The Silent Sister(31)

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.