The Deadly Sister (3 page)

A
s we sat at a traffic light, I felt a new tightness in my stomach and realized that I hadn’t eaten all day. Cheyenne kept energy bars in the glove compartment, but I couldn’t imagine taking any food in. My stomach felt vacuumed shut, as if anything I’d force myself to chew and swallow would sit on the sealed organ until it wandered back up to my mouth.

This isn’t me,
I thought as Cheyenne merged onto the interstate.
I’m the one who convinces the group not to jump Thrill Hill, who goes to every party but leaves early and never throws a single one of her own. I’m not the one to get wrapped up in a murder and not call the police. To willfully start down a chain of wrong.

I watched her go through the mundane activity of clicking on her turn signal, inching forward, and stopping as she waited for traffic to clear enough for us to merge. When we jerked to an especially hard stop and Cheyenne started yelling at a driver, a key on a necklace fell from beneath the collar of her shirt. Cheyenne noticed me staring at her and tucked the key away. “You know, if you’d told me that someone I knew was going to die,” she said, in that bizarre singsong she uses when she’s struggling to make conversation, “I’d have predicted Jeff Andrews.”

It was a hugely weird thing to say, weird enough to make me cancel the question I was about to ask about the key. I didn’t reply for a few seconds. “Everyone loves Jefferson,” I said, in the manner of a television announcer.

“He wasn’t a nice boy,” Cheyenne said, tapping her finger against the steering wheel.

The neighborhoods around Xavier High are all planned developments in soil shades, the monotony broken only by electronics stores or billboarded restaurants where the silverware comes wrapped in waxy paper. But Medusa’s Den is deeper into the old town, near the abandoned rail depot in the center. Surrounded by drifters and gangs of kids avoiding home. Cheyenne locked the doors as we surfed for parking. We finally found a spot in a gravel lot that spilled between office buildings. We hid our purses and watches under the seats. I pulled my hair down and mussed it. I always feel plastic downtown.

I’d been so intent on finding Maya that I hadn’t really considered what I’d say to her once I was face-to-face with her again. I’d have to see what condition she was in, find out what she knew about what had happened. I imagined her frantic and scared and angry, spouting nonsense. Maybe she’d have taken something to calm her nerves, would be docile and open, all pupils and liquid limbs.

Cheyenne paid the meter, placed the receipt on her dashboard, and clicked the door lock button until the car honked twice. We headed toward Medusa’s Den, my dog leading the way.

People only go to our downtown to work, so on the weekends it’s a hollowed-out place, like the set of an apocalypse movie minus the zombies. Locked revolving doors, vividly empty streets, homeless asleep on curling cardboard, gravel parking lots boundaried by rusty chains. In the corner of one of the more desolate lots was a large green vintage car. I stopped in my tracks.

Cheyenne pulled up short alongside me. “What—oh, shit.”

We stared at the car. Cody whined.

“How’d he get his car here, if he’s dead in the woods?” Cheyenne asked.

“Well, somebody obviously must have put it here.”

“Who would ride off with Jeff’s car?”

I couldn’t avoid stating the obvious implication. “Who do you think?”

“Abby, this really doesn’t look good for her. Not at all.”

“I know,” I snapped.

“What do we do about the car?”

“We stop standing here staring at it. Let’s go.”

“I think we should investigate it,” Cheyenne said.

“No.”
I was shaking. Cheyenne took my hand and squeezed it.

Medusa’s Den was right around the corner. It was a blacked-out window next to a liquor store where people placed orders from behind a Plexiglas wall. The grimy door hummed with neon. I pulled it open.

The walls, floor, and much of the ceiling were plywood.
In a case, body-piercing jewelry—much of it glowing green, yellow, orange—glinted like tropical fish next to some truly ugly fluorescent bongs. Two girls on a ripped couch by the entrance had just said something that ended with “Okay, Mama.”

“How do I find Keith?” I asked them.

They glanced at each other to see who should go first. I was irritated by the delay and, obscurely, by the very fact that these girls might have been friends of my sister. If I was the one to spend so much of my life looking after her, didn’t I at least deserve to know everyone she knew?

“You wait around,” one said.

“So you know, we were here first,” said the other with a smirk.

“We don’t need tattoos,” I said. “I just have to talk to him. Do you know which studio is his?”

“He’s probably upstairs,” said the first girl. “He lives here.” She thumbed toward the back of the parlor. “I like your dog.”

I cautioned myself as I climbed the stairs:
Don’t act like you suspect Maya, or she won’t let you help.
My throat tightened.

Keith—and this guy could only be Keith—opened the door. Not a gawky emo boy after all. A long history of ink on his body. Predictable tattoos in the predictable places (a girl on a bicep, a skull on a calf) in faded ink, and fresher and more unusual images in more unusual places. A typewriter on the inside of his elbow. A planet on the corded
muscle that led into his boxers. He was wearing only those boxers.

The tattoos were too plentiful and too engrossing. The door had been open for rich seconds and I hadn’t said a thing.

Say something.

He was a warrior, something from a dreamscape.

Say something.

A
snake vined through the paisley on his shoulder, its tongue licking toward his earlobe.

“I’m Cheyenne and this is Abby,” Cheyenne said, pushing past me. “The dog’s name is Cody.”

“You look just like Maya,” Keith said to me as he reached out a hand to fend off Cody, who was in full greeting mode. No one ever said I looked like Maya. Flirting cashiers called us cousins, and even that was a stretch. We had the same body type; that was it.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“‘I’m sorry?’”
Keith echoed back in a mocking accent that might have been aiming at British. A moment came back to me: getting into the family car, Maya calling me affected. I hadn’t known what the word meant, but I knew what it felt like and argued back hotly. Maya had only stared at me from her half of the backseat.
I have something on you. I am larger. I reach further.

“Abby Goodwin and Co.,” Keith said. “Come in.”

It was a busy, dirty loft space, more an attic than an apartment. But clean light streamed in, illuminating Keith’s ink.
He turned and sauntered into the room, not bothering to look back. In Maya’s world, assumptions were good enough. Keith was hardly concerned whether Cheyenne and I felt welcome.

He plucked a limp collared shirt from the back of a chair and shrugged it on. A sea turtle disappeared under the neckband. The tattoos were strategic: When he turned around with the shirt on, none of them were visible.

“Is Maya here?” I asked.

“It’s a small space,” Keith said. “What you see is all there is.”

I did a quick scan. One door, hanging open, led to a bathroom. The rest of the loft was cluttered, full of hidden corners. I glanced in a wastepaper basket next to me and then wished I hadn’t. There was a blue bandage on top, blood leaking from an oval in the center and sealing one side in a crimson line. It looked like a used pad. Cody already had her nose halfway into the basket. I yanked her back.

Keith noticed my reaction. “That’s your sister’s, actually. She had me do a tattoo cover-up last night. It bled more than usual, but that’s probably because her skin was still sensitive from the original. She only got it a few weeks ago.”

“What time was that?” I asked. “The cover-up, I mean.”

“Early evening. Eight, maybe?”

There were other things I should have asked about, but I couldn’t get my brain to put events in order. Cheyenne stepped in. “Did she stay the night?” she asked.

“I’m not sure she’d want me to give her sister that kind of information.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“You want something to drink? I’ve got, um, water or bourbon. No? Suit yourself. All I mean is that you two aren’t exactly the closest of sisters. I can’t imagine that’s news to you.” Keith pulled out a pair of chairs—puffy brown brass ones, like from the “Wait to be Seated” area of a diner—and motioned that we should sit. We did. I balanced forward on the balls of my feet.

We
were
close sisters. It also just so happened that she hated me. “I’ve got her phone,” I said, brandishing it. The move felt lame, like I was trying to prove a connection to her.

“She hates phones. I’ve heard the rants. I’m sure she’s not suffering without it.”

“Look, she’s in trouble. She needs help. You said she was here—so where is she?”

Keith laughed. “She’s not in trouble. She’s doing fine.”

“When did you last see her?”

“She spent last night here.”

“Really?” Cheyenne asked.

“Did she seem okay?” I asked.

He smirked. “Why, Little Miss Goodwin, wouldn’t she seem okay?”

I could tell he knew something I didn’t. But how to make him reveal it?

“I need you to tell me,” I said. “Please.”

“Maya’s a good friend of mine. And I know she goes to great pains to make sure that her family doesn’t know where she is. So unless you cough up a better reason, I’d say it’s time for you to go.”

All I wanted to do was talk to her. Why was that so hard? With any other sister, it would have been simple. But I couldn’t go telling everyone it looked like my little sis had killed her drug dealer sex-boy.

“I know,” I said, clearing my throat, “that Maya and I aren’t too close anymore. I know she avoids me and my parents, that she might tell you she hates us. She’s probably involved in all sorts of things she’d be furious if any of us found out about. But she’s my
sister,
and something’s come up that makes it so important that I find her. I can’t explain it to you, but you have to know that I really need to do this. I’m not trying to get her in trouble. I’m trying to save her.”

Keith lit a cigarette and stared at the tip. Never taking his eyes from the glowing point, he held the pack out to me and Cheyenne, placing it in his shirt pocket when we both declined. A shirt cuff fell back on his arm, and I saw beneath it a second cuff tattooed directly onto his flesh, complete with cuff link.

“Maya,” he called, “your sister is here.”

S
he was thirteen the first time she ran away. That evening I’d been doing dishes while listening to my parents scold her for skipping school. As I soaped a plate, it struck me: She’d said nothing to any of us for a week. She’d accepted my parents’ waves of frustration, but it was like we were a radio station and the technology didn’t work both directions. She’d stopped broadcasting anything back.

I followed their lecture as it inevitably turned toward her failing schoolwork and lousy friends.
I’ll stay flexible,
I told myself.
I’ll try not to judge. I’ll be the one she’s still willing to talk to.
I knew she was barely sleeping anymore, that she spent her evenings reading magazines in the basement or watching TV on her computer. I set my alarm for one
A
.
M
., when I knew our parents would be long asleep. I went to the kitchen and made peppermint hot chocolate, her childhood favorite. I poured two cartoon-kitten mugs full and headed downstairs.

Back during the divorce year, Maya and I had fixated on those kitten mugs. We’d used them constantly, filling them with orange juice at breakfast, water at lunch, and milk at dinner. They always went to their special spot in the dishwasher, mine in the back and hers nestled right next to it. We’d take them to the roof and sip and talk, or on weekend
mornings we’d walk around the neighborhood with steaming tea. On those walks she’d ask question after question about why our parents were splitting, even though I never had any answers. One morning, I made a plan with Dad to meet at the local fields to go over some soccer moves. I waited for him for an hour, until who came huffing down the street but little Maya, clutching two kitten mugs of gone-cold chocolate. She didn’t need to explain: In the emotional torture they were putting themselves through that year, my parents forgot appointments all the time. Maya had had plans to go camping with her best friend’s family that weekend, and she missed out just so she could come console me with those watery cold chocolates. We huddled together on the edge of the field, my shoulder against hers, and I was so glad that my otherwise annoying eleven-year-old sister had totally come through when it mattered most.

Two years later, I walked down those basement stairs intending to return the favor. I meant to convince her to stay, to make her feel like she belonged. But she was already gone. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that everything since has been my fault.

I wouldn’t have thought anyone could have hidden in Keith’s bed, but here she was, emerging from the stale airspace beneath the comforter. The sheets must have gone weeks without being made, their wrinkles thickened into deep ridges. She cringed in the pale light. It struck me that maybe she wasn’t avoiding me; she was just embarrassed to have
been found in this guy’s slimy bed. She hit the ground unsteadily, jostling a side table and spilling empty prescription bottles that pinged and rolled on the floor.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. The emphasis was on
you,
like she couldn’t care less about my reasons—it was my very presence that had her pissed. “What exactly are you trying to save me from?”

She moved into the brighter light of the window, which cast her green. She hadn’t slept in a long time—the skin beneath her eyes was rumpled. She looked like she’d just dodged a speeding car that was turning around for another pass: unsteady, panicked. But did she look all messed up because she’d just killed someone, or because that was the way she always looked? Both our fates would hang on what people decided was the answer.

Every time I saw her, I tried to find the little girl underneath.

Every time I saw her, I failed.

Maya liked to wear a lot of pink and a lot of black. Her panties sported both colors, in tight horizontal stripes. Her thighs looked red and sore. I was embarrassed that Cheyenne was seeing my sister like this. And I was angry that Maya had waited for Keith’s permission to come out. She was passive, easily led—another way we were different.

“Hey, Cody,” she murmured. The dog had found a stretch of her exposed heel and begun to nuzzle.

“Is there someplace private where Maya and I can talk?” I asked.

Keith looked at Maya. “Take my studio. I’m not using it until four.”

Cheyenne followed Maya and me downstairs, then squeezed my arm, said “I’ll meet you outside,” and kept moving toward the front. Cody reluctantly allowed herself to be dragged behind her.

The plywood wall shuddered as Maya closed us into the studio. A tattoo needle droned next door, cut off, then droned again.

“So this is where you spend all your time?” I asked.

“One of the places,” Maya said. She eased herself onto the tattooing table, paper crinkling under her. She was still in her underwear, though she’d thrown on one of Keith’s T-shirts to cover her breasts. It had a chicken on it, of all things. I wheeled away a cart with needles and little tubs of ink, took the artist’s chair. Maya clutched one of her elbows, a forearm across her belly. It was an insecure and intimidating pose, making it look like she was both closing herself off and preparing to use her arm as a club. Even clutching her bicep, her fingers shook. It made the grayer skin near her elbow quiver. She was so thin. Effortlessly, sickly thin. Like a model, or someone soon to be deceased.

“No one can hear us, right?” I said.

Maya nodded, eyes still suspicious.

“Jefferson Andrews,” I said.

She flinched. “What about Jefferson Andrews?”

“He’s dead.”

There it was again, the godlike moment of changing the
currents of someone’s life. Every time I said he was lying dead at the bottom of the ravine, there was a rush and a jump and the universe changed. Maya’s outline went hazy for a moment.

She didn’t go pale—she couldn’t have gotten paler—but a sheen appeared on her skin. She was horrified. But she didn’t look surprised. Not quite.

“Tell me you didn’t kill him, Maya,” I said.

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“What happened? What do you mean?” It wasn’t really a question. It was a bid for time. I waited.

“Maya. Only I know.” I left out Cheyenne, to keep my allegiances uncomplicated. I could lose Maya’s trust—whatever trust she had for me—so easily. “But someone else could be finding his body right now. We don’t have time. I need you to tell me exactly what happened last night.”

She was scared now. Calculations passed just beneath her face. What I’d told her about Jefferson, perhaps slowed by drugs in her bloodstream, seemed to hit in slow motion. She staggered to her feet. “He’s not dead!”

“I
found him,
Maya. And he
is
dead. Drowned, or hit on the head. Dead.” I felt sick and full at the same time.

“Where is he?”

“In the river. Right below where you met up with him last night.
Did you hit him?
”

“He was there to meet up with some other girl. But when I got there, she wasn’t there. I was confused.”

“Start at the beginning. I was the one who told you he was with some other girl, remember? And you went to find him. Did you talk to him?”

“Yeah. Oh my god. He’s not dead, Abby. He can’t be.” She twisted her arms together. Her torso hinged so she almost folded, left over right. I put my arm around her shoulders. It was the first time I’d touched her in a long time. She smelled like her room smells: that gasoline stench of old rolling papers; a potent, almost buttery pungency of candy; and cheap berry perfume. But she also smelled of clues to the other half of her life: invisible, unknowable, a challenge to the imagination. Chemical smells, unhealthy sweat. Drug vapors. Somewhere deep in the fibers of her shirt, she smelled like burnt detergent. I pulled her tighter, until she slipped free.

She began hitting herself. The heels of her hands made soft thunks against her skull. I grabbed her wrists and pulled her arms down to her side. She was gorgeous for a moment. Gorgeous and otherworldly and profoundly ill.

“Look, Maya,” I said. “You’re going to tell me everything that happened last night, and then we’re going to figure out what to do.”

She didn’t nod. She just stared from the hollows of her face. Right then, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d passed out or bolted from the room. I had no idea what to expect.

“For right now,” I continued, “you need to get grieving for Jefferson out of your head. Pretend he’s still alive. Deal
with that later. Your life is on the line, okay? Our priority is deciding what the police will think, and what that means for you.”

At the mention of the police, a glass was lifted. She nodded, ran her tongue over her craggy lips. “Someone saw him parked at the Bend. So I went. I knew he was waiting for a girl to meet up with him. He’d met up with me there plenty often.”

We’d been over this the night before. I was used to this frustration—Maya never quite seemed to be listening to me, asked only the most basic questions, regularly requested information I’d given her moments earlier. It told me, over and over, that she didn’t really care what I had to say. And whenever I asked,
Did you hear what I just said?,
she turned defensive. It’s weird that I was swelling with irritation even as something so serious was happening, but so be it.

“So you went to the Bend…” I prompted.

Maya nodded, and I watched her get temporarily lost in the details of the room: the paper on the table, the tubes and contraptions and wrapped needles. Her mouth was hanging open. She snapped it shut and shivered, rubbing her arms.

“Was he there?” I asked.

“Yeah. His car was there. I rode in on my bike. I remember his taillights glowing. Smoke coming from the tailpipe. I banged on the hood, to freak out whatever girl was inside. But when he rolled down the foggy window, I saw it was just him. He had a joint, was listening to music on the
car stereo. I got in and closed the door. Automatic reaction, you know.”

“He must have been surprised to see
you
get in.”

She kept going, like I hadn’t spoken. “He was just sitting there, I guess waiting for that girl to arrive. And he flipped when he saw it was me, just flipped. ‘Oh, what are you doing here? Me, I’m just hanging out,’ that kind of typical crap. Exactly how I’d have expected him to act if I caught him cheating. I told him to cut through it and tell me what he was really doing there. What he was planning on doing with Caitlin. He kept telling me not to be ridiculous, instead of saying he wasn’t meeting anyone. So I knew I was right.” Her voice kept rising, like she was back there all over again. Maybe the drugs were actually aiding the confession.

“Who’s Caitlin?” I asked. “I didn’t mention a Caitlin. I’d just heard it was some girl.”

“He’d mentioned her to me once. Said I had a nice ass, but not as nice as Caitlin’s. So I knew. That name stuck with me. How could I forget it? I mean, it’s not like I didn’t know he was sleeping with other girls. But I guess I hadn’t had to face it before, straight out like that. He told me to calm down. I was really upset. He started kissing me. I can’t believe he did that, tried to kiss me when I was so worked up.”

You kissed him back,
I thought,
and you know it. No one resists him.

“He locked the doors and dove into the backseat. Just
expecting
me to follow. It got me mad again, and I started
thinking about some slut with a great ass named Caitlin arriving, so I threw open the door. He tried to pull me back, but I slipped out of the car. He whipped out of the driver’s side and leaned over the hood. He was furious, called me a tease and a bitch. ‘It’s not Caitlin,’ he finally said, and he started
smiling.
Like he was getting off seeing me tortured. I asked him who it was, and he wanted to know what it was worth if he told me. I said I couldn’t believe he was asking
me
for favors after everything else he’d done, and that was when he confessed he’d been planning on meeting up with another girl, but that he didn’t really like her and it was just to get her off his back. I didn’t believe him, of course, but while I was thinking about what he’d said, I let him hold me, I guess. God, what happened next? Let me think.”

There was a lot to unpack out of what she was telling me, but right then I just needed to keep her talking. “So at this point you
knew
he’d been lying to you. Because at first he hadn’t admitted that he was meeting some girl, and then he admitted it.”

“Yes, Abby. I
knew
he was lying to me. And I was still there. Don’t be such a Girl Scout.”

“Just keep telling me what happened.”

“God! I’m trying!” She barreled on. “So I’m standing there, and we’re talking or whatever, and I keep telling him that I just want to lie down. I’m finding it hard to put sentences together, you know what I mean? He said we could just stand there and enjoy the view, even though I couldn’t
see anything from where we were because it was so dark, and that felt fine, just being held even by someone who I knew was playing me, but then he wanted to talk and I said can’t we just stay quiet and he asked what was wrong and I said I wanted to lie down again.”

“Wait, were you high?”

“Out of my mind. I thought you’d have figured that out by this point. He was practically jamming pills in my mouth.”

I pictured it, Jefferson placing a little pill on his fingertip—he had these broad, rough fingers, more tools than body parts—and working his finger between Maya’s lips. “Are you high right now?” I asked. I hated my tone—I sounded like a doctor again.

“No,
I’m not high right now.
So I wind up in the back of his car, lying down. He’s talking to someone on the phone, and I just want to go to sleep so that when I wake up, my brain will start thinking in order again. And I guess I do fall asleep, because I wake up. I feel his hands on me, and his lips on my mouth, his tongue prying my lips open. Then it all comes back to me, that he was there waiting for some other girl, even if I sorta believed him that it wasn’t Caitlin, and that if I let him keep on going, I’d never have made a choice, that entire evening. I’d have just been
led.
It was our last night together, and I would have let him do all the wrecking. Does that make sense?”