The Winter Sister(41)

“I miss you too,” I wrote. Then I pulled up Jill’s number and pressed the button to connect the call.

After the fourth ring, I heard the click of her voicemail. I waited for the familiar and clipped “Hi, it’s Jill, leave me a message,” but her outgoing message was one I’d never heard before.

“Hi there—Jill here! Sorry I can’t answer the phone right now, but I’m busy waiting to become a grandmother! That’s right—it could be any day now, so I’m either out shopping for the baby or helping Missy prep for the baby or—God, if I’m lucky—holding the baby! You can leave me a message, but I don’t know how good the reception is on cloud nine!”

There was a quick girlish laugh just before the beep, and I immediately hung up. The energy in her voice was dizzying. It felt like, wherever she was, folding tiny clothes into drawers in a nursery or driving Missy to a doctor in Boston, the sky was a soothing unbroken blue, completely empty of the plump gray clouds that hovered over the houses on our street. I hadn’t heard her voice sound that way—so chipper and buoyant—in a long time, and hearing it bounce so easily against my ear, I knew that my questions about Will and Mom would have to wait. She was only one state away, but even still, she was in a whole different world, one of cheerful excitement and trips to the doctor that ended in smiles instead of dread. After taking care of Mom for months—for years, really—Aunt Jill deserved that joy. She deserved to remain in her blissful, hopeful present—not to be dragged back into her exhausting sister’s past.

I reached for my purse and dug around for the piece of paper that Detective Parker had given me on Monday. He’d told me that I should contact Detective Falley if I was unsatisfied by his answers to my questions, and now, with Aunt Jill a temporary dead end, I realized that unsatisfied was the perfect word to describe how I’d been feeling—not just that afternoon, but for days. Ever since I’d come back to Spring Hill, it seemed that our past—Persephone’s, Mom’s, and mine—had been circling around me while remaining tauntingly out of reach, and after my conversation with Ben in the hospital, I could feel it slipping even further away. I got up and paced around the room, the slip of paper with Falley’s number gripped between my fingers, and decided that if I wasn’t going to find out about Will that afternoon, then I at least needed to know about Tommy.





14




I didn’t recognize her when I first walked into Spoons, the diner on the southern edge of Spring Hill. I’d looked for the same Detective Falley I’d met sixteen years ago—chin-length brown hair; a gentle, almost timid demeanor; a soft, uncertain smile—but the woman who stood up from a table to greet me had dark-framed glasses, a stylish pixie cut, and she grinned at me so widely it was as if I were some long-lost relative. I almost walked right by her, thinking she must be smiling at someone just behind me, but then she put her hand on my arm as tenderly as a mother would.

“Sylvie,” she said, and when my eyes met hers, I recognized them as the ones that had once looked at me with such kindness, the two of us standing in my living room as Mom raged behind the closed door down the hall, as Jill and Detective Parker tried to coax her out.

“It’s good to see you,” Falley continued, gesturing for me to have a seat at the booth where she’d been waiting. “Thanks for accommodating my crazy schedule.” She said this with a quick, almost nervous laugh as we each sat down, as if she’d been the one to request a meeting with me, as if it had been her voice that nearly shook on the phone that afternoon. “I just dropped my daughter off at ballet, so we have some time to chat.”

I nodded. I’d been able to hear her daughter laughing in the background when I called her. “It’s crazy over here right now,” Falley had said over the sound of a faucet turning on. “But I’m happy to meet you in a little while—say, six thirty? Do you know Spoons?”

Spoons was where Mom had waitressed for most of my childhood, the green and yellow of her uniform as familiar to me as the colors of a beloved sports team. She’d always come home smelling like french fries and gravy, and sometimes, on the best nights, she’d walk through the door holding a stack of take-out containers. We’d open them up, inhale the aroma of cheese and salt and meat, and we’d eat our burgers on the living room couch, some made-for-TV movie making me and Persephone laugh with our mouths still full.

But I hadn’t told Falley this. I’d been too relieved that she was willing to speak to me so soon, and I’d just told her that, yes, I knew where Spoons was, and I’d be happy to meet her there. Now, though, taking in the forest-green walls and metal napkin holders, the framed photographs of utensils, and the plastic menus that looked as if they hadn’t changed since I was a girl, I regretted that I hadn’t just suggested the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. Mom was whole here, able to smile at customers and take their orders, to attend to people’s needs. How easily I’d once taken such miracles for granted.

Clearing my throat, I tried to smile at Falley. “Thanks again for meeting with me, Detective,” I said. “I wanted—”

“Uh, uh, uh,” she interrupted, wagging her finger from side to side. “Call me Hannah, okay? Just like I told you on the phone. I’m not a detective anymore. We can dispense with formalities.”