The Better Sister

by Alafair Burke

  Her knuckles were tight around the steering wheel. She was quiet when she finally answered. “Because I loved him. And I felt lucky to have him. I told myself he was under a lot of pressure and I wasn’t doing a good enough job. Do you know what I used to do to try to make him happy? I’d ask myself, ‘What would Chloe do?’”

  My eyes welled up at how painful that must have been for her. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing, and let her continue. “I remember you telling me how good I looked when I went to my high school reunion that summer. I was dressed like you. I acted like you. I wanted to show up seeming smart and successful and confident, so I was like, fuck it, I’ll just impersonate Chloe for a weekend. And Adam obviously liked it. I felt like I was faking during our entire relationship.”

  I understood now why she had been so certain when Adam moved to New York that it was to be with me.

  “And, let’s face it, compared to the shit Mom went through with Dad, it didn’t seem that bad. He never actually hit me.”

  I could see her looking at me even as she tried to keep her eyes on the road. Was she waiting for me to say something?

  “Well, I’m still sorry.” We both knew it was a lame response. She turned on the radio when it became clear I had no follow-up.

  Two miles later, I was the one to turn it off. “What if we had been boys?”

  “What kind of question is that?” she asked.

  “Growing up in our house, with the same mom and dad. The same dysfunction. You rebelled. I became a control freak. But what if we’d been boys?” I remembered an article I had read about boys and mass shootings. It dovetailed with my research into the dark fringes of the web, where aggrieved young men raged against society—and against girls in particular—for not giving them their due. “When girls feel lost, they hurt themselves. Boys hurt others.”

  “Ethan’s a good kid. Don’t go down this road.”

  “What would have happened if that kid hadn’t told the principal about the gun Ethan had?”

  “But that was a mix-up with carrying stuff back and forth from the house.”

  I shook my head. “That was bullshit, Nicky. We weren’t carrying a gun into the city, and we definitely weren’t putting anything in Ethan’s backpack. He told me he was just trying to look like a tough kid to stand out from the crowd. I should have taken it more seriously.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I didn’t change the alarm code, Nicky. Why didn’t I change it?”

  She had been living with me for nearly six months now, and we were both still using those same six digits, Ethan’s birthday, every time we walked in and out of the East Hampton house. If I really thought a stranger had murdered Adam, why hadn’t I changed the code? Why hadn’t Nicky asked me to change it?

  Neither one of us was going to say it out loud, though.

  “Maybe Olivia can do something with that newspaper article,” Nicky said.

  I had given her this morning’s New York Times write-up about the corruption investigation into the Gentry Group. “Like she keeps saying, we only need reasonable doubt. And only one undecided juror is enough to get a mistrial.” Neither of us sounded optimistic. “So when all this is over, what are we going to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When Ethan comes home.” We both knew I was trying to give us hope. “You’re his biological mother, but he’s been living with me, and Adam’s will put me down as the guardian. My understanding is that a judge would look at the best interests of the child if we fought each other for custody.” When Adam was first killed, I had prayed that Nicky would be too dumb to realize that I wouldn’t automatically be the legal guardian, but now I was the one broaching the subject.

  “Why would we fight?”

  “Because we’re the Taylor sisters.”

  She let out a soft laugh and then let herself play with the hypothetical of seeing Ethan come home. “Your lawyers would probably run me over, especially since you’re obviously banging one of them.” This time, her laugh was louder. “And he’s not a little kid anymore. He’d be eighteen by the time any court was done with us. So, we’re not doing that, okay?”

  “So what would we do?”

  She shrugged. “We’ll figure it out. But just so you know, Chloe, when the police called me about Adam, I only came to New York to make sure you and Ethan were okay. I wanted you to see me in person so you’d know I had changed and that you could rely on me for help if you needed it. But it never dawned on me—not even once—to try to take Ethan from you.” I turned to face the passenger window and wiped away the tears that were forming. “I know you’re kicking yourself now, but you raised my kid well. You gave him a better life than I ever would have, that’s for sure. We’re fine on that. I promise.”

  The next thing I remember is Nicky waking me up as we pulled into the driveway.

  “Olivia texted us. She thinks Ethan needs to testify after all.”

  30

  It was Jennifer Guidry’s first full day off in two weeks. Between testifying and running point for the Ethan Macintosh trial and working the arson investigation with the fire department, she had racked up enough overtime to cover all her Christmas shopping for the year, but she was ready for a break. Amy couldn’t take a day off from the bank, but in truth, Guidry was downright giddy about having an entire day to herself.

  She was on her third cup of coffee at Babette’s, treating herself to the salmon omelet—extra scallions—and a leisurely browse of all the papers. Her ritual was to start local with the East Hampton Star, then to Newsday for the rest of Long Island, then on to the New York Times for the national stuff. She was relieved to see that not one of the papers had yet figured out what she and the fire department already knew: the blaze at the $40 million oceanfront mansion of an A-list director had been intentional. The director himself had hired a special effects guy to make it look like an electric fire. Absent a leak from the investigative team, the news wouldn’t become public until the director was picked up on a warrant in Los Angeles later on tonight.

  “Top off?” It was Ivy the waitress, offering even more coffee. Guidry happened to know that Ivy had originally been hired just for the season, needing a job of her own while her boyfriend had a gig doing private security for a party club out in Montauk. She didn’t press charges after police responded to a Labor Day weekend 911 call at their summer rental, but she did move out. Now she had joined Guidry and countless others who had come out to the East End to hang on the beach for one young summer, only to start a whole new life.

  “Better not, or I’ll never make it through my beach walk without a bathroom break.” Fall was Guidry’s favorite time of year. The summer crowd was gone, the leaves had turned, and the waves were roaring. She knew Amy, for all her strengths as a girlfriend, never gave Cosmo a proper walk, and she was looking forward to seeing her beautiful boxer gallop unleashed along Maidstone.

  While she waited for the check, she flipped through the one untouched section of the Times, the business section, in the interest of completeness. “Gentry Reports FBI Investigation.”

  Something about the company name sounded familiar. It was described as a “publicly traded powerhouse in the energy, health-care, and industry sectors,” not exactly the crime and political news that Guidry tended to follow. But then she came to a quote from the company’s lawyer, Jake Summer of the New York City law firm Rives & Braddock: “The Gentry Group is conducting an internal investigation and also plans to cooperate with all investigative agencies.”

  The Gentry Group was the company Chloe Taylor kept mentioning when she was trying to figure out where Adam Macintosh had spent the last two days of his life. Guidry had done the legwork of reaching out to Uber, but she hadn’t learned anything beyond what Chloe already knew—that he’d been dropped off and picked up at the Kew Gardens train station. Once the investigation pointed to his son, Ethan, she had dropped the inquiry.

  The year before, Guidry had been a small pa
rt of a big mail theft case that sprawled from Queens to Brooklyn and through Nassau and Suffolk Counties. The defendants had washed and forged millions of dollars in checks. When Guidry drove to the FBI regional office handling the investigation, she had parked next to the Kew Gardens train station.

  She was still thinking about that when she was about to start the engine of her CRV. It’s one phone call, she thought. What’s the harm?

  She searched her old emails, trying to remember the agent’s name. How could she have forgotten? He was a nice guy. Cute, too, and had asked her to dinner. She still felt a little guilty for not telling him the real reason she didn’t accept the offer.

  Damon Katz. There it was. She tapped the phone number in his email signature line to make the call and got his voice mail after three rings.

  “Agent Katz, this is Detective Jennifer Guidry from Suffolk County Police. I think you’ll remember me from that Tobin and DeLaglio investigation a couple of years ago. I’m hoping you can help me out with something. Any chance your office had any contacts with Adam Macintosh last spring? Perhaps something to do with a company called the Gentry Group—I’m wondering if he might have been at your offices on two specific days in May. Give me a call when you can.”

  By the time she pulled out onto Newtown, she’d told herself he’d never call back. There was no way the FBI was going to call some Long Island detective about a pending case. She didn’t even know why she was curious. Ethan Macintosh was their guy. She had called it, almost from the start.

  31

  Looking at Ethan on the witness stand, I was able to see how much he had changed in the six months since his arrest. His chest and shoulders were broader, and his voice was lower. Now that his face was more defined, his chin and jawline were just like Adam’s. He wasn’t quite an adult, but nothing about him looked boyish anymore.

  Nicky and I knew Olivia had spent hours with Ethan, preparing him to testify, but we had no idea what he would actually say. We wanted to believe that Olivia was putting Ethan on the stand because his innocence would be obvious to the jury once they heard his side of the story. But more likely she was doing it because she believed he’d be convicted unless he gave it a shot.

  He grew more comfortable speaking in the courtroom as Olivia posed a series of basic questions about where he was born, when he moved to New York, where he lived, and other background information. Once he seemed at ease, she walked him through his time line for the night of the murder. For the most part, his version lined up with Kevin Dunham’s. They were together all night except for a one-hour window. The only variation was the reason for the separation. Kevin had testified that Ethan was supposed to meet someone on the beach to sell some pot, while Ethan claimed he had asked to be left at the beach while Kevin finished a deal.

  Olivia showed Ethan a list of the items we had reported stolen from the house after Adam’s murder, and then showed him a matching list of the items seized from the top shelf of his bedroom closet in the city. “Now, are the three items from your closet the same things that were reported missing from your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did those items come to be on your top shelf?”

  “I put them there.”

  “Do you remember when you put them there?”

  “Yes. It was Saturday night.”

  “Which Saturday was that?” she asked.

  “Sorry. The night after my dad was killed. Mom and I drove back to the city that afternoon.”

  Olivia stated the exact date in May to clarify, which Ethan confirmed.

  “Were you in possession of those three items when you left East Hampton and went to the city that afternoon?” Olivia asked.

  “No.”

  “So where were those items immediately before you put them on the top shelf in your closet?”

  “In my bedroom.”

  “Which bedroom?”

  “Sorry, my bedroom in the city.”

  “Please explain why you placed those items in your closet.”

  “Mom had gone to bed, and I knew there was no way I was going to fall asleep. I kept thinking, He’s never coming back, he’s never coming back. Even now, it seems hard to believe, but that first night was . . . really hard. And I was looking around my room, thinking about all the times I didn’t listen to him. And disappointed him.” His face wrinkled, and I could tell he was fighting back the urge to cry. “He was always telling me my room was a pigsty . . . if pigs hoarded overpriced clothes,” he added with a sad smile. “So I started cleaning up my room. And I found the stuff we told the police was missing.”

  Olivia showed him a photograph of his bedroom, printed from a still shot of the video the jury had already seen when he was arguing with Adam. She then showed him a photograph that the police had taken of his bedroom during a search of our apartment on the day he was arrested. It was clear that his room was cleaner in the second image.

  “So why did you put those items in the closet instead of, for example, telling your stepmother you had found them?”

  Ethan looked down, appearing ashamed, and then gazed up again. “I figured they had already been reported stolen anyway, so I might as well keep them. It was stupid. And wrong.”

  “So why did you do it?”

  “I was scared. I had seen how much more money we had recently, and I thought it was because Dad was working at a law firm. I was afraid we were going to be broke and figured some insurance company wouldn’t miss a couple thousand dollars. I was going to sell the stuff if we ever needed money.”

  It was a plausible explanation. The jury didn’t know, however, what I knew. Ethan had asked me to go to Kevin’s on Saturday afternoon for his backpack, but later that night, the backpack was empty except for a burner phone.

  He also had an explanation for secretly videotaping Adam in his room. “He was just so disappointed in me—making it sound like I was a really bad kid. I mean, I’m not perfect. I could follow every piece of advice he ever gave me, and I’d never be first in my class or the ninety-ninth percentile like him and my mom.”

  “Just to be clear for the jury, you mean your stepmother, Chloe Taylor, correct?”

  He nodded and then said “Yes” for the court reporter. “Yeah, but I call her Mom. I mean, she’s always accepted the way I am, but Dad was really upset that I wasn’t more like them. He was making it sound like I was going off the deep end. And, yes, he was even talking about sending me away to military school. So I recorded him. I was thinking it would be like an intervention or something—like when that girl put up an Insta story about her dad getting wasted all night. But I wasn’t going to go public or anything. I was just going to show him that he was the one who was acting crazy when we argued. I was normal. I am normal. And now I feel like the police are treating me like I’m some horrible kid, too.”

  When he wiped his face with his palms, he momentarily looked like a child again.

  “So did you ever show that video to your father?”

  He shook his head.

  “You need to answer aloud,” she reminded him.

  “No. I felt too bad about it. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.” His face pruned again, and this time he couldn’t stop the tears. He sniffed a few times and ran the sleeve of his suit jacket across his eyes, regaining his composure.

  “There’s one more thing I need to talk to you about, Ethan. You said before that you refer to your stepmother, Chloe Taylor, as Mom. Do you love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you proud of her?”

  “Very. I mean, look at everything she’s done.”

  “Did you write those posts on the Poppit website about her, under the name KurtLoMein?”

  He looked at me with pain in his eyes as he answered quietly. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I honestly don’t know. It’s just . . . everything was changing. She always worked hard, but then she got sort of famous because of her magazine. Then when the Them Too stuff blew up, she was li
ke a hero to people. She was busy all the time, and even when she was home, she was writing in her office or looking at her social. I think—”

  “You mean social media?” Olivia clarified.

  “Yeah. Like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Dad would tell her she was worse than a teenager, and she’d say he didn’t understand the pressure she was under. That she had twenty-five-year-olds nipping at her heels who’d steal her job the second she fell behind the digital trend.” The eyes of several jurors moved in my direction. It was clear that no sixteen-year-old would have come up with that sentence unless he’d heard it repeatedly from an adult. “I think I was hoping to get her attention, because I knew she read what people were saying about her online.”

  “Finally, Ethan, just to be clear: Did you go to your house any time after Kevin picked you up on Friday night, or before you returned with your mother on Saturday morning?”

  “No.”

  “Did you kill your father, Adam Macintosh?”

  “No, I swear.”

  “I have no further questions, Your Honor.”

  If Ethan’s direct examination had earned him any sympathy at all, it had not worked with ADA Nunzio. He stood only two feet from the witness chair, his voice bellowing with skepticism and indignation. He had purposely positioned himself to obscure Ethan’s view of Olivia and therefore also Nicky and me, who were seated behind her.

  He poked tiny holes in every aspect of Ethan’s testimony. On the time line, he prodded Ethan to account for the hour he had been alone on the beach, making it sound nearly impossible that a teenage boy could spend an hour of solitude without sending a single text or social media post. On the marijuana, he asked question after question about the price of Ethan’s various possessions, arguing that he, not Kevin, must have been the one selling pot. On the items seized from the top shelf of his closet, he ridiculed the idea that a kid of Ethan’s means would believe that a few used luxuries could make a dent in the household budget.