The September Sisters (9 page)

AT THE BEGINNING
of October I started having the dream every night. Sometimes the man seemed so vivid, so close, that I thought I would even be able to describe him to Kinney, to make Kinney believe that he was real, but every time I woke up, the image fell away, so I knew I’d have nothing more to tell him than what I already had.

But I had to talk to someone, so I told Tommy about the dream one afternoon at lunch. Though Tommy and I had been sitting together at lunch for weeks, we rarely talked, and when we did, it was briefly, about the food, our homework. It must have come as a surprise to Tommy, because it was somewhat a surprise to me when I blurted out, “Do you think dreams can be real?”

“What?” He flipped his hair back, and for a moment I could see his eyes, deep, round saucers, like the eyes of a deer I’d once seen startled in Morrow’s field.

“I keep having a dream about that night.” I saw him nod, so I knew he knew exactly which night I meant, as if he understood that there was no other night important enough to speak of. I told him about the man in my doorway, about the one time I could see his face.

“You should tell the police,” he said.

I thought about the way Kinney looked at me when I told him about the man I thought I saw. “No. They don’t listen to me. They’re useless.”

“My father is a cop,” he said. It was the first time Tommy had mentioned his father to me, and I tried not to look alarmed, to give away what my mother had told me about him. I thought Tommy was going to be mad that I called the police useless, but what he said next surprised me. “Maybe I can help you.”

For Halloween I dressed up as a loaf of Wonder bread. It was my mother’s idea, and even though I thought it was a little strange, I went with it because she offered to make me the costume.

She’d been acting pretty normal since she’d come home from the hospital, but since she’d started going to therapy, she’d stopped talking about Becky altogether, and she didn’t want anyone else to talk about her either. Once my father said something to my mother about a report from the private investigator, and she covered her ears and ran out of the room. I thought this was strange, but I found it better than the alternative. I was disappointed, though. I’d wanted to hear what the investigator had to say, but when I asked my father, he just said, “Not now, Ab.” And he stormed out after her.

My mother made my costume out of a white trash bag and colored paper. She cut out the letters and the little circles and glued them on the front of the trash bag. Then she got me a white turtleneck, pants, and shoes to wear underneath, and some white face paint for my face. It was a pretty interesting-looking costume, I had to admit.

Tommy dressed up as a gladiator. Mrs. Ramirez made his costume out of cardboard and tinfoil. He had a sword and everything, though the tinfoil blade wasn’t exactly straight. Mrs. Ramirez topped the costume off with a tinfoil crown that held Tommy’s hair back away from his face, something like a headband. I didn’t think that gladiators had actually
worn crowns, but I didn’t say anything to Tommy. I didn’t want to make him feel bad.

Tommy and I went trick-or-treating together, while my father and Mrs. Ramirez agreed to follow along behind us and keep a respectable distance, so no one knew they were actually with us. I told my father we were old enough to go by ourselves, but he shook his head and said, “Absolutely not, Ab.”

Mrs. Ramirez agreed. “Used to be safe neighborhood, but now with the drug and the”—she looked at my father and paused—“other bad stuff…”

Tommy didn’t want to go trick-or-treating in the first place. He said that he was too old for it. Maybe he was right, but I’d never thought about it that way before, probably because I always went with Becky, so I’d never felt too old to go. Until this year Becky and I had gone with Jocelyn and some of the other kids in our neighborhood. We formed a big group, a pack, and several of the parents walked behind us, talking, while we skipped ahead. It was different, though, just me and Tommy, my father and Mrs. Ramirez. Quieter.

I convinced Tommy to go when I told him about my plan to scope out the neighbors. I told him we both could get a glimpse into everyone’s house, to try to notice anyone
who might be acting strange or seemed suspicious. “That’s a good idea,” Tommy said, a comment that made me feel a little excited.

Halloween night was unusually chilly, and we were expecting a frost. My father made me wear my coat over my costume, despite my protests. “No way. It’ll ruin the whole effect.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “I’m not going to have you catch your death out there.”

I tried to recruit my mother to my side, since she’d so carefully made the costume, but she was upstairs resting, and when I called out for her into her dark bedroom, she didn’t respond.

So I was Wonder bread with a coat on, which actually made me look more like a ghost nurse because all you could see were my white pants and shoes and my white painted face.

“Nice costume,” Tommy said when we met him out by the curb.

I felt a little hurt, and I almost made fun of his sword or his crown, but he already looked so silly that I just didn’t have it in me. “Whatever,” I said.

Tommy and I talked my father and Mrs. Ramirez into
staying back in the street while we went up to the individual houses. We tried to attach ourselves to the ends of other big groups so we didn’t look so silly: the ghost nurse Wonder bread in a coat and the lopsided gladiator.

We skipped right over the Olneys’ house, and no one said a word about it, so I knew even Tommy knew about Mrs. Olney’s contempt for my family. It was a shame, really, because Mrs. Olney always gave out the best candy, the full-size chocolate bars, not the teeny-tiny miniature ones that we got from most of the other neighbors. And as we started out and I saw other kids bouncing away from her door with their pumpkin candy holders looking extra full, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit jealous.

So we ended up starting a little bit down the street, with the neighbors who didn’t really know Tommy since he was so new, but all of them knew me, even with the white face paint on. It took us some extra time at every house as each neighbor got me an extra piece of a candy, a pat on the head, a “How’s your poor mother doing, dear?” I found their condolences oddly insincere and too late. Where had all these people been since Becky had disappeared?

To be fair, I knew that some of them had joined my father in his initial search parties, but after that their interest
had tapered off. My neighbors were too busy with their own lives, too busy being afraid of my family and what had happened to us, to offer any real help.

“I could just punch that woman,” Tommy said after we’d gone to Mrs. Johnson’s house and she’d pinched my cheeks, leaving a mark in the white makeup. “How do you take it?”

I was strangely pleased with Tommy’s urge to protect me. It was not the same way I felt about my father’s suffocating sense of protection. This was different. I thought about what my mother had said about Tommy’s getting into fights in Florida, and I wondered if he really would punch someone for me.

As we went from house to house, I felt sort of lost without Becky. The year before, we’d both dressed up as bees, another set of costumes my mother fashioned out of trash bags and colored paper. That whole night we kept buzzing at each other and stealing each other’s candy. It wasn’t the same, trick-or-treating with Tommy, searching for suspects. Somehow none of it seemed fun anymore.

Mr. Barnesworth had lived in our neighborhood for years, and Becky and I had always found him exceptionally creepy.
He’s probably only a little older than my father, but he lives all by himself and never mows his lawn or anything, so the grass out front gets all ragged and weedy, and his house is what my father calls an eyesore. When we rang his doorbell, he didn’t answer. You could tell he was home because some of the lights were on inside. I wondered what he was doing in there, all by himself, and I wondered if he didn’t answer the door for anyone or just for us.

To me, this made him seem suspicious, as if he were avoiding us for a particular reason. I wondered if he could be hiding Becky in his house. Maybe he’d locked her in the basement. Maybe she could hear us on the porch, hear my father’s booming voice and Mrs. Ramirez’s chuckle from the street. But I knew I had no real reason to suspect any of this, so after we had rung the doorbell three times, we gave up.

When I got home, after I had separated my candy into piles on the living room floor and allowed my father to inspect it, piece by piece, for evidence of poison, I went up to my room, chewed on a peanut butter cup, and thought about Mr. Barnesworth. I wondered how I could find out more about him.

The knock at my door caused me to jump, and I was surprised when it was followed by my mother sticking her
head into the room. “How was it?” she asked. She sat on my bed, right next to me, and smoothed out the front of my costume with her hands. “It got crushed.”

“Dad made me wear a coat.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” She sounded more amused than annoyed. “Here.” She handed me a jar of her cold cream. “I brought you this. For your face.”

“Thanks.” Last year our faces had been painted black and yellow, and Becky and I had taken turns sitting on the toilet seat in her bathroom while she’d cotton balled the goopy stuff onto our faces. I guessed this year, as with everything else, I was on my own.

“Did you get a lot of candy?”

I shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Good.” She kissed me on the top of the head. “Don’t eat too much tonight. You’ll get sick again.”

I nodded, but I didn’t remind her that it was Becky who always ate too much candy and got sick, that Becky was the one who’d thrown up in bed last year and cried out in the night for her.

The next day Tommy pleaded with me to call Harry Baker and tell him about Mr. Barnesworth. “I thought
you
were
going to help me,” I spat at him; he turned away quickly as if he’d been slapped. I felt a little bit bad for snapping at him, but I didn’t apologize.

I called Harry Baker at home the next morning because I wondered if maybe, unlike Kinney, Harry, a friend of my father’s, might actually listen to what I was saying. I got up early, before anyone else was awake, and I got his home number from the little address book my mother kept in the kitchen drawer. He answered the phone, sounding sleepy and slightly annoyed, but as soon as I said who I was, he cleared his throat, which I took as a cue for me to continue. “I have someone I think you should look into.” I told him all about Mr. Barnesworth’s strange behavior.

His silence on the other end was deafening. He cleared his throat again. “Abigail, you have to let the police do their job.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “You don’t know what to look for.” I heard a muffled noise, and I thought he might be laughing at me, and I felt my cheeks turning bright red. “It couldn’t hurt to check,” I said, trying to sound more nonchalant, as if I had other things on my mind, but of course I didn’t.

I worried all day that Harry would give me up to my father, that when I got home from school, my father would be there waiting for me, ready to yell and scream and ground me. I hadn’t been grounded since Becky’s disappearance. I wondered if my father would suspect that it wouldn’t have the same effect on me that it used to. Unless I was sent next door to Mrs. Ramirez’s, I spent all my time at home anyway. But if my father knew about my call to Harry, he didn’t mention it, so I figured he didn’t know. It isn’t like my father to keep quiet about something like that.

I had a hard time keeping quiet myself, waiting for Harry to call me back. Over the next few days I let my imagination run away with me. I imagined all the clues the police might find if they actually looked in the right places, that they might even find Becky herself, and she would come home, and everything would be back the way it was.

I waited until the end of the week, and when Harry still didn’t call me back, I tried calling him. I dialed his home again, but I got his answering machine. So then I called the station. Somehow I got transferred to Kinney, who picked up his line with a short clipped “Yes?”

“Mr. Baker.”

“No, Abigail, it’s Detective Kinney.”

“I need to talk to Harry Baker,” I said.

“He’s not in today.” The realization startled me: that Harry Baker continued to have a life, that he did not spend every waking moment working, looking for my sister.

“Did he tell you about our conversation?”

“Hmm?” It was clear Kinney didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

I took a deep breath before I repeated my spiel about my suspect, because I already knew before I started talking that Kinney was going to yell at me.

Kinney was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Abigail, we’ve already looked into everyone in your neighborhood.” He sighed. “I thought I told you, you need to let us do our job.”

I hung up on him. I closed my eyes and felt tears welling up against my eyelids, and I blinked, trying to hold them back.

IN ENGLISH CLASS
we finished
Hamlet
, and we moved on to
To Kill a Mockingbird
. It was a little disappointing, after Shakespeare, to be reading a book that the rest of the eighth graders were reading too. But Mr. Fiedler said it was a classic book nonetheless.

The English class I was in was strange, because the advanced classes in our school didn’t have to follow the same curriculum as the regular classes. Mr. Fiedler could decide whatever he wanted us to read, whenever he wanted us to read it, as long as the books were on the district approved list. He told us that he didn’t normally have his advanced class read that book second, that normally he continued on with something else by Shakespeare, but he’d geared up for
a change. I thought that maybe after listening to what we had to say about
Hamlet
, he decided we were idiots after all, so he sent us back a bit to something more our speed. Or maybe he just really liked
To Kill a Mockingbird
and decided we shouldn’t miss out just because we were supposedly super-smart in English.

And so, as I started reading the book, Mr. Barnesworth became my Boo Radley. I imagined him pale and ghostlike, a criminal, inside his house waiting to be discovered. Since I’d read only the first few chapters of the book when I got this idea in my head, I didn’t know about the ending of the book yet. I didn’t realize that Boo Radley turned out to be a nice guy who saves the day. No, at first I thought this novel was fate, a sign that Tommy and I should cut school one day and break into Mr. Barnesworth’s house.

I’d convinced myself that Becky was in his basement, that Mr. Barnesworth kept a stash of little children in there, and that when Tommy and I broke in and rescued them, we would become heroes of our school.

“Why do you think he has your sister?” Tommy asked.

“I don’t know.” Why anyone would’ve taken Becky was beyond me in the first place, but Mr. Barnesworth gave me the creeps, so who knew exactly why he would do anything?
"If you don’t want to go with me, I’ll go myself.” He sighed. I knew that would get him. I’d learned to tap into Tommy’s instinct to protect. I felt almost ashamed of myself for using him this way, but honestly I was afraid to go to Mr. Barnesworth’s on my own

“Fine,” Tommy said. “But if we get caught, I’m telling everyone it was your idea, that I only went along to make sure you were safe.”

“Whatever.” But the way he said it made me blush, and I had to look away so he wouldn’t notice.

We waited until the next Tuesday to cut school. Tuesday mornings Mrs. Ramirez volunteered at the library, so we knew she wouldn’t be at home, and we knew she wouldn’t have a chance to see us walking around when we were supposed to be at school.

Tommy and I both went to homeroom, so we could be counted on the attendance. Otherwise the office would call home to ask our parents why we weren’t there. We knew there would eventually be a problem if our morning teachers counted us as absent and compared that with the list of homeroom absences, but I was hoping no one would notice. Teachers didn’t always do these time-consuming
comparisons; most of them just didn’t care enough. I knew the only teacher who would notice if I was missing was Mr. Fiedler, and that class was last period, so I’d be back for that.

After homeroom Tommy and I met by the front doors. As everyone else shuffled on to first period, we opened the doors and ran away through the side parking lot of the school. We avoided the front lot because we knew that’s where the monitors usually stood, waiting to catch cutters like us. I’d never cut school before, but I could see the monitors out the window of my first-period algebra classroom, stopping the occasional student trying to get away with skipping. Luckily we didn’t get caught, and before we knew it, we were walking down the treelined street toward our neighborhood.

I had this sudden eerie sense of déjà vu. I hadn’t walked through these streets since last spring, when I’d walked them with Becky and Jocelyn. Walking them with Tommy, I had this overwhelming feeling, this sense of lightness. “We used to walk home from school this way,” I told him.

“I walked home in Florida,” he said, “except when it got too hot or it rained. Then I took the bus.”

I’d never ridden on a school bus, except for the occasional field trip. Our neighborhood is too close to the elementary
school, junior high, and high school for the district to provide us bus service, so I always walked or got a ride. “A bus would be cool,” I said.

He shrugged. “It was okay.” The way he said it, I could tell he was thinking of something unpleasant that had happened to him on one of those bus rides. I wondered if he’d gotten in a fight or if someone had tried to beat him up. I didn’t want to ask him, though. I didn’t want him to get mad and change his mind about going to Mr. Barnesworth’s.

The dumb thing about our plan was that we planned our escape from school perfectly, but we did no planning on how we were going to get into Mr. Barnesworth’s house. I didn’t really start thinking about that until we actually got to our neighborhood and began cutting the back way across the development behind us, so we would avoid being seen. Even though Mrs. Ramirez was at the library, we were afraid one of our other neighbors would see us and dutifully call my father. I tried not to think about what would happen if he found out about this.

I asked Tommy how we should get into the house.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you had a plan.”

“I did,” I lied. “I do. I just wanted your opinion.”

“Well.” He sounded a little nervous. “Maybe we should
ring the doorbell first. I don’t know, pretend we’re selling something for school.”

It was a good idea, and it seemed much less scary than breaking in. But I wondered if it would work. On Halloween, Mr. Barnesworth hadn’t even opened the door. Besides, I assumed he wouldn’t even be home, that he must have a job. That’s why I’d convinced Tommy that the only way to do this was if we went during the school day.

It was odd the way I’d pictured myself inside Mr. Barnesworth’s house all week, finding Becky, seeing her standing there. I imagined the way it would feel to see her again, what I would say to her. I thought I would hug her, that I would hold her body close to mine and tell her that everything would be okay now that we were there. Tommy and I would be instant heroes. But I hadn’t imagined how we would get in there until right then.

We crept along the back of his property a little first, trying to peer into these two small windows that went into his basement. We have similar windows to the basement in my house, and I knew from playing in my backyard that we wouldn’t be able to see anything. “This is a waste of time,” I told Tommy. “Let’s just try to go in the front.”

Before we went to the front yard, up the walkway to the
door, we hid behind this large oak tree and kept a lookout at the street. The street looked virtually empty; all my neighbors were at work or at school. “Let’s go,” I said. Tommy looked at me, his eyes wide and more lost than I’d ever seen them, and I could tell that he was afraid. This made me nervous, and I felt this little runner of sweat begin to trickle down the back of my neck.

When we got up to the door, I told Tommy to ring the bell. He argued with me. “Why don’t you do it?” he said. “This was all your idea anyway.”

I gave him a look. “I’m watching out for the neighbors who know me.”

“The street’s empty.”

“You never know. Someone could decide to walk his dog or something.” But the truth was I was nearly paralyzed by fear, almost too afraid to move my finger to the doorbell.

“Fine.” He put his finger on the bell. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest so loudly that I thought I might give myself away.

When we heard the lock begin to turn, the creak of the door beginning to open, we both jumped. I hadn’t expected him to open it, hadn’t expected to come face-to-face with the man I’d convinced myself was a crazy kidnapper. I was
suddenly afraid for me and Tommy, for my parents, for Mrs. Ramirez. What would they do if we disappeared too?

When the door opened, Tommy and I took a step back, almost in sync with each other. But standing there, in the foyer of the house with an identical layout to mine, was a short middle-aged woman with brown highlighted hair. The highlighted part was right down the center, and it reminded me of a skunk stripe. “Can I help you?” she said.

I suddenly wished that Tommy and I had come up with a plan B, the way they always do in movies. We hadn’t expected this strange woman to answer the door. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do, and I felt oddly frozen, paralyzed.

“We’re selling raffle tickets,” Tommy said, before I could even think to say anything. “For school.”

“Oh,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be in school now?”

“We have off today,” Tommy lied.

“Parent-teacher conferences,” I said. I was surprised by the squeaky sound of my own voice.

“Would you like to buy a raffle ticket?” I wasn’t sure where Tommy was planning on going with this, since obviously we didn’t actually have tickets to sell. And I began to wonder how any of this was going to get us into the house. It
also dawned on me that this woman made Mr. Barnesworth seem more normal. Whoever she was, old skunk hair didn’t seem like the type to hide children in the basement.

“Hmm, I don’t think so. Not this time,” she said. She began to shut the door.

“Wait.” I was desperate, not actually sure what I was going to say until it popped out of my mouth. “What about Mr. Barnesworth? Would he like some tickets?”

“Oh, no. I don’t know,” she said. “He’s very ill. I don’t think so.”

Tommy looked at me. “He’s ill?” I said.

She looked us over, up and down, as if sizing us up. “Do you two know him well?”

“Yes,” Tommy lied. I almost reached over and pinched him. What a stupid thing to say! I was beginning to worry he was getting us into more trouble than we were already in. Whoever this woman was, there was a good chance she’d know that Mr. Barnesworth didn’t even know who we were.

“Well, nice to meet you then. I’m Sara Alban, his nurse.” She looked at us, expecting our names, but we pretended not to understand and just smiled at her. I felt myself sweating, even underneath my too-tight bra,
making it more uncomfortable than it already was before. I thought about how sick my grandmother had been when she needed a nurse to come to the house, and I felt suddenly guilty for thinking of Mr. Barnesworth as my sister’s kidnapper.

Tommy must’ve had a similar thought, because he said, “Sorry to bother you.” He grabbed my hand and started to pull me away from the house. We walked quickly down the street, and as soon as we thought she couldn’t see us anymore from the doorway, we cut behind Mr. Barnesworth’s next-door neighbor’s evergreen tree. Tommy’s hand was sweaty, but it felt nice to hold on to.

By the time we got to the tree, I was out of breath and shaky, and I felt like I was about to cry. “I don’t think he’s it,” Tommy said. I nodded. “Come on. Keep walking.” He was shaking his hair out of his eyes, but his voice sounded even, in control. He still didn’t let go of my hand, and I didn’t want him to.

We walked behind the properties, down the treelined divider between our development and the one behind it. As we walked, I felt my heart slowing down. I began to be able to breathe again. “This was stupid,” I said, “wasn’t it?”

“No,” Tommy said. “No, it was fine. Now you know.”

“I guess so.” I felt like an idiot, though, suspecting Mr. Barnesworth, calling Harry Baker early in the morning. Then I began to feel deflated. I felt like we would never find Becky, that she wasn’t trapped somewhere in our neighbor’s basement, that she could be anywhere in the entire world by now.

“Hey,” Tommy said. He let go of my hand and pointed up to the street in front of us. “Isn’t that your mother?”

I looked to where he was pointing, unable to register what he’d said to me. I’d worried about seeing Mrs. Ramirez, Mrs. Johnson, but not my mother. I didn’t believe that she ever left the house when I was in school. I imagined her solidly fixed to it, as if she were somehow attached to the foundation, like another wall.

Sitting in a strange red car at the stop sign that divided our development from the main road was a woman who looked eerily like my mother and a man I’d never seen before. Before I could get a good look, they pulled out onto the main road. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell.”

“Well, it probably wasn’t her anyway.” But he sounded the way I felt, unsure. I began to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I was afraid I was going to be sick right there in front of Tommy.

We were back at school for lunch, and if anyone had noticed we were gone in the morning, no one said anything to me. For the rest of the day I thought about my mother and the man in the red car. There was a chance that it hadn’t been my mother, that I was worrying for nothing, but it had looked so much like her, her blond hair pulled back the way she always did, in a ponytail. I wondered what she’d been doing, who’d she’d been with. I felt afraid for her, worried about her being in the wrong place.

When Mrs. Ramirez picked us up from school, Tommy and I didn’t say anything to each other in the car. It was as if the morning had never happened, as if Tommy and I had never held hands and run, sweating, through the trees. It was as if we’d discovered a whole new world together in the morning, but by the afternoon that world had vanished, become something hazy that I couldn’t be sure had ever quite existed in the first place.

“Did you see my mother today?” I asked Mrs. Ramirez. Tommy was sitting up front, and I was in back. He turned around and gave me a look that seemed to say,
What the heck are you doing?

“No, Ah-bee-hail. Not today. Tomorrow we have big shopping trip!”

“Oh, right,” I lied. “I thought today was Wednesday.” I thought that I could safely ask Mrs. Ramirez about my mother’s whereabouts without her suspecting a thing. My mother, on the other hand, was a completely different story.

By the time I got home, I’d convinced myself that my mother would be gone, that the man in the red car had driven her somewhere far away. So I was almost surprised when I found her sitting out back, in her chair, smoking a cigarette, just like any other day.