The September Sisters (6 page)

He looked me solidly in the eye when he said this, so I knew what he wanted me to wish for. I was surprised. I didn’t think my father believed in wishes.

BY THE END
of September, work on Becky’s case had slowed down considerably. My father complained that the police weren’t doing enough, weren’t looking hard enough for her. He told me that he blamed the lack of progress in Becky’s case on the fact that we lived in such a small, clean suburban county. “The police aren’t used to crime here,” he said. “What do we have? A burglary every once in a while, some minor vandalism?” He waved his hand in the air, as if all that were nothing, that compared with Becky, it meant nothing.

But the police did finally manage to find the man in the blue van, something that my father did not exactly give them credit for. “How long does it take to find somebody?”
he said, and I think the fact that it took them that long was not a good sign.

His name was Oscar P. Derricks. The police found him after pulling him over in what Harry called a routine traffic stop. They found a Baggie of marijuana in the glove compartment and took him into the station, and someone there put two and two together. It was Kinney, not Harry, who called my father to tell him about it. This was when we also found out that Kinney had been put in charge of the case in order to avoid a “conflict of interest,” something my father said was bullshit.

What I know about Oscar Derricks came from the little I overheard of my father on the phone and the very little my father told me. Oscar was twenty-four years old; he was a high school dropout; his permanent residence was listed as a subsidized apartment in Camden. Apparently he worked as a delivery driver for FTD, delivering flowers and such. Sometimes he’d make deliveries in Pinesboro, though not often, only when the regular guy was sick or flooded with calls. He hadn’t made any deliveries in Pinesboro the week of Becky’s disappearance.

When the police asked him what he had been doing on my street, sitting in his van, he denied ever being there at
first. The police got a search warrant for his van, his apartment, his workplace, but the only thing they turned up was fourteen pounds of marijuana, which he admitted he’d been selling.

Oscar’s story checked out when the police turned up one of Oscar’s best customers, Shawn Olney.

“I can’t believe there drugs in this neighborhood,” Mrs. Ramirez clucked one day on the ride home from school. “Used to be safe for the children.”

“Do you think he knows where Becky is?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “He sell the drug. Little Shawn. I remember him when he this high.” She held up her hand to show the size of a toddler. “He always such nice boy. He shovel my driveway when it snow.” I thought about Mrs. Olney attacking my father in the supermarket aisle, and I felt a cruel sense of satisfaction that Shawn had indeed been doing something wrong.

A few days after the police found Oscar, they charged him with drug-related crimes, but they were thoroughly convinced that he had nothing to do with Becky’s disappearance. “If he didn’t take her, then who did?” I asked my father.

He shrugged. “That’s the same thing Kinney said to me
earlier.” Only I guess what my father meant was that Kinney had said it in a much more accusatory way.

After Oscar was cleared, my father hired a lawyer and a private investigator. I heard about the private investigator through Mrs. Ramirez, because he was a friend of one of her sons-in-law. “He good man,” she told me. “He find your
hermana
just like that.” She lifted her fingers from the steering wheel to snap, and I felt the car jerk to the right a little bit. “You no worry now.”

I found out about the lawyer only because he called one day right after I got home from school. When my mother didn’t answer the phone in her bedroom, I picked up. The man on the other end asked for my father, and when I told him he wasn’t home and asked if I could take a message, he informed me that he was my father’s attorney, Raymond Garth, and that he would appreciate it if my father could please return his call.

It made me nervous that my father had a lawyer. I wondered if the police were planning on arresting my parents.

I thought about what would happen to me if they did, where I would live. Both sets of my grandparents are dead. My father has a sister in Ohio he doesn’t talk to much, Aunt
Claire. I’d met her only once, and she seemed like the sort of cold woman who would sew a lot and ask children to mind their manners. I didn’t think I’d have to live with her, but maybe I would. After all, she was my only blood relative.

I didn’t think Mrs. Ramirez would take me in, as much as she’d been watching me lately. All her children were grown, and she was always talking about the trips she was going to take to see her grandchildren in Florida—someday, once she saved enough money.

It was just after my birthday that I saw my father hand Mrs. Ramirez an envelope. “Oh,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Reed. This going straight to my grandkid fund.” I realized that my father was paying her to pick me up from school, to cart me around, that in all actuality she was nothing more than my babysitter. I didn’t think my father had enough money to pay her to watch me full-time.

Suddenly I started to get angry with Becky.
You’ve ruined everything
, I told her.
You’re ruining my life.
And I wondered if she could hear me, wherever she was.

The weather the last week in September was cool and beautiful, and I talked Mrs. Ramirez into going outside in the backyard instead of watching TV. She sat on the back patio,
in my mother’s smoking chair, while I ran behind the pool to the edge of the yard, where I could see Morrow’s field. I told Mrs. Ramirez that I wanted to practice my cartwheels, but really I wanted to see what the police were doing in the field. It didn’t seem like much; I saw an area that had been roped off with yellow tape, but I never saw a person out there doing something, looking for her. I wanted to go out there and start looking myself, but I couldn’t get away from Mrs. Ramirez’s sharp eyes. It was frustrating, standing there on the edge.

One afternoon Mrs. Ramirez seemed to be paying particular attention to me, and every time she looked up I remembered I was supposed to be doing cartwheels, so I must’ve ended up doing about twenty of them across the yard until I saw it. A little blue glint, it caught the edge of the afternoon sunlight, and I bent over and reached out for it. When I realized what it was, I gasped at a sight so unreal and unbelievable that it was almost like finding Becky herself: Becky’s necklace, sunken in the dirt by a maple tree root, right by the edge of Morrow’s field.

I was so excited to find the necklace that I picked it up and ran over to show it to Mrs. Ramirez right away. I didn’t think that maybe I shouldn’t touch it, because I had
to; the necklace was something that was so real, such a part of Becky, that it wasn’t something I could leave just lying there in the dirt.

A few years back, just before my grandmother got sick and died, she gave Becky and me these necklaces for our birthdays. Each necklace had a little sapphire (our birthstone) shaped like a heart on a thin gold chain. I didn’t like to wear mine. I was afraid I’d lose it, and I’m not really a big fan of necklaces anyway. Usually I feel like they’re choking me, and they make my neck itch. But Becky put hers on and decided she would never take it off. Becky loved jewelry, and this being her only authentic piece, she wore it and showed it off constantly.

Mrs. Ramirez called my father, who called Detective Kinney, and a few minutes after my father got home, Kinney arrived. My mother, hearing all the commotion, got out of bed and came downstairs. I held out the necklace and showed it to her, feeling this oddly enormous sense of pride that I’d done something useful, but as soon as she saw it, my mother started shaking violently, as if she were sobbing; only she wasn’t crying. I knew that I was the one who’d made her shake, so I just stood there, all of a sudden sort of dumbstruck.

Kinney took the necklace from my hands and dropped it into a clear plastic bag. “You shouldn’t have touched it.” Kinney sighed. “You contaminated it.”

This only made my mother start sobbing harder, and I felt so terrible that I wished I’d never been the one to find it in the first place. I think it suddenly occurred to my father that I had the same necklace because he said, “Where’s yours, Ab?”

“She has one too?” Kinney sounded annoyed, and I hated the way he referred to me as “she,” as if I weren’t even in the room.

“It’s in my room,” I said.

“Let me see it,” Kinney said, and I knew he didn’t believe the necklace was really Becky’s, that he couldn’t imagine that I’d found something he’d missed. Something I hated more than anything about Kinney was the way he never believed me; he always suspected me of lying or doing something wrong just because I wasn’t an adult. Kinney’s way of looking at things was on the surface: I couldn’t know anything because I was young; my mother must be guilty because she was sad. Sometimes I wonder, if Kinney had been a different person, someone who dug deeper, who believed there was more to every story, if we would’ve found her right away.

I kept my necklace in the little blue velvet box it had come in on top of my dresser, next to my bin of barrettes. It was there, right where I’d left it. Before I went back downstairs, I opened the box and ran my finger over the sapphire heart. My grandmother’s heart. Becky’s heart.

“Here.” I handed the box to Kinney. “It’s in here.”

He opened it, glanced at it quickly, then shut it and thrust the box back at me.

“Then that’s Becky’s,” my father said. “That’s Becky’s necklace.” He said it again, as if he couldn’t believe it was really true.

“Could she have lost it earlier in the summer?” Kinney asked.

“Did she have it on, Elaine? Had the girls been playing back there?” My mother was no longer shaking and stood perfectly still. She had this look on her face that reminded me of this sick bunny Becky and I had found in the pool once. It was almost drowned in there, half alive, its face glazed and afraid.

“Elaine, goddammit.” My father shook her a little, but she didn’t say anything.

I tried to think if Becky had been wearing her necklace in the pool the last night we were in there, and I couldn’t
remember. I can picture it on her, certainly, bobbing up across her chest in the black night water, but I wasn’t sure if that image was that night or another one. I’d seen Becky swim with her necklace hundreds of times.

“She loved that necklace,” my mother finally said. “She always wore it.”

What my mother meant was, if Becky had lost her necklace when she was playing earlier in the summer, we would’ve heard about it. Becky would’ve noticed right away.

“Can we have it?” my father asked Kinney. “Can we have it back?”

Kinney shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Reed. Evidence.”

“No,” my mother said. “She’ll need it back. When she comes home, she’ll want her necklace.” Kinney looked uncomfortable, and he rubbed his top lip with his forefinger a few times. “You can’t keep my daughter’s necklace. It’s not yours to keep.”

“Elaine.” My father put his hand on her shoulder. “Elaine, calm down.”

It was one of those moments when I think the adults had forgotten I was there. They were so wrapped up in Becky’s necklace that they didn’t notice me. Kinney had put
the bag with the necklace on my mother’s sofa table, so it was sitting there, right in front of me. Just within my reach. I thought about taking it, putting it in the velvet box next to mine, so the two hearts were together, touching. It’s not so much that I wanted the necklace. But I agreed with my mother; it wasn’t the police’s to have. Besides, I was the one who found it.

Before I could do anything, Kinney picked the bag up. I think he was afraid of my mother’s picking it up and screaming bloody murder.

“You don’t think she’s coming home, do you?” My mother looked him straight in the eye when she said this, and he began tugging on his bottom lip a little.

“Mrs. Reed—”

My father cut him off. “Abigail, why don’t see you Detective Kinney out? Your mother needs to lie down.” He put his arms around her and murmured something in her ear.

She nodded. “Yes, Jim. I know.”

I wondered what he had said to her, and I felt left out, as if some secret comfort had passed between them. My father looked at me and nodded toward the door. I expected Kinney to congratulate me, to thank me, to tell me that I’d done a good job, but all he said was: “No more snooping
around, young lady. Why don’t you try to let us do our job?” He sighed heavily, as if I had just made things so much harder for him, a sigh that I couldn’t feel bad about because I believed they would’ve found the necklace weeks ago if they had really been doing their job.

I nodded because I realized Kinney wasn’t ever going to listen to me, but I crossed my fingers behind my back. There was no way I was going to leave things up to the police.

After Kinney left, I took my necklace and went up to my room. I took it out of the box and put it around my neck. I admired the blue sapphire, the way it caught the afternoon light through the window. It really is a beautiful necklace, something Jocelyn envied on Becky all the time. That was part of the reason Becky wore it, I thought. I decided right then that I would wear my necklace all the time, the way Becky had.

Our grandma Jacobson gave us these necklaces right before she got sick. It’s the last time I remember her perfectly whole and smiling. She was an amazing grandmother, one of those old people who act young and totally understand you. Not like Mrs. Ramirez.

The time she gave us these necklaces, Becky and I were
staying with her in Pittsburgh. Our parents had dropped us there before leaving on a vacation to Bermuda. It was the first and only time Becky and I stayed there without our parents. When we were younger, the four of us had gone to stay there every year for Thanksgiving. But my father and my grandmother hated each other; they bickered over everything. “Marge is the goddamned turkey,” my father would say to my mother before we arrived.

One time when I asked my mother why my father hated her so much, she laughed and said, “Oh, don’t be silly. Of course he doesn’t hate her.” But I always thought it had something to do with the fact that Grandma Jacobson teased my father for being so rigid, and he couldn’t stand the fact that she didn’t really like to listen to rules. They were like oil and vinegar, my father and my grandmother, which was something my grandmother told us more than a few times.