The Wicked Sister

by Karen Dionne

  The thought fills me with power. I have two choices: I can sneak away after Diana and Charlotte go to sleep. Grab my suitcase and duffel bag and hike out to the highway and thumb a ride to the nearest town. I have no money and no I.D. and no way to access my bank account, assuming Diana hasn’t already taken my name off it, but I can borrow someone’s cell and call Trevor to come and get me. I can spend the night at his place or perhaps with one of his friends and then move to a women’s shelter if Marquette has one while I fight my sister in court.

  But there are risks. If I go up against Diana openly in court and I lose, I’ll be sent back to the mental hospital with no hope of ever getting out. In theory, I could go into hiding if the judgment goes against me, but then what? With no assets and no job skills, I’d be helpless. Homeless, with the threat of incarceration constantly hanging over my head.

  Or I could stay here. If I can find proof that Diana is planning to strip me of my rights in order to develop our property, I might have a chance. My parents both had cameras and tape recorders. If I can take pictures of the developer’s brochure and any other paperwork I can find, and better yet, if I can catch them talking about Diana’s plan to defraud me and record their conversation, odds are good that the judgment will go in my favor.

  And there’s another reason for me to stick around: I still need to clear up the discrepancy between my visions and the police report. Reenacting my vision in the place where my parents died is the whole reason I came home. If I leave now, I might never get another chance.

  Hiding out in my own home might sound crazy, but I’m not talking about doing this for weeks or months—only as long as it takes to assemble the proof that I need. What’s more, I have the perfect set of circumstances to pull this off. It’s a big house, with only two people living in it, which means there’s plenty of room for me to stay out of their way. The doors to the extra bedrooms are always kept shut, so there’s no reason for them to look inside this one and find me or my stuff. Logically, they each use their own bathroom, which means I still have two to choose from. If I only use the bathroom when they’re out, and sneak food from the pantry instead of raiding their leftovers, it’s unlikely that they would notice their food supplies going down. I don’t even snore.

  I tiptoe down the hallway to my chosen bedroom and lock the door. Take off my shoes and pull back the covers and climb quietly into bed. The Fates are smiling on me, all right, but not in the way that I expected.

  I think again about the raven’s message. All will become known, indeed.

  THIRTEEN

  THEN

  Jenny

  It’s been almost two years since Dr. Merritt delivered his terrible diagnosis, and contrary to my expectations at that time, we’re still here. Still going about our daily routines, still living, still breathing. The sky didn’t fall, and the earth didn’t implode, proving once again the truth of that old adage: life goes on. There have even been a few times when I can honestly say that I have been completely and unreservedly happy.

  Naturally, Diana’s diagnosis necessitated changes. We’d already moved the baby’s crib into Peter’s and my bedroom and installed battery-operated security cameras to monitor the room and the hallway (“trail cams,” Peter jokingly calls them), as well as a door lock with a keypad to which only we three adults know the combination. We also asked Charlotte if she wouldn’t mind switching to the bedroom next to Diana’s, which has a door between them that can be left open like in a hotel suite. Naturally, we didn’t tell her the real reason we wanted her close. We said only that Dr. Merritt thought Diana was acting out because she was feeling neglected, and it would help if she would pay as much attention to Diana as she could.

  Now, nearly two years on, it sometimes feels as though my sister has taken our request too much to heart. Char and Diana have grown unbelievably close. It’s almost as though our roles have flipped, and Charlotte has become the mother while I have become the aunt. Sometimes when I see them with their heads together laughing over a whispered joke or chummily cooking or drawing or playing a board game as if nothing and no one in the world mattered but them, I can’t help but feel jealous. Charlotte has always been more exciting than me, more adventurous than me, warmer, prettier, funnier. Possibly even smarter. It hurts to be relegated to the role of lesser sister in my own home. But whenever I start feeling sorry for myself, I remember that Charlotte has essentially put her life on hold for us, and that the extraordinary bond that has developed between my warmhearted sister and my prickly daughter is not a bad thing, and I am beyond grateful.

  Today is actually one of those rare occasions when they are not together. It’s a gorgeous fall afternoon, perfect in every way; sunny skies with a scattering of clouds and the temperature just the way I like it: brisk enough to wear a sweater but warm enough that we don’t need hats or scarves. Peter and I are splitting and stacking the load of firewood he had delivered next to the far end of the barn under a sky so blue, it hurts to look at it. Diana is in the house reading while the baby is in the playpen that we set up for her a safe distance away under a tree. When I was Diana’s age, the last thing I would have wanted was to be stuck inside on such a beautiful day, but I understand that when you grow up traipsing the woods with your mother and father day after day, spending time alone indoors feels like a treat.

  “Break time,” Peter announces as he shuts down the saw. In the sudden silence, my ears ring. He takes a slug from his water bottle, then flexes his fingers and links his hands behind his head and stretches. My heart melts. I can truthfully say that I am more in love with my husband now than I was on the day we married. Whenever I see him swinging an axe or handling a chain saw, I marvel at the wilderness skills this former university professor has acquired. After years of living out of doors, Peter is tanned and fit. I wish I could say the same for me. Diana says I look like I swallowed a bowling ball, which isn’t a particularly kind or clever thing for her to say but is exactly how I feel. I got so big so fast, if the ultrasound technician hadn’t promised otherwise, I’d have sworn I was carrying twins.

  Obviously, this third pregnancy is unplanned. Another surprise: this time we are going to have a son. Peter couldn’t be happier. Most of the time I am, too. An unborn baby is nothing but possibility. Will our son be blond like Peter, or will his hair be dark like mine? What color eyes will he have? What will his personality be like? When will he take his first steps, speak his first word, and what will that word be? What talents and interests will he have? What will he become? All prospective parents happily indulge in questions like these. Unfortunately, my happiness will always and forever be tempered by the memory of another little boy who never got to grow up.

  “Mama!” the baby calls from her playpen. “Duice!”

  The sippy cup of apple juice she was happily sucking down the last time I checked on her is now on the ground a good five feet away. Peter jokes that our daughter has such a strong arm, she’s going to grow up to become a major league baseball pitcher. I’ll just be glad when she gets big and strong enough to defend herself against her older sister.

  “Can you get her?” I sit down on a piece of upended firewood to catch my breath. I’m already feeling the effects of this pregnancy. It’s hard to believe that I have to carry this baby another four months.

  Peter plucks our daughter from the playpen and swings her onto his shoulders and gallops with her around the yard. She shrieks and laughs. Everyone talks about how difficult children become after they reach the age of two, but so far, our daughter is a perfect angel. Of course, as soon as I have the thought, another intrudes, but I refuse to let it take root. I am determined to love my girls equally, no matter that one is easy to love and the other is not.

  A gunshot splits the air, followed immediately by another. I cringe. I know exactly where the shots came from and who made them and why, but I swear I will never get used to the sound. Peter stops galloping and looks off longingly in
their direction. Of course, he’d rather be target shooting with my sister and her boyfriend than cutting and stacking firewood with me. Peter’s been out to the gun range a number of times, and according to Max, my husband is an excellent shot. They’ve invited me to go with them as well, but I told them no. I’ve never touched a gun in my life, and I intend to keep it that way. If it had been up to me, we never would have let them set up a gun range on the property at all. But Charlotte did an end run around us by asking Peter’s grandfather for permission without telling him that we’d already said no, and of course, he said yes because he loves guns as much as I hate them.

  That said, I laid down two absolute and inviolable rules. First: no guns are allowed to remain on the property. Max can bring his and Charlotte’s rifles with him when they’re planning to shoot, but he has to take them away again when they’re finished. Second: our daughters are forbidden to go to the gun range ever, no exceptions. I don’t care that Charlotte and Max think my rules are silly and consider them a major inconvenience; this whole endeavor is one big concession as far as I’m concerned. I get that Charlotte needs someone in her life and something to do besides babysitting my children, and I understand why after Max suggested setting up a gun range, she wanted to make it happen. But I don’t like Max, and not only because of the influence he has over my sister. I don’t trust him around my daughters. He’s too smooth, too self-assured, too proud of his good looks, and far too physical with Diana, lifting her onto his lap and letting her braid his long hair and comb out his beard. It worries me how quickly Charlotte fell in with him. I get that some women are okay on their own and some are not, but that doesn’t mean she has to hook up with the first man to show an interest. The only reason we hired Max as our part-time handyman was because Peter wrenched his back when he tripped on a book Diana left on the stairs. Of course, once we’d opened that door, Charlotte launched a campaign to convince us to let Max move in to the empty apartment above the carriage house because he was having trouble paying his rent, but we put our foot down and made sure Peter’s grandfather knew how we felt so we wouldn’t get blindsided again. I swear, if it were up to my sister, we’d be living in a commune.

  “Do you smell something?” I ask. Beneath the dried leaves and fresh sawdust and chain-saw exhaust is something dank and ugly. “I think it’s coming from the barn. It smells like something died in there.”

  “It’s an old barn. Something probably did.”

  “It’s really rank. Will you check it out?”

  Peter hands the baby to me and follows his nose to the side of the barn facing away from the lodge. There are a couple of missing boards back there that he’s been meaning to replace. Most likely an animal crawled inside and couldn’t find its way out. Probably a porcupine or a raccoon.

  Minutes later, he’s back. “You have to see this.”

  “See what?”

  “Just come.”

  I return the baby to her playpen while Peter opens the sliding door in the front of the barn because there’s no way I’m going to fit through the missing boards in the back. Inside, the smell nearly knocks me off my feet. It’s all I can do to keep from throwing up, and not because I am pregnant. I swallow hard and pinch my nose and follow Peter past the piles of moldy hay bales and rusty farm equipment to one of the old horse stalls. He opens the latch and steps to the side.

  At first, it’s hard to comprehend what I’m seeing. A non-scientist would probably conclude from the animals in various stages of decomposition splayed open with their guts laid out beside them that our barn is home to a serial killer. Some I recognize: a field mouse, a striped chipmunk, a baby rabbit. Others are in such an advanced state of putrefaction, it’s impossible to tell.

  “My God. What is all this? Why did she do this?” Because we both know this is Diana’s handiwork.

  “More important, how did she do this without our knowing it?”

  It’s a fair question. If anyone were to ask me if Diana had enough alone time to have amassed this macabre collection, I would have said absolutely not; that between tagging after Peter on his rounds, or hanging out in the observation blind with me, or doing whatever it is she does with her aunt Charlotte, she is under constant supervision. Obviously, my sister has massively let us down.

  “Can you imagine what would have happened if Diana had done this while we were living in the city and someone discovered it?” I shudder. “Social services would have gotten involved. Diana could have been taken away from us, put into foster care, maybe juvenile detention. My God.”

  Just thinking about how close we could have come to losing our daughter makes me ill. I understand she only cut open these animals because she wanted to see what was inside of them, and that she did this out of curiosity and not from malice, the same as that first winter when she cut apart her toy animals. It’s not her fault that she doesn’t understand the difference between a legitimate scientific inquiry and . . . whatever this is.

  My stomach twists. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I gasp as the bile rises in my throat. I hurry outside and bend over with my hands on my knees.

  Peter follows me out. “Are you okay?”

  I take a deep breath and wipe my mouth on my sleeve. “I will be if I can ever get that smell out of my clothes and my hair. How can she stand it?”

  He shrugs. “How are we going to deal with it?”

  I honestly can’t think of an adequate response. One of the things I’ve learned from reading about psychopaths while waiting in Dr. Merritt’s office is that the normal rules of reward and punishment don’t apply. Emotionally, Diana operates on neutral, Dr. Merritt once explained, meaning that she simply doesn’t feel the range of emotions that guide and moderate most people’s behavior. Taking something away from her as a punishment has no effect, because there’s nothing she cares about enough to make the threat of losing it change her behavior. Psychopaths also don’t feel resentment because they don’t care what other people are doing or about what they have. They never experience self-doubt because for them, failure is not a problem. In a psychopath’s black-and-white world, she either accomplishes what she sets out to do or she doesn’t. If something doesn’t work out the way she wanted, she might try something else to achieve it, but in the end, if it turns out that her objective is unobtainable, she simply lets it go and moves on. It’s no wonder that all our attempts to discipline our daughter have been a failure.

  “I was thinking,” Peter says. “Instead of punishing Diana, what if we were to channel her interest in anatomy in a more productive way?”

  “Are you suggesting that she become a butcher? Because if you are, it looks like she’s already well on her way. Or were you thinking she could become a mortician?”

  “I was thinking about letting her learn taxidermy.”

  “Taxidermy. You’re joking.” The idea of giving our eleven-year-old psychopath knives and encouraging her to skin animals and reconstruct them sets off so many alarm bells, I hardly know where to start.

  Peter holds up his hand. “Hear me out. I know you hate the taxidermy in the lodge. I’m not crazy about it, either. But taxidermy would give Diana the opportunity to see what’s inside animals without coming off as some sort of mad scientist. We could set up a workshop for her in the barn—away from our offices, because of the smell. I’m sure I could find someone to come in and teach her.”

  I shake my head. “I can’t see how legitimizing Diana’s bad behavior is going to help her. It seems to me we’d only be condoning it.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  I shake my head again because I don’t.

  “Just think about it. We don’t have to make a decision now.”

  Which is a good thing, because as much as I hate what Diana has done, I hate Peter’s solution even more. I go over to the playpen to refill the baby’s sippy cup, then follow him back to the woodpile, throwing the chunks of wood
he splits against the neat stacks of firewood with far more force than is necessary. Taxidermy. I can barely stand to think the word. I’ve learned to live with the taxidermy in the lodge because I had to, telling myself that as distasteful as these pieces are, they are relics of another place and time. But that’s a long way from allowing my daughter to add to the collection.

  I throw another piece. It bounces off the barn with a satisfying smack. I think about the carnage on the other side. I picture Diana setting out the live traps she must have found in the barn, turning our property from haven to horror for the hapless creatures who took her bait. Bringing the cages to her secret workshop and killing her victims with her own hands and cutting their bodies apart without a moment’s concern for the fact that she had taken a life. Then I imagine her doing this over and over again. If we hadn’t discovered her collection, would she have gone on to kill larger animals? Would she have started torturing them first like the boy I read about in one of Dr. Merritt’s magazines who cut off the family cat’s tail with a knife bit by bit over a period of weeks because he wanted to see how the cat would react?

  Maybe Peter is right. Maybe taxidermy is the best way to channel her inclinations. At least she’d be putting animals together instead of taking them apart.

  And the sad truth is, it probably doesn’t matter what we do in response to Diana’s mini massacre because our daughter can’t be fixed. Diana is a psychopath and has been since the day she was born. As her parents, it’s our job to keep her from going completely off the rails, but in the end, what she does is outside of our control. Maybe Peter’s solution will work and maybe it won’t. Either way, I can’t help feeling as though we’re all barreling toward disaster, and my daughter is the one driving this train.