The Lost Sister (22 page)

“Bronwyn, no!” Maddie screamed. When she opened her eyes, she realized she was on the floor, and Cordelia and Kate were looking down at her anxiously. She must have passed out. The back of her head hurt where it struck the floor.

Cordelia knelt down next to her and asked, “What did you see? What happened? Could you see where Bronwyn is? Is she still alive?”

Kate skeptically looked down at Maddie like she was a freak, as if they were putting on a show for her. “What the hell was that, Crane?”

“I saw Bronwyn. I don’t know who has her or where, but she’s definitely in danger. I—I couldn’t do anything….” Maddie started crying. “I tried to stop it. I really did.”

“Stop what?” Kate asked, her interest piqued.

“Stop her from being killed,” Maddie said stoically. “I watched her die.”

“W
hy would Bronwyn be a target?” Maddie asked Kate pointedly. She had returned to the Endicotts’ house the following day at Kate’s insistence. After the episode that had occurred the previous night, Cordelia was adamantly against it.

“That place is pure evil, and so is Kate,” she warned. “If you can’t see that, especially after your episode last night and the whole Ouija board fiasco, then maybe you need to be in Fairview more than my mother.”

Cordelia told Maddie to be careful and that she was going back over to Fairview to see what kind of paperwork needed to be filled out for her mother’s release. “Seriously, call me if you see anything strange,” Cordelia said. “Well, anything strange besides Kate Endicott groveling for help,” she added, smiling.

This gave Maddie the opportunity to get some real information from Kate, one-on-one. Maddie knew how to get Kate’s guard down, or at least get under her skin a little.

Kate looked at Maddie with a withering look and began speaking to her slowly, as if she were talking to a small child. She was curled up on a luxurious leather chair next to the fireplace, sipping hot cocoa spiked with Baileys. She looked like one of those girls curled up in a J.Crew winter catalog—all innocent, blond, sipping a mug of hot chocolate. But Maddie knew the evil and ugly monster that was beneath the porcelain doll exterior.

“Bronwyn knew too much, and around here, knowing too much and sticking your nose into things that don’t concern you can get you into trouble.” Kate continued by explaining that Bronwyn knew of the sacrifices that the Sisterhood had to make throughout the years. She knew of the legends and the curse. She was never part of the Sisters of Misery because she wasn’t originally from the town—had no local or ancestral ties.

Maddie did.

Kate explained to her that the reason that everything bad that had happened to her—Cordelia running away, Rebecca being committed, her mother’s cancer, her father’s disappearance—all of it was due to the Sisters not being able to sacrifice one of their own to keep the curse of the Pickering sisters at bay. Maddie tried to understand what Kate was saying to her, but it seemed too far-fetched—too Stephen King for it to be really real.

“Every group of Sisters has to sacrifice one of their own. It’s a fact. It goes back for hundreds of years, ever since the Pickering Witches cursed the women in the families of Hawthorne. The Sisterhood was created to protect us from the evils that exist if we don’t fulfill our end of the deal.”

“So Cordelia was supposed to be sacrificed?” Maddie said indignantly.

“She’s your family, Maddie, but to the rest of us, she was a complete stranger, which made her the perfect person. She had the original ties to Hawthorne—and to a member of one of the Sisters—but wasn’t someone that meant anything to us.”

“To you!” Maddie snapped. “To me she was my family, my best friend, my own flesh and blood, my—”

“I know that she was all of those things to you, but look what happened when we didn’t follow through with the sacrifice. Your family was torn apart, your mother’s sick, your aunt has lost her mind. My future brother-in-law Reed has become the laughingstock of the town and his only chance at happiness, Bronwyn, has pulled a disappearing act, much like Cordelia. My family—as well as many others in this town—is on the brink of financial ruin because of the unexplained fires at the Endicott, which just so happened to be the site of Ravenswood. And I don’t have to remind you that the broken-down asylum—in addition to being your aunt’s living quarters for a short period—was also the place that kept the Pickering sisters when they were accused of witchcraft.”

“So what are you saying?” Maddie asked as she was trying to take all of it in. “That instead of just torturing Cordelia that night, you were planning on killing her to keep the pact of the Sisterhood fulfilled?”

“Not killing, sacrificing,” Kate insisted as if there were a real difference between the two.

Maddie was so angry that she couldn’t even begin to speak. She could feel the bile rising in the back of her throat. Maddie shook her head in disbelief. “Okay, okay, just how many
sacrifices
are we talking about?”

“There have only been a handful that you and I know of. I mean, it’s not like a weekly thing.”

“How often does it take place?” Maddie asked, cringing.

“Every ten years or so,” Kate said with about as much emotion as if she were reading from an almanac.

Maddie thought back to the premature deaths that she had known of—the parents and friends who’d died unexpectedly or simply disappeared.

“Who?” Maddie was insistent on knowing.

Kate hesitated. As if she’d said too much already. “I can’t give you everyone. That’s a complete betrayal of the Sisterhood.”

“But killing a member is totally acceptable?” Maddie said incredulously.

“They don’t always have to be part of the Sisterhoo—”

“But it helps, right?” Maddie interjected. “Unless it’s someone who’s getting too close to figuring out what’s going on. Someone like Bronwyn Maxwell.”

Kate was getting visibly uncomfortable with where the discussion was headed. Maddie had never witnessed Kate squirm.

She must be really desperate to open up to me like this
, Maddie thought.

“Yes, I mean, no…I mean, if it’s someone that’s one of the Sisters—a descendant of one of the ancestors of this town—then we don’t need as many, as many…” She searched for the right word as she gazed into the crackling fire.

Maddie helped her out. “Murders.”

“Exactly.”

Maddie looked Kate straight in the eye. “If you want my help, you’d better give me at least one person that was victimized by you.”

“You know, you’re just as much a part of the Sisterhood as the rest of us. Even if you switched schools, you’ll always be a member of the Sisters of Misery.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I didn’t read that part of the handbook,” Maddie snapped. “A name, Kate.”

“Fine,” she said uncomfortably. “Eleanor Putnam.”

“Mrs. Putnam, as in Kevin Putnam’s mom?”

Maddie remembered the shock that rippled through their fifth grade class when Kevin’s mother overdosed on pills in a surprising, and unfortunately successful, suicide attempt. It was the first time that Maddie had ever been subjected to a tragic death happening to someone she knew so well.

“Kevin’s mom was part of the Sisters of Misery?”

“Yes, back when my mother was the head of the group.”

“Oh, so your mom decided that Mrs. Putnam should take one for the team. Or did Eleanor volunteer like she was baking a freaking cake for a fund-raiser?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Kate insisted.

“Really? Well, tell me what it was like, Kate, because after seeing Kevin and his family go through such a traumatic event, it would really surprise me if Eleanor Putnam would raise her hand and say ‘Pick me, pick me. Kill me to get rid of the curse.”

“That’s not the way it works—or worked. My mom explained it to me. If your mother had been a part of the Sisters of Misery, then it wouldn’t seem so strange to you. Not when you grow up knowing that it’s a part of you, part of your destiny—a responsibility to your Sisters, your town, to everyone.” Kate continued trying to rationalize the murder spree that had been going on for decades unbeknownst to most of the residents of Hawthorne. “You see, everyone going out to Misery Island knew there was a chance that they could be the one selected. It was part of our legacy. Things just cooled down. Things had been going well for everyone, so there wasn’t a need to—to…”

“To kill,” Maddie said bluntly. “So you guys just got rid of that whole giving someone a fighting chance option—giving someone the choice
not
to go along with the sacrifice.” Maddie waited a beat and then asked, “Why didn’t any of you volunteer, seeing as how you are all card-carrying members of the Deaths R Us Club?”

“We were, but then…things changed.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Cordelia came into town and she just seemed like the obvious choice. She had the ties to the town, the right ancestry, and, well, we all hated that bitch. It made it a lot easier to take out someone that you can’t stand than one of your best friends.”

“Wow,” Maddie said, shaking her head in disbelief. “It must have been just like winning the lottery when Cordelia came to town. She certainly turned your luck around.”

“Obviously not, because she’s still alive.”

“The nerve of her!” Maddie said in mock horror.

“Maddie, I wouldn’t be so cocky. Just so you know, your name was tossed around a few times before Cordelia entered the picture. I kept you out of it. I convinced the girls that we could pick someone outside of the Sisterhood. Someone like Emily Johnson or Sarah Charles. But then Cordelia came to town and the opportunity just presented itself.”

“Wrapped up in a pretty bow, wasn’t she?” Maddie said harshly.

“For someone who has probably been hit the hardest by the curse, you seem to be pretty glib.”

“Well, maybe I just don’t take much stock in village stonings or sacrificing virgins to appease the war gods.”

“Well, Cordelia was hardly virginal.”

“You know, Kate, you would have done everyone a huge favor if you had been the one to volunteer. I can honestly say that the world would be a better place without Kate Endicott to manipulate, taunt, blackmail, and generally destroy people’s lives. It’s a pity that option never occurred to you.”

“Maddie, silly Maddie,” Kate said in a mocking tone. “If I weren’t here to continue the tradition, who would?”

A
week before Christmas, the buildings ravaged by the fire at Ravenswood were finally secure enough for investigation. The main building of Ravenswood, the one that had been built centuries ago right after the terror of the witch trials, remained inexplicably untouched by the fire. It was almost as if a protective bubble had formed around the original building. The authorities assumed it was arson, either an accidental fire from a homeless squatter, or someone with a grudge against the Endicotts. Either way, there was no possible way that the fire could have started on its own, especially since the four towers mainly affected by the fire hadn’t even been wired for electricity yet.

It was during one of those initial sweeps that one of the firemen came across the body. He called in a local officer—Officer Sullivan—to see if it was, in fact, the missing girl.

At first, they weren’t sure if it was a prank: a wax dummy or one of those blow-up dolls left over from a Halloween party. But as they got closer to the heap of a body sprawled on the dirt floor of the basement of Ravenswood, the realization that this was a person became gruesomely real. Her hair was cut short, as if angry hunks were torn out. She was facedown and sprawled toward the entrance, one leg coagulated with blood and bruised from the archaic metal shackle coming from the center of the floor. It was Bronwyn Maxwell.

Sully looked at the frail body in horror. Despite his burly frame and reputation for bar fights, a thin sliver of fear crept under his skin and made his body visibly shake.

“Hey,” he called softly, as if he were afraid to disturb the spirits that clung to the moss-covered stone walls. “You okay?”

Silence.

“Oh, shit, she’s dead,” he said to the firemen.

He crept closer to her, silently cursing the pathetic lighting they had within the chamber.

Her body was clad only in undergarments and the pale skin had a blue hue interrupted by darker blue bruises and crimson bloody scrapes.

Sully inched forward and then drew back suddenly as a large sound clapped through the chamber. His heart leapt into his throat and he directed his flashlight to where the sound emanated from. There was a plate of food left on the floor, now covered with remnants of ants and cockroaches; the plate was left just out of her arm’s reach. Whoever locked her up here left the food there to taunt her, knowing how she would strain and struggle for just a small mouthful of insect-laden sustenance. Next to her body was a large bottle of water. It became clear that the person who locked her up wanted her to live, yet suffer every moment of that life.

“Looks like whoever did this to her wanted to cover their tracks,” the fire official said.

“You think?”

“Why else would they want to torch this place down? Stupid fools didn’t count on this old building being the only one left standing,” he said in a gruff laugh. Sully could only focus on Bronwyn, the girl that all the guys he knew growing up had fantasized about at one point in their lives—the golden girl who could stop a guy in his tracks with one flip of her hair and a sidelong glance. One of Hawthorne’s great beauties reduced to a broken and battered body on the filthy floor of Ravenswood. Shudders ran down his spine and he turned away quickly to vomit.

Once the EMTs had arrived, they declared Bronwyn dead at the scene. And the statewide manhunt for her killer was under way. There was no way that this was going to remain unsolved like Darcy’s murder. There was a kidnapper and murderer among them and the Maxwell family would not rest until he was found and brought to justice. They would spare no expense. They were dead set on finding out who was responsible for the death of their only child. They would be relentless.

But only a select few knew that the Maxwells were up against something even more powerful than all the money in the world. The Sisterhood.