The Silent Sister(76)

Verniece clamped her mouth shut, though I had the feeling if I hadn’t been there, she would have let him have it the way she had when I’d overheard her a few days before. She had to keep up her sweet-and-innocent act for my sake.

“This is why my father’s been paying you five hundred dollars a month all these years,” I said. Suddenly the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

“A small price to pay to keep his daughter out of prison, don’t you think?”

“What I think is that you haven’t told me much of anything,” I said bitterly. “So Lisa was alive twenty-three years ago, with a name that’s impossible to track down, and she got on a train to who-knows-where.”

“You know what, Riley?” he said. “Did you ever stop to think that if Lisa wanted to see you, she would have found you?”

He’d hit a nerve I hadn’t even realized was raw and tender, and the pain was too much for me. I stood up, and grabbing the copy of the signed form from the table, I tore it in two.

“That’s only a copy!” Verniece said.

“This is what I’m going to do to our deal,” I said, tearing the paper into quarters, then eighths. “I’m calling Suzanne to tell her I’ve changed my mind and not to record the deed.”

“You can’t do that!” Verniece looked up at me, a shocked expression on her face. “We signed the paper! The real form!”

“I can do it and I will,” I said, hoping I was right. “This is over.”

“You little bitch.” Tom growled. He took a step toward me and I tried unsuccessfully not to flinch.

“Riley.” Verniece groaned. “That’s not playing fair! He’s telling you everything he knows. You don’t want him to make things up just to satisfy you, do you?”

“No, but I do want him to tell me something that’s worth two hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “We’re done.”

I pulled the door open, then leaped down the steps. Once I hit the ground, I ran all the way to my car, terrified Tom might come after me with a shotgun. When I got into my car and hit the locks, though, I looked back at the trailer and saw there was no one in sight. My hands shook as I started the car. I turned it around at the end of the lane and headed out of the park, and only when I reached the main road did I pull over to the shoulder and start to cry. What had I expected? That he would know right where I could find her?

Sitting there, I called Suzanne’s number and was relieved to get her voice mail. I was too embarrassed to talk to her at that moment. I cleared my throat, hoping she couldn’t tell that I’d been crying.

“Suzanne,” I said, “this is Riley MacPherson. I thought about some of the things you said and I’ve decided not to gift the park to the Kyles after all. I’m sorry for the hassle. Please don’t record the deed. Thanks for helping me think it through.”

I hung up the phone and sat there staring blindly at the trees by the side of the road. Daddy knew. All these years, he’d known the truth. Could he have told my mother? I didn’t think so. Not the way she grieved. You couldn’t fake that kind of grief. I thought only my father knew, and I wondered if somewhere, buried deep in the sea of paperwork in those living room cabinets, there might be a clue to Lisa’s whereabouts.

And if there was a clue, I was going to find it. I would attack the paperwork with a new vengeance. No more stopping to shred every unwanted sheet of paper. I had no time for that. I would search through it all for something, anything, that would tell me where I could find my sister.





APRIL 1996

39.

Jade

“Hi, Charlie,” she said as the old man walked into Grady’s carrying an armload of LPs. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and took the records from him. “Ready to turn these in?” Every time he came into the store lately, he brought more records to sell to Grady. He’d reached the age where it was time to pare down, he’d told her, but even though he was turning in ten or twenty a week, he was buying at least five to replace them, so it was going to be slow going.

She set the pile of records on the counter in front of Grady, who would tally them up while Charlie wandered through the aisles, looking for something new.

“I’m going through some boxes in the back,” she said to them. They were the only people in the store, and she usually looked forward to catching up with Charlie, but today she needed to be alone.

“Let me know if you come across anything back there that I can’t live without,” Charlie said.

“I will.”

Sitting on a stool in the back room, she pulled old vinyl albums from one of the estate sale boxes. She barely noticed the records, though. She was thinking about what she’d discovered at school that morning: before she started her fifth year at San Diego State, the year in which she’d get her credential that would allow her to teach, she needed to be fingerprinted. It was the law for anyone who taught, anyone who worked with kids. How stupid she’d been not to realize that she’d have to be fingerprinted to work in a school! Blindly sifting through the records in front of her, she realized that the last four years of her life, at least from an educational perspective, had been wasted. She could never teach. Not music. Not anything. And she had no idea now what she was going to do.

It was momentarily quiet in the store. Grady always had music going, but Enya’s Watermark had just ended and Jade knew he was figuring out what to play next when she heard the jingle of the bell on the front door.