The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  14

  I didn’t recognize her when I first walked into Spoons, the diner on the southern edge of Spring Hill. I’d looked for the same Detective Falley I’d met sixteen years ago—chin-length brown hair; a gentle, almost timid demeanor; a soft, uncertain smile—but the woman who stood up from a table to greet me had dark-framed glasses, a stylish pixie cut, and she grinned at me so widely it was as if I were some long-lost relative. I almost walked right by her, thinking she must be smiling at someone just behind me, but then she put her hand on my arm as tenderly as a mother would.

  “Sylvie,” she said, and when my eyes met hers, I recognized them as the ones that had once looked at me with such kindness, the two of us standing in my living room as Mom raged behind the closed door down the hall, as Jill and Detective Parker tried to coax her out.

  “It’s good to see you,” Falley continued, gesturing for me to have a seat at the booth where she’d been waiting. “Thanks for accommodating my crazy schedule.” She said this with a quick, almost nervous laugh as we each sat down, as if she’d been the one to request a meeting with me, as if it had been her voice that nearly shook on the phone that afternoon. “I just dropped my daughter off at ballet, so we have some time to chat.”

  I nodded. I’d been able to hear her daughter laughing in the background when I called her. “It’s crazy over here right now,” Falley had said over the sound of a faucet turning on. “But I’m happy to meet you in a little while—say, six thirty? Do you know Spoons?”

  Spoons was where Mom had waitressed for most of my childhood, the green and yellow of her uniform as familiar to me as the colors of a beloved sports team. She’d always come home smelling like french fries and gravy, and sometimes, on the best nights, she’d walk through the door holding a stack of take-out containers. We’d open them up, inhale the aroma of cheese and salt and meat, and we’d eat our burgers on the living room couch, some made-for-TV movie making me and Persephone laugh with our mouths still full.

  But I hadn’t told Falley this. I’d been too relieved that she was willing to speak to me so soon, and I’d just told her that, yes, I knew where Spoons was, and I’d be happy to meet her there. Now, though, taking in the forest-green walls and metal napkin holders, the framed photographs of utensils, and the plastic menus that looked as if they hadn’t changed since I was a girl, I regretted that I hadn’t just suggested the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. Mom was whole here, able to smile at customers and take their orders, to attend to people’s needs. How easily I’d once taken such miracles for granted.

  Clearing my throat, I tried to smile at Falley. “Thanks again for meeting with me, Detective,” I said. “I wanted—”

  “Uh, uh, uh,” she interrupted, wagging her finger from side to side. “Call me Hannah, okay? Just like I told you on the phone. I’m not a detective anymore. We can dispense with formalities.”

  She smiled again, her face so open and encouraging that I felt myself relax, even if only slightly.

  “Sorry,” I said, and she shook her head, dismissing my apology. I put my hands on the table and tore tiny pieces off my paper place mat. It was a habit I’d had for a long time, with napkins or straw wrappers or place mats like this, and one I usually didn’t even notice until Lauren would lose her patience, clamp her hand over mine, and demand I stop making a mess “like some OCD rodent.”

  Dropping the edge of the place mat and brushing the shreds I’d already made to the side, I put my hands in my lap. “I’m sure you were surprised to hear from me,” I said, and my eyes latched onto a waitress a few tables away, the green of her uniform much brighter than Mom’s had been by the time she worked her last shift.

  “Actually,” Falley said, “Ryan Parker called me the other day and told me he’d given you my number. He said you’d probably try to get in touch with me, and to be honest, I was happy you did. I’ve kind of always hoped our paths would cross again.”

  “You did?” I asked, leaning forward. Falley nodded, opening her mouth to say more, but the waitress slapped two plastic cups of water onto the table and pulled out a pad of paper.

  “What can I get you ladies?” she asked.

  “Just a coffee for me, please,” Falley said.

  “Coffee,” I echoed.

  “Easy enough,” the waitress said, and walked away, her eyes never having once met ours.

  Mom used to say that true customer service was all about eye contact. You have to look at the person, she’d tell me. It’s important to foster that human connection, because that’s what keeps people coming back. If they’d wanted someone to not even look at them, they’d have gone to the drive-through across the street. So you have to actually care—and that starts with getting to know the color of their eyes.

  Falley’s eyes met mine so intensely that I had to look away, focusing instead on my fingers as they found the place mat and tore.

  “Yeah, so, as I was saying,” she said, “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years. Your sister’s case was . . . brutal. I was still kind of a rookie. I don’t know if you knew that, or could tell, but I was. Ryan and I were only sent out that day because a couple of the more senior detectives were on vacation. That, and . . .” She paused, as if she wasn’t sure she should continue.

  “And what?” I asked.

  “They just didn’t think her disappearance would amount to much. She was eighteen—a legal adult. Old enough to leave and be on her own. Not to mention that it was Spring Hill, and there hadn’t been a murder there since the seventies.” She shook her head and took a sip of her water. “But obviously—what happened to your sister—it was all much more than that.” She folded her hands together over the table and leaned forward. “And I promise you, Sylvie, I wasn’t the most experienced detective, but I worked my fingers and toes to the bone on that case. I did everything I could—we both did—but it just wasn’t enough. I’m still so sorry about that.”

  She wasn’t smiling anymore. I could see that behind her tightly closed lips, she was biting the inside of her cheek, and now I wondered if her expansive grin when I first arrived had been to overcompensate for how nervous she was to see me.

  “I still dream about the case,” she continued. “I think about you. Your family. How badly we failed you. How badly we failed your sister. I’m not going to pretend it’s the sole reason I left the force—the case had been cold for ten years already once I did—but it stayed with me. Made me wonder, if we can’t catch the bad guy in a situation like that, if we can’t give the victim some justice and the family a little peace, then what’s the point of being a cop in the first place? What’s a badge and a pair of handcuffs if you can’t use them to make things right, you know? I mean, I—”

  We each moved back as our waitress returned with two coffees and a bowl of creamers. She set them down between us without a word, and the smell that rose from the mugs was instantly familiar to me. When we were really young, Persephone and I would sit at the counter for hours after school, our legs dangling from the stools, waiting for Mom’s shift to be over. “That coffee smells gross,” Persephone would say as we watched a waitress reach for the pot. “Like cinnamon skunk.” She’d hold her nose and we’d laugh while the waitress rolled her eyes, and I wouldn’t tell her that, secretly, I liked it, that there was something to its pungent, nearly sweet scent that comforted me because it meant that Mom was nearby.

  “Anyway,” Falley said. “I know you said on the phone that you wanted to ask me some specifics about the case, but I just wanted to get that out of the way first. I wanted to finally be able to tell you that I’m sorry—and not as a cop, but as a human, I guess.”

  She reached for a packet of sugar from the dish at the end of the booth. When she stirred it into her coffee, the movements of her fingers were stiff and jerky, as if she was gripping the spoon too hard. Part of me wanted to tell her I didn’t blame her for what happened, to watch the relief slip over her face like a veil, to see her smile come shining back, but another part w
anted to stay in that moment, where someone was taking responsibility for the ragged, loose ends of my life.

  “Thanks,” I finally said, and I saw the corner of her lips lift just a little before she took a sip from her mug. “But, uh—” I cleared my throat, then drank from my water, leaving my own coffee untouched. “The reason I wanted to meet with you is to ask if you remember a Tommy Dent?”

  Falley hesitated for only a moment before she nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “He was a suspect.”

  I felt my stomach contract, and I had to lean back against the booth.

  “Why?” I managed.

  Falley ran her finger over a dark stain like a burn mark on the table. “For lots of reasons,” she said. “But we started to look into him because of Ben Emory. When we first questioned him, he told us that Tommy had been stalking Persephone.”

  “And you believed him?” I asked. “Just like that?”

  She shook her head, scratching at the stain with her thumbnail. “No,” she said. “But it’s the kind of thing you can’t just ignore. We had to look into it.”

  “What else did Ben say?” I asked. I could feel the sandwich I’d eaten an hour earlier rocking in my stomach.

  “As I recall,” she began, putting her elbow on the table and rubbing at the back of her neck, “he said that Tommy used to leave notes in Persephone’s locker, saying—weird things. I don’t remember exactly, it’s been so long, but stuff like . . . what she’d been wearing that day, or what she’d eaten for lunch. ‘Good choice going with the egg salad today.’ Things like that. Nothing overtly threatening.”

  She paused, her eyes sweeping over my face as if trying to gauge my reaction. But I couldn’t react. Couldn’t even move.

  “Go on,” I urged after a moment.

  Falley reached for her coffee and took another sip.

  “Ben said that, some nights, when he dropped Persephone off, he’d see Tommy out on his front steps, just watching Ben’s car go by. Almost as if he’d seen Persephone go out and had been waiting for her to return. Because of that, Ben always waited until he saw Persephone get safely back inside the house, and then he’d stop in front of Tommy’s house and glare at him until he went back inside, too.”

  “How chivalrous of him,” I said, but even as the words came out, I was remembering how, on that very last night, with snow just beginning to frost the streets, Persephone hadn’t given up on our locked bedroom window and rung the doorbell instead, as I’d planned. She’d returned to Ben’s car—which hadn’t left, which still had its brake lights on.

  “He said,” Falley continued, “that he thought maybe Tommy saw Persephone leave with him on the night she went missing, and that maybe he decided to follow them. He said it was possible that Tommy saw Persephone get out of his car on Weston Street after their argument, and maybe he . . .”

  She trailed off, the end of her sentence as clear as the water I reached for and drank, its iciness spreading along the walls of my stomach.

  “That’s a lot of maybes,” I said when I set down the glass, and Falley nodded.

  “We thought so, too. But after her body was discovered and we went to question Tommy, we saw that he was—” She shook her head slightly as if unsure of what words to use. “He was just very strange. We went to his house and the first thing he did was take us to his bedroom, as if he wanted to give us a tour. And his room was kind of creepy. There were all these posters of guns and samurai swords and other weapons. And it was dark in there. The windows were covered with, like, cardboard or something, except for a few holes that had been made to let some light in. And then—” She shuddered a little. “There was this doll.”

  “A doll?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It was creepy. Not really the doll itself so much as the fact that it was so ‘one of these things is not like the other,’ you know? It was a porcelain doll, in perfect condition, and it was lying on his bed against the pillow. I remember it had this shiny golden hair, and it was wearing a pink satin dress with little lace frills at the collar and wrists. And then he—he introduced us to it.”

  “To the doll?”

  “To the doll. He said her name was Molly—God, I’ve never forgotten that—and then he just . . . stood there, waiting for us to say something, like ‘Nice to meet you’ or something. It gave me the willies, if I’m being honest.”

  I shrugged one shoulder. “So he was weird,” I said. “That doesn’t mean he had anything to do with what happened to my sister.” Still, my heart thudded.

  “It was more than that,” Falley said. “When we actually got down to questioning him, he was so . . . interested. He was just really, really interested in what had happened. And not in a devastated way, or in a ‘Wow, this happened so close to where I live’ kind of way, but as if he was really fascinated by it. He kept asking us questions—what did her body look like? How was she positioned? Was her lipstick smeared? Had she been wearing lipstick at all? It definitely raised a red flag.”

  I’d been tearing my napkin to shreds. There was a pile at my fingertips I hadn’t noticed I’d been making.

  “Well,” I said, “wouldn’t those questions suggest he didn’t know how she looked that night, which would suggest he didn’t do it?”

  Falley shrugged. “Not necessarily. Sometimes people want recognition for what they’ve done. It was almost as if he was toying with us, baiting us toward seeing some piece of evidence.”

  She leaned forward then, pressing her hands flat against the table and lowering her voice. “In fact,” she continued, “when we were questioning him, I noticed that he was playing with this hair tie. A scrunchie, actually. Remember those? He had this black scrunchie in his hands, and he kept stretching it out, tying it around one wrist and then the other, and I could see that there were these long blonde hairs tangled up in it.”

  The skin on my arms prickled. “Oh my God,” I said. “Did you test the hairs to see if they were a match?”

  Falley straightened up and shook her head. “Didn’t have to. When we asked him where he got it, he said it was Persephone’s. Said he found it in front of her locker when he was slipping in a note one day.”

  “So the notes were real?”

  “Yep. He said . . . oh, how did he put it?” She put her elbows back on the table and rubbed her temples. “He said he wrote her notes all the time. Said he knew what it was like to feel lonely and he wanted her to know that he noticed her.”

  “But Persephone wasn’t lonely,” I objected—a little too quickly, maybe. “She was noticed all the time.”

  Hadn’t I known by heart the map of veins in her wrists, even when they were shadowed by bruises? If I had the chance, couldn’t I still recognize the catch of breath in her throat as she woke up in the morning? Hadn’t I known exactly who she was, even if I never knew about these notes?

  “Oh, I’m sure it was all a load of crap,” Falley said. “Everything that kid said. I don’t think he was totally there, you know?” She tapped the side of her head with her finger.

  “So then . . . what happened?” I asked. “If he all but admitted to stalking her, and he said the scrunchie was hers, which—by the way, I highly doubt he just found it in front of her locker—then why wasn’t he arrested? Did he have an alibi or something?”

  Falley chewed on her bottom lip, held my gaze, and then shook her head. “I really shouldn’t be telling you all this, especially since it’s still an open case. But—God, I feel like I owe you something. And what are they going to do? Fire me?” She chuckled dryly before continuing. “He had no alibi. He wouldn’t tell us where he was that night. When we asked, he said ‘Out.’ That’s all he said, every time. Just ‘Out.’ ”

  I felt the ghost of an old rage lift its head inside me. It scratched at the inside of my stomach with long, uncut claws. “Then why wasn’t he arrested?” I asked. “What more did you need?”

  “Evidence,” Falley said. “We needed evidence.” She took a deep breath and clamped her lips t
ogether, a look of discomfort or disgust gathering on her face. “We only had a few of the notes. Ben gave us some he’d managed to hold on to, but he told us that Persephone usually just threw them away. Tommy admitted that the notes we showed him were his, but the ones we had couldn’t prove malicious intent. The scrunchie didn’t do anything for us because we couldn’t prove where he got it. And his lack of an alibi—well, it could have meant he did it, or it could have meant he was just a petulant teenager bucking against the system by refusing to answer our question. Believe me, Sylvie, any case we tried to build against him would have been thrown out the second it reached the prosecutor’s desk. That’s just how things work, and it’s a big reason why I left. There’s too much red tape and not enough stock put into hunches and gut feelings. And I get it. We can’t put people away on intuition. But it’s still just frustrating and demoralizing, to say the least. I mean—God, sorry—” She waved her hands in the air, as if trying to erase what she’d just said. “This isn’t about me and my crap. I’m sorry.”

  “So it was your gut feeling,” I said slowly, “that Tommy Dent killed Persephone.”

  Falley opened her mouth, her response practically visible between her lips, but then she closed it again and looked down at her coffee.

  “I don’t know who killed her,” she said. “But it was my gut feeling that Tommy knew more about what happened to her than he let on.”

  I nodded, as if I understood that kind of feeling, as if I was finally able to comprehend that someone other than Ben might have been the one to kill her.

  “And what made you think that?” I asked.

  Falley’s eyes flicked toward the ceiling, and I couldn’t tell if she was avoiding looking at me or just pausing to consider the question.