by E. R. FALLON
“Rachel, that’s my other daughter, isn’t of a sound mind.”
“Rachel.” I slowly repeated the name. My sister? My sister. “You’re embarrassed by her?” Outrage increased the volume of my speech. “You’re going to insist you did this for the benefit of both your daughters? Shouldn’t you have let Evelyn decide for herself whether she wanted to meet her sister?”
“I kept—keep Rachel a secret out of concern for the safety of others,” Alice said. “Including Evelyn. Even my lawyers don’t know about Rachel.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not understanding you. What does this have to do with you being in here?”
“I took Rachel’s place.”
“What do you mean you ‘took her place’?”
“If the law knew what I did, then Rachel and I would be changing places.”
“You—how is that possible?”
“I confessed so she wouldn’t have to.”
Somewhere out there, it was possible I had a sister, a twin, and if Alice told me the truth, then my sister was a cold-blooded murderer. “You’re saying your daughter Rachel is the—”
Alice nodded before I could finish with ‘killer.’
“I’d kept Rachel hidden for so long I felt I owed her my going to prison for her. She never got the kind of life Evelyn had,” she said.
“You’re not suggesting Rachel is committing the killings in my city,” I said.
“I couldn’t say. I don’t know what is happening exactly.”
“If she is, if you are telling the truth, you could be implicated in the new crimes because you haven’t gone to the police with this information.”
“Go ahead, tell them. I’m a dead woman, what do I care?”
I couldn’t tell whether the master manipulator, as the media had portrayed her, was manipulating me right then. In the prior years, her confession and arrest had led me to believe she’d fooled me enough already. I wasn’t about to let her fool me twice, and as an adult no less.
“I’m going to get this off my plate, and because we don’t have much time, I’m going to do it fast,” Alice said.
I looked behind at the door and considered escaping. “I . . .”
“Can you just sit back and listen?” she said.
If she was authentic, hearing her side of the story could change my life in unexpected ways. And if she was lying, then I had little to lose. After some thinking, I faced her and nodded.
“I couldn’t choose between my children,” Alice said. “I worked so hard to have children in the first place. My husband—he left when my girls were very young—and I, had trouble having children.”
At the mention of my father I felt as though I had been swallowed whole by something so brutal and powerful it had eviscerated my body and taken my soul as it devoured me.
“We went to a specialty clinic in the city, and the doctor there prescribed a fertility drug for me to take,” Alice spoke. “At the time, it was an experimental drug. The doctor warned me of the risks but I was so desperate I took it, regardless.” She cleared her throat and took a break. “Aren’t you going to write this down?”
“I’m recording it in my memory,” I said, partly in jest.
Alice frowned, and for a moment it felt like we were mother and child again. “Are you sure you’ll remember all of it?”
“I’m confident I’ll remember most of it.”
“Yes, you have a good memory,” she acknowledged. “I intended to protect Evelyn, you see—”
“You thought that having her mother go to prison would help her?” I’d tried not to make my question sound too personal, and failed.
“I’ll explain.” Alice seemed more composed than I expected someone in her situation would be. “I had a hard time getting pregnant so I took this drug. After Rachel and Evelyn were born, it was clear from the start, after a year or so, that Rachel was troubled. She wouldn’t stop crying. Even as an infant she had terrible fits. Evelyn was fine, she was normal.”
I hadn’t recalled having a sister but I’d been too young to remember.
“After their births, the doctors concluded that the drugs had a negative effect on Rachel but not on Evelyn. They—they determined that Rachel was—psychotic, in some form.” She stammered through the admission.
I didn’t take offense because I knew myself well enough to know that some drug hadn’t made me the way I was.
“My husband left when neither of my girls was old enough to remember,” Alice said. “After he took off, my family paid for Rachel to leave my home and be cared for by a local woman in the town. Anyone who knew Rachel existed knew she was ill and that her illness couldn’t be cured. When Rachel left my home, those who knew her assumed I sent her away to an institution. But I would never have allowed that to happen to her at such a young age.”
I felt it was safe enough to remark, “No one in the town has mentioned her to me.”
“People in the town don’t talk about it. Folks don’t like discussing unpleasant things, as though my bad luck might rub off on them. Once something’s hidden, it stays hidden. I was unhappy with the plan but Rachel was too much for me to handle by myself, and as she got older, it became clear . . . let’s just say my family thought she’d be an embarrassment to their image. The irony is I ended up being an embarrassment.” Alice laughed softly to herself.
I didn’t believe her yet, and I wanted to listen and not speak but I had to make myself appear like an interested journalist might, and I had to pose questions that one would have asked. “And your other daughter, Evelyn, did she know about her sister?”
“No. But Rachel knew about her. And she knew more than her sister’s name. I wanted Rachel to have some grasp on normalcy so I kept her informed about Evelyn’s life as they aged. She got to see Evelyn grow up through photographs and videos. We talked about their father as well. That part was painful for me to discuss but I wanted Rachel to know where she came from. The more I consider it, the more I think it wasn’t a sound idea. You see, I think Rachel became resentful of her sister’s freedom.”
Jealousy burned my skin’s most tender spots because Alice had told me so little about my father. Right then was my chance to ask her a question that had been on my mind for years, a question that, when I was a child, she’d refused to answer the many times I asked her.
“Did your husband have a reason for leaving? It’s none of my business but I’d like to hear your opinion. You don’t seem like a woman a man would walk away from.”
Aside from her committing murder, that was.
“Are you joking?” she said.
“No.”
Alice became very self-aware and blushed and patted her hair. “Thanks for the compliment, I think. Emotionally, Clayton, that was my husband’s name, went through everything with me during the period we couldn’t conceive. He loved our girls, but I think that, after everything we’d gone through, in some way he viewed Rachel’s problems as a failure on his part. He couldn’t handle the idea of going through life with her the way she was. Clayton developed his own problems, drugs and drinking, after Rachel was born. He never had a real career, and my family had made it quite clear to him that they didn’t approve of him. That, plus Rachel’s condition—I think it ruined him.”
I flinched at the revelation but I didn’t judge my father. He’d abandoned us but his personal struggles had been vast. “Has your husband tried to contact you since your conviction? To see how your daughters were doing perhaps?” Expectation softened my tone.
Alice looked off to the side. “He hasn’t.”
The disappointment I had in him felt heavy on my shoulders.
“We can’t divorce legally because I don’t know where he is,” Alice said. “I don’t know if he’s even alive.”
I kept talking to prevent myself from shedding a tear. “How would you say it came about, how did you end up going to prison for Rachel?” I asked.
“During one of my visits to see Rachel at her caretaker’s house, I found
something—a ring—and I asked Rachel about it because it didn’t seem like something she’d own.”
My attention to her intensified. “What did the ring look like?”
“It was such a long time ago, I’m not sure I remember correctly but I believe it was a wide band, made of brass. On the large side. A gentleman’s ring.”
Based on Alice’s description, that sounded like the ring Ben’s father said he had given him, the ring they’d never found on or around Ben’s body, or inside his house after his death. He’d loaned it to me a few times when we were kids. It had Ben’s initials carved on the inner part. “I . . . ” She trapped me in a vulnerable place and I stopped myself before I revealed too much.
“I asked Rachel about this ring and she said that it didn’t belong to her and that it belonged to a boy who’d died. Evelyn’s friend and our neighbor, Ben, had been killed recently and I told this to Rachel. Rachel said she already knew that Ben had been killed. Then I asked her how she came about having this ring. That’s when Rachel said she’d killed Ben. Your child comes to you with something like that, how could you not help them?” Her suffering raised her voice.
I recited the publicized facts of her case. “Ben Palmer was the first known victim. But you were accused of murdering several young men.”
“I’ll get to that in a moment. When the police interviewed me because I lived next door to Ben, I confessed to all the deaths. Mercifully, the killings stopped from then on.”
“Why did she kill him—kill Ben?” I felt tears coming but couldn’t dry them without revealing my sentiment. Then I realized I’d spoken as though I was familiar with Ben, as though we were close, which we had been, but that was something I couldn’t express because Alice thought I was someone else. I rectified the situation with, “Why did she murder the first young man?”
“It was never quite clear to me. But I believe it was out of jealousy. Initially, that’s why she killed. In some twisted way, she wanted to hurt Evelyn. Rachel didn’t have Evelyn’s life with me, a life with school and friends. Her caretaker, who was a single woman, a retired nurse and a teacher, tutored her as best she could. The woman had been paid by my family to keep Rachel hidden from the town. The town is small, so it wasn’t an easy task. But the woman was very careful.”
“How much did she—Rachel—know about her sister?” I asked cautiously.
“After she confessed to me, I looked back and realized that she’d been pulling more and more information about Evelyn’s life out of me during my visits to her.”
“When did you visit her?” I hadn’t recalled my mother being absent for long blocks of time.
“During my lunch hour mostly, in secret because my family didn’t like me seeing her. They wanted Rachel to forget about me and me to forget about her. But I couldn’t forget. Her caretaker felt sorry for me and would let me into the house. I worked as a schoolteacher but if you’ve done your research you already know that.” She smiled in a nostalgic manner. “Rachel told me she’d started to watch Evelyn around the town. Rachel knew what her sister looked like, you see, because they’re identical. When her caretaker would go to the market and to run errands, apparently, Rachel would sneak out and pretend to be Evelyn.”
“Pretend to be m—her?” I said.
“Yes.” Alice looked at me in a new way.
“There were others besides the boy, Ben Palmer,” I said, flustered.
“Yes. Rachel started with Evelyn’s friend and then she killed the others.”
“Why on earth would someone—why would she do that?” My voice cracked and I couldn’t disguise my emotions.
“This part is hard for me to say.” Alice sighed and stared at her hands. “Rachel said she planned to blame Evelyn for all the murders so that I would let Rachel come home to live with me when Evelyn was in prison. Rachel told me that she would replace Evelyn. My daughter’s—Rachel’s thought process doesn’t make much sense, but there you have it. She’s smart, but she isn’t well. Rachel can be devious. She can appear to be quite normal when she wants to be. She intended to take Evelyn’s place in my life. In her twisted mind, that’s what she thought. In some crazy way, I thought that going to prison for Rachel would show her I loved her as much as I loved Evelyn and get her to stop killing and leave Evelyn alone. She let me, and so I went.”
“You just assumed she’d stop killing if you went to jail for her?”
“No, I . . . I haven’t thought of it that way before.” Alice’s voice softened, and her face paled. “Oh, God, you don’t think . . . Do you think Rachel’s started killing again, in your city? Why would she go there and do that?”
I could have told her the truth right then, all of it, but I didn’t answer. “There were rumors—it was well publicized that you consumed your victims.”
“You want to know if I’m a cannibal?” Alice smiled.
“Yes, did Rachel?”
“Eat those boys?”
“Yes,” I said. “If you didn’t, did she?”
“She must have if they said she did.” The tips of Alice’s ears turned red. “The truth is, I’m not sure. That wasn’t something she talked about, and I certainly never asked her. It was hard enough to get anything out of her. You’ll have to leave here without an answer to that gruesome question, handsome.”
“Are there victims the police don’t know about?” That was something I’d wondered.
“I believe that, with my help, they found them all. I don’t think Rachel kept any from me. These weren’t the kinds of young men you wouldn’t miss, so someone would’ve noticed if they were gone.”
“Unlike the ones being killed today,” I said.
“Is that so?” Relief softened the lines on her face.
For all I knew at the time, all the words, the entire confession, that flowed from her mouth, was bullshit. Yet, the material seemed too intricate for even someone as imaginative as her to have invented.
“You’ll have to understand that I’m a little confused. I’ll admit I have a great deal of doubt about what you’re telling me,” I said regardless. “I’m sorry but that’s the way I feel. You have to understand how this looks to an outsider, it looks like you’re making someone up to blame them for your actions, or if she does exist, you’re trying to blame her for your crimes so you can potentially be released from jail.”
I intended to make Alice own up to her crimes if she should have, but would it have been any less painful for me if she hadn’t been lying?
“Why would I blame my own daughter?” she paused. “But there’s no need to apologize. Let me explain better. I imagined the way Rachel viewed her actions was, if her sister was locked away, then she, Rachel, would be the child I loved.”
“I need proof, something to go on.”
“Do you want to see her, do you want to see Rachel?”
On the one hand, she didn’t know I was her child and I wasn’t so foolish as to believe a sociopath would have any sentiment for me, and therefore wouldn’t care about what happened to me. Alice might lead me into a trap if I agreed to meet my alleged sister. On the other, my lifelong wish to exonerate her could come true. I needed to confirm whether Rachel was out there, no matter how dangerous she might be. It came down to my potential death or to possibly freeing my mother. It was a simple decision.
“Her last name’s the same as yours?” I asked.
“Yes. Rachel Lane.”
“Does she live in town?” Then I cut myself short with, “Here’s the thing I don’t understand, if your daughter is unable to care for herself as you’ve suggested, then how have you managed to provide for her financially while you’re in prison?
“My family’s been estranged from me since my imprisonment but they do arrange for Rachel’s comforts. They took complete control of her wellbeing after my conviction.”
I nearly lost my cool. “And they managed to keep her a secret? Don’t you think it would have been courteous to notify your other child about their sibling?”
&n
bsp; “Yes, I thought about it. But it was clear to me that Rachel was—is—dangerous. It wouldn’t have been safe to connect Evelyn with her twin. It still isn’t safe, I believe.”
“Shouldn’t you have let Evelyn decide that?”
“If I could speak to her today, perhaps I would tell her, now that she’s older. But, like I said, she cut me from her life a long time ago.”
Alice scratched at her cheeks. She must have had an itch. No, she was wiping her eyes. For the first time since I’d started visiting my mother, she’d physically expressed remorse. Why would a serial killer have retained so much emotion inside them that they couldn’t have regulated their feelings in front of a stranger? Unless, of course, she wasn’t a monster.
Perhaps my mother’s estranged family, my estranged family, had kept my twin a secret from me. Regardless of Rachel’s malice, I had to see if I really had a sister out there. A twin, who, if she existed, would have been an undeniable part of me.
“My family felt it would be better to keep Rachel hidden from Evelyn, to protect Evelyn and her future,” Alice said.
I sat up. “They continued to hide Rachel despite knowing her crimes?”
“No, they weren’t in on my plan to take her place for her role in the crimes. They don’t know what Rachel did. They really do think I’m a murderer. They think Rachel’s a victim of my actions, like Evelyn was. I didn’t give a rat’s ass what they thought.” She smiled to herself. “I wanted to protect my children.”
“You must love your daughter very much to have accepted life imprisonment.”
“I do love Rachel. I love both my daughters, even if one of them doesn’t love me any longer.”
“You don’t know what Evelyn’s thinking. Maybe she has her reasons for not communicating with you. Maybe she doesn’t hate you.”
“Oh, and how would you know the inner workings of my daughter’s mind?”
Her cynicism stung me all over. “I don’t. But, truthfully, maybe she doesn’t hate you. You don’t know what she’s thinking until you ask her.”