The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  “A lot of it was just his demeanor,” she said. “Something was off. It was as if he didn’t really get that we were questioning him because he was a person of interest in the case. It was like he thought our questions were meant to get his opinion, like he was some sort of police consultant. Like he—like he could lead us to a detail that would blow the whole thing open. He kept asking questions that didn’t make any sense to us, like ‘Did you take any blood from the body?’ or ‘Did you check her pockets for house keys?’ And he was particularly insistent about—”

  She stopped, her eyes widening and her mouth drooping open, suddenly aware, it seemed, of what she’d been about to say.

  “Insistent about what?” I asked. “Come on, what was it?”

  Falley reached for her coffee and took a long, slow sip. My heart measured out the seconds as I waited. Then she cradled the mug with both hands, holding it close to her chest, and shook her head. “It’s nothing, really. More nonsense, I guess. It’s just—he kept saying, ‘Talk to the mother.’ Over and over throughout our interview. ‘Talk to the mother. Talk to the mother.’ ”

  “Whose mother?” I asked.

  She set the mug back on the table but kept her hands circled around it. “Yours,” she said.

  15

  I felt something push me backward, something with strong, insistent arms. I closed my eyes at the impact, but when I opened them, there was nothing in front of me but air. Falley was looking toward the door at the front of the diner, as if she were regretting ever agreeing to meet with me in the first place, and my fingers trembled under the table.

  “Talk to my mother?” I asked. “Why? About what? Talk to her, like—question her? Talk to her, like—a suspect?”

  Falley nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “And we did question her. She never told you that?”

  I was beginning to think I could fill a hundred pages with all the things my mother never told me.

  I ignored Falley’s question, let it evaporate in the air like the steam from our coffees. “What would you have had to question her about?” I asked.

  As she hesitated, her eyes bounced across my face.

  “It’s actually pretty standard procedure,” she said. “You always have to question the parents. And with your mom, we were concerned about the way she acted when we first came to your house.”

  “She was devastated,” I reminded her.

  “I know,” Falley said, “but at that point your sister was still only missing. And of course she should have been upset—any mother would be—but the way she acted, it was like she was positive that Persephone was never coming back.”

  “She was out of her mind with worry,” I said. “Doesn’t it make sense that she’d jump to the worst-case scenario?”

  Falley nodded. “Sure. And she was never really a serious suspect, not once we questioned her.”

  I couldn’t picture it. Questioning Mom meant she would have had to emerge from her darkened bedroom, taking in the light from the sliding door in the living room, squinting as it fell across her face. Questioning her meant she would have had to speak, string words together, one after the other, like the popcorn and cranberries she used to make garlands with every year for our Christmas tree. But Mom didn’t speak in words, not in the days immediately following the news of Persephone’s murder. Hers was a language of sobs and silence that I couldn’t understand.

  “What happened,” I asked, “when you questioned her?”

  Falley shrugged. “Not a lot. It was . . . the saddest day of my career, I think. I couldn’t sleep for days afterward because I kept picturing her face. During our interview, I kept looking at her and thinking, ‘This woman is beyond shattered.’ ”

  I nodded. That was the right word—shattered. I thought of Mom in her recliner that night as I put on my coat to go meet Falley. She’d been watching TV and hadn’t even asked where I was going. I’d looked at the bones that protruded from her hand as it held the remote, and it hadn’t been hard to imagine that even beneath the gentlest grasp, those bones would easily break.

  “So you saw that she was perfectly normal, then,” I said. “For someone who had just lost their daughter, I mean.”

  Falley put her spoon in her coffee and stirred. She raised one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “Well,” she said, and didn’t continue.

  “What?”

  She let go of the spoon and shook the hand that had been holding it, as if she’d been writing for hours and suddenly had a cramp. “I don’t know, Sylvie,” she said. “I feel terrible talking about your mom this way. What she went through—what you both went through—is unspeakably horrific, and who knows how I’d react if the same thing happened to me. It’s just, there was something about her behavior that day that didn’t seem right.”

  “Not right how?”

  “Just—” Falley tilted her head in thought. “I don’t know. She was obviously devastated, but she didn’t necessarily seem surprised. I remember that she was acting almost as if she’d expected this to happen.”

  “Expected what? For her daughter to be killed?”

  Falley shook her head. “No,” she said. “To lose her.”

  I dipped my fingers into my glass of water and placed them, dripping and cold, against my wrist. There was something about icy water above a place of pulse, Mom had taught me once, that always made her feel calm.

  “So what happened with Tommy Dent?” I asked, steering the conversation away from Mom. “He just went on to live his life like normal? Have a family? A job? Not a care in the world?”

  Falley winced, briefly and only faintly, but I noticed it just the same. “Not exactly,” she said. “Up until about a year ago, Tommy was in prison. He got out last March and he’s been living in a trailer park in Hanover ever since. I only know this because, uh—” She chuckled, but the sound was filled with disappointment. “I’ve learned you can’t ever really leave the job behind. I’ve kept tabs on him. Even though I probably shouldn’t anymore.”

  “What was he in prison for?” I asked.

  “Sexual assault.”

  I admired how quickly she said it.

  Reaching for my water again, I finally started to see it. Tommy might have followed Persephone that night, just like Ben said. He might have driven far enough behind them that, with the snow coming down, his headlights would have been difficult to see in the rearview mirror. Maybe when Persephone stormed out of Ben’s car, Tommy saw his opportunity. Maybe he drove up beside her and offered her a ride. She wouldn’t have taken one, though. She would have rather walked all the way home just to be able to hold it over Ben’s head later. You were being so stupid, I could imagine her saying, that I chose trudging home in a fucking blizzard over being in that car with you for one more second. Maybe Tommy grew angry when she declined the ride. He seemed to think they had some sort of connection—two lonely souls in a town too self-absorbed to care for them—so maybe he saw her refusal as a betrayal. Maybe he got out of the car, reached for her, but slipped on the slickening road. Still fuming from her fight with Ben, Persephone might have laughed at him then, and the next time he reached for her, his hands might have been stretching toward her neck.

  “So you never really thought it was Ben who did it?” I asked.

  Falley shrugged. “With boyfriends, there’s always that suspicion. Call it sexist, call it history, but it’s there. I don’t know, though. My instinct was always that he didn’t do it.”

  Still, he wasn’t innocent, and night after night, I had agreed to be his accomplice.

  “But what about the bruises?” I asked. “When I talked to Detective Parker the other day, he said you guys decided not to file any assault charges against Ben, even though he admitted that he’d been the one to hurt her. Why would you do that?”

  I saw the exact moment she closed up. It was like watching a flower unbloom, tucking in its petals until it was nothing more than a tight, protected bud.

  “I can’t speak to that,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”

  I lunged closer to the table. “What do you mean you can’t speak to that? You just told me everything about Tommy. Come on, Fal—Hannah. Please. Just tell me why you didn’t arrest him for hurting her.”

  She shook her head, and I could tell by the way she folded in her lips that she wasn’t going to answer me. “I told you about Tommy,” she said, “because I think you have a right to know. If he did kill Persephone, or even just knows who did, then he’s a danger to you. Now that he’s out of jail, I don’t want you running into him somewhere, completely in the dark.”

  “But Ben could be a danger to me,” I insisted. “He—listen. The only reason I’m even back in Spring Hill is because my mother is sick. She has cancer, and I’m here to take care of her. And I—”

  “Oh, that’s awful,” Falley said, the taut lines around her eyes instantly softening. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks. But—the point is, Ben’s a nurse now. A nurse. And he works on the same floor where my mom is getting her treatment twice a week.” Falley’s eyebrows shot up. “I know, right? So you see why this is important. I’m going to be around him a lot. And I know you don’t think he killed Persephone, but you do know that he abused her, he told you he did. So what’s to stop him from hurting me, too?”

  Falley looked down at her mug, and when she met my gaze again, her eyes seemed cautious but resolute.

  “I don’t believe Ben abused your sister,” she said quietly. “At least not in the way you think.”

  I jerked backward. It’s not what you think. That’s what Persephone had always said.

  “What other way could there be?” I asked. “She had bruises. Ben said he gave them to her. That’s clearly abuse.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “But what did you mean?”

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I can’t tell you about that. It’s just, you have to understand, I worked your sister’s case for a long time. In some ways, it feels like I’m still working it. And I didn’t know her, but I feel like I did. All the interviews and searches, all the dead-end leads we followed. You start to get an idea of a person. And that idea of her, it’s real to me, Sylvie. She’s real to me.”

  She picked up her mug and took a slow, measured sip. “I think there are things she didn’t tell you,” she said, setting her coffee back on the table. “Things we learned over the course of the investigation. And I know it probably doesn’t make sense to you, and it probably doesn’t seem fair, but I’d feel like I was betraying her if I told you what you want to know. And I already betrayed her once by not solving her case. I can’t do it again.”

  I opened my mouth to push back, to insist that I had a right to know whatever it was she thought Persephone had kept from me, but in that moment, the guilt on Falley’s face was palpable. And I knew, better than anyone, how guilt kept you in debt to the dead.

  “I’m sorry, Sylvie,” she said. “The last thing I wanted to do tonight was upset you, but clearly I have.” Her fingers fidgeted with the handle of her mug, and then she lifted her wrist, making a show of checking the time. “Maybe I should just get going. I’m, uh, I’m sorry to make this so short, it’s just—Alyssa likes it when I’m there to watch her dance. I told her I couldn’t make any promises tonight but I’d try.” She dug into the purse beside her on the booth and pulled out her wallet. “Of course, to a six-year-old, ‘I’ll try’ means ‘Yes, honey, I’ll definitely be there.’ ”

  She took out some money and looked around the room. “Where is that waitress with the bill?” she asked. “Terrible service here, huh?”

  Mom used to draw flowers on people’s checks before dropping them at their tables. No matter the season or weather, she’d sketch a rose or a daisy right beside the amount they owed. Persephone said she was manipulating the customers, buttering them up so they’d give her a larger tip.

  “You can go, I’ll wait for the check,” I told Falley. “Just one more thing, though. I’m not trying to make you feel worse about this than you already do, but I have to ask: That’s it, then? No one will ever pay for what they did to my sister? Ben will go on being a nurse? Tommy will go on living in his trailer, unless he hurts someone else? I just—” I shook my head and bit my lip. “I mean, what about Persephone’s necklace? The gold starfish. The one I told you guys about after she died. Did you ever even check to see if Tommy or anyone else had it?”

  Falley flattened her money out on the table, placed the saltshaker over it, and then put her wallet back in her purse. When she looked at me again, I could have sworn her eyes were glistening.

  “When we were trying to build a case against Tommy,” she said, “we got a warrant to search his house. He seemed fine with it, not nervous or anything like people usually are. But he watched us the entire time, following us from room to room, and he had this smile on his face that I’ll never forget.” She blinked and the sheen on her eyes went dry. “We never found anything.”

  I nodded, my fingers reaching for the place mat. I was tearing at one of the clean, untouched corners when Falley placed her hand gently over mine. The warmth was like a soothing balm to my chapped knuckles; it made my throat tighten, my eyes sting. Then she leaned forward, her body arching halfway across the table.

  “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, though,” she said.

  16

  Even though I hadn’t left her a message, Aunt Jill called me back. I woke up on Thursday morning to the phone shouting in my ear, and when I rolled over to silence it, it took me several shrill seconds to find it under my pillow. I’d been up late doing research in bed—scrolling through web results of “Thomas Dent, Spring Hill, Connecticut,” or “Thomas Dent, Connecticut, sexual assault”—and I must have passed out in the middle of it all. Now, I fumbled to get ahold of the phone, my fingers stiff and clumsy.

  “Hi, Jill.”

  It was the second time in a week that I’d been sleeping when she called. I tried to sound steady and focused when I answered, as if I’d been up for hours and had even made Mom breakfast, but my throat betrayed me, filtering out my voice in thick, scratchy waves.

  “Hi yourself,” Jill said. “What do you think you’re doing, calling me and not leaving a message? I was going to call you back last night, but I didn’t notice the little notification thingy until after ten o’clock, and Missy told me you would have left a message if it were important. But you can’t do that to me, okay? Not with your mom the way she is. If you call, you leave a message, got it?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. How’s Missy doing?”

  “Good, good, her due date is today, you know.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “So it could be any minute, then, huh?”

  Jill chuckled. “Only if you listen to Missy. She’s sure it’s going to be today, but I keep telling her that first babies always come late. I wouldn’t be surprised if, a week from now, we’re still waiting for the little lady to arrive.”

  I heard Missy groan from somewhere behind Aunt Jill. “Oh my God, don’t say that.” Then, louder, as if leaning closer to the phone, she added, “I’m the hugest woman who’s ever lived, Sylvie!”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Jill said. “Surely the circus has huger women.”

  When Missy responded with a squeaky, indignant “Mo-om!” I tried to laugh, but the sound came out of me in a whisper. I wanted so badly to be with them, helping to prepare the nursery, listening to Aunt Jill and Missy go back and forth.

  “Anyway,” Jill said. “What did you call about yesterday? Did everything go okay with Annie’s session?”

  Still lying in bed, I fidgeted with my blankets, picking at lint that wasn’t there. If I closed my eyes, I could see the picture of Mom and Will that Ben had showed me in the hospital the day before. She’d tilted her face toward his like a flower toward the sun, and she’d clung to his body like ivy on a brick wall. Once again, questions bubbled up inside me, ready to come frothi
ng out.

  “Um,” I started. “No, yeah, everything went fine yesterday.”

  “Okay. Good,” Jill said. “And that’s why you called? To tell me things went well?”

  “Well . . . not exactly. No.” I set my eyes on the thin space between my closed door and the floor. “It’s just . . . I have a question.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jill prompted. “Go on.”

  I listened for the TV, or a faucet turning on, or a creak in the floor, anything that would tell me where Mom was at that moment.

  “Well, it’s about”—I lowered my voice—“Mom. And Will Emory. I don’t know if you remember who that is, but he’s the mayor. And Ben Emory’s father.”

  She paused. “I remember.”

  “Okay, well . . .” The house was unnervingly quiet, like a street after snow has stopped falling. “I was just wondering if you knew anything about Mom and Will. Like, did they go out or anything?”

  Jill sighed against the phone, and her breath sounded like the air outside on nights when I left the window cracked for Persephone. “Yeah, they dated,” she said.

  “Oh,” I replied, trying to sound casual. “Why’d you sigh about it? Was it a bad relationship? Did he hurt her or something?”

  “Yeah, he hurt her quite a bit, actually.”

  I swallowed, imagining blue fingerprints like smudges of paint on Mom’s skin. “Bruises?”

  “No,” Jill said after a moment’s hesitation. “No, not that kind of hurt. I was away at college when she was with him. I never even saw them together—not until he came to Persephone’s wake. And by then, it had already been over between them for—what? Twenty years?”

  I pulled back my blankets and got out of bed, the floorboards cold against my feet. Pacing around the space between Persephone’s bed and mine, careful to keep to the large oval rag rug that had been there for as long as I could remember, I posed my next question.

  “Was it serious?”

  “Eh,” Jill said, her voice like a shrug. “It was to your mother, but I don’t know about him. They started dating in high school—senior year, I think? Then he went off to some fancy university and your mom stayed in Spring Hill so she could go to community college. She’d only applied to one school—one that was close to where Will wanted to go—and she hadn’t gotten in. So he broke up with her soon afterward. The distance was too hard, I guess.”