The Deadly Sister (17 page)

O
ut in the hallway, out of that apartment but still away from the police, her first words to me were:

“What’s going to happen?”

As if I knew. As if I had any idea.

She was so small at that moment. So tiny. Like she’d never be able to live a day without care. She was begging for my selfless protection. But it wouldn’t work.

“Alcaraz talked me through it,” I tried to explain. “He’s got to take you in and ask you questions. There’s the issue of running away from the house that one time—we’re both going to be in trouble about that—but if you’re totally helpful about everything else, they won’t press any evasion charges.”

“We could claim we were running away from home, that we had no idea the police were coming. That’s not
illegal,
right, to run away from home? If we had no idea we were fleeing arrest, or whatever?”

I nodded. The matter of our fleeing was so inconsequential compared to what was about to happen. “So we get in his car and go down to the station,” I said. “And he’ll ask you questions.”

“Will you be there?”

“I’ll ask them to let me in, if you’d like me there.”

“Yes. I really would. And Dad?”

“I’m eighteen, so I can serve as your guardian. He doesn’t have to be there, if you don’t want him to be. You have to tell them very clearly that you don’t trust your parents to represent your best interests.”

“I don’t. I just want you.”

I looked down the stairwell, at the flickering bare halogen lights forming a line all the way down to the rusty front door. I had to get this all under way before my resolve broke. “We go out that door, and it’s over.”

She nodded. Her lips had almost disappeared, they were that gray. She was terrified.

“How high are you?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if the police would test her for drugs.

“Not much,” she said. “Mostly I’m scared. Will you hold my hand?”

I took it. It was cold, her fingers thinner and smaller than my own.

“First,” she said, “I want a jacket. I left my green jacket here the other day. Could you grab it for me? It’s on the chair by the couch.”

Typical. I entered Keith and Blake’s apartment one last time and got her jacket.

We rode to the station in silence. Jamison was in the passenger seat, wearing his blues this time. There weren’t any handcuffs involved, but I was well aware of the pair dangling from his waist, of the gun at his hip, of the Plexiglas
and metal separating us criminals in the backseat from the officers in front.

Maya never let go of my hand. In fact, by the time we’d pulled into the station and parked she was leaning heavily against me, like Cody does when she’s sick. It made my heart quake that Maya had been so reduced, that she was changing into a stronger person in the long term but right now was exhausted and confused and in need of my help.

I pulled her hand up to my lips and kissed it.

She was doomed.

T
hat night. Where were you cut?”

Maya shook her head stubbornly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Honestly, I don’t.”

“Your blood. We found it on one of the murder weapons, intermingled with Jefferson’s. That’s impossible unless you’d been cut, as well as him,” Jamison said. He slammed the table, which reverberated through the interrogation room.

Maya looked at me. I shrugged back, almost imperceptibly. You’d have to know me as well as my sister did to notice it. I’d only been allowed in the room on the condition that I not communicate with Maya. Which was fine, since I didn’t know what to tell her, anyway.

“We’ll search you if we need to,” Alcaraz chimed in.

“You won’t find anything,” Maya said. She was starting to get angry. That was good.

“Would you prefer to do this without me here?” I offered to Alcaraz. “I can wait in another room or something.” Our parents were right outside. Maya was allowed to have one of them with her, but she chose me instead. She refused to have Dad come in, even though he was a lawyer.

“I’m conducting this,” Jamison growled. “And you’ll stay seated. You’re both suspects in my book.”

“Choose your battles, man,” Maya said with familiar
acidity. “You’re really going to try to bring something against my
sister
?”

I stared back at him, imperturbable. I had to get him to lose control of the interrogation. I needed him to make a wrong step.

“You’d do best to cooperate, both of you,” Alcaraz said.

“Fire away,” I said.

“Are you aware, Maya, of the list of evidence stacked against you?”

“I didn’t kill Jefferson, so whatever you have won’t hold up in court,” she said.

“It’s all very conclusive, actually. I can promise you right now that no jury in America would find you innocent.”

She didn’t budge. We’d watched enough TV to recognize a detective pushing for a confession. Maya was about to say she wouldn’t say any more without a lawyer, I knew it. All that was stopping her was the fact that I hadn’t suggested it already. She assumed I had some master plan. Which I did, of course. Though it was quite different from what she expected.

“I’m not overstating the case,” Jamison said, as though he’d read our minds. “There’s no trick to this conversation, no hidden manipulation going on. You’ll find out how strong my case is soon enough. Let’s begin, shall we? First, Maya: the murder weapon. We found it a short way off from the body. And your blood is on it.”

“That’s impossible. You’ve done DNA testing?” Maya asked.

“Not yet. But it’s a fairly uncommon type, B negative. Which is the same as yours. DNA results will come back eventually. We’re very confident it will be a match.”

“Still, other people could have my blood type. Like my sister.”

“I’m A positive, actually,” I said. “We tested it in a bio lab once.”

Maya glared at me indignantly.

“Second,” Jamison continued, “we have your confession that you were there. That you struck him.”

“Lightly,” Maya said. “I struck him very lightly.”

“Third, there’s the matter of your tattoo. You have a tattoo on your lower back that you had covered up the very night Jefferson Andrews was killed, no? One that used to be his name? It will be easy for us to make out the old tattoo. UV light does the trick very simply.”

“How do you know about that?” Maya whispered, staring into the table. I could watch her mind race—why would Keith or Blake tell the police about the tattoo cover-up? And when?

“This isn’t the time for you to ask questions,” he said. “Concentrate on answering, please.”

“What kind of moron would I have to be,” Maya said, “to get his tattoo covered up the same night that you’re saying I killed him? That would be so stupid. I’d say that only proves even more that I didn’t do it.”

“Interesting logic, Miss Goodwin. Getting the tattoo covered up is so incriminating that it becomes proof of your
innocence. I’m not sure if the court will accept your reasoning quite as easily.”

She was nearly hyperventilating. I watched her shirt flutter, a little triangle of cloth at her collar trembling as if there were a breeze in the room.

“How would my blood get on a stupid bottle?”

“A bottle?” Jamison asked.

I closed my eyes and pressed the heels of my palms against my face.

“Yes,” Maya said. “I hit him with an old whiskey bottle that was there.”

“Really. What did you do with the bottle?”

“I left it.”

“No,” Jamison said. “You’re lying to me. We didn’t find a whiskey bottle anywhere near the crime scene.”

“Then maybe she didn’t kill him,” I said.

“I want my dad in here,” Maya whispered.

“What did she say?” Jamison said.

“Nothing, she’s fine,” I said. “Don’t make this any worse,” I whispered to Maya. “Just cooperate. Tell the truth. If you only start calling for him now, then you look guilty.”

“You have the right to an attorney, I informed you about that before we began our conversation,” Jamison said, over-enunciating toward the recorder in the middle of the table. “You’ve said you don’t trust your parents to represent your interests in this matter, and have designated your sister as your adult representative. Your rights in the matter have previously been made clear.”

“Tell him the truth, Maya, it’s as simple as that,” I said.

“I hit him with a
bottle
,” Maya said defiantly. “I’m sure of it.”

“You were high. Extremely high. So high that you couldn’t remember taking Jefferson’s car.” Maya looked at me sharply. “So I don’t think we can trust your memories on this,” Jamison continued. “You hit him with a rock. Not a bottle. A rock. Forensics has come back conclusively. You picked it up, bludgeoned him with it, then threw it away. You probably meant to throw it in the water, but you came up short. We found it right by the edge, in a recent search. And it didn’t have just his blood on it. It had yours as well.”

Maya chewed her lip for a few moments, working through the rapidly changing situation. I wondered how long it would take for her to put everything together, if it would happen during this interrogation or later.

Jamison continued, “There’s more evidence, of course.”

“Go on,” I said. “Let him go on, Maya.” She stared at me crazily.

“There’s the matter of the security camera. We have footage from the gas station across from the high school of you vacuuming Jefferson Andrews’s car early in the morning after he died. What were you trying to clean out?”

Maya stared back at him. She truly had no idea what he was talking about.

I stared at the doorknob that I’d have to turn to flee the examination room, silver except where the friction of hands had revealed a ring of copper color.

Alcaraz sighed. “Are you really going to pretend you don’t know what we’re talking about?”

“I’m not pretending,” Maya said desperately, swatting at her hair. She was still high, I realized. I wondered if the detectives had noticed yet. “Oh god, oh god. Abby, tell him I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

“None of this makes any sense,” I said stiffly.

“Do you want some water?” Jamison asked, pouring a plastic cup of water from a jug at the center of the table and pushing it toward Maya.

“He’s making this up, isn’t he?” Maya said. “Show us this video you claim to have.”

Jamison looked meaningfully at me. “I don’t need to show you.”

Maya swatted at her hair again and peered at me from under the tangled mass. “What is he
talking about
?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What are you sorry about?”

Jamison sighed and looked at me apologetically. “Abby turned in the security footage to us, Maya. She can tell you what it shows,” Jamison said.

“And how did you get it?” she asked me, blinking in incomprehension. Her expression had turned into something awful, a black shroud.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“How can you tell me not to worry about it?” Maya asked. “What could there possibly be not to worry about?” Her
words didn’t make sense and made perfect sense at the same time. My heart was making shivery motions in my chest, pumping cold to my limbs. “I didn’t do it,” Maya said emphatically to Jamison.

A pitiful silence filled the room.

“Then who did?” he said.

Maya stared at the wood grain of the table and then, slowly, raised her eyes to look at me.

For a glittering moment, our gazes locked. She was utterly helpless. Then I spoke. “Show him the key,” I said.

“What key?”

“You know exactly what key I mean.”

“I really don’t. Abby, what’s going on?”

“The key in your jacket pocket.”

Stunned, she reached into the pockets of her jacket and started when her fingers contacted something. She started trembling and shaking her head. Slowly, she pulled out her hand.

A key.

Jefferson’s car key.

M
y memory of the rest of that brief purgatory in the police station is vague. Maya convulsed once, stopped being able to speak, stared deeply into her knuckles, and then broke into keening sobs. That brought my parents busting in. They saw my distress, Jamison’s satisfaction, Maya’s tears, and made all the necessary connections. That Maya was screaming out that I’d betrayed her only made her seem more desperate and unhinged, painted her more fully as someone mad enough to have killed Jefferson.

When Jamison brought out the handcuffs and slid them over Maya’s wrists, Dad lost it, became a red teary beast raging through the police station.

Mom and I turned to vapor and floated to a quiet place in the front hall. Maya was gone and Dad had ceased to be a human. We held each other and cradled the heavy emptiness between us.

The ride back home: Imagine the most awkward family moment you can, then take the awkward and replace it with something equally uncomfortable but blacker. A big gaping hole of a feeling. Thoughts racing and going nowhere. Maya was in custody, and there was only one way things would go from here. Our parents would have to finally put to rest
any of their doubts that Maya really was Jefferson’s killer. I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation. It wouldn’t happen for some time, I knew. My house would be queasily quiet for days.

Once they got inside, Mom and Dad huddled around the phone, setting up the legal war plan. I glided up to my room. They wouldn’t be bothering me for a while. For a blissful and painful stretch of time, I’d have nothing to do but disappear.

I slid into my bed, pulled a protesting Cody under the sheets beside me, tucked the comforter around my head like a mummy, and slipped into the fullest sleep I’d had in ages.

B
rian and I wound up assigned to the same therapist. Guess there’s only one shrink nearby equipped to deal with teenagers who are going through stuff on our scale. I told my mom and dad that I definitely didn’t need anyone that hard-core, that I had looked her up online and was positive I didn’t have post-traumatic stress disorder and that the last thing I wanted to do was jabber about my sister to a woman who would frown in concern and take notes in her notepad about how brave I was. But my parents knew the distance that had sprung up in me, that I wasn’t talking to them or spending time with any of my friends.

Cheyenne and I had started treating each other like strangers. She’d tried to get me to open up at first, but I couldn’t. And when I glazed over while she was telling me about her mom’s clinginess at the thought of her going away to college, Cheyenne stopped speaking to me all over again. The rest of the kids at school weren’t much better—Rose tried to smear me with what Maya had done. It didn’t stick, because I didn’t care. But I guess it looked like everything was taking a toll on me, and my parents made their diagnosis. So I spent two hours every Tuesday and Thursday on I-75, the forty-five minutes of therapy in between spent
with a trauma specialist, reciting a story I now know by heart.

There was a big silk ficus in the doctor’s waiting room, and it draped over one of the seats, practically hiding it away. People sat in that chair only if the rest of the waiting room was full, but Brian always gravitated to it. Since his appointment was after mine, I’d gotten used to opening the door after I finished and seeing him hidden behind the plant, eating candy from the freebie tray, deep in a paperback about hot women in chain-mail bikinis. The first few times we avoided each other so intently that it looked like we’d had some breakup in our past. The receptionist raised her eyebrow at us.

One time, though, Brian didn’t have his book with him. He very consciously met my eyes when I came out. I said hey, and so did he. I kept walking toward the door.

“I don’t have an appointment today,” he said.

“Why are you here, then?” I asked, reluctantly stopping.

“Let’s get a smoothie next door. I’ve been meaning to try that place.”

We sat at a rusty wire table at the edge of the parking lot, him armed with Chocolate Banana, me with Mango Madness. I could barely taste my smoothie; he’d driven here just to see me, and it had my mind racing.

“What’s the word from Maya?” he asked.

“Maya doesn’t talk to me,” I said. “You probably heard they set bail way high because of the whole flight-risk thing,
so she’s not home. I’m almost glad the trial’s in a few weeks. We’ll get everything settled and stuff.”

“Does she get to visit with anyone? Like, have one of those phone conversations across a plastic wall?”

“Yeah. But I let my parents take care of that. I don’t know if I’m up for it. She’s still so angry at me for turning her in. Like I had a choice.”

He paused. His features twisted; I could see him debating whether to ask me something. Maybe he was going to protest that I
did
have a choice.

He finally spoke. “Are you sure she did it?” he asked.

The parking lot was full of cars, but there weren’t any people around. We had that pure privacy you only get in public places.

“How can anyone be sure about anything?” I replied carefully. For all I knew, this whole conversation might be repeated to Brian’s parents and their lawyers.

“I know you gave them my drawings. Or told my mom where they were. I was mad at you. But I don’t think I am anymore. I mean, I get that you were trying to protect Maya. Sometimes I wish I’d been able to protect Jefferson. And a lot of the time I feel guilty that I never would’ve tried.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

“I know. But still, with the trial and everything else, and the way everyone is making it like Jefferson was this big hero—maybe he was, and I couldn’t see it. I wish I’d loved him more. Like you love Maya. You did so much for her.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “Sure, there are times when I love Maya. But there are a lot of times when I hate her, too. And that’s okay.”

“Thank you,” Brian whispered. “That kind of thing might seem obvious to you, but it helps to hear it.”

I could tell he felt better. But I couldn’t feel anything at all.

In another life, if I were someone completely different, I would have been able to console him more. There might have been a future involved. Not romantic—just
connected.
But that was the thing about our connection. All we’d ever have was the past.