The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  Falley tilted her head. “What necklace?”

  “The starfish one,” I said.

  Our mother had given it to Persephone for her sixteenth birthday. When Persephone had opened it, she’d stared at it for a long time. “It reminded me of the Persephone constellation on our wall,” my mother had told her. “All those stars Sylvie painted you as.” Persephone had pulled the necklace from its box. She’d unclasped it and turned around, holding out each delicate gold end so Mom could put it on her. She’d then walked to the entryway mirror and we’d followed her, admiring how the starfish hung just below her collarbone.

  She never took it off after that. She showered in it, went swimming in it during the summer, and often held the pendant absentmindedly between her fingers as we watched TV. Still, the night she had received it, she said to me in the dark as we were falling asleep, “Of course Mom got me a present that had more to do with you than me. She only thought to get me a star because you painted me that way.”

  She was always saying things like that, collecting evidence that our mother loved me more than her. I never really understood where she got this idea; sure, my quizzes hung on the refrigerator instead of Persephone’s, but Persephone only got average grades. And yes, I always got to pick the movie we’d see when we’d splurge and go to the plush, air-conditioned theater at Spring Hill Commons, but Persephone always crossed her arms anyway, claiming not to care. Persephone’s favorite theory to go on about, though, was that Mom had been madly in love with my father. Naturally, then, Mom favored me, because I reminded her of the man who got away. None of this was true, of course. Both of our fathers had been little more than flings, Mom had always said, even when we were too young to really know what a “fling” was. She was an independent woman, she’d told us, and she could love us more than a hundred fathers ever could. “Well,” Persephone would whisper to me conspiratorially, “she can love you that much.”

  It comforted me, then, to see Persephone become so dedicated to the gift our mother gave her. This simple act of wearing the starfish necklace seemed to me an acceptance of the fact that Mom loved us equally. It didn’t stop her from hypothesizing about my father, or suggesting that Mom’s Dark Days were probably some anniversary related to their relationship, but then again, once Persephone had made up her mind about something, nothing could stop her. Not even her sister’s pleas. Not even bruises.

  “It’s gold,” I told Falley in the interview room. “And it has a starfish pendant.”

  Falley opened a folder on the table and flipped through some papers. She paused as she read, and then closed the folder back up.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Your sister wasn’t wearing a necklace when we found her.”

  “Yes, she was,” I insisted. “She never took it off. Ever.”

  Aunt Jill nodded. “That’s true,” she said. “I can’t remember the last time I saw her without it. Could you check again please?”

  Falley reopened the folder as Parker stood up. “I can call over to Evidence,” he said. “Maybe it wasn’t catalogued with the rest of her personal effects. I’ll be right back.”

  I pressed my fingertips into my knees. Despite its name, the phrase “personal effects” sounded completely impersonal. What about her red coat with the third button missing? What about her black boots that she’d worn until they were gray?

  Falley gave us a quick, sympathetic smile, tucking her hair behind her ears again. “This necklace,” she said. “It was special to Persephone?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “My mom gave it to her.”

  “And she and your mom were close?”

  “Um . . .”

  I thought of the impatient tone that would creep into Mom’s voice whenever Persephone used to ask for a ride somewhere. (Seriously? I just got home from serving people all day long, and now you want me to serve you, too?) I thought of the day Persephone got her license, how she bounced around the house, holding it up like a trophy she’d won. But Mom refused to let her use her car. (If you think I’m letting a seventeen-year-old drive around wherever she pleases, you’re crazy. I’ll hide the keys if I have to.) Persephone ran to our room then, slammed the door behind her, and even from the hallway, I could hear her screaming into her pillow. Letting myself in, I watched with wide eyes as she punched her fists against her bed, as she unclenched her fingers to claw at the quilt, her legs kicking, her face becoming bloodred.

  Even when they weren’t fighting, Persephone would talk about Mom like there was something wrong with her. “You know she drove your dad away, right?” she said to me one night just after we’d gone to bed. “I mean, that has to be it. I don’t remember him or anything, but I bet you a million dollars she loved him so much that she suffocated him. Like how she’s always doting over you. I don’t know how you stand it.” I shrugged in the dark but said nothing. I didn’t really know what she meant.

  “I don’t know how to describe their relationship,” I said to Falley. “I mean, they weren’t, like, super close, but they also weren’t, like . . . I don’t know.” I looked at my hands, knotted my fingers together. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be,” Falley said. “It’s a complicated question. I don’t know what I’d say, either, if someone asked me about me and my mother.” She laughed a little, and the sound was comforting. “But you’re sure she was wearing this necklace the night she drove off with Ben? You saw it on her before she left?”

  I remembered her coat, sprinkled with snow as she ran back to Ben’s car. I remembered the jeans she’d put on earlier that night (“Ben likes these,” she’d said), but I couldn’t recall seeing the necklace. It was like asking me to remember if she’d been wearing socks, or if she’d brushed her teeth that morning. How do you remember a specific occurrence of something that happens every day?

  “I guess, technically, I didn’t see it on her,” I said. “But she was wearing a coat. And anyway, I know she was wearing it. She was never not wearing it.”

  The door opened with a loud click as Parker returned. We all looked at him expectantly, but he just shook his head, keeping his eyes focused on Falley. “She wasn’t wearing a necklace when her body was found,” he said, “and there was nothing like that recovered at the scene.”

  “Then Ben must have it,” I blurted. “Maybe it fell off her when he was strangling her. Or maybe he kept it as, like, a trophy or memento or something. Isn’t that a thing murderers do?”

  “Sylvie,” Aunt Jill said, placing her hand on my leg.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Don’t murderers do that?”

  Parker rubbed his chin, seeming to think carefully about how to answer my question. Finally, he said, “Sometimes. But that’s more consistent with the behavior of a serial killer. And there’s no evidence to suggest that this was the work of someone like that.”

  “Sylvie,” Falley said, before I had a chance to respond. “If your sister was, in fact, wearing a necklace that night, and it’s missing now, then we have to be open to the possibility that this was a robbery gone wrong.”

  “What?” I asked. “That’s crazy. The necklace was gold, yeah, but it couldn’t have been worth that much. You know my mom’s a waitress, right?”

  Falley shrugged. “Sometimes things look more expensive than they actually are,” she said. She paused then, flipping open her folder and jotting something down on the inside cover. “Please be assured that we will look into this. It’s a good lead. We can contact pawnshops, and—”

  “Pawnshops? It won’t be in a pawnshop. It’ll be with Ben. I know it.”

  She paused—for only a moment, but I felt something cryptic in the lag time of her response. “We’ll look into that, too,” she said.

  “In the meantime,” Parker piped in, “it would be helpful to us if you could check Persephone’s things when you get home. See if she took it off that day for some reason. See if it fell off and slipped under the bed or a pillow or something. Maybe it’s in a drawer in the bathroom. You’d be surpris
ed where missing things turn up.”

  I imagined Persephone then—how the sleeve of her red coat must have looked like a slash of blood in the snow, how the runner who first discovered her must have jogged in place, squinting at what he saw, unsure in the dull morning light if the sleeve belonged to a body, or if it was just some lost, discarded thing.

  Even though I knew I wouldn’t find it, I scoured our bedroom as soon as Jill brought me home. I banged drawers open and shut, I put my hands between Persephone’s mattress and bed frame, I got onto the floor with a flashlight and searched between the clumps of dust under her bed, and I even picked through our trash can, wincing at the paint-smudged tissues. After searching, I felt a strange sense of satisfaction. The necklace wasn’t there, so there was only one other place it could be—with Persephone’s murderer. With Ben.

  But the police never found it—not with Ben, or at a pawnshop, or on the ground that spring, when all the snow was melted and the detectives, in a last-ditch effort, returned to the place where my sister’s body had been found. In fact, I had very little contact with Falley or Parker after that day in the interview room. They came over one morning, a week or so after Persephone’s funeral, to ask for samples of Persephone’s handwriting, but even as I handed them old birthday cards she’d written in for me, they wouldn’t tell me why they needed them. After a while, I grew weary of calling them. I grew weary of Falley’s voice on the phone, telling me kindly, but firmly, that although the investigation was ongoing, she had no new information she could share.

  I was sure that Ben’s father was protecting him. For as long as I could remember, Will Emory had been our mayor, and his pockets ran deep. He had inherited ownership of Emory Builders, which had been around since the turn of the century, and it was nearly impossible to throw a rock in Spring Hill without it flying over land that was either owned or developed by the Emorys. As mayor, he was able to use his wealth to an even greater advantage, keeping his hands in every aspect of town government, from planning and zoning to the police force. There were rumors that he would summon individual members of departments into his office, close the door, and use whatever tactics necessary to get what he wanted. No one in town ever seemed fazed by this, though; when it came to Will Emory, “any means necessary” was not a sign of corruption, but just another reason to revere him. Look how resourceful he is, residents said.

  I’d only seen him on a handful of occasions. He was tall, with irises as dark as his pupils, giving him an unsettling shark-eyed gaze, and his sandy hair had streaks of gray in it. At Persephone’s wake, which nearly every Spring Hill resident attended, regardless of how they may have treated us in the past, Will stood with his head bowed somberly, playing the part of the compassionate town leader. When he reached Mom in the receiving line, ready to offer his rehearsed condolences, her knees buckled suddenly, and Will caught her as she fell against him. He had a moment of uncertain stillness, and then he stroked her hair, looking around the room to be sure that everyone saw how comforting he was, how tender. Even then, cloaked in a practiced, artificial sadness, he came off as an intimidating man.

  Over the years since then, election after election, town council members had come and gone, but Will Emory remained a constant as the mayor of Spring Hill. Even living in Providence, I’d kept up with him online. I wanted to read that he’d planned an early retirement, or that he’d finally lost the voting public’s support—anything that would mean Ben no longer benefited from his father’s immunity, his backdoor threats—but all I ever saw were stories about council meetings and ribbon cuttings.

  It wasn’t just Will Emory’s position that gave Ben power; he had a long line of respected Spring Hill ancestors to stand behind him like an army of ghosts. The statue of George Emory on the town green was only part of his family’s legacy. Emory Lane was named after Jackson Emory, one of the original colonists who settled Spring Hill in 1674, and Nathaniel Emory had built Emory Bridge back in the 1800s. Even Will’s own father, Richard Emory, had been a popular congressman for several terms. Before that, he had expanded Emory Builders’ niche from constructing modest houses in local towns to erecting million-dollar homes in vast subdivisions and leasing commercial spaces in strip malls throughout the state. The success of the company transformed the Emorys from a highly regarded, prominent family to town royalty presiding over a business empire. To convict Ben Emory of such a vicious crime would have been to cast a shadow on the entire town’s history.

  Now, sixteen years later, my sister’s case was so cold that I imagined the folders and bags of evidence cracking like ice in the aisles of the police station basement. So much had changed since that day in the interview room, and yet, the details of my sister’s death remained a mystery.

  As I turned onto the street where Persephone and I had grown to be teenagers together, each making choices we couldn’t unchoose, my heart thudded. My stomach felt weightless and heavy all at once. With only a few houses left before I reached our ranch near the end of the road, I caught sight of the cluster of hills where the Emory estate lurked. It was one of the many things that hadn’t changed in the years I’d been away—the Millers’ blue house still had a broken shutter on the first floor; our street sign still sat crooked on its metal pole; and the place where Ben Emory had grown up still felt like a taunting, towering presence over the south side of town. I wasn’t sure if it was the sight of that distant land, or the thickening flakes of snow against my windshield, but something in that moment made me shiver.

  6

  Before I could knock or ring the bell, the front door opened. I had been looking down, careful not to slip on the icy walkway, and it took much more energy than it should have to lift my head and meet Jill’s eyes. She was smiling at me, dressed in a loose sweater that hid the weight she’d gained over the years, and I was so relieved that it was her instead of my mother that I rushed up the steps and threw my arms around her.

  “Whoa,” she said, squeezing me in that strong, enveloping way of hers. “Don’t know what I did to deserve such a hello, but I’ll take it.”

  Jill’s face was a bright burst of joy in the snowy gloom of the afternoon. The consequence of avoiding my mother during her illness, I suddenly realized, was that I’d been keeping myself from Jill as well. Jill who made banana bread on rainy days. Jill who smiled.

  “Well, come in,” she said. “It’s freezing out there.”

  I stepped inside and wiped my feet on the mat. Then I followed Jill to the living room, where it was so dark I could barely see. The curtains on the sliding glass door were closed, the lights were turned off, and when my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I didn’t find Mom on the couch like I’d expected. She was probably squirreled away in her bedroom, and even though that meant I still had a few more minutes alone with Jill until I had to face her, some part of me felt stung by the fact that she hadn’t even wanted to greet me.

  Pulling off my scarf and shrugging out of my coat, I looked around for a place to put my things. Where had we hung our jackets? My memory offered up an image of Persephone bouncing through the doorway after school and flinging her red coat over the rack in the entryway—the same rack that Mom had knocked over when Persephone went missing. Her rage that day had momentarily paralyzed me, and even remembering it now, I could only stand in the middle of the room, my coat and scarf hanging limply over my arm as I stared at the carpet.

  “So,” Jill said, “here we are.”

  I nodded, knowing where this was going. The welcome was over, and now we had to get down to business.

  “Is she in the bedroom?” I asked.

  Aunt Jill cocked her head, her brow furrowing. “Who?”

  Who? I actually laughed—the question was so strange. “Mom,” I said.

  Jill squinted and then her eyes slid past me, toward the corner of the room.

  “I’m right here.”

  My lungs squeezed shut as I heard my mother’s voice, huskier than I remembered, but undoubtedly hers. I saw then what
I hadn’t noticed when I’d entered the darkened room. Mom, or at least some version of her, was sitting in a recliner by the bookshelf. She was thinner than I’d ever seen her. When had been the last time? Two Junes ago when Jill dragged her to Hanover for another attempt at a family dinner? She’d been thin then as well, and had always been slender, but in the years since Persephone’s death, the shape of her body had become less and less defined, more like a teenage boy’s than a woman’s. Now, though, all of her features seemed sunken. Her cheekbones protruded, and her neck looked like a thin stalk that could barely hold up her head. She’d lost her hair, too—her long, blonde Persephone hair—or at least that’s what the scarf around her scalp suggested.

  “I . . .” My throat felt dry all of a sudden; my vocal cords grated against each other. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Aunt Jill laughed, the sound of it rich and rippling. “I guess not!” she said. “I was wondering why you hadn’t said hello. Thought you were just being shy.”

  I looked at Mom, but her eyes were so masked by shadows that I couldn’t see if they looked at me in return. “I didn’t see you,” I repeated.

  Aunt Jill walked around the couch toward the sliding glass door. “It’s because we’ve got these damn curtains closed,” she said. “Is your headache any better, Annie?”

  “No.”

  “Well.” Aunt Jill ripped open the curtains, and for a moment, all I could see was crisp, blinding ivory. “We need some light in here.”

  Mom shielded her face with her hands and I saw how delicate her fingers looked, how easily it seemed they could break. When she lowered her hands, I noticed the brittleness of her skin, flakes gathering on the corners of her lips, the lobes of her ears. She had only wisps for eyebrows, making her forehead seem wide and vast as open land, and her cheeks looked sucked in. She was wearing a gray sweater, with large buttons down the front, and it was almost shocking how completely the shirt consumed her. She looked like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.