The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  The woman looked at me, bored and unimpressed. “What is this regarding?” she asked.

  “I have a . . .” I struggled to find the right word. “Complaint, I guess. Or a request.”

  She pulled a sheet of paper from a folder on her desk. “Do you wish to file a report?”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s not like that. I need to speak with Detective Parker and Detective Falley. Please—it’s important.”

  It had been so long, but I still remembered their names. I remembered the stubble on Parker’s chin and the way Falley tucked her hair behind her ears before she spoke. I remembered that they’d promised to find out what happened to Persephone, no matter how long it took.

  The woman behind the glass raised one eyebrow, as if the detectives’ names legitimized my presence. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Sylvie O’Leary.”

  She picked up a phone and punched a couple of numbers on the receiver. “Detective Falley doesn’t work here anymore,” she said to me. “She—yeah, hi. I’ve got a Sylvie O’Leary here. She says she needs to see you and that it’s important.” The woman listened, her eyes still focused on my face. “Okay.” Hanging up, she gestured with a quick nod of her head toward a couple of chairs against a brick wall. “Detective Parker is on his way. You can have a seat over there.”

  “Thank you,” I replied, but I didn’t sit down. I only moved a few feet away from the woman’s line of sight, pacing slowly in a small circle.

  After a few minutes, a door opened and a man in a brown suit stepped into the lobby. He had gained a little weight over the years, and the stubble on his face was now gray, but other than those differences, he looked exactly as I remembered him. Even the way he held the door open seemed familiar, his arm stiff and outstretched as he looked at me with a solemn squint.

  “Ms. O’Leary,” he said.

  When I was younger, he’d called me Sylvie, but the way he said my name now reminded me of how he’d stood outside Mom’s locked door, trying to convince her to open up and answer his questions. Neither of us knew right then that she wouldn’t be coming out, that she’d make a life inside those walls, shrinking into herself like a plant without light.

  “Hi,” I said, slipping past him through the doorway. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  He let the door close behind us and then led me down a long hallway with fluorescent lights that buzzed. Near the end of the hall, he held an ID card to a black keypad just outside a room. After a high-pitched beep and the sound of a bolt unlocking, he opened the door and gestured for me to head inside.

  “We can talk in here,” he said. “Please—have a seat.”

  As the lights switched on, illuminating the small, sparsely furnished space—just a metal table, two padded chairs, and a desk that held up a stack of boxes and folders—I had to swallow a lump that instantly swelled in my throat. The room looked exactly like the one I’d sat in with Aunt Jill, and it still gave me the prickly feeling of being a suspect, just as it had all those years ago.

  The chair scraped against the floor as I pulled it away from the table. I sat down and waited for Detective Parker to do the same, but he remained standing, looking at his watch and passing his hands over his tie. “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Coffee? Water? Stale doughnut, perhaps?”

  I shook my head. “No, thank you.”

  “All right.” He reached for the chair across from me and settled himself into it. “I’m afraid I have to preface this by saying that I don’t have a lot of time. I have a meeting that I have to get to in a few minutes, but when I heard you were here . . . well, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” He folded his hands together. “So what can I do for you, Ms. O’Leary?”

  “I—” Where was I supposed to begin? Looking at Parker’s fingers, which he knotted and unknotted as he waited, I cleared my throat and took a breath. “I need you to reopen the investigation into my sister’s death.”

  Parker nodded a little, as if expecting me to go on, but when I didn’t, he sat back in his chair, his face gently sympathetic. “The investigation was never closed,” he said. “The case is still open, but with no direct evidence or witnesses or new suspects, it’s long been considered what we call a ‘cold case.’ ” He used air quotes on the last two words, as if he assumed the phrase was foreign to me.

  “I’m sorry,” he added. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I assure you we did everything we could to try to find out what happened.”

  “How is Ben Emory not still a suspect?” I asked, shooting forward in my seat. “Do you know he’s a nurse now? A nurse. He’s supposed to be helping people and making them better, and meanwhile, no one has any idea that he once killed somebody with his bare hands.”

  Parker’s eyebrows lifted a little, but other than that, his face remained neutral. “I didn’t know that,” he said, “and I understand that that must be upsetting for you, given that you believed he was responsible for your sister’s murder, but—”

  “I didn’t believe,” I interrupted. “I knew. I still know.”

  “We were never able to find any evidence that connected Mr. Emory with the crime.”

  “What about his dad? The mayor. He’s the owner of Emory Builders so you know he has tons of money. He could have easily paid someone to cover it up.”

  He paused for a second—just a tiny breath of hesitation, but one I noticed nonetheless. “That’s a serious allegation, you know,” he said, “but again, there was no evidence to suggest that.”

  “What about everything I told you sixteen years ago? Why—at the very least—wasn’t Ben arrested for abusing Persephone? I told you and Detective Falley that the bruises on her body were from him. And what about the necklace that was missing when you found her—the one she never took off? Didn’t you check to see if Ben had it? In his car? In his house?”

  For a few seconds, Parker didn’t speak, and I took the time to try to control my breathing. I needed to be calmer if I was going to get anywhere with this, but I kept seeing Ben in my mind, how deftly he’d placed his fingers on my face in the hospital, as if assessing injuries came naturally to him, as if he never could have dreamed of inflicting them himself.

  “Ms. O’Leary,” Parker said. “I promise you that we followed up on all the leads you gave us. We simply never found the necklace. Now, as for the bruises . . .” He paused again, as if carefully choosing his words. “We followed up with that as well, and Mr. Emory admitted responsibility. However, some information came to light that made us feel it was best not to press any charges.”

  I felt my lips open in surprise. “He actually admitted that he bruised her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t charge him with anything—assault? Battery?”

  “As I said, some information came to light, and—”

  “What information? I thought you said there wasn’t any evidence. I thought that’s why this became a cold case in the first place.”

  As Parker looked at me, he took his time breathing in and then out. I clasped my hands together under the table, and for every moment he didn’t respond, my fingers squeezed each other harder.

  “It’s true that there was no evidence directly associated with your sister’s murder,” he finally said. “But we became aware of some evidence, of a sort, regarding the bruises on your sister’s side and wrist.”

  “What evidence?” I asked again.

  Parker shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t really comment on that.”

  “But I’m her sister,” I insisted, wincing at how effortlessly I still thought of Persephone in the present tense. “You’re saying you can’t even tell me why you eliminated Ben as a suspect?”

  “No,” Parker replied. “Let me be clear. Just because we didn’t file any assault charges against Mr. Emory at the time does not mean that we’d eliminated him entirely. The fact of the bruises on your sister’s wrist and the fact of your sister’s strangulation were, we believed, two
separate things—not necessarily connected, not necessarily unconnected. It was possible that the bruises on her neck and arm were inflicted by the same person, but then again, it was equally possible that they weren’t. There were other people we were looking into at the time.”

  Other suspects? What would have been the point? Ben had a history of violent behavior against Persephone, and he’d been the last person to see her alive. It was so cut-and-dry that the thought of Parker and Falley investigating anyone else seemed almost laughable. And maybe that was the problem—they’d never found anything conclusive against Ben because they’d been too busy inventing additional suspects, searching for evidence in places it would never be found. My breath quivered with a slowly budding rage.

  “Who else were you looking at?” I demanded.

  Again, Parker shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we can’t release details like that in an open investigation, not even to the victim’s family.”

  “Why not? Don’t we have rights in this?”

  “You do,” he said. “And if we were to make an arrest, you’d be the first to know. But think of it this way. If I gave you a name, what’s to stop you from trying to track that person down? Or going to the media? Either of those actions could interfere with the investigation.”

  “But there isn’t an investigation anymore.”

  “I understand why you would feel that way, but as I said, the case is still open.”

  I dug my fingers into my leg. We were going around in circles.

  “Then can you at least tell me about my sister’s bruises?” I asked. “Don’t I have a right to know why you didn’t charge Ben with anything, especially since he admitted to hurting her?”

  Parker opened his mouth, uttered the beginning of a word, and then closed it. Looking at his watch, he tapped its face with his fingers in a pensive, rhythmless way. “Ms. O’Leary,” he said, “as you just noted, Mr. Emory was never charged with a crime, which means that, just like you or me or anyone else, he is entitled to his privacy. It would not be appropriate to divulge the details of his personal life. I can understand that may be frustrating, but I’m sure you’d expect the same treatment if you were in his shoes.”

  “You’re worried about his privacy?” I blurted. “My sister is dead.”

  “As I—”

  “You can’t just bring him in for questioning again? Just to see if maybe there’s something you guys missed? I just—I don’t think he should be able to work with sick people. It’s not safe.”

  “I’m sorry,” Parker said. “We can’t bring someone in for questioning without a reason. Now, please be assured, Ms. O’Leary, that if something were to happen that seemed to link Mr. Emory to this case, then, yes, of course we would question him again. But as it stands . . .” He shrugged.

  I could feel him building a wall between us—one that, clearly, I wouldn’t be able to penetrate. But why would Parker need to hide the truth from me? Why was he more concerned with protecting my sister’s abuser than arresting her killer?

  Despite the room’s comfortable temperature, I braced for a shiver. As it shook through me, I felt the determination and anger that had been spurring me on just moments before melt into hopelessness.

  I picked up my purse. “Okay,” I said, standing up.

  “Listen,” Parker said, rising from his chair. “I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear. I’m sorry I couldn’t . . .” He trailed off, his eyes lingering on me, and then he patted the pockets of his pants. “Here.” He took out his cell phone and reached into his suit jacket for a small notepad and pen.

  “You mentioned my former partner—Detective Falley,” he said, tapping at his phone, then writing something down. “She left the department a few years ago, but—” He ripped out the sheet of paper from his notepad and handed it to me; he’d written “Hannah Falley” at the top, along with a phone number. “You might want to talk to her if you’ve been left feeling unsatisfied here. I’m not saying she’ll be able to tell you much more than I already have, but I will say that she’s no longer bound to certain . . . rules. Just tell her that you got her number from me.”

  I stared at the paper. Falley wasn’t a detective anymore; she couldn’t arrest Ben or even interrogate him, so what could she possibly do for me? But as Parker stood in the doorway, waiting for me to follow him out, I folded the paper anyway and stuck it in my purse. “Thanks,” I mumbled, and he nodded in response.

  When I got back to my car, I sat there for a while, the cold air hardening around me like a cube of ice. I watched people pull into the parking lot, walk toward the doors of the station, and disappear inside. I watched officers exit through the same doors, head toward squad cars, and take a left onto the main road, some with their lights flashing, some not. At a certain point, a text came in from Lauren, and my phone startled me with its chime.

  “Best news ever,” she’d written. “Tankard now does half-off apps and drinks on Mondays! Come home for the night and we’ll app it up!”

  Home. I read the word over and over. Where was that exactly? In Providence? There, Lauren and I split orders of mozzarella sticks at bars with scratched and sticky tables. We swapped stories of our day’s clients as we picked at cheese stuck on our plates. We laughed about the guy who wanted a tiny squirrel on one earlobe and an acorn on the other. We cringed about the girl who wanted “is terrible in bed” under the tattoo of her ex-boyfriend’s name.

  But here, living in Spring Hill, my sister had once shattered all Mom’s perfume bottles, once ripped pages from the book Mom was reading, once threw forkfuls of spaghetti on the floor—all in retaliation for things I couldn’t even remember. Here, she’d been wild-eyed and passionate and alive, right up until the last time I saw her—red-coated and running from our house, right back to Ben.

  “Wish I could be there,” I responded to Lauren, and I turned the sound off on my phone so I wouldn’t hear the alerts for any other texts.

  Another twenty minutes passed before I drove back to the house, minutes in which I shivered and pulled my coat tighter but refused to turn on the heat. What had Persephone’s skin felt like when they found her? She’d been dead for days, buried beneath layers of snow, so when someone first touched her—the police, or an EMT, or the jogger who discovered her, maybe—did it feel smooth but glacial, like touching a window in winter?

  The moment I opened the front door, I could see that Mom wasn’t in her recliner anymore. I headed down the hallway, the bottle of her pills rattling inside the pharmacy bag, and when I reached her bedroom door, I was surprised to find it ajar. “Mom?” I asked, slipping my head inside.

  I hadn’t seen her room in a very long time. With the door so often locked after Persephone died, it had become forbidden territory. Now, as I looked around, I was struck by how dark it was, the shades pulled down and the curtains drawn. Still, there was just enough light from the hallway to see that things hadn’t changed much since I was a teenager. There was the same bed with the same floral comforter. The same dresser with a top drawer that never fully closed. Even the smell was as I remembered it—musty and stale, but sweet, too, like roses that had been left to rot.

  I heard a noise like an animal retching. “Mom?” I called again, following the sound to the bathroom, where she kneeled on the tile in front of the toilet. Her back was to me, her wig off, and her head was a globe of thin veins that pulsed when her body heaved.

  I was too late. I hadn’t listened to the nurse; I hadn’t returned right away with the pills. Now Mom would be miserable; she’d just throw the medication right up—and I hadn’t even considered that as I sat in the police station parking lot, letting my skin grow colder and colder like some useless punishment.

  “Mom, I’m sorry,” I said. “I—”

  But then she snapped her head toward me, and the sight of her cheeks, smudged with eyeliner, slick with sweat, made the words evaporate like snow on my tongue.

  “Where the hell were you?” she spat, and as she
stared at me, squinting through a dry heave, I saw that her eyes were the darkest gray they’d ever been. They looked shadowed and leaden, the color of clouds about to rain.

  11

  On Wednesday, I visited Persephone. I hadn’t been planning to do it until I jolted awake from a dream in which she crawled into my bed, her body so cold that, even through layers of sleep, I felt myself shiver. “You never talk to me anymore,” she said, her breath as solid as icy fingers on the back of my neck. “I’ve been here all along, but you keep ignoring me.” In the dream, she was crying, her tears the color of bruises, watercolor streaks of blue and gray. Then, with only the slightest waver in her voice, she said, “You did this to me, Sylvie,” and my body jerked in response, sending me shooting up in bed.

  I hadn’t actually been to her grave since the day we buried her, so when I got to the cemetery, I had to weave through rows of headstones, my boots leaving tracks in the snow as I searched for her name. My memories of her burial were foggy. Mostly, I remembered Mom, who cried so loudly that the priest had to pause his prayers. She was wild that day—sobs as jarring as a car crash, debris of tears all over her face—and though I preferred any show of emotion to the silence she’d been keeping behind her locked door, I was hurt, too, that she never once composed herself enough to come to me, never once untangled herself from Jill’s arms to gather me in her own.

  When I found Persephone’s grave, I was surprised to see a bouquet of white roses lying on the snow in front of the stone. The flowers looked fresh, the petals still clean and crisp, as if they’d only been there for a day or two. Bending down to pick them up, I turned them over to check for a note, struggling to imagine who might have left them. But then, like a surge of electricity passing through me, I remembered a night when Persephone came through our window, a single white rose clutched in her hand.

  • • •

  “Look what Ben gave me,” she said.

  I closed the window behind her, shutting the cold air out of our room, and watched as she brought the flower to her nose and breathed in its scent. Shrugging out of her coat, she touched the petals to her face and dragged the rose from her temple to her chin. Then she placed her finger against a thorn, as if its sharp point were incapable of piercing her skin.