The Silent Sister(79)

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “What can’t you take?”

“This!” I waved my arm through the air above the table and the hundreds of items from the attic. “The mess in my house! People in my house! I really—”

“Honey”—Jeannie dropped the patterns onto one of the dining room chairs, where they spilled like a fountain onto the rug—“you just need to let Christine and me handle everything. I’ve told you. There’s absolutely nothing you have to do.”

“I need some peace and quiet,” I said, trying to lower my voice. Trying to keep myself calm. “I know you two are doing a ton of work and I appreciate it, but I need some time to myself.”

They looked at one another. “We could go get a cup of coffee and come back in an hour,” Jeannie suggested to her daughter.

“No.” I looked from one of them to the other. They wore puzzled expressions as if I were speaking a foreign language. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I need days to myself. Maybe weeks.”

“But the sale is in eight days, Riley,” Christine said, “and we’re making fabulous progress, but we have a lot more to—”

“You’ll need to move the sale,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘move it’?” Christine said. “We can’t cart all this stuff someplace—”

“I mean, postpone it,” I said.

“Oh, no.” Christine finally caught on. “The date is already set and we’re—”

“I don’t care!” I gripped the back of one of the dining room chairs. “I hate this! I hate people in my house, taking it apart bit by bit until I don’t recognize it anymore!” My voice rose to a hysterical pitch and it felt good. “I just lost my father, and now I’m losing the house I grew up in!”

“You should have thought of that before you hired me.” Christine put her hands on her hips. “Everything was ‘rush rush rush’ and now suddenly the brakes are on?”

“Christine.” Jeannie moved to her daughter’s side, a hand on her arm as she tried to calm her down, but that did nothing to temper the anger in Christine’s eyes.

“Yes,” I said, more quietly now. “The brakes are on. I’m not ready to let go of everything. You need to wait until I am.”

Complete silence fell over the dining room. Finally, Jeannie spoke. “All right,” she said, “I’m sorry if we’ve been in your way, Riley. I wanted to make things easier for you, not harder. Let Christine and me organize this mess we made today, and then we’ll postpone the sale and we won’t come back until you’re ready. How’s that?”

“That would be excellent,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Mother!” Christine shot a look of daggers at Jeannie.

“Of course that means the house won’t go on the market until late in the season,” Jeannie said. “We can’t get the repairs and painting and everything done until after the estate sale, but maybe we can—”

“It’ll be fine,” I said calmly, heading for the living room. Suddenly, though, I turned back to face them. “Oh, but the RV park?” I said to Jeannie.

“What about it?” she asked.

“You can put that on the market right away.”





41.



In my bedroom, I closed and locked my door, then sat in the armchair by the front window waiting for them to leave. I could hear them downstairs; the dining room was right below my room. Their voices were muffled, but I imagined they wondered what had gotten into me. I didn’t give a damn. It had been such a relief to tell them to go. I’d still be uncomfortable, living in a house that had been turned upside down, little price tags on every lamp and chair and dish, but I could deal with that, and my own bedroom was an untouched haven.

A half hour passed before I heard the front door close. From the window, I watched Jeannie and Christine walk down the porch steps and across the lawn to their cars in the driveway. I smiled, watching them go. Once they’d driven away, I sat down at my desk and turned on my laptop.

How to begin?

I Googled “Ann Johnson” and immediately knew the name was going to be of absolutely no help. I tried searching for images of women with that name. Pages upon pages of Ann Johnsons showed up on my computer, all looking at me with such haunting expressions that I couldn’t stand it and I closed down Google altogether.

I sat with my hands in my lap, staring at the screen. With his tech skills, would Danny know of some way of finding her I’d never think of? I shook my head to rid it of the idea. It didn’t matter. Even if he did, I couldn’t involve him. Maybe I could hire a private investigator, but would a PI have a legal obligation to tell the police if he or she managed to track Lisa down?

And then I remembered that someone had hired a PI: Steven Davis’s wife, Sondra. And she, I knew, would be easy to find.

It took me only a few seconds to locate her blog again. “Never Forgotten: A Meeting Place for Families of Murder Victims.” My gaze fell to the bottom of the page, where I clicked on the word contact, and a form appeared below Sondra Lynn Davis’s e-mail address. I chewed my lip for a couple of minutes, thinking through what I was about to do. Then I began typing.