The Sullivan Sisters

by Kathryn Ormsbee

  “Would you stop that?” Claire hissed. “You can’t break in.”

  “I’m not,” Eileen said, fiddling. “You can’t break into a house you own.”

  “We own,” Claire corrected. “And you don’t own it yet.”

  “I’m eighteen, aren’t I?” Eileen countered.

  “Yes, but there’s paperwork that—”

  “If I can vote for the president and fight in a goddamn war, then I can enter my new house.”

  “We can’t risk it,” said Claire, realizing with dawning horror the position she’d put herself in. “What if the police come out here? They could arrest us. We can’t afford to get arrested. We don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Sure we do,” said Eileen, smiling placidly. “You have thousands, Claire. Isn’t that what you said? The people of the Internet have paid you well.”

  Claire threw Eileen a dirty look, then felt instantly ashamed. Was this the kind of person she was? Making faces, like a child? Claire couldn’t imagine Harper Everly—with her perfectly contoured face, radiant hair, poise, and grace—even thinking of such behavior.

  Being impulsive had been a terrible idea. Claire wondered how nonplanners did this, day after day—running where the wind took you until you landed flat on your face. It put you in precarious positions, led you to throw dirty looks.

  Claire had to rise above. This had been a bad idea from the start, but she could turn it around. She could devise a way to get out of here.

  “Think about it,” she told Eileen, her thoughts leaping one step ahead of her words. “We get arrested here—just set aside the implications of that. It’d get back to Mr. Knutsen, and you don’t know what kind of trouble that could put us in. You haven’t seen Uncle Patrick’s will for yourself. What if there’s a clause saying he disinherits us if we break in?”

  Eileen squinted. “Yeah, Claire. I’m sure there’s a clause that says exactly that.”

  “You don’t know!”

  “You’re goddamn paranoid.”

  “Fine,” Claire snapped, grasping for a different approach. “It’ll get back to Mom, though. You want her hearing about this?”

  Eileen grew very still. Even though the sisters barely spoke anymore, in this moment Claire knew what Eileen was thinking. She had to be wondering, like Claire, why Mom would lie about this. Why had she told them, all their lives, that they had no family?

  These days Claire thought of Mom as plenty of things: frazzled, distant, out of touch. She’d never thought of her as a liar, though. Never malicious. So should Claire and Eileen have taken Mr. Knutsen’s letter to Mom directly? Was it right, keeping this a secret from her? Maybe, maybe not. It was pointless asking the question when Mom was currently worlds away, in the Bahamas.

  Still, Claire’s words had an effect on Eileen. She stopped fiddling with the door and rose from her crouch.

  Claire forgot sometimes how tall her sister was—a good six inches above her, supermodel height. She wondered where Eileen had gotten those good genes, and why the universe in its infinite irony had given them to her and not Claire. Eileen didn’t do herself justice with those black, baggy clothes and constant slouch.

  Claire shook her head. Concentrate. She could judge Eileen’s fashion at a more convenient time.

  Eileen, meantime, was frowning into the distance. “Where’s Murph?”

  Claire looked around. In the heat of her fight with Eileen, she had released Murphy’s arm. Now her little sister was gone. She wasn’t on the porch or in the front yard.

  “I GOT IT.”

  The shout came from the back of the house.

  Claire and Eileen exchanged wide-eyed looks before clambering toward the sound.

  They had followed the deck around to a set of French doors. The left door was open, swinging in a sea-born breeze, and Murphy was nowhere in sight. Claire drew closer, trying to peer inside, but the house was utterly dark.

  “Murphy!” It was getting harder to whisper her shouts.

  Claire pulled out her phone and switched on its flashlight, directing the beam inside the house. She didn’t step inside, though. Somehow, she couldn’t.

  It was Eileen who charged ahead, boots stomping across the old, hardwood floor.

  “Murphy!” she bellowed into the house.

  Cautiously, Claire followed Eileen, casting light in every direction, trying to calm her thudding heart.

  “Murphy,” she squeaked. “Not funny!”

  “Jesus,” Eileen said, snatching the phone from Claire. “This isn’t a rave.”

  A protest bulged, then died in Claire’s throat. She was behaving frenetically, she knew, but how could she help it? She didn’t like dark, open spaces—the thought of who, or what, could be ahead, masked by shadows.

  Eileen, by contrast, steadily shone the light ahead. There wasn’t a whiff of fear coming from her. That’s the way it had been growing up: Eileen was the one to remove spiders from the bathroom, the one to tell Claire that there was nothing in her closet at night save sweaters and shoes. She’d been the brave one. It seemed she still was.

  “Murphy!” Eileen called again.

  They passed through a narrow hallway that turned into a larger room—a kind of parlor. As the flashlight cut through the darkness, Claire took in the room piecemeal: a green velvet sofa, a mantle, crown molding, a grand piano, a pile of filing boxes.

  Boxes. There were lots of those, stacked four high and many across, running along a wall.

  Eileen stepped deeper into the room and slowly slid the beam upward, illuminating a grand staircase nearly as wide across as the parlor itself.

  There, a few steps up, stood a motionless figure.

  “AAAH!” Claire screeched.

  “Fucking fuck!” Eileen added.

  The figure, all purple and puffy, said, “Calm down, do you want the police to show up?”

  “Murphy. Maureen. Sullivan.” Claire spat every one of her sister’s names.

  In an instant she’d gone from terrified child to the worst maternal version of herself.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she barked, and had to stop herself from adding “young lady.”

  “You keep asking that,” said Murphy, blithely hopping down the stairs. “Maybe you should spend more time asking yourself what you’re doing. You and Eileen waste time fighting. You weren’t getting anything done. Me, on the other hand—”

  “Are a criminal!”

  Claire’s whisper-shouts had completely lost their whisper.

  “Whoa, whoa.” Murphy brought down her hands in a calming gesture. “Who’s breaking the law?”

  “What do you think that is?” Claire shrieked, motioning toward the French doors. “That is literal breaking and entering.”

  “No, it’s not.” Murphy grinned as wide as the Cheshire Cat.

  Was there something wrong with this girl? Claire hadn’t paid much attention to Murphy lately … as in the past couple years. Had she hit her head at some point? Become feral from lack of parental oversight?

  “How did you get in?” Claire demanded.

  “Magicians. We’re good at locks.” Murphy beamed. “Ta-da.”

  Claire put a hand to her head and whispered, “Oh my God.”

  “It’s our house,” Murphy said, indignant. “We split it three ways, right? So, I’m scouting it out for my third. Isn’t that the whole point of our sister road trip?”

  “No,” Claire said coldly.

  “Then what?”

  “Yeah, Claire,” Eileen turned to her, shining the flashlight directly in her face. “Why are we here?”

  Claire angrily shielded her eyes until Eileen relented and lowered the beam. Then, and only then, did she answer. She’d been given a chance to lay out a plan. Eileen hadn’t meant it that way, with her snarky question, but Claire was going to seize the opportunity. Impulse had brought her here, but planning was going to get her out.

  “We came to see the house for ourselves,” she said, addressing Eileen with
a steady glare. “All right, we’ve seen it. We didn’t have to break in, but we did. Now we leave, before anyone finds out, and we proceed the legal way.”

  “You can leave if you want,” said Murphy. “No one’s stopping you.”

  Claire ignored Murphy, intensifying her glare at Eileen. “We had a deal. You’re here because of my money.”

  Eileen’s lips twitched. “The deal didn’t involve me taking orders from you.”

  In one rabid swipe Claire grabbed her phone out of Eileen’s hand. “Fine. You have fun exploring a pitch-black house. I’ll be in the van, waiting for you. And if the police show up? Have fun getting back to Emmet on your own.”

  Claire stalked toward the double doors, leaving behind the two most infuriating sisters known to earth.

  “You’re not curious?”

  Claire stopped. She turned slowly to Eileen. “Excuse me?”

  Eileen said, “You don’t wonder why Mom didn’t tell us we had an uncle?”

  Claire wasn’t going to admit that she’d been asking herself that question minutes ago. She folded her arms and said, “I’m sure she had a good reason.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  Eileen’s words were sour with sarcasm, and Claire couldn’t think of a rebuttal. Mom had to know about Uncle Patrick, didn’t she? Mom didn’t talk much about Dad, and Claire had understood that, at least: The memory of him was too painful to revisit.

  But why had Mom hidden the fact that Dad had a brother? She’d told the sisters they had no extended family. Mom had been in the foster system since she was two, handed from house to house, never remaining in one long. She’d emancipated herself at seventeen, and that’s when she’d met Dad. He’d been an only child, and both his parents had died when he was a teenager. Car accident. Claire hadn’t ever asked questions, because the stories of her parents’ pasts had made her sad, and because … well, who lied about something like that?

  As it turned out, some people did.

  “Do you know how Uncle Patrick found out about us?” said Eileen. “Knutsen said he used a private investigator to track us down. He left instructions, too, for Knutsen not to tell Mom about any of this.”

  A prickly feeling spindled up Claire’s arms. She couldn’t help herself from responding, “But … why? Did she do something wrong? Was there, like, a falling out?”

  “Who knows,” Eileen shrugged. “The way Knutsen talked, the guy was batshit.”

  “Then he’s got to be our real uncle,” Murphy said, guffawing.

  No one else laughed.

  “All I’m saying,” Eileen said to Claire, “is there’s a chance we could find some answers here, if we stick around. Knutsen said this place could be chock-full of stuff. Documents, photographs, antiques.”

  “So, what?” said Claire. “You’ve broken and entered, and now you want to steal?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Eileen threw out a hand. “I don’t need this crap. I do want some time to see if there’s a clue about who Patrick Enright was, and, you know, what the hell is going on. And you want to know what the place is worth, right? How much you could get for the shit, to pay for Yale.”

  Claire was wavering. Eileen had it partly wrong, of course. Claire didn’t need the money for Yale, but she did need it to start a new life. Even if this house was unsellable for four years, it was money for the future. Money she could plan on, down the line. She was curious. About the house, but also—unexpectedly—about family.

  She hadn’t let herself think about who Uncle Patrick could be, or how this could have anything to do with her father, long dead of a bad cancer. Those things weren’t part of her golden moment. Now, Claire was thinking better of it. This house wasn’t merely money-in-waiting. It could’ve touched her dad in some way.

  Claire had only a handful of memories of her father. He’d passed when she was three. She didn’t even remember the funeral, and she wondered sometimes how her mind could have failed to hold on to something as big as that. What it held on to instead was him by her bedside, reading Harold and the Purple Crayon. And another memory, when she’d skinned a knee and come in the house sobbing, and he’d stuck a Band-Aid on the damage before handing her a Reese’s cup, saying, “These make the pain go away.”

  He’d been a good father, Claire was certain of that. He’d just been gone for so long. Occasionally, when she told people her dad was dead, they got a serious look on their face and said, “I’m sorry.” When that happened, Claire felt guilty, because she was sad that her dad had died young. But the truth was, she didn’t think about him most days. She didn’t miss him, exactly, because there were so few memories of him to miss.

  She’d made do without a dad, just like she’d made do without much of a mom. Like she’d made do without an older sister, once Eileen had abandoned her for the garage bedroom two years ago. She’d made her own new family, with Harper Everly as its head and fellow online Harperettes as siblings. She’d more than made do. She’d excelled.

  But now, what was waiting for her at home? A rejection from Yale and an unanswered text from Ainsley St. John.

  Claire was scared to be here. She didn’t like recklessness, not knowing what came next. But maybe she was supposed to work through this fear. Maybe that was part of the golden moment. Maybe she could give this one more try.

  Claire narrowed her eyes at Eileen. “You don’t plan on taking anything?”

  Eileen raised two fingers in a mock salute. “Scout’s honor.”

  This wasn’t how Excellers behaved. They played by the rules, worked hard, and got their just reward. But then, Claire had done all that work, and there was no reward to be had. No Ivy League for her, and no breathless romance with Ainsley. No escape from Emmet.

  They were already here, inside the house, the worst of the damage done. As long as they didn’t steal, they wouldn’t be breaking additional laws.

  Maybe they could stay. For an hour. Two, tops.

  “Look at her, Leenie,” said Murphy. “I can tell: You’ve got her convinced.”

  TWELVE Murphy

  Murphy had never set foot in a house this big, not even when she’d made friends with Zoe Colvis in fifth grade and been out to her pool party in Chester Heights, the one nice neighborhood in Emmet. There, bedrooms had their own bathrooms and the kitchens had fancy spigots over the stoves, and there were, of course, in-ground pools.

  But even Zoe’s house hadn’t been this. Her place had been so new that the trees in the front yard were saplings supported by wooden stakes. The house on Laramie Court was ancient. Murphy could tell by the crystal doorknobs and giant staircase. She’d seen houses like this on TV, in movies set in the 1800s and shows about rich teenage vampires. Maybe that’s why, walking around, she felt she was on a Hollywood set, and at any minute a director might call, “Cut!”

  One day I’ll know what that’s like, Murphy thought. When I have my own Netflix magic series.

  “WHOA!”

  Murphy staggered, knocked clean out of her thoughts. Light had flooded the room where she and her sisters stood.

  “How about that,” said Eileen, hand resting on the light switch. “These still work.”

  Claire looked aghast. “What are you doing? Leenie, turn those off!”

  “Why?”

  “Someone could see!”

  “The place is deserted. It’s on top of a goddamn cliff.”

  “Exactly. Someone could see the lights from below.”

  “Like I said, paranoid.” Eileen yawned, squinting above their heads at the parlor’s brass chandelier.

  Loaded, thought Murphy. That’s what Uncle Patrick had been. Zoe Colvis sure hadn’t had a chandelier.

  With the parlor illuminated, Murphy took in the scene in gulps, staring first at the shiny black grand piano, then a circle of plush sofas and chairs, then the artwork on the wall—oil paintings of farmland landscapes. It was impressive, but Murphy wanted more.

  She ran from the room, up the grand staircase—the route she�
�d wanted to take before her sisters had interrupted. With electricity at her command, there was no stopping her. Murphy flicked light switches as she passed them, running up the stairs and then down an arcing hallway. She popped into one room and took a look: a four-poster bed, grated fireplace, and massive armoire.

  She let out a squeal and carried on to the next room: a canopy king-size bed, vaulted ceiling, and writing desk. Another squeal and Murphy was off, continuing her mission. She was going to drink in this whole house, lighting its rooms as she went.

  She made quick work of it, too. Within a minute Murphy had poked her head into every room on the floor. There were four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and one office. Office. Who the heck had enough rooms in their house for an office? Murphy was vaguely aware of Claire calling her name from downstairs, but something more exciting had caught her attention: the spiral staircase at the end of the hall. Murphy sprinted toward it, then stopped to gawk up at its spindling, metal form. The staircase completed three full spirals before it led into a hidden place.

  Murphy charged the stairs. There was no door blocking her way at the top. The landing led straight to a small, round room with a domed ceiling. A large window at the room’s center overlooked the front yard and, beyond it, the sea. But the very best part were the shelves hewn into the walls, crammed with books.

  “Magic,” Murphy whispered—and she didn’t use that word lightly.

  She approached the window, surveying the darkened bluffs and the Pacific Ocean—wide and restless on the horizon. She breathed in deep as she spun a circle and took in the room’s treasures: hardcovers of all sizes and colors stacked in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

  “Yeah, Uncle Pat!” she yelled, punching the air. “Way to share the wealth.”

  “Murphy?”

  Claire’s voice came from the bottom of the stairs. Murphy leaned over the banister, looking down.

  “Oh, hey,” she said to Claire’s supremely annoyed face.

  “The entire town’s going to know we’re here,” Claire chided. “It’s like a lighthouse up there.”

  Murphy gasped. “It is a lighthouse. Come see!”