The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  “They didn’t ask me about the necklace until a couple weeks after her body was found,” Ben continued. “And she was my girlfriend, Sylvie. It was her necklace. I wasn’t just going to give it to them so they could—I don’t know—hold it as evidence forever, or somehow use it as evidence against me. But, listen, if I’d known how much it meant to you—and I should have, I should have known—but I was nineteen and so stupid and I was only thinking of myself, of what I’d lost. So I kept it.”

  “Get off my property right now or I will call the police,” a second voice shouted.

  “Yeah, you do that. Go call the police. I’d love to have a chat with them.”

  My head was reeling, the sky whirling in circles above me, but I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, looking toward Will Emory’s house. It was a couple hundred feet away, beyond the bend in the driveway. From where we stood, all I could see was the glow from the spotlight over the garage.

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “But that’s my dad, and the other one sounds like . . .”

  He started walking down the driveway, and despite how I’d just run away from him, how I could still feel the grip of his fingers on my arms, I followed him.

  “Look, I’m willing to make an even trade. Just like old times. They left this stuff at my house yesterday. Then they hauled ass out of there and—”

  “They?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to me? They were harassing me, asking me all these questions. I need more money if I’m gonna have to deal with shit like that from now on.”

  As we crept down the driveway, we stayed close to a row of evergreen trees, careful not to crunch too loudly over the snow with our feet. When we drew near enough to make out their faces—Will’s face, Tommy’s face—I was about to take another step forward, but Ben held his arm in front of me. He put his index finger to his lips, then gestured for me to follow him to one of the larger evergreens a few feet closer to where they stood in the driveway. We crouched down behind it, my heart thumping.

  “I’m not your personal savings account, Thomas. I’ve told you this.”

  “Just look,” Tommy said. “Look—it’s her blanket or whatever.”

  Through the branches, I watched as Tommy opened a box—the box, I saw through squinting eyes, the one I’d brought to his house the day before, then stupidly left behind when Ben dragged me out the door. I hadn’t really thought about it—there had been too many other things tugging me this way and that—but now, seeing it in Tommy’s arms, I could barely breathe. He pulled out a single corner of Persephone’s afghan, and my stomach lurched.

  “See?” Tommy said. “I bet she used this all the time. Way more often than an old sweater or a dingy copy of some dumbass book—and you paid for all that shit no problem.”

  It took me a moment to catch up—I was still staring at the afghan—but as I began to process Tommy’s words, I felt the nausea slither up my esophagus. I tried to swallow it down, but everything inside me was stiffening, my throat heavy and immobile as stone.

  Will had Persephone’s things. Tommy had said he’d sold them to someone who needed them more than he did. But why would Will have needed them? My mind raced through possibilities. Had Persephone’s death made him feel guilty for ignoring his daughter during her life? Had he sought, too late, to know her through the things that had been hers?

  I looked at Ben, whose face was contorted by confusion and surprise. Still in the dark about his dad’s relationship to Persephone, he had no context with which to make sense of it.

  “You’re not supposed to just show up like this,” Will scolded. “There’s a procedure.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck the procedure, because I called your secretary all day and she gave me nothing but bullshit. And I’m so sick of your rules. That was great and all when I needed a lawyer, or a place to live, or even back when it happened, but you know what I realized? I hold the fucking cards, and they’re all coming up aces.”

  “Oh, is that right—you hold the cards?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, let’s call the police, then, shall we? I’ll tell them how you’re trespassing on my property, and then you can tell them . . . whatever it is you want, and we’ll see who they believe—the mayor, or a convicted sex offender.”

  “They’ll believe me,” Tommy said, but there was something in his voice now that sounded unsure.

  “All right, then,” Will said. “Do you want to call or should I? Because to tell you the truth, you’ve never been anything but a headache, Thomas, and I’d be happy to see you arrested again. I only gave you money when it happened because you were so easily bought. Such a bargain. But I guess that’s what happens when you never have any money—you have no idea what things are actually worth.”

  Will took a step toward Tommy, and his eyes, blacker than his son’s, glinted in the light.

  “You could have drained me of millions,” he continued. “Although, at a certain point, I would have just found other ways of dealing with you, I suppose.”

  “Bullshit,” Tommy spat. “I see what you’re doing—you’re trying to scare me—but I’m not afraid of you. I know you’re not a killer.”

  “I’m not?”

  “I saw your face that night. You were fucked up about it. Snot running down your nose. Crying all over her. Begging her to ‘wake up, oh God, just please wake up,’ even as you were dumping her on the ground. It was pathetic. You’re not a killer. It was just what you’ve always said. You were pushed too far.”

  “I’d be careful, Thomas. I’m feeling a little pushed right now.”

  “Dad,” Ben said. He stood up from behind the tree and walked toward his father. At the same time, as if we had choreographed the move, I followed him, my body in step with his as we stomped onto the driveway.

  Tommy startled when he saw us. The box slipped from his hands, and I grabbed it.

  Will, too, looked shaken, the fierceness in his expression now replaced with unmasked surprise. “Ben,” he said, and then, looking at me, his eyes narrowing in on mine, he added, “You. What are you two doing—spying on me?”

  “What are you doing?” Ben demanded. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Cut the shit, Dad,” Ben said through his teeth. He took a step toward his father, and even through his sweatshirt and jeans, I could tell that all the muscles in his body were tensed. “Please tell me you didn’t do it.”

  “Do what?” Will asked. “You’re babbling, son.”

  “Tell me you didn’t kill her.”

  The air in my lungs solidified. I managed only the thinnest breath.

  “Kill who?” Will asked. “That—that girlfriend of yours? Really, Ben, it’s been years. You have to move on from that.”

  Ben grabbed Will by the shoulders and pushed him against the garage door. I heard Will’s back slam against the wood.

  “Take your hands off me, son. Right now,” Will said.

  His voice was as cold as I knew the air should have been—but I couldn’t feel anything, not even my own body. I could only watch as the scene unfolded, as if I were in the audience of a play, as if I could leave anytime I wanted to, and the story would end right there.

  “Right now, Ben,” Will said again.

  There was a part of Ben that almost obeyed his father—a flicker in his arms that seemed ready to let go—but then, his back rippling with the force of the movement, he pushed Will harder against the garage.

  “Did you do it?” he yelled, smacking his hand against the door, inches from Will’s head.

  Will winced, closing his eyes for a second, but he opened them again at the sound that spewed from Tommy. At first, it sounded like he was choking, but then, when I looked at him, I saw he was laughing—a textured, guttural noise.

  Ben turned his head toward Tommy, still holding his father to the garage.

  “What’s so funny?” he snapped.
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  “I’m sorry, this is just—oh man.” Tommy covered his mouth, but then his fingers slipped from his face when another snicker burst from his lips. His laughter condensed in the air, his breath vivid and white as it rushed right out of him.

  “Fuck the money, okay?” he continued. “I changed my mind. I don’t want it. This right here is priceless.” He laughed again. “And—holy shit—so worth the wait. I mean, your face, Benji.”

  “Thomas,” Will warned, but Ben tightened his grip on his father’s shoulder, his eyes never leaving Tommy’s face.

  “Nah, don’t ‘Thomas’ me. I’m done with that. I mean, he heard us, right? Cat’s out of the bag now. Cat’s meowing up a fucking storm.” His laughter doubled him over, his hands clutching his knees. “Oh man. This is so—” Then he cleared his throat, straightening back up and attempting a serious expression. “No, but it is true. Your dad killed your girlfriend.”

  And just like that, I felt the cold again.

  28

  The air bit at my skin, my bones glazed with ice, my blood freezing in my veins. To move right then would have been to shatter, so I stayed rooted to the ground, only a thread of air spooling in and out of my lungs.

  As Tommy broke into laughter again, Ben let go of Will, his arms going slack at his sides.

  “I saw it happen, man,” Tommy said to Ben. “I saw you leave with her, even after you dropped her off at her house. And it took me a while to find my mom’s car keys—that bitch was always hiding them from me—but I followed you anyway. Or I tried to. Tried to figure out where you might have gone. I mean, it was so weird, you know? You dropped her off, just like you always did, but then she came back and you guys left together again. That wasn’t how you usually did it. I wanted to know where you were going. Where you were taking her. She should have been off to bed, Benji.”

  He sounded angry, like a parent scolding a child for missing curfew.

  “I couldn’t find you,” he continued. “I drove around for a while, but I didn’t know what route you took. What I did find, though . . .” He looked at Will and licked his lips. “Well, that was so much more interesting. Mind you, it was too late for Persephone by then. But if it’s any consolation, your dad really was very pathetic that night. He was sitting in the snow beside her, sobbing into his hands like a little kid. It disgusted me. I mean, if you’re going to do something like that, then fucking do it. Don’t sit around and be a crybaby about it.”

  He shook his head, a grimace pulling at his lips. Then he looked at me, and I stared back, unable to blink.

  “For the record,” he said, “I never wanted your sister dead. She and I were the same, okay? But when I saw that she was gone, I realized it made sense for her to die.”

  He cocked his stare back toward Ben. “She wasn’t yours anymore, Benji. She wasn’t yours to pick up and drop off and drive to the park where you kept her locked up in your car for hours every night.” His smile slithered across his face. “That’s right—I followed you more than once. I knew it was only a matter of time before Persephone realized you were nothing but a rich kid, sucking off your daddy’s teat for life—and when she did, I’d be there to show her we were the same. Only—you were so possessive of her, weren’t you? Staring me down as you drove past my house at night, like I had no right to stand in my own yard and look at whatever I wanted. Waiting for me at the bus lane—Jesus, dude, you’d already graduated, and there you were, back at school—just to tell me to stop sending her letters, as if you were the only one allowed to speak to her.”

  Tommy snapped his eyes toward me again. “So, by dying, see, your sister was finally free of this asshole. She didn’t belong to him anymore. She didn’t belong to anyone. By dying, she became even more like me—neither of us had anybody—and you know what? In the end, that made her more mine than she’d ever been his.”

  He chuckled. “But your dad,” he said, turning back to Ben. “Oh my God—that night—I finally saw where you got your patheticness from. Once he finally noticed me standing there, noticed there was another fucking car idling in the street behind his, he scrambled to keep me quiet. He explained the whole thing.” He licked his lips again. “His dirty little secret. Well, actually—at first he tried to play it off like he’d just found her there, but I’m not an idiot, I could see the marks on her neck. His hands were shaking—like this—” He demonstrated. “So I told him I knew that he’d strangled her, and then that’s when he told me.”

  “Told you what?” Ben asked, his voice low and steady.

  “Why he picked her up in the first place. Why he stopped the car. Why he put his hands around her neck. He was so stupid, though.”

  Tommy looked beyond Ben to the tall, black-eyed statue behind him. “Weren’t you?” he demanded. “I guess you were just trying to justify what you’d done, but—” He returned his gaze to Ben. “He was just giving me more ammo. And he realized that himself, soon enough. That’s when he offered to pay me off.”

  Tommy snorted at the memory.

  “We were both shivering out there—the snow’s coming down, Persephone’s getting whiter and whiter—and he’s pulling hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet, telling me there’s more where that came from.”

  He looked at Will again.

  “Pathetic,” he said. “I probably wouldn’t have even told the police anyway. I know how cops are in this town. They’re all—”

  “Is it true?” Ben cut in, and though I could only see him in profile, I could tell that his eyes, staring at Will, were as arctic as the air.

  Will looked at his feet for a moment, then lifted his chin to meet Ben’s gaze. “No,” he said. “This story he’s concocted, it’s ludicrous. He doesn’t even—”

  “Stop.” Ben took a step toward his father, his voice measured. “I’m giving you one more chance to tell me the truth.” I watched his shoulders rise as he took a breath. “Did you kill Persephone?”

  Staring at his son, Will’s face sagged, his iron jaw seeming to soften, but when he finally spoke, his answer was unchanged. “No.”

  Ben punched him in the face. I heard the sound of it—like a loud crack of ice—before I processed the swinging of his arm. Tommy’s laughter continued, high-pitched, but as soon as Will straightened up, his hand on his jaw, I couldn’t even hear it anymore. Will’s eyes flashed with a rage so bright that Ben actually took a step back.

  “You want to know why I picked her up that night?” Will asked, all pretense dropped. “Because of you. This is on you, Ben.”

  It seemed to take a moment for words to come to him, but when they did, Ben spit them out as if they burned his tongue.

  “Why? Because I let her out of my car when I shouldn’t have? Fuck you. I made a mistake, one that I will always regret, but that doesn’t mean I’m—”

  Will put a hand up in the air to silence him. Ben’s immediate compliance suggested it was a gesture he was accustomed to obeying.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Will said. “I’m talking about your insubordination.”

  “My what?”

  “I told you I didn’t want you dating her.”

  “Are you serious?” Ben asked. “I was nineteen.”

  “That doesn’t matter!” Will bellowed. “In my day, I listened to my father. Even when what he wanted was in direct opposition with what I wanted. That’s what a son does. But you—” He paused, a look of disgust curling his upper lip. “You failed me. And when I saw her walking that night, I took the opportunity to set things right.”

  “Set things right?”

  “She accepted my offer of a ride, and when she got in the car, I simply told her I would drive her home as soon as she heard me out. She was polite at first. Respectful. She listened when I explained that the two of you were from different worlds and it would never work out. She nodded along and seemed to understand my points—that staying with you now would only mean greater pain in the future, that you were meant for more and she would only keep you from achiev
ing everything you were destined to. It seemed—for a little while, at least—that we were on the same page. But then she said, and I quote, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ Classy girl you had there.”

  Ben shook his head, his body vibrating with rage or horror or even just cold, and when he spoke, his words trembled, too. “So you just killed her?”

  “Do you think I meant for that to happen? Of course not. But she tried to get out of the car, and I still had things to say—I couldn’t just let her leave. And then I don’t, I don’t really know what happened. I sort of blacked out, I think—she was being so impossible—and the next thing I knew, I had my hands around her neck and she was just limp.”

  “And then you just left her!” Ben exploded. “You just dumped her on the side of the road, let people think she was missing for three fucking days. You saw I was in agony worrying about her. And you didn’t say a word!”

  “I didn’t say a word because I knew it would kill you.”

  “Oh, really, which part? That my girlfriend was dead, or that my father killed her?”

  “Neither,” Will said. “That it was your fault. That if you’d just listened to me from the start and done what I said, she would have still been alive. I was trying to save you from that, son. Because I love you.”

  Ben stared at him, his mouth slightly parted. “No,” he said quietly—and then louder. “No. This isn’t you throwing the knife at me in a rage. This is you killing someone. And you’re going to stand there and say you were justified in what you did—that it was actually my fault—just because you didn’t want us to be together? Just because you’re such a narcissistic fuck who couldn’t stand that I was dating someone from the other side of town? God, this fucking family, I—”

  “This family is all that we are! You have never understood that, and that’s why you continue to waste your time working for an embarrassing salary at that hospital. You—”

  “Tell him,” I said.

  Ben and Will looked at me, and it was clear from their expressions that they had both forgotten I was there.