The Silent Sister

  “Don’t worry,” she said, heading for the living room. “I’ll take care of it. You don’t have to do a thing!”

  * * *

  I stayed in the kitchen eating my egg salad sandwich while the movers hammered and grunted and yelled at one another in the living room. I didn’t even peek into the room to see how they would take apart the baby grand. Instead, I sat at the small kitchen table, checking my friends’ comments on Facebook. Bryan and I had unfriended each other, but I still went to his page to look at his profile picture every few days, staring at his smile and wondering if I’d made a mistake. He hadn’t changed his picture in the two years that I’d known him. He stood against a pink sunset with his son and daughter, who had been three and four at the time the photograph had been taken and who were climbing up his body like little monkeys. The picture still made me laugh. I missed those kids almost as much as I missed him. Looking at the picture, though, I felt glad of my decision. That was where he belonged. With his kids, and whether he knew it or not, with his wife.

  The silence from the living room was sudden, and I could hear voices out on the front porch. I waited until they’d subsided, then walked into the living room, past the Santa Claus look-alike who was still working with the pipes. From the middle of the room, I stared at the enormous empty place where the piano had stood for as long as I could remember, and the breath went out of my body. I pressed my hand to my chest. I was only twenty-five, but I thought this month might kill me. If I was having this much trouble saying good-bye to a piano I couldn’t even play, how would I ever say good-bye to the house I loved?

  I dropped onto the couch as Christine trotted down the stairs carrying her iPad. “Whoa, look at that!” she said. “No piano! Mom went with the movers, I guess?”

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “The appraiser guy is almost done up there,” she said. “He’s loving those compasses!” She turned to the man at the pipes. “How’s it going?”

  He shut his computer. “Just about done,” he said, running his hand over his beard. “I have a few things I need to check at the office, but ballpark figure is seventeen thousand.”

  “Wow!” I said, sitting up straighter on the couch. I’d had no idea the pipes were that valuable. Maybe that would take some of the grouch out of Tom Kyle.

  The appraiser slipped his computer into a briefcase and headed for the door. “I’ll get back to you with the exact figures and a certificate in a few days.” He spoke to Christine rather than me and I didn’t bother getting up as she ushered him out of the house. Once back in the living room, she sat down at my father’s rolltop desk, sideways on the chair so she was facing me, her iPad resting on her thighs. “How’s the shredding going?” she asked.

  “Slowly,” I said. “I’m afraid of tossing something that turns out to be important.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to be supercareful,” she said. “I’m sure most of it is tossable.” She smoothed her bangs across her temple and I saw the damp skin of her forehead. The attic had to be unbearably hot to work in and I suddenly felt sympathy toward her.

  “Must be challenging, going through someone else’s stuff,” I said. “I feel like I’ve left you a mess, but Jeannie said not to throw anything away except the old paperwork.”

  “She was absolutely right,” Christine said, “and I love going through someone else’s stuff, so don’t worry about the mess.” She touched the screen of the iPad. “Mom and I will be in again tomorrow, if that’s okay with you. I know you want to get this thing rolling.”

  “The sooner the better,” I said.

  “A few items I need to go over with you.” She tapped the screen again. “The computer on the desk in the office upstairs. Does that go?”

  I nodded. “It was my father’s. I guess I should clean the hard drive first.”

  “Exactly. We can do that for you, but you might want to be sure there’s nothing you need on there before you let us have it.”

  “All right.”

  “I found keys lying here and there around the house and I put them in a plastic bag and left them on the shelf in that office,” she said. “You should go through them to see if you need to keep any of them. And you should be putting things you want to hold on to in that office, too. Mom knows that room is off-limits, except for the lighters and compasses and instruments, of course.”

  “And my bedroom,” I said. “Make that off-limits, too.”

  “Of course,” she said. “What about your brother’s old room? There’s nothing in there, really, but would he want to—”

  “He won’t care,” I said.

  “If we find anything that looks like a personal item or a family heirloom, we’ll put it in the office, too,” Christine said. “How’s that?”

  “All right,” I agreed. “I want to keep that one violin, at least for the moment.”

  “Lisa’s,” she said. “The one with the violet on the tag?”

  “Yes.” I looked up at her. Tipped my head. “Did you know about … what she did?” I asked.

  For the first time, I saw a shadow pass over her features. “I was living abroad when it happened and not in much contact with Mom at the time, so I only heard about it later when I got home,” she said. “That was after your family moved down here. I was shocked. I knew Mom felt terrible. She really liked Lisa and wished she could have talked to her. Helped her somehow.”

  “It sounds like Lisa was beyond help,” I said.

  “Yeah. That happens.” Her bangs had flopped over her forehead again, and she looked at me from beneath them. “Mom told me you didn’t know and you found some articles about it. That must have been a shock.”

  “It was,” I said. “It still is.”

  “Well,” she said, getting to her feet again. “Hopefully that’ll be the last shock you have as we clean out the house.”

  16.

  “You look like shit,” Tom Kyle said as he sat down across from me in the waiting room at Suzanne Compton’s office the following morning. I’d run to the attorney’s office from home and knew my face glistened with perspiration under my visor. It was the first time I’d seen Tom out of his T-shirt and camo pants. He’d shaved, combed his sparse gray hair, put on khakis and a blue short-sleeved dress shirt. But the clothes hadn’t seemed to change his ornery disposition, and I wished my father had left him absolutely nothing. I thought of him cheating on Verniece, maybe even putting some high-level government work at risk when he did so. What my father had liked enough about this man to help him cover up his affair was beyond me.

  I wanted to say something snotty to him in response to his crack about the way I looked, but I needed more information from him and didn’t think that was the way to go about getting it. If he knew why Verniece was stuck on me being adopted, I wanted to know, and if he knew why my father gave him those checks every month—and left him the pipe collection—I wanted to know that, too. I decided to play on his sympathy, hoping that beneath that rough exterior, he actually had some.

  “I know,” I said, aiming for a self-deprecating smile. “My life is kind of a mess right now.”

  He studied me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows. “Your father left you a lot to deal with,” he said.

  I nodded. “And I just feel really alone.” I rubbed my palms on my damp thighs. “It’s overwhelming.”

  I thought I saw sympathy in his face, but it was quickly replaced by his usual scowl.

  “That brother of yours is more a hindrance than a help, I take it,” he said.

  “Well, he has his own problems to deal with.”

  Tom glanced at the reception desk. Suzanne’s secretary wasn’t at her desk, and although we were alone in the waiting room, he still lowered his voice. “You ever think he’s a suicide risk, like your sister?” he asked. “We hear gunshots coming from down there sometimes and Verniece gets worried. She wants to go check on him, but I say it’s best we leave him alone.”

  That sounded like Verniece, worrying about othe
r people. “My sister’s situation was totally different,” I said. “Danny won’t hurt himself … or anyone else, either, so Verniece doesn’t need to be concerned. He’s just hunting out there.” I wondered if Tom knew the real reason Lisa had killed herself. Probably. Steven Davis’s murder had been such a big deal in the news back then. I thought Danny and I had been the only people kept in the dark about what really happened.

  “Well,” Tom said, “let me know if we can do anything else to help with the RV park.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “It’s our home, you know,” he said. “We’ve lived there more than twenty years and I’m not sure where we’ll go once you sell it.”

  He stared at me so intently that I had to turn away. There was something other than kindness in his offer of help, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

  “Hello, Riley.” Suzanne walked into the waiting room, hand outstretched toward me. “And you must be Mr. Kyle.”

  We both shook her hand, then followed her into her office where we sat nearly side by side across the desk from her.

  “Riley,” she said, scrutinizing me from her side of the desk, “are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” I must have looked even worse than I’d imagined. I wanted to get back to the house. Christine and Jeannie were again culling through my family’s possessions, and it felt strange to leave them there alone. Christine’s rough edges were beginning to chafe me. She was impatient and not exactly a diplomat when assessing my family’s old possessions.

  “Okay,” Suzanne said, getting down to business. “I’ve drawn up this document transferring ownership of the pipe collection to you, Mr. Kyle. Have you had it appraised yet, Riley?”

  I nodded. “The appraiser thinks it’s worth about seventeen thousand.” I watched Tom’s face, but it was impossible to read. I’d just told him he was seventeen thousand dollars richer and he seemed unmoved. “How do we do it?” I asked. “I mean, do I deliver the pipes to him, or—”

  “I think it’s best if Mr. Kyle comes over and packs them up and takes them away. They’re his now.”

  We talked with Suzanne awhile longer, signed a couple of documents, and then walked quietly out of her office together. Once outside, I saw his old Ford in the driveway.

  “Don’t take everything so hard, Riley,” he said as he walked away from me toward his car.

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut and kept walking. He was backing out of the driveway by the time I reached the sidewalk, and he suddenly called to me through his open car window.

  “Riley?”

  I looked over at him. “Yes?”

  “That sister of yours who killed herself?”

  I waited for him to say more, but it appeared he was waiting for me to respond. “Yes?” I said again.

  “She didn’t,” he said, and he gave his car gas, swinging the tail into the street, then taking off before I even had a chance to register those two words.

  PART TWO

  JANUARY 1990

  17.

  Alexandria, Virginia

  Lisa

  The glow of the streetlight spilled into her bedroom, and from her seat on the edge of her bed, she saw the outline of Violet’s case, the sweet worn black leather shoulder. She looked away. Her father had said Violet couldn’t go with her. She’d argued with him. If she killed herself, it made sense that she’d take the violin. She’d never leave it behind. But he gave her a look that told her Violet was the least of their problems and she’d said no more about it.

  Powdery snow fell like dust beneath the streetlight and she shivered. She couldn’t get warm these days, no matter how many layers she wore. Tonight, her teeth chattered and she felt sick. She hadn’t been able to eat in days. Her mother thought it was because of the trial and worried that the jury would take one look at her pale sunken face and bony shoulders and think she was a junkie. “You have to eat, Lisa,” she’d pleaded. “The jurors will think you’re on drugs.”

  She didn’t want to think about her mother tonight.

  Her father came to her bedroom door. She couldn’t see his face in the darkness. He’d said to leave the lights off in case a neighbor was awake and curious.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  She stood up from her bed. “No,” she said, but she picked up her backpack and the bag with the towel and empty hair dye box and every strand of her hacked-off long blond hair and walked past him into the hall. This was the sort of thing you could never be ready for.

  He caught her arm and turned her toward him. “You need to leave this here.” He touched the pendant at her throat.

  “But I’d be wearing it, Daddy!” she said, touching the oval of white jade. Beneath her fingertips, she felt the design carved into the stone. “I never take it off.”

  “You have to,” he said. “It’s too identifiable.”

  Giving in, she returned to her room and unfastened the necklace, but rather than leaving it in her jewelry box, she slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. There was no way she could leave it behind.

  Back in the hallway, she followed her father out the front door, pulling her hat low on her head because it was so cold and her hair was still damp.

  “Sh!” Her father said, although she hadn’t made a sound. He walked ahead of her to the driveway and pulled open the driver’s side door of her car. “No lights till we get to the parkway,” he whispered.

  She nodded, and he closed the door more quietly than she’d thought a car door could be closed.

  His car was behind hers and they both backed out of the driveway slowly, with only the streetlight to guide them. She followed him down the road, the chattering of her teeth echoing inside her head. “Good-bye, Ansel Road,” she whispered. The car filled with the scent of the hair dye she’d used, and she wondered if the same scent was in her bedroom. How long would it stay there? Would her mother notice it when she came home from Pennsylvania? Worse, would the police?

  Then she pictured Violet abandoned in her room. She imagined her mother reading the note she’d left. And then she thought about her mother and Riley and Danny up at Granddad’s house in Pennsylvania, not knowing anything was going on. “The kids shouldn’t be here right now,” her father’d said to her mother when he insisted she get Riley and Danny out of town. “Not with the press hounding us like this.” Her mother had agreed without really knowing what she was agreeing to.

  Riley. Danny. Mom. She would never see any of them again. Her heart seized in a way that sent a prickly pain down her arms.

  “Don’t think!” she told herself. Her voice sounded weird inside the dark car. She couldn’t let thoughts of her family derail the plan. She couldn’t think of anything except what she needed to do now. Tonight.

  Her father had told her his idea only a few days earlier. He’d come into her room in the middle of the night. Sat on the edge of her bed. Presented it to her in great detail and she knew he’d been thinking about it a long time. She listened, first in complete disbelief, then in gratitude that he would do this for her. He would save her. She had a choice, he said: spend the rest of her days in prison or live out her life as someone else. Some other girl who was free as a bird. She didn’t see that she had much of a choice at all.

  They didn’t pass another car as they headed for the George Washington Parkway that ran along the river. That was good, since they were driving blind. The darkness on the road made this eerie night even eerier, and she put on her wipers to brush the dusting of snow from her windshield. Every time they passed beneath a streetlight, she saw the shadow of her kayak fall across the hood of her car and hoped she’d tied it tightly enough to her roof. She’d asked her father to tie it for her because she was too shaky, but he said she had to do everything herself in case the police had a way of figuring out she hadn’t acted alone.

  When her father turned onto the parkway, he put on his headlights and she did the same. The snow was coming down harder and she kicked up the speed of her wipers. They passe
d only a few other cars. The fewer the better.

  They drove for a while. She knew they were headed for the Belle Haven Marina and then some little road she’d never been on. Her father had it all figured out and she had to trust that he knew what he was doing. They reached the turn for the marina, and she followed him into the driveway that led to the parking lot, but instead of continuing to the lot, he turned onto a narrow road that cut through the woods. His car lights blinked off, and she turned hers off as well, and then it was almost impossible to see. The bushes scraped the sides of her car. After a while, her father pulled his car into the woods, nestling it in a narrow space between the trees. She knew she was supposed to stop driving then. He’d explained all of this to her. So she stopped and waited and he got out of his car and into her passenger seat, kicking the snow off his shoes before letting his feet rest on the floor.

  “You’re doing great,” he said, patting her shoulder with his gloved hand. “Just great. Keep going now, nice and slow.”

  She gave the car a little gas.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Perfect. We’re so lucky with this snow. It’s supposed to get a lot heavier before morning and it’ll cover our tracks when we walk back to the car. I wasn’t sure how we were going to handle that.”

  She didn’t want to hear that he’d been unsure about anything.

  After a while, he told her to turn on her headlights to see where they were. She flipped her lights on and saw the snow falling ahead of her, and beyond that, too close for comfort, the river.

  “Perfect,” her father said again. “Stop right here. Turn off your lights.”

  Once the lights were off, she couldn’t even see her gloved hand when she held it in front of her face. How was she going to do this without being able to see?

  He handed her a flashlight. “Keep it pointed to the ground,” he said. “The woods are thick right here, but we can’t risk too much light. Can you get your kayak down on your own in the dark?”