My Sister's Prayer

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Why not?”

  “He’s too…perfect.”

  My head jerked back, as if struck. “Too perfect?” I asked, incredulous. Where had that come from? How could she say such a thing to me, especially knowing my history?

  She shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain.”

  “Wow.” I pushed myself away from the bed. “That’s harsh.”

  “You don’t get it—”

  “Oh, I get it. Leave it to you to turn something good into a negative.”

  “That’s not what I’m trying to do,” she said defensively. “Just forget I said anything. Never mind.”

  With that, she turned away and pretended to be asleep. I got up and left the room, not even bothering to close the curtain all the way.

  Was she jealous? Was that it? I didn’t know. I stomped back up the stairs to my room. What I did know was that even after a wonderful day of bonding, Nicole was capable of being cruel, of striking out in the exact way that would cut me to the quick. So I wasn’t good enough for the handsome doctor? Of course I wasn’t.

  Once an ugly duckling, always an ugly duckling, right?

  I dreaded the thought of dealing with my sister the next morning, but fortunately Inez arrived before Nicole was awake. Quickly but quietly, I showed the woman around and told her what she needed to know, and then I slipped out without ever having to interact with the patient.

  It wasn’t a good day. As I worked, I kept going over our weekend, wondering what I could have done to make my little sister say something so hurtful. By the time five o’clock rolled around, I wasn’t ready to go, but I didn’t really have a choice. The invalid with the razor sharp insults was depending on me.

  I pedaled home in the gathering darkness and was out on the patio, locking up my bike and helmet, when I realized I could hear a man’s voice coming from inside the carriage house. For a moment, panic seized me. This happened sometimes when I was greeted by unexpected things. A flashback to the cabin in the woods, the body on the cot, the horror of knowing, even at so young an age, that something was terribly wrong, that things would never be the same again. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I was an adult now, that the murder was in the past.

  Unless Nicole was entertaining an unauthorized guest in my home, in which case she’d be in big trouble.

  “Hello?” I called sharply as I opened the door.

  “In here,” an unfamiliar voice said from the living room. A male voice.

  I swung the door wide to see a man bending over Nicole. She was in her wheelchair, and he was doing something to her arms.

  “Good,” he told her. Then he released her wrists and gave her shoulder a pat. Looking up, he rose and extended a hand to me.

  “Greg Fremont,” he said. “You must be Madeline?”

  “Maddee,” I replied, taking in the logo on his navy polo shirt and realizing he was the new physical therapist Nana had arranged for Nicole. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d been so worked up about last night that I’d completely forgotten he was coming today.

  “I’m still doing my evaluation. But once I’m finished, I’d like to discuss her treatment plan with both of you.”

  “Sure. Just let me know when you’re ready.”

  Turning, I spotted Inez in the kitchen, just pulling on her coat. I could tell she was tired and ready to go, so I resisted the urge to ask all about the day. Instead, I saw her to the door, whispered a quick thanks, and headed for the stairs.

  Though I usually dressed to impress, tonight I wanted nothing more than to be comfortable. As they continued working downstairs, I changed into a long sweater and a pair of yoga pants and then pulled my hair into a ponytail.

  I headed back down after that, trying to be unobtrusive in the kitchen as I heated up what remained of the chicken casserole Inez had made for dinner. It was delicious, and I ate quietly, observing them work and trying not to flinch as this man put my sister through her paces.

  I had finished and was just washing up my dishes when Greg said they were ready for me. The three of us convened at the kitchen table, and though Nicole looked exhausted and in pain, she also seemed encouraged. Almost upbeat.

  Greg launched right in, explaining that they would start by focusing on range of motion and lung health, including exercises to help prevent pneumonia, which was always a danger with excessive immobility. In two or three weeks, once the casts came off, Nicole would be moving around more, and their focus would shift to leg work and all-over muscle strengthening.

  As Greg talked, I glanced at my sister and saw that she was gazing at him with rapt attention. He was terribly cute, all dark, wavy hair and deep-blue eyes, and it struck me as I looked from one to the other what Nana had meant when she called this particular therapist “special.” Yet again, she was playing matchmaker for one of her granddaughters—only this time it was for Nicole.

  Frustration swelled in the pit of my stomach at the very thought. Unlike me, Nicole was in no way ready to date, much less form a relationship with anyone. She had to get well first, both physically and emotionally. Until she did, a romance was the last thing she needed.

  I couldn’t believe it. I could tolerate Nana meddling in my love life, but to pull this with a recovering addict? Our grandmother should have known better.

  Somehow, I managed to make it through the rest of the session, but by the time Greg was gone, I felt ready to explode. Nicole, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to my roiling emotions.

  “I can’t wait to walk again,” she said as I went to the sink to dry my dishes and put them away. “You have no idea.”

  I took in a deep breath, held it for a long moment, and then let it out slowly, telling myself I could deal with our matchmaking grandmother later. For now, I would focus on my sister. She may have forgotten all about her hurtful comments last night, but I hadn’t. We needed to clear the air. I set down the dishtowel and turned toward her, ready to speak my mind. But before I could say a word, we heard a knock at the door.

  What now?

  I swung it open a little too forcefully and then took a step back when I saw who it was, Detective Ortiz, here at the time we’d arranged the other day, yet another of tonight’s appointments I’d forgotten all about.

  She had come to share with us what she could of the file, to tell us more about the cabin in the woods, the disappearing victim, and the day that changed our lives forever.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Maddee

  For the next hour, Detective Ortiz, Nicole, and I sat and talked about the case over decaf coffee and yesterday’s rugelach. In the face of more important matters, I decided to put my anger with my sister aside.

  The detective started by explaining how one goes about attempting to solve a crime that happened twenty years ago. “First you review the existing information, which in this case wasn’t very much. Just the single police report written up by one of the responding officers to the initial incident.”

  We were allowed to have a copy of that report now, which I skimmed eagerly. It had been written when I was just eight years old, yet here I was at twenty-seven holding a copy of it in my own hands. Reading it through, I didn’t see that it told us anything new, but it still felt validating somehow.

  I passed it over to Nicole and took the next item from the detective, which was a copy of the more recent report, along with our statements, which we’d given to police in July after the four of us returned to the cabin—this time as adults—and tested it successfully for blood evidence.

  Ortiz went on to talk about that evidence, how their luminol tests had validated ours and how, by bringing several of the floorboards from the cabin into the lab, they had been able to extract enough DNA to run a profile. She let us see a copy of that profile now, though we weren’t allowed to keep it. That didn’t matter. It was mostly just numbers and terms and graphs, all of it meaningless to the untrained eye. The only part I understood was in the summary at the bottom, which identified the blood as having c
ome from a “single source, male.”

  I handed that page to Nicole as the detective continued, explaining how that profile had been checked against all of their various databases but had come back without any hits. Meanwhile, she said, they had investigated in all the other ways she’d already told me about last week, to no avail.

  “That’s really about it. I’m sorry there isn’t more. We tried to figure this one out, we really did, but I’m afraid that unless something new turns up, there’s nothing more we can do.”

  I nodded, somber and disappointed but no longer angry, as I had been last week. Considering the lack of information and evidence, Detective Ortiz had done more than any of us had the right to expect, and I said as much now.

  “Thanks, Maddee. I appreciate—”

  “I don’t understand,” Nicole interrupted, her eyes on the profile she still held in her hands. “I thought DNA could tell you all sorts of things about a person. This just says he was a male. Where’s the other info about him?”

  Detective Ortiz sat back in her chair and provided a lengthy response, one that had to do with profiling and confidentiality and legalities, the long and short of it being that yes, DNA forensic technology was capable of predicting, with fairly reliable accuracy in many cases, not just gender but also race, hair color, eye color, age, various medical conditions, and even some physical features.

  “But that’s a different type of DNA report,” she continued, “and one I’m not at liberty to share. Though I will tell you this. On the way over here, I thought of one last thing we could pursue.”

  We both looked at her, suddenly encouraged. So maybe the case wasn’t completely inactive just yet?

  “There is a company that specializes in a new but really promising area of phenotyping,” she continued. “Do y’all know what that is?”

  We both shook our heads.

  “Put simply, a genotype is the part of the DNA sequence that varies between individuals. That’s what you’re looking at, Nicole, and it’s what we use to compare one person’s DNA with another. But a phenotype is the expression of those genetic variants, the way they play out in the person’s physicality. This company takes an individual’s phenotype and uses it to generate an image similar to what he or she might actually have looked like. It doesn’t always work, but in many cases, fairly accurate computer-generated likenesses of people have been created solely from their DNA phenotypes. The whole science is still new, but in situations of forensic identification it can be useful.”

  “But we already know what the guy looked like,” I said. “We have Danielle’s drawings.”

  “Oh, right, the drawings.” Ortiz leaned over to pull a packet of papers from her case. “Here. We have to keep the originals as evidence, but I made copies for you.”

  I accepted the small stack of paper and shared it with Nicole, both of us flipping through slowly, taking in the various sketches of the man on the cot, the blood, the cabin, the knife. These pictures had been drawn by our cousin Danielle in the weeks following the incident at the cabin simply as a coping mechanism. And though she’d been only nine at the time, she was already quite talented, almost an artistic prodigy, and we all agreed her renderings were extremely accurate. Once the case was reopened, Danielle had dug up these old pictures and handed them over to be used in the investigation. They weren’t easy to look at, but I was glad they existed, just one more validation of our claim.

  “If you check closely,” the detective said, “you’ll see she never got all that detailed around the face. The hands and the knife are drawn repeatedly, but the face is always pretty much in shadow.”

  I nodded, understanding as a psychologist that the day it happened Danielle’s eyes had been riveted on the shocking parts of our discovery, and those were what she’d later drawn in an attempt to work through the trauma. “So even without a good sketch of the man’s face, you’re saying this company might be able to create a likeness anyway, just from his DNA?”

  Ortiz nodded. “It’s worth a try. I can’t keep actively working this case, as you know, but I can probably talk the chief into letting me run this one last report. I’ll keep you posted. Sometimes a good image can open up new doors of inquiry.”

  “Thank you, Detective,” I said. “Anything you can do would be deeply appreciated by all four of us.”

  We were wrapping things up, just chatting more generally about the situation, when I happened to glance over at Nicole and realized something was wrong. She had spread Danielle’s drawings out on the table in front of her, and her eyes were darting from one image to the next, taking them in their entirety.

  “Nicole? Are you okay?”

  She looked up at me, her eyes wide, her expression one of horror. “I just…this is new to me. I can’t explain it. I…”

  Her voice trailed off. Watching her, I realized she was white as a sheet.

  “What’s going on?” I persisted.

  “I…nothing…”

  “It’s not nothing. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  “Yeah, I need to lie down.”

  Hands trembling, she reached out and pushed herself away from the table. Because of her healing ribs, it hurt to wheel herself around in the chair, but at the moment she didn’t seem to notice or care. She began propelling herself toward the living room.

  “Wait, let me help,” I said, rising from my seat.

  “If you really want to help, you’ll put those drawings away somewhere. Please. I don’t ever want to see them again.”

  Confused and alarmed, I dashed around the table to stop her.

  “What is it?” I asked, catching her chair and turning it toward me. “Did you see something specific? Something that could help the investigation?”

  She shook her head miserably. “No. It’s just…I wasn’t expecting…Maddee, this is the first time I’ve ever seen those pictures.”

  I thought for a moment and realized she was right. We hadn’t even known about them when we were younger, and though I had gotten a look this past July when Danielle dug them out for the police, Nicole was back in Norfolk by then, living the wild life as usual, oblivious to the progress of the investigation.

  “I’m not like the rest of you,” she said, crying now, tears streaming down her pale, pale face. “I was younger than y’all when it happened. I don’t have any memories of that day, not really—or at least I didn’t think I did. Until now. I was sitting there looking at them and…I don’t know…they just…I remembered. I remember the blood, the knife. I remembered him. He wouldn’t wake up. I shook him by the shoulder, but he wouldn’t w-wake up.”

  Her words sent shivers down my spine, the memory of that encounter etched permanently into my brain. As we three older cousins stood and gaped at the fellow on the bed with the knife in his chest, we’d all known he was dead. But as a six-year-old, Nicole hadn’t quite caught on. For some reason, despite the tremendous amount of blood, it just didn’t click for her right away. Before I thought to stop her, she’d stepped forward and was tapping the man on the shoulder, telling him to wake up.

  I could still hear her little-girl voice, could still feel the rising panic in my throat, could still smell the coppery stench of the blood. Within seconds, she seemed to understand what was actually going on, that the man was dead. Then she let out a bloodcurdling scream. She’d been standing in the sticky red liquid, but now she turned and ran away, her little white boots tracking the blood across the floor. I could still see it, vividly.

  And even though I’d heard her say this before, that she didn’t remember it much at all, I hadn’t really understood until now. Undoubtedly the incident had stayed with her, but on a less-than-conscious level. All these years, while the rest of us had been able to think about it and process it and work through the trauma in our own ways, Nicole hadn’t had that luxury. Though the incident was tucked away somewhere deep in her brain, she’d been left with the nearly impossible prospect of overcoming a trauma she couldn’t even recall. No
wonder she was so messed up.

  My heart nearly breaking for her, I asked the detective to excuse us for a few minutes and then I helped Nicole the rest of the way into the living room. After pulling the curtain closed behind us, I knelt down and wrapped my arms around my sister and held on to her until her trembling eased. And though she didn’t hug me in return, she buried her face against my chest and sobbed as she gasped, “That man in Danielle’s drawings…that’s how my nightmares always start. I never see the details of his face, but the image is the same, his dead body…just…lying there. In the dreams I see him exactly like that. Then I realize that whoever killed him is coming after me next. I run and I run, but he’s always after me, always trying to kill me too.”

  My stomach lurched at the thought. These were details she had never shared.

  “Oh, sweetie,” I said, rubbing her back. “How awful. I had no idea.”

  Before the murder, when Nicole was a carefree child, we would tuck in our favorite dolls every night in their miniature beds, smoothing their blankets under their chins so they would sleep better. But then the nightmares started, and she wanted nothing to do with that ritual. Or much to do with me.

  Those dreams kept us both awake, night after night. Her room was next to mine. I still remember her screams, the nightmares she would wake up from that would make her body tremble. I couldn’t do anything to help her. Only our parents could calm her down. Soon I began to feel that I had done something wrong. I hadn’t protected her at the scene of the crime. And I couldn’t protect her from its aftermath either.

  I hugged her tighter now, saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Nicole eventually managed to calm down, and I was able to help her into the bed. After I’d tucked the covers around her, I stayed, sitting on the edge of the mattress and holding her hand until she fell asleep.

  When I finally emerged from behind the curtain, I was afraid the detective might be gone, but she was still sitting at the table. I rejoined her, and though I tried to apologize, she wouldn’t let me. She just gave me a sympathetic look and assured me that she understood Nicole had been through a lot—then and now. Glancing down, I noticed that Ortiz had gathered up the drawings and tucked them underneath my pile of papers.