The Sisters (47 page)

A young woman appeared by the bed. “Hey, Gran.” The young woman’s hands rested lightly on the shoulders of a little girl, about ten or twelve, who stood in front of her. The little girl wore a soft pink dress.

“Sweetheart.” Mabel reached out to the child. Her hair was cold, stringing wet and cold. “I’ll hold on to you, Bertie. I won’t let you drown.”

“It’s Bonnie, Gran. This is Bonnie. We’ve just been swimming. The pool opened today.” The young woman turned her head toward Daisy and said, “How long has she been like this?”

“She just woke up,” Daisy said, her voice breaking. “She might know you later on.”

“You’d better tell me, Mom.”

Mabel reached out again for little Bertie, trying to tell her not to be afraid of the water, but her sister kept pulling away, as if she were frightened somehow of Mabel. The others talked on.

“The hospice nurse is here. She says the kidneys are going. It’s why I called you. Could be anytime. She won’t really know what she’s saying, but the nurse said it won’t last long.”

“I’ll take Bonnie home and come back,” said the young woman. She bent down to the child. “Bonnie, say good-bye to Great-Grandma.”

The little girl in the pink dress drifted across the room. Bertie was going.

Mabel struggled to rise. She would go after her sister.

Far away, a door was opening and Bertie was going through it.

Tugging free of the weight that held her, Mabel followed. She opened the door and there was Bertie, standing before the dresser in her pink chiffon dress, settling a small comb into her upswept hair.

“Oh, Bertie!” Mabel motioned for her sister to twirl around and they both laughed with pleasure at how the dress floated and settled, floated and settled, like a spring breeze.

“Does my hair look all right?” Bertie asked.

“Hold still,” Mabel said, taking the small finishing brush from the dresser. A single lock threatened to tumble, so she took out a couple of pins, smoothed the lock, and fastened it into place. “You’re beautiful,” she said, wrapping one arm across her sister’s chest, pressing her own cheek against Bertie’s. “Mama would be so proud,” she said to their smiling reflections.

“You’ll be there by a quarter to three?” Bertie smoothed the front of her dress and fastened the buttons on her sleeve bands, little silver roses. “Any later and you might not get a seat.”

Mabel hoped her smile was convincing. “Of course I’ll be there.”

How she longed for that to be true. If only she could make this day as happy as Bertie had imagined it would be—but in half an hour, Wallace would sneak into the barn and settle himself in the loft to wait for her. After that, there would be no turning back. For now, though, for this moment, she would pretend that today would be nothing more or less than Bertie’s eighth-grade graduation day.

“Wallace is coming,” Bertie said. “He promised he’d dance with me at the party.”

“You can’t dance in a Baptist church.” Mabel laughed.

“I know,” Bertie smiled, her cheeks pink. “But Wallace keeps his promises.” Suddenly serious again, she touched Mabel’s arm. “You think that’s all right, don’t you? After all,
he
won’t be there.”

“Of course it’s all right.” Mabel hugged Bertie tightly. “You don’t need to worry about him spoiling anything.” She took her sister’s hands, stepped back, and held her at arm’s length to have one last look at her. “You’d better get on, now. The principal likes to have everybody in place before the families get there.”

When Bertie left, Mabel closed the door and sat down on the bed to watch the clock. She and Wallace had timed everything as carefully as they could. Early this morning, Wallace would have walked two streets over to Henry Layman’s house to catch him while he was doing his chores and give him the sealed envelope to pass to Bertie at the graduation party. Inside was a train ticket, along with the instructions Mabel had written:
Go straight to the station. Don’t go home. Take the late train to Louisville. We’ll leave another ticket for you there at the window in Mama’s maiden name. Don’t be afraid. Trust us. We’ll be waiting for you. Love M&W
.

If anything had gone wrong—if Wallace hadn’t been able to find Henry or if Henry had refused the task or asked too many questions, Wallace would have found a way to let her know. Everything was already in place in the loft. Now, she needed to wait a full ten minutes just to be sure Bertie didn’t turn back for something she might have forgotten. Then, Mabel would write one more note, very brief, and slip it into her dress pocket. She needed this time to breathe deeply and prepare to go to the back porch to wake Jim Butcher from his Saturday nap.

How easily in these last few days had he taken to believing she welcomed his hands. Instinct alone had allowed her to swallow her revulsion and act when she saw the way Butcher was looking at Bertie standing before the mirror in her pretty new dress. Even from the back, as Mabel stepped into the hallway to tell him his breakfast was ready, she could see it in how he was leaning into the room, the way his head tilted, the way his hand pulsed on the knob.

She had moved without thought or hesitation: a light touch on his arm. A smile. A question about supper. Enough to break the spell, but for how long?

The moment Bertie stepped out the door on her way to school, Mabel let her stepfather take her in his arms and kiss her as if she were his bride.

All that day at Kendall’s Dry Goods, she couldn’t stay still, unfolding and refolding neat stacks of shirts, taking tins off shelves only to put them right back again. Ten minutes before the senior high school was to let out for the day, she faked a stomach pain and begged Mr. Kendall to let her go home to lie down. She waited outside the school, waved down Wallace and persuaded him to send Henry Layman to tell Bertie he wouldn’t be meeting her for their walk home for the rest of the week.

She told Wallace the whole story—not every detail, but enough to make the blood drain from his face and then rush up again until she thought he might explode. He was the one who put it into words what they had to do, and that was when she knew that there was one other person in the world who loved Bertie as much as she did.

The core of their plan came to them quickly, and it was with astonishing ease that they agreed on each point. Over the next few days, they let people in town see them together—but they gave the impression they were trying not to be seen by sitting in a corner of the balcony at the movies, their heads together; by holding hands as they slipped round the back of the church after Wednesday-evening service; by tucking almost out of sight to embrace behind a display of washtubs at the hardware store. Between them, they had almost enough for three train fares, and to get the rest, Wallace sold his pocket watch and his bicycle, while Mabel begged for an advance on her pay, saying it was for Bertie’s graduation gift.

Mabel raked her fingers through her hair. Time to go. She simply had to trust that Wallace was in place in the loft. It was too risky to check.

Just last week, Butcher had met his bootlegger for his summer supply of whiskey. He took a lot of trouble not to let anyone see him heading out for the meeting, but once the whiskey was in the house, he didn’t care who knew about it. In the kitchen, Mabel took a new bottle from the cabinet and set it on a tray with two clean glasses. She chipped a bowl full of ice off the block because she knew in summer he liked his whiskey cold.

On the back porch, he was stretched out across the swing, swaying in rhythm with his breath. She set down the tray, filled the glasses with ice, opened the bottle and poured. She picked up one glass and took a drink, bathing her lips in whiskey, then set the glass back on the tray and approached the swing. Now she must do it, just as she had done so many times this week in her mind.

She bent over him. “Daddy,” she whispered, waiting until he stirred before stroking his cheek with her fingertips. “Daddy.” When he opened his eyes, she leaned down to kiss him. The kiss, she knew, would tell her whether he believed her. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine they were both other people, as if Mabel Fischer and Jim Butcher had never known each other, or even existed. His response was immediate. Without breaking the kiss, he rose up in the swing and pulled her onto his lap.

“Bertie’s gone now.” Mabel slid the tip of her tongue over his lips. “She won’t be home for hours.”

At this, Butcher laid rough kisses along her throat and clutched at her breasts. He began unbuttoning her dress.

She put a hand up to stop him and then remembered,
No, gently
, so she wrapped her fingers around his and lifted his hand to her lips. “No rush, Daddy,” she said. “We have hours.” She got up from his lap but continued to hold his hand. “Look, I’ve brought you a cold drink.”

She handed him one glass and set the other and the bottle on the ledge closest to the swing. He drained the first glass, so she gave him the second and poured a refill. After three whiskeys, he pulled her onto her feet and started to steer her back inside the house.

“I’ve a better idea,” Mabel said, smiling. “It’s so much cooler in the barn. And”—she wrapped her arms around Butcher’s neck, pressed her head to his chest, and cooed—“if Bertie should could home early, she won’t find us.”

Butcher answered by lifting Mabel into his arms. She reached out to pick up the whiskey bottle as he carried her down the steps and across the yard into the barn. When they reached the loft, he took a few more swallows of whiskey while Mabel lay down on the floor. She didn’t dare look toward the far corner, where Wallace would be hiding, so she looked at the heavy beams above her. When Butcher put aside his whiskey and came to her, she closed her eyes and opened her arms to him.

While he unbuttoned her dress and laid her bare, she kept up a steady moaning, like a chant, and concentrated. Her body was a fortress and could bear anything. He could pummel away at her, try to break her down, but he would never breach her.

He would never take Bertie.

So she let him thrust and pound. She let him believe that the sounds she made were the sounds of the conquered. And then, just as they had planned, just as the bastard cried out, believing in his victory, Wallace sprang from behind the bales, hooked Jim Butcher’s ecstatic throat with a length of short rope and twisted the breath from him with all the wrath of God.

Wallace held the limp body upright with the rope so Mabel could pull out from under, and while she dressed, he fastened up Butcher’s pants. They didn’t speak. Mabel knocked over the whiskey bottle so it would drain onto the floor and then opened the sack of seed corn to dig out the two empty bottles she’d hidden there. She dropped them randomly near the other. Wallace shook apart two bushel baskets to remove the long rope he’d coiled between them. Already he had tied a crude noose at one end, and now he flung the untied end over the lowest beam, pulled, and flung it over twice more to loop it.

They stood together beside the corpse and stared silently at the noose dangling just beyond the edge of the loft. Mabel took Wallace’s hand, but she couldn’t look at him. After a moment, he stepped closer to the edge and leaned out to pull the rope in. When he had the noose end, he passed it to her and she moved aside while he pushed and pulled the body toward the drop-off. A few feet from the edge, Wallace held Butcher upright and Mabel slipped the noose over his head, tugging the rope back a little to tighten the slipknot. Then, at Wallace’s count, they shoved the body over. Mabel heard the tiniest of snaps as the weight dropped. Good, a broken windpipe.

Wallace picked up the short rope, wound it to a small coil, and shoved it deep inside his pocket. Later, when it was dark, he would find an empty space on the train, open a window, and let it slip off into the wind.

They took a few moments to look around for anything they might have missed. Mabel found a button that had pulled off her dress, but nothing more. They climbed down from the loft and Wallace waited by the door while Mabel went to stand just below the place where Butcher’s body swung gently. She looked up, estimating the spot, and drew from her pocket the note she’d written earlier—less than an hour ago—unfolded it, as though it had been read, crumpled it in her fist, and let it drop to the floor. Finding it, the people of Juniper would believe that she and Wallace had run off together and that Jim Butcher had hanged himself out of foolish jealousy. They would think, too, that, having no one left, Bertie had fled.

This, Mabel prayed, would be what they would think. It must be.

Seeming to know her thoughts, Wallace came to her, embraced her, and led her toward the door.

If only there were some other way.

But there wasn’t.

Bertie had to pay this little price—these few hours of believing herself abandoned, betrayed; then a night and day of confusion and fear, traveling far from all she had known, not sure where she was headed, not sure she could trust Wallace and Mabel to be there at the end of her journey.

But Mabel would be there to meet the train in Chicago, to rock away Bertie’s terror and wipe her tears. And later, when Wallace came back to lead them to their new home, after they had all eaten and slept, then she would take Bertie’s hands in hers and tell her sister everything. Bertie would understand. Bertie would forgive her and comfort her in return. They would be closer than ever. And for the rest of their lives, no matter what else happened to them, they would never be parted.