as she repeats the cruel words to Aunt Frankie, whose brown eyes are shiny with tears. She reaches out and holds Carley’s hands in her own, silently listening to the rest of it.

There isn’t much left to tell.

Carley doesn’t mention that when she fled the locker room in tears, she crashed right into Johnny, the janitor, right outside in the hall—so close he might very well have heard every word Melissa and Renee said.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” he called after Carley, but she kept her head down, running . . . running . . .

“I just wanted to go home,” she tells Aunt Frankie, “so I went to the nurse, but when I got there, she was with two other girls and I didn’t want them to know something was wrong.”

“So what did you do?”

“I went to Sister Linda, the social worker.”

“That was a good move.”

Carley shrugs. “That’s what we’re supposed to do if we have a problem, and . . .”

“And you’ve always tried to follow the rules, do the right thing.” Aunt Frankie gets it, gets her. “What did Sister Linda say when you told her what happened?”

“She said she understood why I believed they had elected me princess. She said, ‘There are none so blind as those who will not see.’ ”

Aunt Frankie frowns, but says nothing.

“She said not to worry, that she would handle it with the other girls,” Carley said, “and she called Mom and now Melissa is Spring Fling princess like she should have been all along.”

“Wait,” Aunt Frankie says, “you lost me. How is she Spring Fling princess now?”

“I told Sister Linda that I obviously couldn’t do it,” she says, and continues talking over Aunt Frankie, who starts to interrupt, because she knows what her aunt is going to say: that she should have taken a stand and insisted on being Spring Fling princess.

But Carley was nowhere near strong enough to go through with something like that.

“Sister Linda said she’d talk to our class advisors for me and explain,” she hurries on with her story, “and they ended up holding another election without saying why even though everyone knew why, and Melissa won.”

At last, Carley stops talking. She takes off her glasses. Her eyes are hot and swimming with tears.

“That’s disgusting.”

“Melissa?” Carley nods. “I didn’t vote for her. I didn’t vote at all. I handed in a blank ballot.”

“The whole thing is disgusting. The way it was handled . . .” Aunt Frankie shakes her head. “That girl should have been punished, not rewarded, and—”

“It wasn’t just her, it was everyone, and it doesn’t matter, it’s—” Carley’s voice breaks. She grabs her napkin off her lap, turns toward the wall, and surreptitiously wipes her eyes, hoping no one sees.

“Here.” Aunt Frankie slides a little tissue packet across the table to her. “Want to go to the ladies’ room?”

In other words, does she want to parade, sobbing, through the busy restaurant? Carley shakes her head furiously, clearing her throat. “I’m okay.”

“No, you aren’t. But you will be.”

“No, I won’t.”

“You will,” Aunt Frankie counters. “I promise. Trust me.”

She looks up at her aunt. It’s so easy for her to say, sitting there. She’s pretty and athletic, with a job and a car and a house, and she has Aunt Patty and two cuddly cats and tons of friends.

What do I have?

Nothing.

Not even a friend.

Except for Angel, Carley reminds herself.

Thank God, thank God for my guardian angel.

W
hen at last it was unearthed from beneath a shallow layer of mud in the basement floor, the trapdoor turned out to be long—much longer than Angel expected. It’s a wooden door with recessed panels, one that, standing vertically, would fit any of the doorways upstairs.

That, Angel suspects, is probably exactly where it came from. Up on the no-frills third floor in what was once the servants’ quarters, some of the shelved closets are open, with hinge marks indicating that they once had doors.

This one on the basement floor has a metal plate covering the place where the knob hole would have been drilled, and someone affixed a sturdy metal handle—which stubbed Angel’s shuffling toes—precisely in the middle.

Simply tugging on that handle wasn’t enough to get it open, though.

No, this has been one hell of a job. It’s required not just patience, waiting for the floodwaters to subside, but also, once the task had commenced earlier this evening, a disruptive road trip to go purchase a heavy metal crowbar from the hardware superstore off the thruway.

Tonight, the clerk wasn’t a disinterested high school kid but a silver-haired retiree who asked Angel about the weather: “How is it out there now that the sun’s gone down? Still warm like it was all day? Feels like spring, don’t it?”

Inwardly cringing at the grammatical error, Angel nodded politely and paid for the purchase in cash, wanting only to get out of there and back to the job at hand.

“You have a nice night now. Don’t work too hard, whatever it is you’re doing.”

It’s none of your damned business what I’m doing.

Jaw clenched, Angel left the store vowing to shop somewhere else next time. You can’t have people talking to you, asking questions—even about the weather. Because then they recognize you, and they notice what you buy—
Oh, you’re the one who got the crowbar that time, and a while back, you had the keys copied, and now you’re getting rope and duct tape? What’s this for?

That’s how it goes in small, friendly cities like this, where people don’t ignore each other and keep their distance the way they do in, say, New York.

At least the crowbar does the trick. The door makes a splintering sound as Angel pries it open at last, letting it thud over onto the damp dirt floor.

Breathing hard from the exertion, Angel grabs a flashlight—also purchased in a hardware store, but at the mom-and-pop one two blocks away.

That was last year, in the beginning, before I knew any better. Before I realized that I’d need to be able to come and go around here without attracting any attention.

Aiming the beam into the hole, Angel is startled to see that it’s lined with concrete.

What on earth . . . ?

Tilting the flashlight’s angle deeper into the hole, wondering whether it leads to an underground bunker of some sort, or perhaps a passageway leftover from the Underground Railroad era—
no matter what that twit Sandra Lutz said about it
—Angel expects to see a tunnel.

But that’s not the case. The hole is fairly shallow, maybe three feet deep from the opening to the bottom . . .

Except, upon closer examination, what appears to be the bottom isn’t the bottom.

Peering into the hole, Angel sees that it’s actually the top—of Mother’s old chest freezer.

But you knew it was here, didn’t you?

No!

Of course I didn’t know! I asked Sandra Lutz to get rid of it, and she said . . .

She said . . .

How many times do I have to tell you the freezer is waterproof?

It isn’t Sandra’s voice that seeps into Angel’s brain; it’s Mother’s.

Mother, with her secrets and lies . . .

Mother who—with Father’s help, of course; he did everything she asked—had buried the freezer in this strange, concrete-lined vault beneath the basement floor, the lid secured with a large padlock, protecting . . .

Protecting . . .

God only knows what’s inside.

No.

Not just God. You know, too.

You do. In the back of your mind, you’ve always known, haven’t you? Even before you read the marble notebook. You’ve known ever since . . .

Winter. Cold. Dark. Late. Flashlights.

The power has gone out again, or . . .

Or they don’t want to turn on a light down here. They don’t want anyone to see.

But I see. I’m crouched on the stairs, and I see what they’re doing, and I smell the dirt, and I hear choking sobs . . .

Father. Father is crying.

“Hush!” Mother’s voice, cold as the bitter January wind that rattled windowpanes and banged shutters upstairs, jarring Angel from a sound sleep.

Father: “I can’t help it! I can’t stop thinking of—”

Mother: “Don’t think of her. Just dig! Dig!”

Shovels digging into the damp earthen floor, rasping, scraping . . .

Father’s sobs . . .

Mother’s voice . . .

Fingertips to temples, Angel can no longer block it out, any of it.

“Y
ou’re ruining my life!” Emma screams at her parents, who are sitting calmly on the couch as she strides around the living room. “How can you do this to me?”