The Silent Sister(36)

“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.