The Lost Sister (14 page)

She inhaled sharply, suddenly overcome by emotions. Was it excitement? Desire? Fear? They all seemed to rush together.

The voices from the party swirled around her in a fog. They were tucked away out of sight, and yet for some reason Maddie felt exposed and on display. This both thrilled and frightened her. She suddenly wanted to be kissed by him, swept up in his strong embrace, and so much more.

He grabbed the back of her hair tightly and rested his hand against the back of her neck, pulling her against him. His mouth was only inches from hers, and his blue eyes peered into hers. She realized that she had missed everything about him. They were no longer bound by the restrictions of teacher and student, and suddenly she wanted him more than ever. And from the look in his eyes, Reed’s thoughts weren’t so innocent, either.

Slowly he leaned closer and gently kissed her. Yet when she felt the heat and passion in his kiss, mixed with hesitation, she began kissing him more passionately, letting him know that they shared the same feelings. Maddie could swear that she could feel the movement of the island beneath her feet. Everything else drifted to a faraway hum. All that mattered was right there between them. Nothing would come between them. Not the memory of Cordelia, not Bronwyn, not the Sisters of Misery, and not Abigail’s disapproval.

Nothing except…“Maddie,” Finn said sharply.

Maddie and Reed quickly pulled apart. She was flustered and looked around to make sure that no one else was witness to their impromptu display of affection.

“Hey, O’Malley,” Reed said lightly. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

Finn nodded and looked at Maddie, acting like Reed didn’t exist. “You okay, Maddie?”

“Yeah, yes…um…sure,” Maddie said nervously. She looked back out toward the ocean, where the monstrous shadow of Ravenswood sat atop Hawthorne Hill. She could have sworn she saw a light in one of the windows—probably just a contractor working after hours. But it chilled her, because it almost looked like it was winking at her, goading her.

“Your mom wanted me to find you. She’s feeling tired and wants to head home. I can totally take her if you—if you’re not ready to go.” He fumbled over the words, while Reed shoved his hands into his jean pockets and looked uncomfortably back toward the party, noticing that Darcy—dressed in a dress similar to Maddie’s—was giving him an odd stare.

“No, no, I’m ready to go. I—I guess I’ll talk to you later, Reed,” Maddie said, peeling her eyes away from Ravenswood and trying to keep her voice businesslike, nonchalant. Their eyes met for one more brief second; then she brushed past him and back to the party. Finn did a two-finger salute to Reed with a cocky smile and then followed Maddie through the crowded party.

“What was that for? Extra credit?” Finn joked.

“Shut up, Finn,” Maddie snapped. “Just shut up.”

“Looked like A-plus work to me,” Finn continued to taunt. “Pity he isn’t your teacher anymore.”

“Enough!” Maddie said, trying to fight back a laugh. Only Finn could make a joke out of something as uncomfortable as getting caught making out with your ex-teacher, a lead suspect in your half sister’s disappearance, and the current boyfriend of the wealthiest, most powerful girl in town.

“Hey, at least you’re not getting graded on a curve.”

Maddie swatted him hard. “Where’s your jacket?” she asked, trying to change the subject and deflect any additional tauntings.

He shook his head. “Oh no, Crane, I’m not letting you off the hook that easy.”

She sighed and then continued into the party to find Abigail and go home to sleep off the craziness of that night.

“Your chariot, my ladies,” Finn said in a jovial manner as he helped Maddie and her mother into the launch boat. He seemed happier than he’d been in a long time. It pleased Maddie, but also made her a bit skeptical. What exactly put him in such a good mood? she wondered as the boat took them out onto the blue-black waters, heading toward home.

I
’
m back on the island. The hum of people around me talking seems deafening. Everyone is looking at me and smiling. Why is everyone looking at me like this? I wonder. I feel different. As if I’m in someone else’s clothes, someone else’s skin. I try to look down, but it suddenly becomes clear that I’m only here as an observer—I have no control over my body or my actions.

My stomach drops when I see who Finn and Reed are talking to. They’re talking to me! How is that possible? Am I dreaming? I try to call over to them, but my voice won’t rise up over the sounds of the party.

I realize now that I’m sleeping, dreaming about the party. But why? I watch myself giggling and nervously talking to both guys. For some reason, it makes me sick.

Then I turn away and see someone hunched over the icebox right outside the tent. I see the leather jacket and wonder how Finn was able to get over here so quickly. It’s freezing, but I move farther away from the tent. The waves are crashing loudly over the jagged rocks.

I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them, I see Darcy looking at me with intense fear. What’s wrong? I try to
ask her, but the words aren’t coming out. I notice something on her face. Dirt and—what else is that? Blood?

Let me help you,
I try to say, but I can’t make the words come. She shuffles away from me on the ground, looking at me in disbelief, as if I’m a monster. She inches herself closer to the edge of the island.

I look down at my hands and notice that I’m holding a heavy, steel tent stake. It’s covered in blood. Darcy’s blood.

Oh my God, Darcy! With everything that’s inside me, I try to move toward her and help her, but I’m helplessly stuck watching her cry and plead and beg. I can’t hear her words, but I know what she’s saying.

“Please don’t hurt me. I don’t want to die! I’m sorry!”

She’s screaming now. Why doesn’t anyone hear her? Why am I the only one here? Why is she screaming at me? I would never hurt her.

Suddenly, beyond my control, I move over to her.

Yes, that’s right, it’s over now. I’m going to help you,
I think
.

She looks at me with intense fear as I lift her to her feet. It’s that intense look in her eyes that stays with me as I shove her off the cliff and onto the jagged rocks below. Her lifeless body, hidden among the rocks, looks like a broken doll thrown carelessly on the floor. Her eyes are with me as I turn back to the party and try to scream. Darcy is dead! Why can’t you hear me! People nod at me as I walk back into the party. I grab a glass of champagne and fold into the crowd. I now realize that I’m trapped—trapped inside the body of a murderer. I just watched one of my oldest friends get killed by my own hands, and there is absolutely nothing I can do to change it.

I’m helpless.

I’m scared.

I’m horrified.

I’m a killer.

Maddie sat up straight, slick with sweat. “Darcy!” she screamed. “Darcy, no!”

Abigail came quickly into the room, and Maddie was reminded of the last time she was awoken at that ungodly hour—the night they found Rebecca at Ravenswood.

“What is wrong with you, girl? Do you want the neighbors calling the police?” Abigail scolded.

It was just a dream.
Maddie sighed, relieved.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Maddie said as she sank back against her pillows. “I just—I must have been—it was just a bad dream.”
But it was so real!

Perhaps it was just nerves because today she had planned to visit Rebecca for the first time since she’d returned to Hawthorne. Maybe the haunted look in Darcy’s eyes was simply an altered memory—a memory of the night that Rebecca had slit her wrists in the madhouse of Ravenswood. Yes, revisiting Misery Island and seeing Ravenswood from a distance had brought back all of those memories, twisting them together in a horrific nightmare. Maybe facing Rebecca was a way that she could put the nightmares to rest.

Abigail drove to Fairview, despite Maddie’s offer to play chauffeur, as she had been doing ever since her return to Hawthorne.

“I’m quite capable of driving myself, although I don’t know why you want to see Rebecca now. I don’t think you’re at the top of her list of people she wants to see.”

“And you are?” Maddie scoffed. Welcome or not, a visit to her aunt Rebecca was far past due. When they arrived at Fairview, she was slightly surprised by the doctors and nurses nodding and smiling at Abigail, as if they had seen her before.

Abigail walked straight to Rebecca’s room without asking for directions, then sat to rest on the bench directly across from the room. She seemed out of breath and weary, so she nodded to Maddie to continue on into the room without her.

Maddie hesitated, and then assumed that it would be less confrontational if she went in by herself. In all this time she’d never contacted Rebecca and she felt horrible about it.

She pressed the door open and she saw Rebecca lying in bed facing out toward the bar-covered windows. It seemed that Rebecca was asleep or in a drugged state. She seemed quite similar to the time that Maddie had visited her in Ravenswood. It was like she was there, but somewhere else entirely at the same time.

“Hi, Rebecca,” Maddie said quietly.

Rebecca made no movement or noise, but it sounded like her breath caught for just a moment.

“I’m home for the holidays. My mom is sick. I don’t know if you knew that.” She continued babbling awkwardly. The blindingly white walls felt like they were closing in on her. She wished her mother had come in. Her mother’s lecturing tone would have been a welcome change from this heavy silence. “Anyway, I just came to say hi.” She paused. “It’s been a long time, Rebecca. I’m really sorry about the last time we saw each other. I wish it had been different.”

Finally she turned toward the door, promising to come back and visit her while she was in Hawthorne. “And I haven’t stopped looking for Cordelia. She’s still out there. I can feel it. I can’t explain how I know, but I do,” Maddie offered earnestly as she reached for the long, slender door handle.

“Dead,” Rebecca said softly. “She’s dead.”

Maddie spun around, shocked to hear Rebecca’s voice, and even more shocked to hear what she said. “What do you mean she’s dead, Rebecca? How do you know that about Cordelia? How did you—how could you know?”

Rebecca turned her head slowly toward Maddie, her face as pale as the antiseptically white sheets. Her voice came again, almost as a whisper through her grayish lips. “Not Cordelia.”

Maddie was in shock. “What are you talking about? Rebecca, I don’t understand.”

“Be careful,” Rebecca warned. “Or you’re next.” And then she shut her eyes, succumbing again to the cocktail of meds being administered into her thin arm through the IV, drop by drop by drop.

I
t wasn’t until she returned from the hospital and got the panicked phone call from Hannah telling her that Darcy never made it home from the party the night before, and missed the first shift of her day-care job that morning, that Maddie began to realize there may have been more to her creepy dream and Rebecca’s creepy rambling. Could Rebecca have been talking about Darcy? And if so, how could she know? Horrified, Maddie wondered if Rebecca had been in contact with Cordelia and if it was in fact Cordelia who was behind the disappearance of Darcy—one of the Sisters of Misery who had treated her so terribly last year.

But Abigail had a very different take on what could have happened. It was one that was shared by the police, since they had already taken Finn and Reed into custody as “persons of interest” before Maddie had even woken that morning.

“How can they be suspects?” Maddie asked her mother anxiously over breakfast.

“How can they not? You know that everyone still thinks they had something to do with Cordelia going missing. It’s not that far of a jump to suspect that they might have something to do with other missing girls.”

Maddie sat across the breakfast table glaring at her mother.

“But you and I both know that they had nothing to do with Cordelia’s disappearance. You know the real reason she left town.” Maddie was furious with her mother. How dare she blame Reed and Finn when she knew that it was the discovery of who her real father was that made Cordelia run away, the fact that she’d been lied to and treated badly by everyone? It had nothing to do with Reed or Finn. If anything, they were the only ones in the town who were actually good to her, Maddie thought.

“Of course I know! But I’m not going to go broadcasting our family’s dirty laundry just to get those two boys off the hook.” She fixed the scarf on her head, and then took a long sip of coffee. “Besides, how do I really know that they didn’t have something to do with it? For all I know, one of them could have caught up with her after she left here and done away with her.”

“‘Done away with her’? Mom, this isn’t an Agatha Christie novel. People don’t just go around ‘doing away’ with other people. And you know that neither Reed nor Finn could hurt anyone.”

“How? How? How do I know this?” she asked stubbornly. “How do you know this? You don’t live here anymore. You don’t know what people are capable of. You don’t get it anymore, do you?”

“Get what? What is there to get, Mother?” Maddie slammed her hand down on the table angrily.

“Sometimes you think you know someone. You think you know them better than anyone in the world. And then one day you wake up and find out you don’t know them at all. You find out that they’re sleeping with your sister, or that who you think is your father really isn’t or that your cousin is really your half sister. Who knows anyone? Really? And how well do you even know yourself?”

Maddie thought back to her vision of the night on Misery Island when she had thrown the rock at Cordelia’s head. Abigail was right. Maddie couldn’t trust anyone. Not even herself.

Darcy’s lifeless body was found a few days later, caught in a jagged outcropping of rocks below—waterlogged, swollen, and battered from being bashed against the rocks by the pounding surf. Instantly, suspicions of Reed and Finn being involved increased. Especially since Darcy was found wearing Finn’s leather jacket.

After Maddie heard the terrible news about Darcy, a dark feeling crept over her. She and Darcy were wearing the same dress. Perhaps Darcy wasn’t the intended victim. When she had gone off by herself for those few moments, she had a curious weight of someone watching her.
If Reed and Finn hadn’t come by, what would have happened? What if the person who killed Darcy really meant to kill me?

At the same time Maddie was learning about the terrible fate of her friend, across town at the police station Finn slammed his fist on the interrogation table. He knew that both he and Reed were being questioned about Darcy, and that they were both innocent. The only difference was that Reed would have a hell of a lot better defense team backing him. One that all the money in the world could buy.

“Why would I give the girl I’m planning on killing my jacket?”

“Maybe it wasn’t planned?” Sully said, loving the whole act of interrogation. Finn had been through all of this last year when Cordelia took off, but this was just crazy. This was murder. “Maybe you gave her that jacket hoping for something more and when she didn’t give it to you, you flipped on her.”

“Yeah, I’d kill a girl over a leather jacket and holding out on me. Jesus, Sully.”

“Hey, I’m just saying. Some guys snap when they don’t get what they want.”

“I didn’t want Darcy.”

“Then why did she have your jacket on?”

“She was freezing. Visibly shaking. Who came up with the brilliant idea of having a party out on an island in the middle of the harbor on one of the coldest nights of the year?”

“Oh, so you were just being a gentleman. Ain’t that precious?” Sully mocked.

“I was just doing what any other guy would have done if a girl had asked him for his jacket.”

“Yeah, and why am I supposed to believe that she asked you out of all of the people at the party?”

Finn shook his head. This was going nowhere. “I don’t know, Sully. I guess I was one step up from the caterers. Maybe she wanted a leather jacket. Maybe I was the first person to walk by her when she realized that maybe she should have bundled up a little bit better for the Winter Ball.”

“So that makes you Prince Charming, I guess,” Sully said snidely.

“Yeah, I guess that makes me Prince Charming,” Finn said, raising his hands in the air, giving up.

“The only difference is that Cinderella didn’t end up with her head bashed in at the end of the night.”

Finn put his head down on the table. When would all of this end?

Maddie demanded to see Finn and Reed, but no one in the police department would let her near either of the suspects.
This is impossible!
she thought. How could anyone believe that Finn and Reed would be capable of such a crime? Murder? She knew that she wasn’t the town’s favorite girl at the moment, but at the very least she could serve as an alibi for Reed and Finn that night. She was with them at various points of the night, and neither one of them had acted as if he had just committed a heinous crime like murder. But then again, would anyone believe all of the things that Kate Endicott was capable of without truly knowing her?

Kate
, thought Maddie. She had to be behind all of this somehow.

“Ms. Crane, I understand why you are upset by this. We are all upset. Believe me, we are going to find out who has perpetrated this hideous crime.”

Maddie was talking to one of the detectives brought in from Boston to investigate the crime. It was interesting how all the stops were pulled out with Darcy, but no one did this kind of investigation when Cordelia disappeared. Then again, Hawthorne had never embraced Cordelia as one of its own.

“I was with both Reed and Finn at different points of that night. Finn actually brought me and my mother home.”

“Was either man acting unusual, impulsive, out of character?”

Maddie’s eyes flitted to her hands. Reed. The kiss. That was definitely impulsive. But murderous, of course not. Still…“No, not at all.”

“Did Finn mention anything about giving an article of clothing to Darcy?”

“An article of clothing?” What kind of evidence did they have? She was so confused. “Um, no.”

“Did you notice him leaving without his jacket?”

“Yes, but—”

“Did you know that Darcy was found wearing Finn’s jacket?”

Her dream. It suddenly came back to her. She remembered feeling like she was having an out-of-body experience: seeing herself talking to Finn and Reed and then suddenly wondering how Finn had made it across the island so quickly. And then Darcy’s face covered in blood. Was she wearing Finn’s jacket? She couldn’t remember. Could Finn have really been involved with Darcy’s death? But why? What possible reason could he have for doing this horrible thing?

She shook her head. “I know Finn and Reed very well and I know that there is no way they could have anything to do with Darcy’s death,” she said firmly, pounding her hand on the table.

“That’s very interesting coming from a relative of the missing girl of whom both Mr. O’Malley and Mr. Campbell are still suspects.”

“They had nothing to do with Cordelia’s disappearance. They loved her.”

“Both of them loved her?” The detective scratched some notes in his pad. “So it could have been case of unrequited love, a jealous rivalry that turned fatal?”

“No, no, no! Cordelia isn’t dead. She’s just…” Maddie’s voice trailed off. She had no idea where Cordelia was or why she hadn’t come back. It had been a year and still no word from her cousin—her half sister. “She just left. But I’m sure that she would be the first one to clear Finn’s and Reed’s names.”

“Okay, well, why don’t you have Cordelia give me a call when she’s ready? If she’d like to come forward and officially remove their names as suspects from her case, I’d love to be in touch with her. I think we’re done here, Ms. Crane.”

“Yes, definitely done,” Maddie sighed. She’d love to have Cordelia come back and clear their names. If only she knew where to look for the one person who held the key to answering any of these mysteries or who could give Finn and Reed a fighting chance at getting the truth out there; the one person that Maddie was both terrified and determined to find: her sister, Cordelia.