The Winter Sister(33)

“Then can you at least tell me about my sister’s bruises?” I asked. “Don’t I have a right to know why you didn’t charge Ben with anything, especially since he admitted to hurting her?”

Parker opened his mouth, uttered the beginning of a word, and then closed it. Looking at his watch, he tapped its face with his fingers in a pensive, rhythmless way. “Ms. O’Leary,” he said, “as you just noted, Mr. Emory was never charged with a crime, which means that, just like you or me or anyone else, he is entitled to his privacy. It would not be appropriate to divulge the details of his personal life. I can understand that may be frustrating, but I’m sure you’d expect the same treatment if you were in his shoes.”

“You’re worried about his privacy?” I blurted. “My sister is dead.”

“As I—”

“You can’t just bring him in for questioning again? Just to see if maybe there’s something you guys missed? I just—I don’t think he should be able to work with sick people. It’s not safe.”

“I’m sorry,” Parker said. “We can’t bring someone in for questioning without a reason. Now, please be assured, Ms. O’Leary, that if something were to happen that seemed to link Mr. Emory to this case, then, yes, of course we would question him again. But as it stands . . .” He shrugged.

I could feel him building a wall between us—one that, clearly, I wouldn’t be able to penetrate. But why would Parker need to hide the truth from me? Why was he more concerned with protecting my sister’s abuser than arresting her killer?

Despite the room’s comfortable temperature, I braced for a shiver. As it shook through me, I felt the determination and anger that had been spurring me on just moments before melt into hopelessness.

I picked up my purse. “Okay,” I said, standing up.

“Listen,” Parker said, rising from his chair. “I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear. I’m sorry I couldn’t . . .” He trailed off, his eyes lingering on me, and then he patted the pockets of his pants. “Here.” He took out his cell phone and reached into his suit jacket for a small notepad and pen.

“You mentioned my former partner—Detective Falley,” he said, tapping at his phone, then writing something down. “She left the department a few years ago, but—” He ripped out the sheet of paper from his notepad and handed it to me; he’d written “Hannah Falley” at the top, along with a phone number. “You might want to talk to her if you’ve been left feeling unsatisfied here. I’m not saying she’ll be able to tell you much more than I already have, but I will say that she’s no longer bound to certain . . . rules. Just tell her that you got her number from me.”

I stared at the paper. Falley wasn’t a detective anymore; she couldn’t arrest Ben or even interrogate him, so what could she possibly do for me? But as Parker stood in the doorway, waiting for me to follow him out, I folded the paper anyway and stuck it in my purse. “Thanks,” I mumbled, and he nodded in response.

When I got back to my car, I sat there for a while, the cold air hardening around me like a cube of ice. I watched people pull into the parking lot, walk toward the doors of the station, and disappear inside. I watched officers exit through the same doors, head toward squad cars, and take a left onto the main road, some with their lights flashing, some not. At a certain point, a text came in from Lauren, and my phone startled me with its chime.

“Best news ever,” she’d written. “Tankard now does half-off apps and drinks on Mondays! Come home for the night and we’ll app it up!”

Home. I read the word over and over. Where was that exactly? In Providence? There, Lauren and I split orders of mozzarella sticks at bars with scratched and sticky tables. We swapped stories of our day’s clients as we picked at cheese stuck on our plates. We laughed about the guy who wanted a tiny squirrel on one earlobe and an acorn on the other. We cringed about the girl who wanted “is terrible in bed” under the tattoo of her ex-boyfriend’s name.

But here, living in Spring Hill, my sister had once shattered all Mom’s perfume bottles, once ripped pages from the book Mom was reading, once threw forkfuls of spaghetti on the floor—all in retaliation for things I couldn’t even remember. Here, she’d been wild-eyed and passionate and alive, right up until the last time I saw her—red-coated and running from our house, right back to Ben.

“Wish I could be there,” I responded to Lauren, and I turned the sound off on my phone so I wouldn’t hear the alerts for any other texts.

Another twenty minutes passed before I drove back to the house, minutes in which I shivered and pulled my coat tighter but refused to turn on the heat. What had Persephone’s skin felt like when they found her? She’d been dead for days, buried beneath layers of snow, so when someone first touched her—the police, or an EMT, or the jogger who discovered her, maybe—did it feel smooth but glacial, like touching a window in winter?

The moment I opened the front door, I could see that Mom wasn’t in her recliner anymore. I headed down the hallway, the bottle of her pills rattling inside the pharmacy bag, and when I reached her bedroom door, I was surprised to find it ajar. “Mom?” I asked, slipping my head inside.

I hadn’t seen her room in a very long time. With the door so often locked after Persephone died, it had become forbidden territory. Now, as I looked around, I was struck by how dark it was, the shades pulled down and the curtains drawn. Still, there was just enough light from the hallway to see that things hadn’t changed much since I was a teenager. There was the same bed with the same floral comforter. The same dresser with a top drawer that never fully closed. Even the smell was as I remembered it—musty and stale, but sweet, too, like roses that had been left to rot.