The Silent Sister

  It was not yet eleven in the morning, but there were already ten cars in the lot. I parked between the Subaru and a green truck and got out of my car before I could change my mind. When I pushed open the front door of the building, a dozen male heads turned in my direction and I wished I was wearing something other than my running shorts and tank top. The place was like every stereotype I’d ever seen of a pool hall—murky light, smoky air, faint background music interrupted by the muffled thwak of pool balls hitting one another at the tables. A row of booths lined the left wall of the room, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw my brother in the last booth, a book in his hands and his eyes on me. He didn’t wave. Didn’t rise. I walked toward him, ignoring the looks and comments and lip smacking of the pool players as I passed them.

  Danny was alone in the booth, except for a full bottle of beer and one empty, and I slid onto the bench across from him. The fake leather seat felt sticky beneath my bare thighs.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  I’d expected to tell him about my conversation with the Kyles, but knew I couldn’t do it here. I had no idea how he’d react to anything I said about Lisa. “I need your help getting into Daddy’s computer,” I said instead. “It’s password protected.”

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Well, I don’t know how else to get to talk to you, Danny,” I said. “You won’t use the phone I got you.”

  “Why do you need to get into his computer? You should just wipe the drive clean and chuck it.”

  “I have to see if there’s anything important on it before I get rid of it. I need your help. Please.”

  He shook his head. “I told you. I’m not going in that house again.”

  I sighed. “I’ll bring it to you, then,” I said, not looking forward to lugging the computer around with me. “It’s a big clunky old PC. You don’t need the monitor, right? Just the computer?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he gave me a flat look I couldn’t read, his blue eyes catching the faint light from the front windows. I wanted to ask him if this was how he spent his days—sitting alone in this sticky booth in this disgusting building. Did he even know these guys at the pool tables? Was there anyone here he could call a friend? Yet, that’s not what came out of my mouth at all.

  “The other day, when you said those things to me about not being a good counselor, I was hurt,” I said, the words spilling out in an unexpected rush. “I worked hard for my degree, Danny, and I’m good with the kids I counsel. I know I am. Maybe you’re right that I’m out of my league when it comes to someone like … someone who’s been through what you have. But you don’t have to belittle me or cut me down the way you did.” I leaned forward to make my point. “It really upset me,” I said.

  He tightened his hand around his beer and my whole body went stiff, afraid of what he was doing to do, but he only lifted the bottle to his lips and took a long swallow. When he set the bottle on the table again, he looked at me. “I’ll come to the house to help with the computer,” he said, sliding out of the booth. “You don’t need to bring it over.”

  It took a moment for his words to register, and I knew this was his way of apologizing. I felt strangely euphoric as I slid out of the booth, and he waited for me before heading toward the door. He walked next to me, a shield between me and the cretins at the pool tables, and for the first time since we were kids, I felt the protective arm of my brother slip around my shoulders.

  Outside, I started to ask him if he was okay to drive, but thought better of it. He seemed perfectly sober. I had the feeling his tolerance for alcohol was pretty high, and anyway, the last thirty seconds had left me with a sense of joy that I didn’t want to damage.

  “Follow me?” I asked, opening my car door. I was suddenly afraid this was a ploy to get me off his back. Maybe he’d drive away from me once we got on the road and I’d be stuck trying to track him down again. But I didn’t think so. The way his arm had felt around my shoulders seemed to change everything. At least, for me it did.

  * * *

  Driving home, I remembered Jeannie and Christine were at the house. Oh, great. It was one thing for Danny to be there with me alone. Another for him to have to deal with those two.

  I was relieved to see that Jeannie’s car was gone when we arrived and I figured they were on a lunch break. I pulled into the driveway and Danny parked on the street. We met on the lawn and walked together up the front steps, and as soon as I opened the door, I could see Christine in the dining room.

  “Where have you been?” she called to me as we walked into the living room. “A collector was here and bought the lighters and compasses. Isn’t that great? But we have thousands of questions for you.” She appeared in the doorway between the dining room and living room, and when she spotted Danny, she let out a squeal. “Danny MacPherson!” she said. “Oh, my God! I haven’t seen you since you were a little boy!” She started toward him, arms outstretched, but I stepped between them before she was anywhere within touching range and she wisely stopped walking. “You are gorgeous,” she said. “Seriously. Wow.”

  “I can’t do this.” Danny headed for the door, but I grabbed his hand and nearly dragged him toward the stairs.

  “Later,” I snapped at Christine, shooting her a look that could melt steel.

  Danny offered absolutely no resistance as I led him up the stairs, holding his hand as if he were a small child. I walked him past his old room without a word and into our father’s office, where I let go of him to shut the door and turn the lock.

  “Who the hell…?”

  “Jeannie Lyons’s daughter,” I said. “Christine. Do you remember her?”

  He shook his head and walked straight to our father’s desk. “What’s she doing here?” he asked as he sat down at the computer.

  “Remember I told you she and Jeannie are setting up an estate sale? And then Jeannie’ll list the house and the RV park for me. For us. I’m sorry she ambushed you. It’s like having two pit bulls in the house. They’re in every room every time I turn around, and they treat the house more like it’s theirs than mine.”

  Danny stared at the computer screen. “You have no idea what his password might be?”

  “No.”

  He looked up. “Do you know where his boot disk is?” Our voices seemed to echo in the room.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know if he even has one. This computer’s so old.”

  “Let’s start looking.” He got to his feet, and while he looked through Daddy’s file cabinet, I checked the drawers of his desk.

  “This is it,” Danny said after a few minutes. He was crouched over the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet holding up a white-sleeved disk. He sat down at the desk again. “See if he has an external hard drive somewhere. You should copy everything to another drive before you wipe this one clean.”

  “I have one.” I picked up the small, brand-new hard drive from the shelf by the door and handed it to him. Christine had given it to me days earlier, hoping it would encourage me to attack the computer. I sat down on the only other chair in the office—an upholstered antique in the corner—as Danny got to work. Only then did I realize that the glass-fronted cabinetry on the east and west walls of the room now stood empty. The lighters and compasses had been sold, Christine had said. No wonder our voices seemed to echo. Although I’d had no attachment to those collections, the emptiness in the room suddenly struck me hard. It was as though Daddy was disappearing from the house bit by bit.

  Lifting my bare feet to the chair, I wrapped my arms around my shins and turned away from the empty cabinets. Danny inserted the boot disk into the computer and I watched the reflection of the screen light up his pale eyes, mesmerized. Christine was right; he was gorgeous. I remembered what Jeannie had said about keeping Lisa’s violin for one of our children. Could Danny ever have a child? A healthy family life? I wanted that for him so much. As much as I wanted it for myself.

  “I’m in,
” he said, after another few minutes had passed.

  “Hooray!” I clapped my hands together. “Oh, Danny, thank you.”

  “What do you want the new password to be?” he asked, his fingers still on the keyboard.

  The first word I thought of was Lisa, and I quickly moved it as far to the back of my mind as it would go. “Just … anything,” I said. “It’s only for a couple of days. How about New Bern?”

  “Weak as hell,” he said, but he typed it in. “You’ve got newbern. No caps, no spaces. You need to see anything on here right now?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll do it tomorrow.” I smiled. “That’s my new slogan. Why do something today if I can put it off till tomorrow? I’m driving Christine and Jeannie crazy.”

  He didn’t respond as he hooked the computer up to the external hard drive. “Just let this stuff copy over,” he said, hitting a couple of keys. “It’ll take a few hours. Then you should check the drive to make sure everything came over smoothly before you wipe this sucker clean.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “I’m out of here,” he said, standing up. “You want to distract the pit bull downstairs so I can leave?”

  “I need to talk to you about something else first.” I stayed in my seat, trying to get my courage up. “A few things related to the Kyles.”

  “What about them?”

  “Sit down again, okay?”

  He resisted a moment, his eyes burning into mine, and I was relieved when he gave in and sat down.

  “Well, first of all,” I said, lowering my feet to the floor, “they told me that Daddy promised the RV park to them. That he was planning to give it to them.”

  “So give it to them.” He shrugged. “What are we going to do with it?”

  “It’s valuable land, Danny,” I said. “You may not care about the money, but frankly, I do. It’s for our futures. And there’s more,” I added quickly before he could get his temper up. “I know Lisa’s not your favorite subject, but we need to talk about this.”

  “I don’t care what you do with her violin,” he said, his gaze darting in the direction of the five violins still propped against the wall.

  “That’s not what I was going to talk about,” I said. “Tom Kyle thinks she didn’t kill herself.”

  Danny scoffed. “How would he know?”

  “He read somewhere that there were two sets of footprints by Lisa’s car. You know, where she put the kayak into the river?” Danny frowned and I wasn’t sure if he was following me. “Do you remember her friend Matty?” I asked. “A boy?”

  “Vaguely.” He stretched his neck to the left and right, as if I might be boring him.

  “Well, I keep wondering … Maybe she didn’t kill herself,” I said. “Maybe Matty helped her get away.”

  He laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “Wouldn’t that just fit?” he asked. “Everything always went her way. She could kill that guy and stroll away, free as a bird. She’s probably sitting in Tahiti sipping a martini right now. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “I read every one of those newspaper articles Daddy had in that box and there was no mention of two sets of footprints, so—”

  “So, Kyle is yanking your chain.” He leaned across the corner of the desk to get closer to me. “He’s a son of a bitch, Riles. I’m serious. You shouldn’t give him the time of day.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Why would he say that?” I wanted it to be true. I wanted Lisa to have escaped. To be alive.

  “Because he’s an asshole. Don’t let him under your skin.”

  “The thing is,” I said, “if there’s any chance she didn’t kill herself, no matter how small, I think we should pursue it.” I ran my fingertips over the frayed fabric on the arm of the chair. “I mean, I know she probably did it, but what if she didn’t?” I looked at him. “What if we have a sister out there?”

  “Listen,” he said. “If she’s alive, all that means is that we have a sister who intentionally left her family behind,” he said. “And that includes us.”

  I nodded to let him know I heard him. My voice was caught in my throat.

  “It wouldn’t be like she’s lost and wants to be found,” he said. “Even if she missed us, her whole reason for faking suicide would be to avoid prison. And if we found her, that’s where she’d end up.”

  I honestly hadn’t thought of that. Stupid of me. All I’d thought about was the slim chance of having a sister again. “That’s not what I want,” I said.

  I was sure he didn’t hear me. He looked thoughtful, staring at the dark screen on the monitor. “And that’s where she belongs,” he said finally. He lifted his gaze to me. “Damn,” he said. “It’d be nice to see her finally pay for what she did.”

  SEPTEMBER 1990

  23.

  Jade

  She spent most of the morning realphabetizing the rock albums. In the five months since she started working at Grady’s, she must have done that a hundred times. The kids who came into the shop mixed them up so badly she thought it must be on purpose. That never happened with the classical albums, which stayed in perfect alphabetical order. Classical fans, who tended to be older and less wasted, kept things orderly.

  She’d built up a small, carefully selected collection of her own CDs now. Grady gave her a discount, saying she was his best customer. He thought she was amazing, the way she knew so much about music and musicians, but the truth was, she was dumbing down everything she knew.

  Grady was working behind the cash register that morning while she organized the albums. His curly blond hair fell over his shoulders and Jade knew that many of the teenaged girls who came into the shop were only there to get a look at his amazing green eyes. He also had a pierced eyebrow, adorned with a small gold hoop. It had looked bizarre to her at first, but now that she was used to it, she liked it and wondered if she should get her own eyebrow pierced. It would make her look even less like Lisa MacPherson.

  She worked slowly that morning, her mind only half on the records. Today was Danny’s birthday. Wherever her family was living now, they would be going out to dinner tonight. That was their tradition—celebrating birthdays in a restaurant. She could picture it. Even though they’d moved someplace else, she still imagined them in the Chinese restaurant on Route 1 in Alexandria, which was where they usually went for a celebration. They’d sit at the table by the aquarium so Riley and Danny could watch the fish. Riley would be in one of those restaurant high chairs … or, now that she was two, would she be big enough for a booster seat? And Danny was seven! Unbelievable. She supposed she’d think that to herself every year: I can’t believe Danny’s nine or ten or fifteen or twenty. God, that was so depressing.

  It was September. She would have been settling in at Juilliard right now, if things had gone according to plan. She didn’t want to think about that or it would make her crazy. Instead of studying where she’d dreamed of studying her whole life, she was hiding out like a fugitive. Not like a fugitive; she was a fugitive. She was thinking about that impossible fact when an old man walked into the shop. He headed straight for the classical section, so it was clear that he’d been there before, although Jade didn’t remember seeing him. He was short and mostly bald, with wire-rimmed glasses and a mustache, and he wore an ancient sweater very much like the ancient sweater her father always wore in the winter months. It was beige with patches on the elbows, and even though he was much older than her father and looked nothing like him, she felt like walking up to him and asking for a hug.

  Instead she walked up to him and asked if she could help him find something.

  He smiled at her. “I doubt it,” he said. “I’ve been looking for a certain record for years. It was my late wife’s favorite, but it’s obscure.” He rested his hand on top of the Bach albums. “We owned it when we lived in England long ago and we left all our records behind. I checked here about a year ago and, of course, no luck. I’ve tried the big record sto
res and no luck there, either. So I was passing by and thought I’d check again. And anyway, I wanted to pick up a few other albums if you have them. I love looking through the old records you have here.”

  “What was it?” she asked. “Your wife’s favorite.”

  “Well, that’s part of the problem. I can’t remember the artist. The record had both a Bach and Mozart concerto and the cover had two little statues on it and the violinist was Italian.” He chuckled. “Not much to go on, I’m afraid.”

  Her heartbeat quickened. It was plenty to go on, actually. She knew the record he was talking about. He was right—it was obscure, and she hoped she wasn’t about to give herself away, but she couldn’t play dumb with this. She began humming the melody of the Mozart and the old man’s eyes widened as he grabbed her arm. “That’s the concerto! That’s it!”

  “And you’re looking for Gioconda de Vito,” she said.

  “Oh, good Lord. That’s right! That’s the violinist! How did you know?”

  She felt Grady’s eyes on her. She was sure he wondered the same thing.

  “Oh.” She shrugged. “My family was always into classical music and I remember that one.”

  “Amazing! Do you have any idea where I could find it?”

  She was definitely going to make his day. She couldn’t stop smiling. “I do,” she said. “We got a bunch of records from an estate sale the other day and I went through them. They’re still in the back room, but the one you want is in one of the boxes. It’s mono, though.”

  “Mono’s fine! That’s what we had in England.”

  “We have it?” Grady asked from behind the counter. He looked as surprised as the old man.

  “Uh-huh. It’ll take me a few minutes to dig it out.” She looked at the man. “Can you wait?”