The Good Sister Read online

  At last, Carley stops talking. She takes off her glasses. Her eyes are hot and swimming with tears.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Melissa?” Carley nods. “I didn’t vote for her. I didn’t vote at all. I handed in a blank ballot.”

  “The whole thing is disgusting. The way it was handled . . .” Aunt Frankie shakes her head. “That girl should have been punished, not rewarded, and—”

  “It wasn’t just her, it was everyone, and it doesn’t matter, it’s—” Carley’s voice breaks. She grabs her napkin off her lap, turns toward the wall, and surreptitiously wipes her eyes, hoping no one sees.

  “Here.” Aunt Frankie slides a little tissue packet across the table to her. “Want to go to the ladies’ room?”

  In other words, does she want to parade, sobbing, through the busy restaurant? Carley shakes her head furiously, clearing her throat. “I’m okay.”

  “No, you aren’t. But you will be.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You will,” Aunt Frankie counters. “I promise. Trust me.”

  She looks up at her aunt. It’s so easy for her to say, sitting there. She’s pretty and athletic, with a job and a car and a house, and she has Aunt Patty and two cuddly cats and tons of friends.

  What do I have?

  Nothing.

  Not even a friend.

  Except for Angel, Carley reminds herself.

  Thank God, thank God for my guardian angel.

  When at last it was unearthed from beneath a shallow layer of mud in the basement floor, the trapdoor turned out to be long—much longer than Angel expected. It’s a wooden door with recessed panels, one that, standing vertically, would fit any of the doorways upstairs.

  That, Angel suspects, is probably exactly where it came from. Up on the no-frills third floor in what was once the servants’ quarters, some of the shelved closets are open, with hinge marks indicating that they once had doors.

  This one on the basement floor has a metal plate covering the place where the knob hole would have been drilled, and someone affixed a sturdy metal handle—which stubbed Angel’s shuffling toes—precisely in the middle.

  Simply tugging on that handle wasn’t enough to get it open, though.

  No, this has been one hell of a job. It’s required not just patience, waiting for the floodwaters to subside, but also, once the task had commenced earlier this evening, a disruptive road trip to go purchase a heavy metal crowbar from the hardware superstore off the thruway.

  Tonight, the clerk wasn’t a disinterested high school kid but a silver-haired retiree who asked Angel about the weather: “How is it out there now that the sun’s gone down? Still warm like it was all day? Feels like spring, don’t it?”

  Inwardly cringing at the grammatical error, Angel nodded politely and paid for the purchase in cash, wanting only to get out of there and back to the job at hand.

  “You have a nice night now. Don’t work too hard, whatever it is you’re doing.”

  It’s none of your damned business what I’m doing.

  Jaw clenched, Angel left the store vowing to shop somewhere else next time. You can’t have people talking to you, asking questions—even about the weather. Because then they recognize you, and they notice what you buy—Oh, you’re the one who got the crowbar that time, and a while back, you had the keys copied, and now you’re getting rope and duct tape? What’s this for?

  That’s how it goes in small, friendly cities like this, where people don’t ignore each other and keep their distance the way they do in, say, New York.

  At least the crowbar does the trick. The door makes a splintering sound as Angel pries it open at last, letting it thud over onto the damp dirt floor.

  Breathing hard from the exertion, Angel grabs a flashlight—also purchased in a hardware store, but at the mom-and-pop one two blocks away.

  That was last year, in the beginning, before I knew any better. Before I realized that I’d need to be able to come and go around here without attracting any attention.

  Aiming the beam into the hole, Angel is startled to see that it’s lined with concrete.

  What on earth . . . ?

  Tilting the flashlight’s angle deeper into the hole, wondering whether it leads to an underground bunker of some sort, or perhaps a passageway leftover from the Underground Railroad era—no matter what that twit Sandra Lutz said about it—Angel expects to see a tunnel.

  But that’s not the case. The hole is fairly shallow, maybe three feet deep from the opening to the bottom . . .

  Except, upon closer examination, what appears to be the bottom isn’t the bottom.

  Peering into the hole, Angel sees that it’s actually the top—of Mother’s old chest freezer.

  But you knew it was here, didn’t you?

  No!

  Of course I didn’t know! I asked Sandra Lutz to get rid of it, and she said . . .

  She said . . .

  How many times do I have to tell you the freezer is waterproof?

  It isn’t Sandra’s voice that seeps into Angel’s brain; it’s Mother’s.

  Mother, with her secrets and lies . . .

  Mother who—with Father’s help, of course; he did everything she asked—had buried the freezer in this strange, concrete-lined vault beneath the basement floor, the lid secured with a large padlock, protecting . . .

  Protecting . . .

  God only knows what’s inside.

  No.

  Not just God. You know, too.

  You do. In the back of your mind, you’ve always known, haven’t you? Even before you read the marble notebook. You’ve known ever since . . .

  Winter. Cold. Dark. Late. Flashlights.

  The power has gone out again, or . . .

  Or they don’t want to turn on a light down here. They don’t want anyone to see.

  But I see. I’m crouched on the stairs, and I see what they’re doing, and I smell the dirt, and I hear choking sobs . . .

  Father. Father is crying.

  “Hush!” Mother’s voice, cold as the bitter January wind that rattled windowpanes and banged shutters upstairs, jarring Angel from a sound sleep.

  Father: “I can’t help it! I can’t stop thinking of—”

  Mother: “Don’t think of her. Just dig! Dig!”

  Shovels digging into the damp earthen floor, rasping, scraping . . .

  Father’s sobs . . .

  Mother’s voice . . .

  Fingertips to temples, Angel can no longer block it out, any of it.

  “You’re ruining my life!” Emma screams at her parents, who are sitting calmly on the couch as she strides around the living room. “How can you do this to me?”

  “You did this to you,” Dad tells her. “You have to take responsibility for your own actions. If you want to go sneaking around in the woods with some kid who’s too old for you, some kid we don’t even know, then you’d better be prepared to—”

  “I know him, and he’s not too old for me! I’m fourteen!”

  “Exactly. You’re fourteen,” Mom cuts in. “You—”

  “I wasn’t doing anything wrong!”

  That’s what Emma keeps reminding herself. When two people are in love, physical intimacy is natural and right. Even if it’s also scary and kind of embarrassing and painful, too.

  Anyway, her parents aren’t aware of what, exactly, went on between her and Gabe. They just accused her of being in the woods with him, nothing more.

  Emma has no idea how they even found out about that part.

  All she knows is that Mom was lying in wait for her when she got home. She grounded Emma until further notice, took away her phone and laptop, and had already changed the password on the household wifi to keep her from getting online using any of the other computers in the house.

&nbs
p; “You can’t just cut me off like this!” Emma protests, turning her back on them and pacing over to the window.

  The lamplight allows her to see only her own scowling reflection, but she imagines that Gabe is out there in the night, gazing longingly at her silhouette in the glass. She turns her head so that he won’t see her profile; she hates the way her nose protrudes from that angle.

  He’s got to be worried about her, wondering why he hasn’t heard from her.

  “I’ll text you first thing when I get home,” she promised him just before she scurried away this afternoon, having forgotten all about her earlier decision to go straight to her laptop to look up Carley’s Peeps page.

  Now she can’t do either of those things. She can’t do anything, thanks to her stupid parents.

  “It will be good for you to get unplugged and away from screens for a while,” her mother is saying. “It’s not healthy for anyone to spend so much time on the phone and computer.”

  “You didn’t unplug Carley!” Emma hurls, whirling away from the window. “Perfect Carley goes around cheating and breaking school rules and getting suspended and you let her keep her phone and her computer? And you don’t even ground her? She’s out to dinner with Aunt Frankie! How is that fair?”

  Her parents look at each other.

  I’m right, she realizes. They know I’m right. It isn’t fair.

  But they’re not about to admit it. Of course not. They would never give her the upper hand in an argument.

  “That’s between us and your sister,” Dad tells her. “And this is between us and you. We don’t—”

  “Does Carley have the new wifi password?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to give it to her?”

  “That has nothing to do with—”

  “I hate you!” Emma screams, and storms away.

  “It’s okay, Jen,” she hears Dad say as she stomps up the stairs. “She doesn’t mean it.”

  “I do mean it! I wish you were dead. And Carley, too! I wish she was dead!”

  “Don’t you ever say that!” Mom yells. “Ever! Do you hear me?”

  Ignoring her, Emma slams her bedroom door and leans against it, breathing hard.

  “I do mean it,” she says again, this time in a whisper, hating her sister with all her might. “I wish she was dead.”

  And so, she remembers, does Carley herself, according to Gabe and the Peeps page Emma can’t even look at now.

  “How did this happen?” Jen asks Thad, watching him pour a generous amount of Jack Daniel’s into a glass on the kitchen counter.

  “You mean Emma?”

  “Emma, Carley . . . I keep looking back, trying to figure out what we did wrong.”

  “Maybe we didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She just looks at him.

  He shrugs, tilts the glass, takes a long sip, and plunks it down. “Sure you don’t want some?”

  She shakes her head and tells him, just as she did the first time he offered, “I don’t like whiskey.”

  “Have some wine, then. Do you want me to open some for you?”

  “No, thanks.” She slept so little last night and the day has been so challenging that all she wants is to go to bed as soon as Emma settles down up there—which isn’t likely to be soon, given the way she’s still stomping around her room. Anyway, one of them had better keep a clear head in case their daughter bounces back downstairs for another round.

  Thad sits heavily on the stool beside hers, both hands clasped around his glass. “Maybe we were too permissive. Maybe we spoiled them.”

  “By we, you mean me.”

  “If I meant you, I’d have said you. We’ve both had our moments, especially with Emma, where it was easier to give in than deal with an overblown theatrical scene.”

  “I’ve had a lot more of them than you have.”

  “It’s because you’re the one who’s here most of the time. I feel guilty that I’m not. I feel guilty that I have to work all day tomorrow instead of staying here to help you pick up the pieces. And you can’t blame yourself. You’ve been a terrific mother.”

  His words echo, almost exactly, the ones she spoke to Debbie just yesterday. If she herself is suffering guilt over the difficulties with her girls, imagine what her friend feels? For her, there will be no chance to turn things around.

  “Maybe,” Thad muses, “in the grand scheme of things, it’s not so bad.”

  “Oh, it’s bad.”

  “Maybe it’s just that it all happened at once, and that it was this week, with Nicki . . .” He trails off, lifts the glass to his lips to sip and swallow again. “It’s that old saying, what is it . . . ?”

  “All hell is breaking loose?”

  “I meant ‘It never rains, but it pours.’ ” He offers her a wry, faint smile that doesn’t even approach his blue eyes. “But, yeah. Basically, all hell is breaking loose, too.”

  Jen can’t pull off even a hint of a smile. She sits glumly thinking of her girls, her sweet babies, caught up in lying and sneaking and cheating and Lord only knows what else.

  Is this what happens when they grow up?

  Is it going to get worse before it gets better?

  Is it even going to get better?

  “The thing with Emma, by itself, wouldn’t surprise me,” Thad says after a long moment. “She’s always been—”

  “She’s never done anything like this, Thad!”

  “That we know of. If Amy Janicek hadn’t come along and seen her, and then told you, we’d still be in the dark. Who knows? Maybe it’s better that way.”

  “Are you serious?” She looks at him, seeing not dependable, sensible Thad but a man with a drink in his hand and whiskey on his breath.

  Mike. Mike Morino used to drink, back when they were teenagers. He’d steal whiskey from his father’s liquor cabinet and drink it straight from the bottle, passing it around at parties.

  Sometimes Jen would imbibe a bit. She was no saint. But she wasn’t the kind of girl who regularly got drunk, either. Mike used to tease her about that, saying she should loosen up, be more like . . .

  Debbie.

  He was always fond of Debbie. Out of all Jen’s friends—and there were many—she was the only one Mike didn’t complain about having around.

  Were the two of them having a fling even then?

  Are they now?

  Jen’s speculation is cut short by the sound of car doors slamming outside.

  “Your sister and Carley are home,” Thad observes, looking expectantly toward the hall.

  Moments later, the front door opens, and Carley’s voice reaches their ears.

  “—straight up to bed,” she’s saying, “but thanks, Aunt Frankie, for dinner, and for . . . well, you know. Sorry I got all upset.”

  “You’re allowed, kiddo. See you in the morning. We’ve got a lot of cooking to do over at Grandma’s house. Oh, and remember what I told you.”

  What? Jen wonders. What did Frankie tell her? What did Carley tell Frankie?

  Hearing her sister’s footsteps approach the kitchen, she wants to start firing off questions, but manages—just barely—to hold her tongue.

  “Hi, guys.” Frankie sticks her head in. “I’m glad you’re up. Midnight snack?”

  Thad silently holds up his glass.

  “Oh. That kind of snack. I was hoping for popcorn.”

  “Want some?”

  “Popcorn? No thanks.”

  “I meant Jack.” Thad indicates the bottle.

  “No, thanks again. That stuff would knock me out until noon. But if you have any wine . . .”

  “We do. How was dinner?” Thad gets up and busies himself opening a bottle of cabernet as Frankie fills the seat he vacated. Jen manages to merely listen as Frankie talks about what she ordered, what Carley
ordered.

  After taking two stemmed glasses from the cupboard, Thad pours wine into each and slides one across the breakfast bar to Frankie, the other to Jen.

  She accepts it without protest and when Frankie pauses for a breath after describing her tiramisu cheesecake, she asks, “Did Carley talk to you about what happened?”

  So much for holding your tongue.

  Frankie swirls the wine in her glass. “She did. But she asked me not to talk to you guys about it.”

  Jen’s knee-jerk instinct is resentment. But then Thad catches her eye and gives a little nod, as if to say it’s okay.

  He’s right. Isn’t this what she was hoping for? That Carley would open up to someone?

  “I told her she should fill you in,” Frankie goes on, “because she’s had a lot to deal with and you can help her.”

  “So there’s more to the story than she told us?” Thad reaches across the breakfast bar for his whiskey.

  “There’s always more to every story,” Frankie returns simply.

  “I’m glad she talked to you,” Jen says. “Just tell me—should I be worried?”

  “You mean more than you already are? Look, I don’t—” Her sister breaks off, looking at the ceiling as footsteps pound overhead, then down the stairs.

  Bracing herself for another bout with Emma, Jen is surprised to see Carley appear in the kitchen doorway, still fully dressed and looking disturbed.

  “There’s something wrong with the Internet,” she announces. “I can’t get online.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the Internet,” Thad tells her. “Your mother changed the password.”

  “Why?” Carley’s gaze, behind her glasses, darts to Jen, who sighs inwardly.

  Suddenly, she’s too exhausted to get into Emma’s situation now. “I think everyone needs to take a break from the computer stuff for a while.”

  “What? But—you can’t do that!”

  Taken aback by the reaction, Jen manages to say evenly, “I can, and I did.”

  It would be so much easier in her exhausted state to just give Carley the new password. That’s what she was planning to do all along, whenever she got around to asking for it.

  But Emma’s earlier accusations of favoritism aren’t sitting well with Jen tonight. If losing online access is fair punishment for one daughter, why isn’t it fair punishment for the other?