The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  “No,” I said. “Not until . . .”

  There was a closet door on the opposite side of the room. I waded through bins and papers to rip it open. The shallow space was barely big enough for a person to stand in comfortably, and lined up inside was a vacuum cleaner, a broom, and a mop. The only thing hanging from the pole at the top was a gray button-down. As I slammed the door, I grunted.

  Ben was making his way around the bed, Tommy covering his cackling mouth as he watched me, and I dropped to the floor, lying with my stomach flat against the carpet. Reaching underneath the bed, my hand flailed around in empty space until it bumped against something hard and rigid, wrapped in cloth.

  Ben knelt down beside me, rested his hand on my back. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “No!” I said. “There’s something . . .”

  My fingers hooked around it and yanked it out from under the bed. I used my other hand to push myself up off the floor and didn’t look at what I was holding until I was kneeling in front of Ben. We stared at it, Tommy’s laughter cutting off like a needle jerked from a record, and after taking in the shiny pink satin, the waves of blonde hair, the unblinking gray eyes framed by lifelike lashes, Ben and I looked at each other.

  “Is that hers?” he asked.

  “No,” I breathed, remembering what Falley told me she once saw in Tommy’s bedroom. “It’s his.”

  “Don’t you fucking touch her,” Tommy shouted, lunging forward and pouncing on the bed to snatch the doll from my hand. The mattress groaned as he landed on it, and after pulling the doll away from me, he clutched it to his chest. He stroked its hair, smoothed a wrinkle from its dress, and when he spoke again, his voice was strained.

  “Get out,” he said.

  “Sylvie, let’s go.” Ben took my hand and pulled me up as he stood. He started leading me toward the bedroom door, but I resisted, watching what looked like tears gather in Tommy’s eyes.

  “No, wait,” I said, and I took a step back toward the bed. “Tommy, I’m sorry I upset you. I’m sorry I . . . touched your doll. Please, just—tell me what you did with Persephone’s things. Tell me what you know, and then we’ll leave, I swear.”

  Tommy narrowed his eyes, squeezing out a single tear that slithered down his skin. “My doll?” he said, his voice pinched. “Are you fucking serious right now? You think she’s just a doll? Just a fucking doll?”

  He jumped off the bed, the doll slipping from his grasp and landing facedown on the comforter. When he started to charge at me, I drew in a quick gulp of air, but then he fell, tripping over one of the many things I’d thrown around the room.

  Ben grabbed me by the arm—much more tightly now—and pulled me out into the hallway, back through the kitchen, and toward the living room.

  “No,” I protested. “No, stop, Ben. I didn’t even get to check the dresser, I have to—stop!”

  He dragged me toward the trailer door, and when he opened it and pulled me through it, the cold air lashed my face, his fingers digging so deep into my arm I could already picture the bruises they’d leave. Then he slammed the door behind us, finally letting go of me at the top of the stairs, but the momentum sent me sputtering down the steps, and my feet landed hard on the slush that coated the sidewalk.

  “What the hell?” I demanded. “Why did you do that?”

  He walked down the steps, shaking his head. “He’s insane, Sylvie,” he said. “He was coming after you.”

  “That?” I asked, gesturing toward the trailer. “He tripped! He’s a clumsy idiot. He couldn’t have hurt me. And I still had the dresser drawers to check. I could have found something!”

  My chest heaved through my words; my throat tightened with missed opportunity. I felt tears burrowing in the corners of my eyes.

  “You weren’t going to find anything,” Ben yelled. “There’s nothing to find in there.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, then quickly closed it. There was so much certainty in the way he spoke, as if it wasn’t even possible that a single item of Persephone’s could still be with Tommy. But I hadn’t even checked the dresser or kitchen cabinets before Ben had hauled me from the trailer, his hands and arms constricting as a straightjacket.

  “How do you know there’s nothing?” My heart was beating hot and wild. “What was going on between you two in there? He seemed to think you knew a lot more than you’ve said.”

  “What? I have no idea what he meant by any of that. He’s just crazy. He’s completely unhinged. Didn’t you hear what he said about that doll? It’s like he thinks it’s a person or something. And did you get a good look at the thing? It looked like . . .”

  He trailed off, but it didn’t matter. I knew what he was going to say. It looked like Persephone.

  “He seemed to know something about you,” I persisted, pushing the doll out of my mind. It didn’t matter right then; Ben was only deflecting. “And what was with the way you two were glaring at each other? Have you spoken to him before—before today, I mean?”

  Ben shivered against the cold.

  “Damn it,” he said, ignoring me as he looked back toward the door. “I left my coat in there. Oh, whatever, it doesn’t matter. We have to get out of here, Sylvie.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you answer me!” I didn’t care how loudly I yelled it. Let there be witnesses, I thought. Let there finally be people who see and know the truth. “Are you in cahoots with Tommy?”

  “Cahoots?” Ben repeated. “No! Before today, I hadn’t even seen the guy since I was, like, nineteen.”

  “But you’ve spoken with him,” I said. “Haven’t you?”

  The tears welling in my eyes were hot as my heart. I wiped them away as soon as they spilled onto my cheeks. I couldn’t let Ben think I was breaking, or that these were tears of fragility. They were angry tears, furious tears; they were how-could-I-be-so-stupid tears.

  “No,” Ben said, looking at me now with a careful blend of curiosity and concern. “I haven’t spoken to him, either.”

  “Then what was he talking about?” I spit out the question, my voice thick and warped.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Ben said. “He was messing with me. He was messing with both of us. He’s just crazy, Sylvie. That’s all.”

  “Maybe,” I said, brushing my cheek with the back of my hand. “Or maybe I’m the crazy one for thinking for one second that anyone but you killed my sister.”

  “What?” Ben fired. “Sylvie—”

  Something inside me spurred me forward, and I pushed him, watching with satisfaction as he stumbled backward.

  “Hey,” he protested, but I pushed him again—only, this time, I slipped on the slushy ground, and I nearly fell. He grabbed me by the elbows then, as if trying to stabilize me, and I punched at him instead, my fists landing on his chest with feeble, impotent thumps.

  “You did it!” I cried. “Just admit it! Just tell me the truth!”

  I could hear myself sobbing, could feel my arms growing weaker and weaker the harder I swung them.

  “You know I didn’t kill her, Sylvie,” Ben said, his voice quiet and gentle, like someone trying to lure an animal into a trap. “I loved her. God, I—I loved her so much.”

  “If that’s true, then why did you hurt her?” My fists bumped against his chest while he held me. “Why did you abuse her all the time?”

  Ben let go of my arms and took a step back. I wobbled, trying to regain my balance, and when I looked at him, my breath coming out in uneven gasps, I saw that he seemed stunned.

  “Abuse her?” he asked.

  “The bruises!” I pointed to my wrist, my neck, my ribs. “She had them everywhere. All the time.”

  “No,” Ben said, slowly shaking his head.

  “Yes! She showed me every single one. She made me—she asked me to paint over them, so nobody would know. You must have seen that. You must have known that I knew.”

  “No,” Ben said again. “You don’t understand. She . . .”

  “S
he what? Deserved it? Provoked you? Don’t even think of saying that.”

  “No. No, of course not. She . . .”

  “She what, Ben? What?”

  “She asked me to bruise her!”

  I took a step back, the tears on my face seeming to freeze.

  “What?” I said. “No—no, she didn’t. That’s insane. Stop lying to me!”

  Ben’s head drooped, his eyes staring at the ground. “It’s true,” he said, and he sounded so defeated, like he’d lost something just now and knew that he’d never get it back. “It—the bruises—the whole thing—it’s not what you’ve been thinking.”

  My eyes widened. The familiarity of that phrase, the gnawing ache of those words—night after night, It’s not what you’re thinking, Sylvie—made my throat sting and swell.

  “She asked me to bruise her,” he said again. Then, his eyes lifting tentatively toward my face, he straightened his posture, shuffled his feet.

  “I have proof,” he added. He took a step toward me, his black-hole eyes, with all their gravitational pull and imprisoned light, looking deeply, imploringly, into mine.

  “Proof?” I heard myself ask.

  “Yes,” he said, inching toward me again. “But you’re going to have to trust me, okay? It’s at my house. Will you come with me please, so I can show you?”

  22

  The thought of being alone with Ben in his house on the hill—where he knew all escape routes, where there’d be no one around to hear me if I screamed—made the hair on my arms stand on end. Even through my coat, I could feel the goose bumps swelling on my skin.

  “No,” I told him. “How could you ever even prove that?”

  I shivered, the cold air wrapping around me as I stood on the curb, and I shifted my eyes toward Tommy’s trailer. I had a feeling he was watching us, his gaze like an icy hand against my cheek, but when I glanced over Ben’s shoulder at the windows, the curtains remained undisturbed.

  “It’s in a letter,” Ben said. “But you’ll have to read it yourself, or you won’t believe me.”

  “A letter from who?”

  He paused. “From Persephone.”

  My breath snagged on the back of my throat. A letter from Persephone?

  After she died, I tried so hard to resurrect her voice, scouring my room for notes she’d once written me. All I managed to find, though, were my two most recent birthday cards from her—one still on my desk, where it had been propped since October, and one I’d tossed into a drawer. The font of the words inside each card was so distinctly hers, and I stared at the series of too-short paragraphs, memorizing the curves of each letter. A couple days later, when the detectives returned and asked for samples of Persephone’s handwriting, I was reluctant to hand the cards over, even though Falley and Parker had assured me they’d return them.

  As Ben and I stood in front of Tommy’s trailer, I remembered that moment—“We just need our guy to examine them,” they told me, the only explanation they offered—and I found myself staring at Ben’s face, my lips slightly parted. When I’d spoken to Falley and Parker over the last week, they’d both said that evidence had emerged that led them to not press assault charges against Ben. Was it possible that this “proof” Ben wanted to show me was the evidence that neither of them had been willing to discuss with me? And if that evidence was a letter from Persephone, wouldn’t they have needed something, all those years ago, to verify its authenticity?

  “Did they—” I tried. “Did the police ever do, like, a handwriting analysis of this letter you’re talking about?”

  Ben cocked his head to the side. “You knew about that?”

  “No, I . . .” Despite the cold, my palms felt sweaty. “The detectives—they asked me for samples of Persephone’s handwriting once. But they never said why.”

  “Oh,” Ben said. “Yeah, this was why. I showed them the letter—to explain about the bruises—and they had to make sure I didn’t forge it.”

  My eyes widened, my breath shaky between my lips. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’ll go back to your house and read Persephone’s letter.”

  • • •

  The Emorys’ driveway was steep, flanked on either side by evergreens that stood in lines like soldiers on guard. It could have been the shade those trees provided, or the fact that the afternoon was quickly slipping toward evening, but I could have sworn that everything grew darker the higher I drove up the hill.

  I followed Ben’s car past the main house, that brick monstrosity I’d never seen up close before, and I tasted something bitter on the back of my tongue. Will Emory, the man who had so thoroughly unraveled my mother, could have easily been inside there somewhere, drinking a cup of coffee or scrolling through his tablet, completely indifferent to the pain he’d caused—not only to Mom, but to all the other women whose hearts he’d unstitched throughout the years.

  A couple hundred feet past the mansion, Ben veered off into a circular driveway and pulled up in front of a small cottage that looked remarkably different from the main house. The guesthouse, as he’d called it, had immaculate white siding and pale blue shutters. For a moment, the setting sun winked through the trees and glazed the house with a glow resembling candlelight.

  I parked behind Ben, leaving a few feet of space between our cars in case I needed to leave quickly. When I stepped outside, my muscles stiffened against the cold. My breath flared out before me, frosting the air, and I saw that Ben was already at the front door of the cottage.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said, as if I were a guest at a party he was throwing. He opened the door and crossed the threshold. “I know this was a lot to ask.”

  He gestured for me to come inside, and if it weren’t for the heat I could feel from within the house, I might have paused a bit longer before following him in. As he closed the door behind me, my eyes swept across the house. There was a bedroom to our left through a set of French doors, a dining room to our right, and in front of us a hallway that led to a shiny white kitchen. Off of the kitchen there were two closed doors—a bathroom, I supposed, and maybe a closet as well—but from where I stood, I couldn’t see an exit other than the door I’d just come through.

  “It’s not much,” Ben said, seeming to notice that I was studying the layout. “And actually, most of it’s a dumping ground for stuff my dad doesn’t want in the main house anymore. But I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I like it.”

  I turned to him, my gaze as sharp as I could manage. “So where’s the letter?”

  “Right,” he said. “In here.”

  He opened one of the paneled glass doors to our left and stepped into his bedroom, flicking on the light switch as he moved toward a dresser in the corner. I followed him in but stayed near the doorway, my eyes creeping over his navy comforter, the silver laptop on his nightstand, the retainer box propped against an alarm clock. In front of the window overlooking the driveway, there was a cluttered desk holding up stacks of textbooks, and the back of its chair was draped with clothes.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Ben said as he bent down to open the bottom dresser drawer. “This is actually supposed to be the living room, you know. But I like the French doors.” He chuckled. “My dad says I’m compromising the integrity of the guesthouse—his exact words, by the way—because I don’t have a real living room and I’m just using the back bedroom for storage.”

  He pulled a shoebox out of the drawer, and as he straightened back up, he held it as if its contents were fragile. “I don’t know why I felt the need to tell you that,” he said, looking at me. “I think I’m just nervous.”

  “Why?” I asked, crossing my arms as I watched him sit down on the edge of the bed. He removed the lid from the box, and I could see that there were folded pieces of paper inside.

  “Because . . .” he started, his voice sounding farther away than just the few feet of space between us. “It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at any of her letters. We, um, we couldn’t call each other back then, because
your mom didn’t—well, you know.”

  He dug through the contents of the box until he found what he was looking for, a crisply folded sheet of paper that seemed a brighter white than the rest.

  “We wrote each other these letters so we could have them when we were apart,” he continued. “And this one in particular . . .” He held it up to show me, waving it in the air before unfolding it. “This is the one I gave to the police. It’s not even the original—they still have that, I think—but they let me keep a copy after they confirmed it was real.”

  The paper was splayed open in his hands now. I could see Persephone’s handwriting, and it took everything I had to blink away the sudden stinging in my eyes. Ben stared at the letter, his eyes flicking back and forth across the page.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Sorry, I’m just reading it.” He turned the paper over, and after a few more seconds, he straightened his back and looked at me. “Maybe this was a bad idea.”

  “Why?” I snapped, taking a step forward. “Doesn’t paint you as innocently as you remembered?” I reached for the letter, but he leaned back and held it flat against his chest.

  “No,” he said. “That’s not it.”

  Again, I tried to grab it, but he stopped me, curling his fingers around my wrist—not tightly, not aggressively, but the insistence in his touch froze me just the same.

  “Sylvie, stop. Just wait.”

  I jerked my hand out of his grasp and crossed my arms again. He turned the paper over. I waited for what felt like a minute, but just as I leaned forward, ready to try once more to pluck it from his hands, Ben straightened his arm and held out the letter.

  “Here,” he said. “Just—remember how young she was when she wrote this, okay? She was only a teenager, and I’m sure you remember how teenagers can be.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, snatching the letter.

  The second I saw her words and her writing up close, I was transfixed, a white noise humming in my ears.

  Ben, Persephone wrote, and I could hear his name almost as clearly as nights when she whispered it into the darkness of our room.