by Mira Gibson
Holly had told herself if Rose picked it up, she would walk out the door and never come back.
Rose hadn’t just picked it up. She’d seized it, examined the plastic for punctures, exhaling with heavy relief to find it intact.
Wind whipped at her sideways, jarring her from the memory, as snow flurried down from the roof and settled under her collar. She couldn’t wait under the portico forever, not when there was no indication of Rose inside.
Out of frustration, Holly aimed her revolver at the deadbolt, but then thought better of it. A gunshot would terrify Tucker if he was asleep in his bedroom, not to mention set off the security alarms, alerting the police. If her sister was passed out on the couch in a drug induced coma, which in Holly’s mind would be the best case scenario, Rose would lose custody of her son the second the police put two and two together.
Descending the slick steps with caution and trekking through knee-deep snowdrift, her revolver gripped firmly in her right hand, she started for the back of the house.
The snow became compact as she cut towards the porch and she noted tracks leading out to the lake, but thought nothing of it. The second she realized the sliding glass door leading into the living room was open, her stomach dropped. Her fears mounted tenfold in an instant at the distressed sound of Tucker shrieking from within the house.
As she walked swiftly, kicking up powdery snow and wincing at the sting of it creeping down her boots, Tucker’s cry erupting into full-blown wailing, concern sprung in her chest.
Slush lay over the porch, a sign it had been salted. When she reached the sliding glass door, she made an honest effort to stomp the sopping mess off her boots, but the attempt only splashed ice water onto her jeans as well as the shiny wooden floor inside the house.
It crossed her mind to take her boots off so as not to warp the wooden floor with water stains. Back when she had visited often, Rose’s every complaint had centered on Holly’s inability to appreciate nice things—Use a coaster, and Don’t bang the piano keys, and Turn on the exhaust fan when you shower or else we’ll have a mildew problem. But Tucker’s cries were lacerating her eardrums, a horrific sound that also hit her like a knife to her gut, her nephew screaming bloody murder and at times gurgling just to breathe.
She eased the sliding glass door closed behind her.
Rose wasn’t passed out on the couch.
As she charged through the living room, which could’ve been featured in Better Homes & Gardens it was so artfully decorated—oak furnishings, a plush pink sofa-set, abstract paintings on the walls that to Holly had always looked both childish and pretentious—her ears pricked up, attuned to Rose’s domestic sound effects, but there weren’t any. The house was quiet except for her nephew’s anxiety.
But that didn’t mean it was safe. She cocked her revolver.
Though Tucker’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs, she followed his cries to the end of the first floor hallway and found him standing in his crib, his little hands clutching the railing, his face drenched in tears, snot running from his nose.
Seeing him, her heart ached with regret for the years that had been wasted, the estrangement having prevented her from being in her nephew’s life. As she searched blindly for the light switch panel, her vision blurry, tears misting her eyes, she smiled at Tucker in hopes it would calm him. Discretely, she tucked her revolver down the back of her jeans.
He quieted when the lights came on, his expression brightened with recognition, and soon a goofy grin spread across his face.
She couldn’t believe how big he was. His strawberry-blonde hair was a mess of cowlicks just like hers and as she scooped him up, making a ledge of her forearm for him to sit and hugging him tightly for all the years she had missed—God, I love you—it dawned on her how strange it was for him to be in the playroom instead of upstairs.
For reasons that had seemed cruel, Rose had kept Tucker down here to Ferberize him during infancy, the grander plan of which was to move him upstairs into his big-boy bed when he was old enough. During the few phone calls Rose had placed to her sister over their years estranged, she had found ways to mention this amidst her frenzy as though the subject of Tucker helped her catch her breath between panicking over things Holly rarely understood.
But he was four now.
Tucker murmured and seemed suddenly at ease staring up at her as though he understood he was with family. But he hadn’t seen her since he was one. He couldn’t possibly remember her. She suddenly realized Tucker thought his mother had returned.
“You’re okay,” she cooed, her voice going high and breathy to soothe him. She swayed and he nuzzled into the crux of her neck, his wet face pressing against her skin. He felt like warm putty and smelled a bit poopy.
The crib, the diapers, was this coddling or negligence?
“Let’s get you changed, huh?”
She stepped carefully over scattered toys towards the dresser, but clipped her heel on a plastic train. When she glanced down, the smiling gray face of Thomas the Tank Engine was staring up at her. She kicked it aside and juggled the weight of her nephew as she pulled the top drawer open. It was filled with linens so she tried a few more and found a bag of diapers in the bottom drawer.
Holly felt uneasiness grow as she changed her nephew out of his soiled diaper and into a fresh one.
Rose had been outside when she’d called. Holly had heard wind grazing the receiver, muffling her sister’s disjointed assertions. Those tracks in the snow led straight to the lake and what little light the porch fixture had provided, she had been able to tell her sisters footprints veered out onto the ice.
As she got Tucker situated in his crib, his verbal skills returned and he protested, “No!” then called her Mom a number of times, clutching at her hair where locks spilled over her shoulder into his face.
“I’ll be right back,” she assured him, smoothing his hair down and giving him a nervous smile. She grabbed the plastic train off the carpet and offered it to him, but he chucked it at the wall, yelling, Bang!
It caught her off guard and because of it, she walked with a sense of urgency down the hallway. A harrowing intuition told her that she would find Rose out on the ice, but to cover her bases she first checked every room in the house.
The downstairs bathroom contained only the faintest scent of her sister’s perfume. Benjamin’s office was airless. There was no sign of Rose in any of the rooms upstairs, though her sister had left the master bedroom in complete disarray—dresser drawers open to varying degrees, the comforter a mountainous heap on the floor, the TV chattering from the corner of the room.
Leaving the warm house, the icy wind knocked the air right out of her lungs. She glanced towards the lake and noticed tracks in the snow. Following them and noting how the footprints became further and further apart, which confirmed her sister had broken out running towards the lake and onto the ice, she neared the icy shore and scanned the darkness across the lake.
She was nervous about wading out onto the ice. Not one winter had gone by without news reports of children or some drunken fool with grand delusions of fishing having fallen through the ice.
Passing the snowdrift onto the black sheet of ice, her heart fluttering so rapidly in her chest that she felt suddenly light-headed, she pressed onward. After letting out an uneasy breath, shifting her gaze from the ice beneath her boots to the darkness ahead, she sucked in a lung full of air as if oxygen could loosen the knot that was twisting in her stomach.
Rose had thought Benjamin’s car was pulling into the driveway. She’d hung up on Holly. And whatever had followed compelled her to flee out onto the lake.
Her heart punched out of rhythm when she spotted a hole in the ice up ahead. She didn’t blink as she eased farther out, fearing the as she began closing the five-yard gap, Tucker’s high-pitched voice echoing through her head—Bang.
Though it was excruciatingly dim, she saw blood streaked across the ice at her feet. It was unmistakable, yet her mind kept offer
ing alternatives—mud, oil, paint—pathetically hopeful that it wasn’t what she thought. Kneeling, she touched it then examined her fingertips, but they were clean. The blood had frozen to the ice. Her gaze snapped up, locking on the hole now three yards ahead.
If the ice thinned where it neared the hole, she wouldn’t get away with walking. She knew enough to spread her weight out as much as possible to limit the risk of falling through so she eased down onto her stomach, planting her elbows on the ice, and began pulling herself the rest of the way.
Soon the ice was wet, lake water having seeped up. She ignored her numbing thighs, the chill against her stomach where her coat failed to meet the waistband of her jeans, and came to the edge of the hole. The surface of the lake was as smooth as glass. Black. Her sister wasn’t floating beneath.
Holly muscled backwards, pushing herself away from the hole to safety and wondering why she had sensed her sister out here. She wanted to scream and cry, but she had walled-off those emotions years ago. Instead she hung her head, letting her forehead rest on the ice, pinching her eyes shut, and hunting for ideas as to what she should do next, where she should look, who she should call if not the police. Could she call the cops? Or would she be met with the rigmarole of having to wait forty-eight hours before filing a missing persons report. Was Rose even missing?
When Holly opened her eyes, her sister’s lifeless face was staring up at her through the ice.
She gasped, scrambling to her knees then shuffling backwards, straining to grasp that Rose was trapped under the ice.
Not trapped.
Dead.
She couldn’t get back to the house fast enough. Slipping with every third step, she ran towards the shore and picked up her pace when she reached snowdrift where it had blown out onto the lake.
How could this be happening?
What had Rose gotten herself into that she'd wound up dead beneath the ice while her son slept inside their home?
Why would her sister run away from the house instead of towards it where she could have easily locked herself in, called the police, and waited for help to arrive?
Holly had a good mind to do just that, but as soon as she locked the sliding glass door behind her, the disturbing reality of it all took hold.
She barely heard Tucker call out, “Mommy!”
“Give me a minute,” she said, not liking the dismissing tone in her voice, as she pulled it together enough to find the staircase.
Taking the treads two at a time, she reached the landing and hurried down the hallway into the master bedroom. After closing the door to shut out Tucker’s incessant questions—What time is it? and Can I have water? and Daddy?—she unzipped her coat pocket and used the frozen claw of her hand to scoop out her cell phone then searched through her contacts for Benjamin Wythe’s number.
The line opened up after one ring, but before his voice came through, Holly heard the melodic giggling of what sounded like a young woman in the background.
“I checked out the house,” she asserted to steal his attention from whatever woman he was with this time. “You need to get over here.”
Benjamin directed his smooth voice away from the receiver, getting his guest to quiet, but his tone was gravely deep addressing Holly. “What’s the problem?”
“Rose is dead.”
He said nothing.
“Hello?”
“You shouldn’t have called me.”
“What?” she blurted out, astonished. “You asked me to come over here.”
“You should call the police.”
“I plan to,” she shot back. His reaction wasn’t what she’d expected. Tense silence ensued. He didn’t ask how his wife had died or where Holly had found her. He didn’t seem alarmed or shocked. Benjamin had been absent from Rose’s life to say the least, but she would’ve thought she’d get more from him than this. “Benji, your wife is dead. It looks to me like she was killed. Get your ass home.”
In the background, the woman whispered something breathy and Holly could almost see her cloying at the forty-year old man, maybe pouting for sex or at the very least eager to compete with the caller who had the audacity to take up any of her lover’s time.
Benjamin rushed through a stunted goodbye and Holly heard a click, the line having gone dead. She snorted a laugh, appalled he could hang up on her so easily.
Her hands were thawing out so she tucked her cell in her pocket and scanned the bedroom, but she was too overwhelmed for her eyes to work.
The police would comb every inch of this house as soon as they concluded Rose Wythe had been murdered and Holly would be damned if she let them get sidetracked from catching her sister’s killer.
She hoped like hell Rose hadn’t relapsed, but she systematically worked her way through every room in the house checking for hidden stashes anyway.
After twenty minutes, she had found a dime-bag taped to the underside of the toilet bowl lid and three 8-balls—one tucked in the toe of a Jimmy Choo, another wedged beneath a mini-fridge on Benjamin’s side of the bed, the man liked his nightcaps but not enough to journey down to the kitchen, and the third stuffed inside one of Tucker’s stuffed animals where the nape of its neck had sprouted cotton, whether her nephew or her sister had mangled the bear, Holly couldn’t decide.
And that was on the second floor alone. The ground floor proved even more bountiful, a fact that deeply disturbed her.
All told, by the time she sat on the living room couch after setting her findings on the coffee table, Holly was looking at about a quarter-pound of cocaine. More than enough to kill her sister if Rose went on a bender.
But it wouldn’t kill her.
Someone else already had.
And fathoming that was the force that compelled her to tear open one of the little baggies, tap out a heap of powder, chop it with the plastic edge of her debit card, scrape the drug into a long crisp line, and snort it with the only bill she could find in her wallet.
She had never felt closer to her twin.
Chapter Two
The LED light panels angled across the lake were bright enough to illuminate a football field. The Center Harbor PD had set up five of them, each on eight foot stands, each weighing approximately 200 lbs. Three were on the shore, the last two strategically placed on the ice as close to the hole as possible without compromising the safety of the volunteer firefighters and medics that were working to retrieve the body of Rose Wythe.
Detective Lucas York had ordered one rookie to watch those lights and listen hard for moaning, a sign the ice was about to crack. If it did, his team would have very little time to abandon retrieval and get to the shore.
The rookie, Officer Bobby Gibbs, who was barely out of diapers in Lucas’s estimation and whose voice trilled whenever he got nervous, crouched equidistant between the two LEDs, his head snapping left and right, gaze shifting from one light to the other like a ball boy at a tennis match. He was taking his duty very seriously.
There were too many men on the ice. Too much equipment. Lucas had shouted at the team several times to keep their distance from one another, spread the weight. He had been met with glares from the senior medics and wide-eyed confusion from the junior firefighters as if there would be no way to carry out the order.
Grouped tightly together as they were the ice wouldn’t hold.
Lucas kept his eye on the diver, as the man bobbed in the water, readying himself to have another go at submerging. His breath came out in white clouds. There was no way his wet-suit would ward off hypothermia if he didn’t get out soon. But the body had been drifting towards the shore.
Gibbs straightened up, drawing Lucas’s attention, and shouted, “I think it whined.”
“Whined?”
The rookie nodded emphatically.
“Tell me when it moans.”
Gibbs twisted his mouth to the side, furrowing his brow, but resumed his crouch, back on task.
Splashing and adjusting his mouthpiece, the diver slipped beneath the
surface, while the firefighters yelled their encouragement to the tune of, You got this, Carl! and Think warm thoughts! and Beers at Shenanigan’s after, because one of the guys had a cousin who owned the only bar in town that dared keep its doors open until four in the morning.
As the diver inched along beneath the ice, reaching the body and straining to hook his hands under the dead woman’s armpits, Lucas stalked around the hole at a distance, coming to the far side of it, the team five yards ahead, the Wythe house glowing like a Thomas Kinkade postcard in the distance, the twin sister somewhere inside.
Lucas hadn’t lived in Center Harbor long. Though this was his first case with the Center Harbor Police Department, he had worked his fair share of homicides in Plymouth, the most notable of which revolved around a prostitution ring where two under-aged girls had been brutally murdered. Closing the case had garnished him accolades that in his mind he didn’t have a prayer of living up to so he’d decided to move from the small northern town. It had been more impulsive than reasoned, but Lucas had long since accepted that side of himself. In fact, he rarely questioned it or even thought twice when barreling headlong towards change.
The diver surged to the surface, hugging the body tightly. Without hesitation, three firefighters hoisted the dead woman onto the ice, lining her parallel to a stretcher on which they placed her.
Lucas had to bark to be heard over the teams cheering. “Don’t cluster!”
“Moaning!” yelled Gibbs, who they also ignored. He shuttered, staring at the ice beneath his boots. “It’s cracking!”
Just as the firefighters got to their feet, each lifting a corner of the stretcher, the body shifting precariously on top, Gibbs bolted for the shore and not a second later one of the LED lights plummeted, splashing into the lake.
As Lucas jogged away from the hole, someone shouted, “Reroute!” The firefighters veered left, avoiding the compromised ice but nearing the remaining LED and they soon realized their error. The ice shifted beneath their feet. Hollering ensued as they maneuvered away, shuffling along a narrow strip of what everyone hoped was thick ice.