I felt as though he’d picked up his shotgun and smashed the stock of it into my stomach. “Danny.” I wasn’t sure what else to say, the hurt I felt was so intense.
“You don’t get me at all, okay?” He grabbed the shotgun as he jumped to his feet, sending my heartbeat into the stratosphere. He looked down at me, the pale blue of his eyes ice-cold. He leaned over so those angry eyes were no more than two feet away from me. “It’s not my mind that’s sick, Riley,” he said. “It’s my soul. And there aren’t any drugs that are going to fix that.”
He turned and walked back into the woods, his stride long and quick despite the limp, and I let out my breath in relief. I waited a moment, trembling, then got to my feet and followed him at a distance, my legs rubbery. I didn’t want to catch up to him—I couldn’t possibly talk with him right now after that outburst—but I needed to keep him in my line of sight. I would never be able to find my way out of the woods alone. Thank God for his red T-shirt! My eyes burned as I followed it from a distance, and I was crying before I realized it. I ached from the sting of his cutting words. Had he thought that little of me all along? Like I was nothing more than an undereducated charlatan with a “fake counselor voice”? Not only did I feel as though I’d just lost my brother, it seemed I’d never had him to begin with.
I thought about all he’d said as I followed him through the pines from a safe distance. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be Danny. To grow up with parents who told you your memories were crazy. Then to be commanded to do things—maybe torture people? Maybe kill them?—against your will. Against your values.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I was way out of my league. I’d been a terrific student—I hadn’t wasted a moment of my time in school—and I knew plenty about healing the troubled mind.
But no one had taught me a thing about healing the soul.
14.
When I got home, hurt and shaken from the conversation with Danny, I took a yogurt from the refrigerator and sat on the porch, but I lost my appetite after the first bite. Danny had heard the gunshots. He’d seen blood on the floor. What else had he seen that my parents tried to erase from his memory? When I thought about that conductor from the Rome festival tape lying dead in the living room, shot through the eye, I felt sick to my stomach. I hadn’t even seen the image that was troubling me, yet I couldn’t get it out of my mind. What must life be like for my brother?
I put the yogurt back in the refrigerator, then returned to the porch with my laptop. Even with the overhead fan on full speed, I was hot, but I didn’t care. I wanted to know something about the man who seemed destined to haunt me now. According to the newspaper articles, Steven Davis had had no children but he did have a wife. How had that woman fared without her husband?
I searched the archives of the Washington Post for his name, and quickly discovered how many different Steven Davises there were in the news. I added the word killed and that narrowed down my search significantly. I found many of the same articles that my father—and mother?—had kept in the box, but there were more. His obituary, to begin with, which said that he started playing violin at age five, the same as my sister. He was a natural talent, the obituary read, and beloved by his students. He’d studied at Juilliard himself and played for five years with the National Symphony Orchestra.
Members of the symphony remembered him as “charming and a perfectionist, exacting and passionate about his performances.” There was a picture of him with his violin, a black-and-white portrait in which he was unsmiling but not stern. Just flat-out handsome in this photograph, with a touch of gray in the dark hair at his temples and a perfectly symmetrical face that looked like it had been carved from stone.
I Googled his wife, Sondra Lynn Davis, and hit a page full of links to a blog: “Never Forgotten: A Meeting Place for Families of Murder Victims.” I stared at the link for a full minute before finally clicking on it.
The image at the top of the blog was a heartbreaker. A couple stood with their backs to the camera as they watched the sun rise over a milky gray ocean. The man held the woman’s hand to his lips, the gesture unmistakably tender and intimate. Even though the figures were mostly in silhouette, I knew who they were. I knew the man thought he was far too young to worry about dying.
Before I could get any more lost in the picture, I lowered my eyes to the introductory blog post.
NEVER FORGOTTEN:
A Meeting Place for Families of Murder Victims
On October 27, 1989, I lost my husband and best friend, Steve Davis. Steve was a brilliant musician. He performed for years with the National Symphony and later opted to teach at a university in northern Virginia so he didn’t have to travel as much and could be close to home. He was a loving and devoted husband. He taught violin students privately, and that is where the end began. It wasn’t the desire to make extra money that drove him to take private students, but a desire to help as many people learn as possible. This is how he ended up with Lisa MacPherson as a student.
Lisa started with him when she was just five years old. He taught her on a one-eighth-sized violin and she showed a great deal of promise, so he worked extremely hard with her. From the time she was small, she was as driven as he was. Of course, she was only one of his many students, but I think she reminded him of himself, since he started playing at the same age and with the same excitement. Every great teacher wants to inspire one of his or her students to reach amazing heights, and for Steve, Lisa was that student. She was clearly on her way to the top, thanks to his commitment to her. He lined up concert engagements for her, spoke to music schools on her behalf, and took her and his other most gifted students to Montreal and Rome to participate in music festivals. He put his heart and soul into his students.
I’d met all of Steve’s students over the years. They were all talented and unique and intriguing. I believe every passionate musician is a little quirky, Steve included. But Lisa always struck me as more than a little quirky. I felt there was an instability there that had gone unrecognized and therefore untreated. Steve brushed off my concerns. As long as she played beautifully, he wasn’t worried about her mental health. He should have been.
Lisa’s commitment to her music began to deteriorate during her teen years, and her playing suffered as she explored working with other teachers. In his distress over how Lisa seemed to be derailing her own career, Steve wrote to an old friend at Juilliard, which was one of the schools where she was applying. He told this friend that Lisa had lost her edge and somehow word of his letter got back to her.
Steve felt so guilty over writing that letter. For a full week, he couldn’t sleep and he grew quiet and hard to reach. Finally, he decided to go to her house to apologize. That’s when she essentially ambushed him, shooting him in the head with her father’s gun. He died instantly.
Lisa MacPherson was about to stand trial for his murder when she “drowned herself” in the Potomac River. However, her body was never recovered and I believe she faked her suicide. The police stopped looking for her, but I’ll never stop searching. I hired a private investigator who found some leads, though he couldn’t get the authorities to follow up on them. A $25,000 reward for information leading to her whereabouts remains in place, but in a way it doesn’t matter. Nothing will bring my beautiful husband back.
Time doesn’t heal. Maybe you no longer cry every single day but the pain is still there. Steve and I were working on having a family when he died. We’d waited a long time—maybe too long—both of us wanting to have established careers before we added children to the mix. I was undergoing fertility treatments at the time of Steve’s death and we’d been optimistic about our chances. Our children would be in their late teens and early twenties by now if we’d succeeded, and I mourn the lost chance we had to create our family.
Ten years ago, I realized I am not alone in my sorrow. Thousands and thousands of other people have lost their loved ones to murder. That’s when I started this blog. It’s a place for you to share your ow
n journey and where we can support one another. If you’ve lost someone you love to murder, you are welcome to share your story here.
* * *
I didn’t know how many times I read that blog post, sitting on the porch in the breathless heat. I was looking between the lines for … something, I wasn’t sure what. My emotions were in turmoil and I felt the confusion physically: a pain across my chest, a knot in my stomach. My sister’s body had never been found, and the thought of her bones lying undiscovered somewhere in the river was unbearably upsetting. I thought of all the times my parents must have pictured Lisa taking her last breath, maybe panicking in that dark, ice-cold water before finally losing consciousness. No wonder they’d tried to protect Danny from the truth. And no wonder that, even when my mother had been in the same room with me, she often seemed so far away.
I was stuck on the phrase “I felt there was an instability there.” I thought of the girl in the tapes again, always standing a little off to the side with Matty … unless she was called forward to perform. She hadn’t fit in well with all those other teens, had she? Had there been mental illness that had gone unrecognized and untreated, as Sondra Davis suggested? I felt sorry for Sondra, still grieving for the children she might have had, and hiring investigators to find my dead sister. More than twenty years had passed, though, I thought. Sondra needed to let it go. I wanted to write to her, although I knew I never would. I wanted to give her my condolences and tell her I was certain, absolutely certain, that Lisa never meant to kill her husband. But then, it was easy for me to say she must have killed him by accident, because that would be the only reason I could imagine killing someone.
But she wasn’t me, was she?
15.
When I opened the front door the following morning, Jeannie and her daughter burst into the living room like they’d been shot from a cannon, and I stepped back to make room for all that energy.
“Riley, this is Christine,” Jeannie said, setting her purse down on the table by the door.
“Riley!” Christine’s grin split her face in two. Her dark hair was up in a ponytail, and her big eyes were brown instead of blue, but it was clear she and Jeannie were mother and daughter. “I’m so glad to see you!” She grabbed my hands in hers and the tote bag she was carrying slid from her wrist to mine. She pumped my hands up and down. “You were just a baby the last time I saw you, can you imagine? Just an itty-bitty thing!”
The same overwhelmed feeling I’d had at that lunch with Jeannie wrapped around me like a straitjacket. The nut had not fallen far from the tree.
“It’s good to meet you, too, Christine,” I said. “I’m glad you can help me out.”
“Absolutely!” She lifted her tote bag from where it had landed on my wrist. “And this is a wonderful house. I’m sure you have thousands of treasures in here. Mom told me all about your father’s collections.”
“Well, I have no idea if they’re valuable or not.” Nor did I really care. I just wanted someone to take over the daunting business of cleaning out the house while I focused on the emotional turmoil that my life had become.
“You’re so pretty, isn’t she, Mom?” Christine asked Jeannie. They scrutinized me from their stance inside the doorway.
“She’s lovely,” Jeannie agreed.
“You two!” I said, embarrassed. I walked away from them, heading for the kitchen, escaping their analysis. “Can I get you something?” I asked over my shoulder. “Bottle of water? Lemonade?”
“Nothing,” Jeannie said.
“I’m good.” Christine was following me into the kitchen, but she stopped at the cabinet containing the pipes and stood ogling it, hands on her hips. “Mom told me Danny broke the glass doors,” she said. “He was really a sweet little boy back when I knew him. I guess that’s changed, huh?”
I stared at her, wanting to defend Danny but too annoyed by her question to get the words out. I’d had no contact with my brother since we’d spoken in the woods the previous day, but that conversation was on my mind nearly every minute. I wondered if he thought about it, too, or if, once those harsh words were out of his mouth, he forgot about them. Maybe he drank them away along with the memories.
Christine picked up one of the pipes and examined it closely. “Oh, the appraisers are going to have a field day with these, aren’t they, Mom?” she asked.
“I told you,” Jeannie said, moving forward to put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Then to me, she said, “We have the appraisers set to come out this afternoon.”
I felt the first teeny stab of worry. As much as I wanted the house cleaned out, I had the feeling I was going to lose control of everything in the process. Not that I felt very much in control to begin with.
“Please run everything by me before any major decisions are made,” I said. “And remember that once the pipes are appraised, they go to Tom Kyle, not the estate sale.”
“Oh, of course,” Jeannie reassured me.
Christine picked up on my concern. “I’ll just be making a general inventory today,” she said. “I usually have a team working with me but one of them is pregnant on bed rest and the other’s taking summer courses at the community college, so Mom will help me. We’ll be sorting and pricing things once we get rolling toward the sale. As for this morning, I just want to get the lay of the land before the appraisers come.” She smiled at me. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?” She sounded sad.
I shook my head, doing my best to look apologetic.
“You were the cutest thing,” she said. “I’d hang out with your sister.” She laughed, a deep laugh, the sort that sounded like she smoked, although I couldn’t smell tobacco on her. The last thing I wanted was somebody smoking in the house. “Not that your sister actually ever took the time to hang out,” she added. “That girl had so much ambition.” She shook her head sadly.
I wondered if she, too, knew my sister had killed someone? Did she know the real reason Lisa drowned herself?
“Well,” I said, anxious to get the subject off my family. I spread my arms wide, taking in the whole house. “How do we begin?”
* * *
I started shredding the old paperwork in the first of my father’s cabinets, while Jeannie and Christine made their way through the house. I could hear them chatting together from time to time, closet doors being opened and shut, the pull-down stairs to the attic being lowered. I was glad now that Jeannie had known my father so well. I told myself that he would have trusted her with this job. That eased my discomfort over having two people I barely knew pawing through his belongings.
Just breathe, I thought as I listened to them rattling through the house. Everything’s going to be fine.
* * *
Around eleven, Suzanne e-mailed to tell me that Tom Kyle and I needed to sign a document, transferring the pipe collection to him. She’d reached him by phone, she said, and he was coming in the next morning. Could I come at the same time?
I had no desire to see Tom Kyle, although I wouldn’t have minded talking to Verniece again. But I e-mailed Suzanne that I’d be there.
The appraisers, both men, arrived together as I was getting back to the shredder. Jeannie greeted them, introduced me, and then sent one of them upstairs to work with the lighters and compasses. The other man, a Santa Claus look-alike right down to the snowy white beard and round belly, pulled a chair in front of the pipe collection. “Nice stuff,” he said to me as I refocused on the paperwork, but other than that he was a man of few words. I was glad he said nothing about the missing glass doors.
I was making egg salad in the kitchen a while later when Jeannie walked into the room.
She leaned against the counter. “Maybe you shouldn’t sell Lisa’s violin,” she said.
I spooned mayonnaise into the bowl. “What would I do with it?”
“You never know.” She shrugged. “You might have a talented child one day who wants to play the violin. Who knows? Maybe even Danny will have children one day. Even if the tw
o of you aren’t musical, you’ve got MacPherson blood in you. Maybe you’ll pass that talent on to the next generation and it would be lovely for your son or daughter to have a MacPherson violin.”
I thought she was trying to reassure me that I wasn’t adopted and I appreciated the effort. “I guess I don’t need to make a decision about the violin right now,” I said.
“The appraiser upstairs says he’s not an expert in stringed instruments, but he took a look at it and thinks it’s quite valuable, so you might want to store it someplace safer than the house.”
I nodded, stirring the egg salad in the bowl. One more thing to look into.
I felt her gaze on me. “Are you okay?” she asked.
I dropped my hands to my sides. “No, to be honest. How could I be okay?” I spoke quietly, aware of the appraiser in the living room. “My awesomely talented sister’s a murderer. My family may not be my family. My brother’s not doing great. And I miss my father.” My voice broke, and Jeannie stepped next to me, her arm around my shoulders.
“I wish you’d never found that box of articles,” she said. “It’s my fault. I—”
“It’s not your fault, Jeannie.” I hunched my shoulders involuntarily, getting rid of her arm. “I had the right to know the truth and I’m glad I know it. It explains a lot.”
“Your family was … is your family. Your blood family. That adoption nonsense is just that: nonsense. I am absolutely certain of that. I don’t know who Verniece Kyle thinks she is, planting seeds of doubt in your mind. Can you put that worry to rest? Please.”
The doorbell rang before I could respond. “Someone’s here!” the pipe appraiser called from the living room.
“Oh! The piano movers!” Jeannie said.
“Today?” I didn’t even know she’d contacted the movers, and I suddenly felt like running into the living room to block their path. I couldn’t face more people in the house.