The Wicked Sister

by Karen Dionne

  Other objects link to my sister. The dark blue velvet sack filled with white pebbles I collected from our driveway that Diana and I used to play Hansel and Gretel. The plastic Dracula teeth she found at the dollar store that were perfect for any tale that called for a wolf or a monster. Ours was such a unique childhood, two girls raised in almost complete isolation with only each other for company. Romulus and Remus. Snow White and Rose Red. No Internet. No television aside from the VHS movies our parents let us watch on our old black-and-white cathode-ray television when we were sick. It’s not hard to see why we became so skilled at making up our own games.

  Shooting was also a big part of our secret life. I loved sneaking off with Diana and Charlotte and Max to the gun range, or into the woods with Diana whenever our parents were away, knowing that every time we did this, we were going against their rules. “Rules are made to be broken,” Aunt Charlotte used to say, and I wholeheartedly agreed.

  I think again about my visions, and how I always see myself holding my rifle. Like the piece of a memory I dreamed last night, there has to be a reason I see my Remington in my visions. I go over to the closet and open the cubby to take out my rifle, thinking that perhaps I will try to reenact my vision again, but the cubby is empty. My rifle is gone.

  Then I notice something in the bottom. I reach inside. My hand closes around something hard and sharp. I take it out to examine it in the light, and shudder.

  In my hand is a small, silver flensing knife.

  NINETEEN

  THEN

  Jenny

  I sway. Wrap my arms around the sides of the ladder to keep from falling off. My knees are like rubber. I can hardly breathe. I can’t tear my eyes away from Diana’s knives sparkling lethally in the sun. Each flash cuts straight to my heart. This is my fault. I did this. I should have seen this coming, should have realized that we would end up here. Should have trusted my instincts and refused to go along with Peter’s harebrained idea, should have known that letting our psychopathic daughter learn taxidermy could only end badly. Should have realized that for an expert and prolific taxidermist with absolutely no conscience and zero compassion, preserving and mounting a human would present the ultimate challenge.

  Because this is what Diana is planning to do to her sister. Of this, I have no doubt. The knives, the boiling water, the cage with my daughter locked inside it—Diana lured Rachel here under some pretext, and my sweet, innocent, far-too-trusting daughter willingly went along with it. If I hadn’t found her when I did, if I hadn’t smelled the smoke from Diana’s campfire and come out to investigate, if I’d turned around and gone back for Peter instead of coming straight here, at this very moment, Rachel might well be dead.

  “Mommy?”

  “Just a minute, sweetie. I’ll be right down.” Thankfully, my voice comes out sounding almost normal. There will be plenty of time to freak out after Rachel is safely home and I tell Peter what I found.

  I climb up the rest of the way and go inside. Plates and cups stacked inside a plastic milk crate; a sleeping bag rolled inside a waterproof bag; a flashlight, a kerosene lantern hanging from a nail. Inside an old beverage cooler are matches, newspapers, and a bundle of cedar kindling tied with twine. All stolen from the lodge, including the wooden ladder that Peter and I presumed Max had taken. The effort that Diana went through to build this place is almost beyond comprehension. Stealing the building materials a few boards and nails at a time so that we wouldn’t notice, transporting everything here, constructing the blind and the firepit, and then swearing Rachel to secrecy and bringing her out here by telling her who knows what. All while Peter and I were busy working in the field, naively believing that Charlotte was looking out for our interests back at the lodge and that everything was under control.

  I roll the knives inside their flannel carrying case and tie the case shut and slip the case inside my jacket. I know these are Diana’s knives because I picked them out myself three years ago for her seventeenth birthday. Diana and Peter and I had been going through a rough patch (if people think normal teenagers are a handful, they should try living with a teenage psychopath), and we wanted to do something special to show her that we really did love her. These five Grohmann flensing knives with carbon steel blades and rosewood handles set us back well over seven hundred dollars, which, when you consider that neither Peter nor I have steady jobs and we are basically living off our savings and his family’s largesse, was a huge sacrifice. I can’t believe Diana would use these knives on her sister. I can’t believe she wouldn’t.

  What I can’t imagine is how she could have possibly thought that she could get away with this. What would she have said tonight when Rachel didn’t come home for dinner? When we all fanned out to search for her, would she have led us in the wrong direction, perhaps telling us she’d seen Rachel heading for a different part of the forest than where she told us she’d be? Did she really think we wouldn’t move heaven and earth until we found her sister? And what was she planning to say to us when we did?

  “Mommy?”

  I take a deep breath and grab the padlock key from a nail and stumble down the ladder.

  “Did your sister put you in here?” I ask as unconcernedly as if I were asking if Rachel had washed her hands for dinner. My own hands are shaking so badly I can barely fit the key into the lock.

  “Uh-huh. We’re playing Hansel and Gretel. I’m Hansel,” she says proudly and pokes her fingers through the slats. “Do you want to pinch me to see if I’m fat enough?”

  “Fat enough—” I look down. The ground around her feet is strewn with candy wrappers.

  “Oh, Rachel, honey. This isn’t a good game. You need to come home with Mommy right now.”

  “The witch says I have to stay here until I’m ready to eat.”

  “You mean Diana? Diana is the witch?”

  “Uh-huh. I wanted to be Gretel, because Gretel gets to kill the witch at the end, but Diana said that this time, I had to be Hansel.”

  “You’ve played Hansel and Gretel before?”

  “Uh-huh. Sometimes we play Rapunzel and I have to stay in the tower until the prince brings the ladder to rescue me. Diana is the prince,” she adds unnecessarily, because I’ve already figured out how these games work. I suppose I should be thankful they haven’t been reenacting the version of Cinderella in which Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their heels and toes trying to make the glass slipper fit.

  “Well, I’m Gretel, and I’m going to set you free. That’s what happens at the end of the fairy tale, right?”

  “That’s right!”

  The padlock clicks open and Rachel scampers out, apparently none the worse for having spent the morning napping in a cage and eating candy. I pull my jacket sleeve over my hand and lift the pot off the fire and dump half the water over the flames, then knock aside the grate and kick apart the coals and douse them with the rest, kicking a layer of dirt and sand over the steaming coals for good measure. I came here to investigate a possible forest fire; I’m not about to be responsible for inadvertently starting one.

  “Okay, sweetie,” I say when I’m finished. “Let’s go home.”

  She darts back inside the cage. For a moment, my heart stops. Then I realize she’s only gone back for her backpack—the backpack with the survival gear that was supposed to keep her safe—and skips ahead of me down the trail. Rachel is so beautiful, so kind and gentle and loving and innocent, it’s impossible to imagine how Diana can possibly look at her sister and see nothing but bones and skin. I’ve tried to put myself inside Diana’s head so many times in an effort to understand her until I eventually realized that any such effort is doomed to failure, because I’ll never see the world as callously as she does and wouldn’t want to. It’s as though in lacking the emotions that bind us to one another, she has no heart. I realize she’s not alone in this. Some of the things that psychopathic children have done are truly chilling: one li
ttle boy decapitated a baby bird with a ruler after it fell out of its nest on a school playground; another told a little girl that he was going to pry out her cat’s eyes with a fork, and when she started to cry, he told her he was going to do the same to her. Not unlike throwing rocks at a bear cub to see what it would do or putting a pillow over your sister’s face to observe the color change or cutting baby animals apart to see what was inside of them or killing and skinning and preserving your little sister.

  But this is the end. I can’t do this any longer. No more concessions, no more allowances, no more excuses, no more trying to understand her. I never wanted to choose between my daughters, but Diana has made the choice for me.

  “Are you hungry?” I ask Rachel when we come in sight of the lodge.

  She shakes her head. Given the quantity of candy she consumed, I’m not surprised.

  “All right, then. Mommy needs to call a family meeting. I want you to go to your reading room until I tell you it’s okay to come out.”

  She heads off to the barn without complaint. This isn’t the first time we’ve held a grown-ups-only discussion. At any rate, for a child who loves reading, spending half an hour in a room that’s more lavishly stocked than the children’s section of many libraries is hardly a punishment.

  I find Peter and Max in the side yard filling potholes with gravel. I go up to Peter and put my hand on his arm. “We need to talk,” I say quietly and tip my head toward Max. “Alone.”

  “Can it wait? We’re almost finished here.”

  “Sorry. No.”

  He leans his shovel against the barn and strips off his work gloves and sticks them in his back pocket. “Give me a minute,” he says to Max. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Actually, I think Max needs to go home for the day.”

  Peter’s eyes narrow. Of course, he knows that my request has something to do with Diana, because what else could it be?

  “It’s that bad?”

  “It’s that bad.”

  “Okay, then. Same time tomorrow?” he says to Max.

  “Sure thing. I’ll just tell Char I’m leaving.” He props his rake alongside Peter’s shovel and heads for Charlotte’s studio.

  “Tell her to come to the kitchen right away, please,” I call after him. “Family meeting.”

  “Righto.”

  “You want to tell me what this is about?” Peter asks when Max is out of earshot.

  “Not yet. Would you please get Diana? I assume she’s in her workshop. Tell her we need to talk right now.”

  I head for the lodge to stir up the fire in the woodstove and fill a pot of water for tea. Chamomile, to settle both my nerves and my stomach. I’m sorely tempted to add something stronger.

  When everyone is assembled around the kitchen table, I take the knife case from inside my jacket and place it in the middle. I untie it and unroll it to reveal its contents. Just looking at the knives knowing what Diana was going to do with them makes my skin crawl. These curved knives in an assortment of shapes and sizes are manufactured for a single purpose: removing the flesh from an animal’s skin. Hunters use them to get rid of the skin so that they can eat the meat. Taxidermists use them to dispose of the meat so that they can preserve the skin. My daughter, of course, was planning another use for them entirely.

  “What’s all this?” Peter asks.

  “You want to answer?” I say to Diana.

  “They’re my knives,” she says, stating the obvious with a shrug.

  I wait for her to elaborate. She doesn’t. She has to know where I found these knives, why we are all sitting around the table, that her nefarious scheme is over, and it’s time to confess. But if she wants to do this as a game of twenty questions, I can drag out the interrogation as long as I have to.

  “And where did I find them?” I prompt.

  “In my hunting blind.”

  Peter raises his eyebrows. “You know we don’t allow hunting on the property.”

  “I don’t hunt from it,” Diana snaps. “I only call it that because that’s what it looks like. I use the blind as an observation post. To sketch and to paint.”

  I let the lie hang unchallenged. The knives do the talking for me. There’s no logical reason to bring a set of flensing knives to the forest if all you’re doing is drawing and painting. Diana is such a bold and unrepentant liar, I half expect the skies to rain down fire and sulfur on her head, or the ground to open beneath her feet and swallow her up like an Old Testament sinner. A part of me wishes it would.

  I walk my family through my morning, beginning with me sitting in the cemetery and ending with the campfire, the pot of boiling water, the hunting blind with Rachel locked in a cage beneath it. Then I tell them what I found inside the blind: the blue plastic tarp Diana had laid over the floor for easy cleanup, the newspapers she’d spread on top to soak up the blood, the knife case open exactly as it is now on our table.

  “Rachel told me that she and Diana were playing Hansel and Gretel, and that’s why she was in the cage. She said she’d been eating candy all morning because Diana said she had to stay in the cage until she was fat enough to eat. Fat enough to eat,” I finish, and look slowly from one family member to the other.

  No one speaks. Diana is wearing her poker face, so it’s impossible to know what she’s thinking. Peter and I have often joked that she could be a champion card player if she wanted to because she has absolutely no tell. There’s nothing funny about her lack of reaction now.

  “I don’t understand,” Peter says.

  “Don’t be naïve, Peter. I think you do.”

  “You think Diana was planning to kill Rachel, and then what? Eat her?”

  “No. I think Diana was going to kill Rachel and skin her and mount and preserve her as if she were a bear or a deer.”

  He drains of color and recoils as if he’s been slapped. Opens his mouth. Closes it. “Is this true?” he asks Diana when the shock has diminished enough to allow him to speak.

  She tosses her head. “Of course not. Rachel and I were only playing. She’s the one who wanted to act out Hansel and Gretel. I only went along with it because you’re always telling me I should be nice to her and do what she wants. Ask her if you don’t believe me.”

  “What about the fire?” I ask. “And the pot of boiling water? And the knives and the newspapers and the tarp?”

  “Props. I was only trying to make it fun for her. You know, like the wicked witch.”

  “I think—” Charlotte begins.

  “Not now.” I cut her off. “We’ll get to your role in all of this in a minute.”

  “My role—”

  “I said shut up.”

  Her mouth snaps shut. I rarely raise my voice, and I never speak coarsely. Our mother had one of the worst tempers I’ve ever seen, and I determined a long time ago that I wouldn’t be like her. But I don’t care. I’m done being nice. Diana may be the villain in this story, but my sister is the one who made her wicked acts possible.

  “I won’t be quiet. You called a family meeting. Well, I’m family.”

  She points her finger at me and lets loose with a litany of complaints: I’m overreacting like I always do, I’m reading too much into the situation, I think that the way I see things is the only way that’s right, I always take Rachel’s side against Diana, I’m overprotective, rigid, domineering, demanding, bossy, selfish, and on and on. It’s as though she’s been secretly storing up all the anger and jealousy that she felt toward me when we were children, and it’s come spewing out. I had no idea that she harbored so much hatred.

  “You had one job, Char. One job. We gave you a place to live, a car, a place to work on your art. We gave your boyfriend a job, let the two of you set up a gun range on our property though you know we didn’t want to. All we asked in return was that you supervise our daughters.”

  “Which I
did. For ten years. But Diana is twenty now. She’s not a child. She doesn’t need supervision. As for Rachel, you’re far too protective. Rachel is so hemmed in by your rules she’s afraid to think or move without your okay. Do you really think she’s as crazy about bears as you are? She’s only pretending to like bears because she’s desperate to please you. It’s pathetic. I’m surprised you can’t see that.”

  Peter holds up his hand. “Okay, okay. Deep breaths, everyone. This isn’t helping. The question is, what are we going to do?”

  “No taxidermy for two weeks,” I assert. I have much more in mind for Diana, but first, I have to discuss my plan with Peter.

  “Two weeks!” she shrieks. “That’s ridiculous. You can’t do this. I’m not a child, and you can’t treat me like one. I just started a new mounting this morning. The skin will dry out if I don’t finish it. I can’t simply walk away.”

  “She gave you an explanation,” Charlotte says. “Why won’t you believe her?”

  “One afternoon to wrap things up,” I tell Diana. “That’s all. I’m serious. After today, you are not going to set foot in your workshop for two full weeks. I’ll put a padlock on the door if I have to.”

  And then as quickly as her anger flared, it’s gone. Diana is wearing her poker face again, her “mask,” as the psychology books call it, the persona she puts on and off at will to hide who she is. The speed with which her demeanor changes is deeply unsettling.

  She sits back in her chair and crosses her arms over her chest. “Whatever. Can I go now?”

  “You can go.”

  She pushes back her chair and heads for her workshop. Charlotte hurries after her. I pour a cup of tea and add a generous dollop of brandy and take a swallow. My hands are shaking.

  “You think I’m overreacting,” I say to Peter.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You may as well have. ‘Deep breaths, everyone. This isn’t helping.’ Why didn’t you stand up for me?”

  Peter reaches for my hand. I push it away. Take another slug of tea. Blink back tears. Bite my lip. Of all the times for Peter to go all fair-minded and equanimous—I wanted him to jump to his feet, to scream at our daughter, maybe even to hit her if that’s what it would take to reach her, to show some courage, to take a stand; to somehow react in proportion to what she had done. Instead, he’s behaving as if I am the one who’s in the wrong.