The Lost Sister (17 page)

T
he fire raged through four of the new towers built at Ravenswood, the first construction sites of the Endicott Hotel. Supernatural occurrences were commonplace at Ravenswood according to local lore. Rumors of unquiet spirits angered by the new construction led people to believe that the fires that no one could trace to a source, in buildings that hadn’t even been wired for electricity yet, were supernatural warnings. Townspeople speculated that the grounds filled with restless spirits wouldn’t accept a building by the Endicott family—a family that had ancestral ties to the witch hangings that had occurred there centuries ago.

Despite the fact that Finn had been unable to stop the building of the hotel and that the Endicotts had swayed the state in their favor, this new setback had many people in town questioning whether or not it was a good idea to move forward with the project. Despite stipulations by the historical society that the sixteenth-century wall and fortress were to be preserved and remain intact during renovations for the luxury hotel, the Endicotts’ decision to tear down the wall supposedly angered the spirits of the Pickering sisters and had set forth the curse on the town. And now Rebecca seemed to be the spokesperson for the supernatural forces that had been unleashed on Hawthorne.

Abigail muttered, “Now she’s gone and made things even worse. I’ve always told her not to play with fire—but I never thought she’d literally do it.”

“Mom,” Maddie scolded. “You should be more concerned with
how
she got out than the fact that she got onto the news. If she hadn’t turned up on television, we may never have known that she got out of Fairview in the first place.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Mom, please,” Maddie said, trying to reason with her. “You know that there is no possible way that Aunt Rebecca could have started those fires. She’s so frail and weak, she wouldn’t have it in her.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

“What are you talking about?” The phone rang again. Maddie checked the caller ID and it was a news station. She hit the Ignore button.

“Well, I’m not the terrible sister that you seem to think I am. I actually have been going to visit her when I go in for my chemotherapy treatments.”

“Mom!” Maddie said in an elated tone. It was so surprising that her mother would take the time to visit Rebecca, especially after everything that had happened.

“Don’t
Mom
me!” Abigail scolded, seemingly uncomfortable with the approval in Maddie’s voice. “Fairview is connected with the hospital where I get my treatments, so I figured, why not?”

“How do you think she got out?” Maddie asked.

“Probably one of her groupies let her out,” Abigail huffed.

“Groupies?” Now Maddie was really confused.

“I don’t know what you call them. Fans? Disciples? Whatever. Ever since Rebecca came out of the coma, people think she’s some sort of sage or fortune-teller or healer.”

Maddie asked earnestly, “Why haven’t you told me any of this?”

Just then, Abigail Crane did something that utterly shocked Maddie. She started to cry. “Mom, what?”

Abigail pulled the scarf off her head to reveal fluffy brown hair, like downy duck fuzz on top of her head. “I stopped the chemo after the first course of treatment. I just couldn’t handle it. It affected me worse than anyone ever expected. My hair was going, my appetite gone. You’ve been running around so much that you haven’t even noticed how quickly it sickened me. But I didn’t want to burden you with this. I—I thought I could handle it myself. Then I continued visiting Rebecca. She told me that she could see the cancer. She could actually see it!”

Maddie felt the guilt creeping in. She was so preoccupied with the drama of adjusting to life back in Hawthorne that she’d nearly forgotten her mother was going through her own private hell.

“She started telling me what to do: drink different herbal mixtures, carry different stones, go to meditate in different areas near the ocean. Ridiculous things, but what other choice did I have? The doctors told me to start putting my affairs in order and that they would ‘make me comfortable’ when the time came. Rebecca would hold my hand and say things and…” She paused as if she were embarrassed to say the words. “…talk to my body. She was actually talking to the cancer cells. That’s what she said anyway. Until one day, she told me it was gone.”

Maddie opened her eyes, wide with shock.

“Of course, I didn’t believe her. But then I started hearing stories from the nurses who worked with her, saying that she was helping them cure all sorts of ailments. They were bringing other patients in to talk to her and spend time with her and their diseases just seemed to disappear.”

Abigail continued as Maddie sat and stared, eyes wide and mouth open. She ignored the incessant ringing of the phones.

“One woman who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s had everything just come back. I mean, everything! She asked to see her husband, her kids, and I was there for the reunion. It was incredible. It was…magic.”

“So, what about you?” Maddie asked, wiping the tears from her eyes.

“Well, I wasn’t going to take my sister’s word for it that she can cure me, that’s for sure. So I went back to my oncologist and they—they said they’d never seen anyone go into remission so quickly. They didn’t understand it. Nothing had worked on me. Not the chemo, not the radiation, nothing! But, somehow…it’s gone!” Abigail burst into tears and fell into Maddie’s lap, soaking her jeans with her tears.

Maddie stroked her mother’s newly grown hair, soft as tufts of cotton, and her own tears dropped down upon her mother. Her mother, who was no longer sick, no longer cancer-ridden. Her mother, who was healed.

Cordelia let the phone ring and ring and ring, but there was no answer at Mariner’s Way. She wondered if they had gone out looking for Rebecca after watching the news. Cordelia knew where her mother would go if given the opportunity. She just didn’t want to face her alone. With Maddie by her side, it would be easier. She hailed a cab and headed out of Salem and back to Hawthorne. Back to where it all began. And where it would ultimately end.

Cordelia picked her way down the snow-covered path. As she moved farther into the woods, the small amount of light left in the cool wintry air had been squeezed out from the branches overhead. The clean scent of pine and snow filled her senses. She clutched a bag of rosemary and quartz crystals to give her strength and protect her from danger.

As Cordelia wandered deeper and deeper into the woods, she marveled at how something as innocuous as a grouping of trees and brush could evoke such feelings of caution and mystery. The branches reached over her head, spreading their limbs and shutting out any stubborn ray of light. It was as if all color had been blighted from the earth and all that remained were different shades of brown and black and white. The sounds from the outside world disappeared and were replaced by the whispers and licks of air rushing through the trees, distant winter birds calling out to each other, as though they were chiding her for trespassing. Soon she would be home.

She couldn’t be sure if Maddie was really coming through to her in her dreams. Could it be possible that Maddie had acquired this talent while Cordelia was gone? What else had changed?

When Maddie finally answered the phone, she sounded different. Hesitant, almost. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to Cordelia. She
did
run off for an entire year without giving them any clue as to where she was or if she was all right. But it seemed more than that. Maddie sounded a little angry. Wounded. But at the same time, she was her family. Her sister! They shared a father. The man that she wanted to make pay for all of the deception and lies and torture he’d put all the women in his life through. But first things first. Perhaps Maddie would help her with her quest to make Malcolm Crane pay for his mistakes.

Yet why should she hold this man who didn’t even know her responsible for his mistakes, when she had made plenty enough of her own? She wasn’t there for her own mother—practically drove her insane with her foolish running away. And Tess…

Tess
, she thought sadly. How could she not have known that Tess had passed away? She thought about that terrible night—the night that was recapped in the newspaper. The night at Ravenswood when her mother tried to take her own life. The night that everyone she cared about: Maddie, Finn, Rebecca, Tess, all could have been killed. The night that claimed Tess’s life. Cordelia believed that Tess knew all along what was happening at Ravenswood and that she traded her life to save Rebecca’s. It was the only thing that made sense.

Cordelia started to cry, coming to the realization that all of this could have been caused by her leaving. Everything. Tess’s dementia and death, Rebecca’s attempted suicide, Finn and Reed thought of as suspects in not only her disappearance, but now in the murder of Darcy Willett.

And what had it been for? Because she was angry that she’d been lied to for so many years about her father. Because she was treated so horribly by the Sisters of Misery, as well as Abigail. Because she felt like she was trapped in a town that despised her.

Her boots crunched through the fallen leaves, patches of ice and snow, and underbrush. Could Maddie really be waiting for her out there? She had imagined this reunion so many times in her mind, ever since she’d taken off to Maine. Once she came upon her cousin—or half sister or whatever she was to her now—Cordelia would jump out from behind a rotted stump, a crown of wildflowers in her hair, lips dyed bright red from fallen berries, yelling, “Aha! Who dares awaken Queen Mab from her sweet fairy dreams?”

They would then fall into the softness that only forest floors possess, laughing and giggling until the last few rays of sun seeped into the woods and the mosquitoes hummed greedily in their ears. Then they would trudge home along the path and Maddie would tell Cordelia of all the trouble she had caused, and what a big deal was made of her vanishing act. Cordelia would smile wickedly, all the while concocting a remarkable tale of her adventures. She was taken away by fairies that were plotting to return a changeling to her mother instead—an evil being who resembled Cordelia, but was actually sent to do evil bidding. Or perhaps a roving band of robbers took her into captivity, forcing her to pilfer in exchange for her life. Or instead, she might say that modern day pirates nabbed her while she was collecting sea glass along the glossy black harbor rocks.

Cordelia heard rustling to her left, but realized it was only two chipmunks playing tag, scuttling from under a rock and up into a birch tree. Cordelia insisted that the stories she told Maddie about encounters with fairies and elves, spirits and magic were true, even if Maddie refused to believe. For some reason it was of imminent importance that Cordelia open Maddie’s mind to the impossible. She had grown up in a town that had such a narrow view of the world that Cordelia felt it was her responsibility to introduce Maddie to fairy tales, to magic, to all the wonderful things that made every day and night mysterious and exquisite. She described to Maddie her encounters with members of the elvin world when she had lived abroad in Ireland; lithe fairies with glittery wings that beat faster than a hummingbird yet were more graceful than a butterfly. Once, Cordelia told Maddie, she happened upon a fairy ring one night and watched the fairies dance and fly up into the starlit night. Another night she had come upon gruesome gnarled trolls that lived in the gullies along the roadside, waiting to snatch a wandering child and drag him deep into the crevices of the earth.

At night, Maddie sat at the foot of Cordelia’s bed as they whispered and giggled. Cordelia remembered those times fondly as she spun incredible tales of mermaids, demons, sorcery, and magic, watching Maddie’s eyes grow larger with every word. Then, at the end of the tales, Maddie would creep downstairs to her own bed. Cordelia giggled as she imagined her cousin shivering all night at every strange sound and creak, trying to decipher if the stories were real or not.

Cordelia should have known at the time that they were sisters. That’s what sisters do: they tease each other, they play games, they taunt, they tell stories. She was as angry with herself for not knowing, as she was at Rebecca and Tess for not telling her. Cordelia wondered if Maddie even knew. Probably not, she figured, because if Maddie had known that they were sisters, she would have gone looking for her sooner. At least, she hoped that would be the case.

It was when she finally got to Old Captain Potter’s Tavern and stepped into the circle of light thrown by the lantern and saw Maddie’s face that she realized what she’d done. Maddie’s face was racked with a look of pain, horror, relief, and sadness. It was the look that sisters give each other when they’ve done something wrong. Emotions swelled within her and she started to cry.

“What have I done?” Cordelia wailed.

“It’s okay,” Maddie said in a comforting tone. “You’re back now. We’ll fix everything. We’ll do it together. We’re sisters, remember?”

Cordelia nodded dumbly, and repeated the word
sisters
.

Cordelia was taken aback at how strong Maddie seemed. It was as if Maddie were the older sister welcoming back the reckless, thoughtless little sister, calming her down after a tantrum. Cordelia was finally home. That was all that mattered.