The Silent Sister(32)
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 own 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.”