The Sullivan Sisters

by Kathryn Ormsbee

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the plastic coffin. “I’m gonna find you a place to do a good burial. You deserve that. You—”

  “MURPHY.”

  She froze. At last her sisters had noticed. She shoved the coffin back into her coat and turned around.

  “What?” she asked innocently.

  Claire was storming up the sidewalk, Eileen unhurriedly following.

  “You can’t keep doing that! If I lost you, Mom would kill me.”

  “Nah.” Murphy shrugged. “It’d take her a while to notice. You could skip town before then.”

  “Not funny.” Claire reached Murphy, planting her feet and folding her arms. “Maybe neither of you are taking this seriously”—she shot a pointed look at Eileen—“but I am. Don’t you get what it means, everything Cathy said? If Patrick is really our uncle, then—”

  “Sure,” Murphy cut in. “It means that house is where Dad grew up.”

  Claire blinked. “Well … yeah.” Then she seemed to board her former train of thought: “It also means we’re related to a murderer.”

  Eileen said something under her breath, brusque and derisive. Claire ignored her and added, plaintively, “I don’t know why Mom wouldn’t tell us any of this.”

  Murphy swallowed. She wasn’t exactly happy with Mom for leaving the family for Christmas. All the same, Murphy didn’t like to think of Mom as a liar. And something about this didn’t seem fair—questioning Mom when she wasn’t around to answer. She probably had a good explanation. For instance—

  “Maybe she was trying to protect us.”

  Claire parted her lips, but Murphy pressed ahead.

  “Everyone gets it, right?” she said. “Dad was the oldest brother, John. Same name. He was away at college when it happened, and the murder probably freaked him out so bad he never came home and decided to lie about it, say his whole family was dead. He wanted a fresh start. That makes sense.”

  Claire was glaring at the concrete, toeing a scraggly patch of grass. “Well, if that’s true, it’s another lie. Mom said Dad never went to college.”

  Murphy thought about this. “I dunno if she ever said didn’t. She just never said did.”

  “Come on. If he had a college degree, you think he’d settle down in freaking Emmet?”

  “Maybe,” Murphy said, “Dad got so upset about the murders he didn’t graduate.”

  “Whatever.” Claire threw up her hands. “This doesn’t matter. Mom’s not here, and Dad and Uncle Patrick are dead. The only one left is this Mark person, who probably killed our grandparents, and for all we know, he’s back in town.”

  Claire scrunched her nose, and Murphy did too. She bet the others were thinking how weird what Claire had said sounded. Uncles. Grandparents. Murders. Those weren’t part of the Sullivan sisters’ lives.

  “This is the plan,” said Claire. “Eileen, you’re going to try starting the van again. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we call a mechanic, get the van fixed as quick as we can, and leave town. We forget this whole thing ever happened.”

  Murphy gaped. “Forget about our inheritance?”

  Murphy had reached a conclusion: Sure, the house had turned out to be a murder mansion, but it was her murder mansion. A third of it, anyway. There was magic in the place, and it had drawn the sisters together. It was the place to enact Operation Memory Making. She wasn’t ready to leave that yet.

  “Of course not,” Claire told her. “But there’s nothing we can do about the inheritance part right now.”

  While Claire had been laying out her master plan, the sisters had resumed their walk toward the bluff. This entire time, Eileen had stayed quiet. Murphy kept sneaking glances, trying to read her oldest sister’s face, with no success. Eileen’s eyes remained lightless, her lips drawn in a long, neutral line until, after the silence, she said, “I’m not ready to leave.”

  “What do you think you’re going to find there?” Claire challenged. “Cathy already told us the deepest, darkest secret a family could have.”

  “Or,” said Eileen, “she just scratched the surface. Maybe only the Enrights knew what really happened in that house. But we could know too. There could be something in there that tells us the whole story. Maybe even … stuff about Dad.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Claire motioned at Murphy. “What about her? Maybe you’re fine being reckless with your own life, but Murphy’s a kid, and I’m not going to keep her here when there could be a killer in town.”

  Red-hot indignation filled Murphy. A kid? That really was how Eileen and Claire thought of her: the kid, the nuisance, the baggage. The spare tire.

  Well, this spare tire could talk.

  “I’m fourteen,” she growled at Claire. “We’re both in high school. And I want to stay.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Uh, yeah it does.” Murphy raised her voice. “We’re a democracy, and it’s two against one.”

  Claire laughed. “You think this is a democracy? News flash: I’m the one with the money. I pay for gas. If you want to get home, you’ll do what I say.”

  “You have to get home too,” Murphy challenged. “You need Eileen’s van. I heard you say so yourself.”

  Claire laughed again, like a rabid hyena. “I don’t need that van. I told you, I have money. Enough to get a ride back to Emmet.”

  “Whoa,” said Murphy. “For a three-hour trip? That’s your college fund.”

  “Much good it’s doing me,” Claire muttered.

  “What does that mean?”

  Claire’s eyes met Murphy’s. There was a flicker there in the blue—a possibility. Claire opened her mouth to speak. Then, she seemed to reconsider, shook her head, and walked on.

  They’d been ascending the bluff through a drizzle, and the rain-slicked road had leveled out, revealing the topmost gables of the house. At the sight, goose bumps formed on Murphy’s arms—the weather’s doing, that was all. Still, for a moment, Murphy let herself wonder if this Mark Enright dude really was a murderer. If, maybe, he’d found out who had inherited his old house and if, maybe, he was mad about that.

  Murphy didn’t know how a house could look scarier in the daylight than in the dark. This one did, though—its gables pointing up like teeth into a moody sky.

  Blood all over those parlor walls.

  Head bashed in like a cantaloupe.

  What had really happened in this place?

  Yes, it was an adventure. It was drama.

  It was also terrifying.

  But Murphy had made a point to tell Claire she wanted to stay. She couldn’t act scared, like a kid. Like they expected. This was a time for being brave. For making memories. For magic.

  Murphy had been to a haunted house before, on a school trip to Oregon’s one and only amusement park, Enchanted Forest. It had been creepy, sure, and she’d screamed once when Derek Huggins had jumped out from behind a dark corner. But that had been for fun.

  This was an actual haunted house. A place where people had been killed, for real.

  Murphy reached into her coat pocket, grabbing hold of the rope trick she’d packed there. She didn’t care about forming a knot, just needed something to hold on to. She thought of the trick’s instructions: over, under, tug through and out. She repeated them to herself internally. A mantra. A bit of magic in the face of murder.

  SIXTEEN Eileen

  I’m giving you an hour.”

  “Sure, Claire. Sure.”

  Because, seriously, with the level of absurdity emanating off her sister, the only thing Eileen could say was, Sure, Claire. Sure. The same way she had for months:

  “I don’t want pizza. Don’t you know how bad gluten is for your gut?”

  Sure, Claire. Sure.

  “You use way too much eyeliner. If you’d watch these tutorials …”

  Sure, Claire. Sure.

  “It’d help if you could take out your own trash.”

  Sure, Claire. Sure.

  And if Claire thought she could
dictate Eileen’s life now, of all times …

  Sure, Claire.

  Sure.

  They’d see what came of that.

  Eileen intended to spend as much time as she goddamn pleased inside this house. A couple murders weren’t going to keep her away.

  Especially since she’d already known about them.

  When Eileen had gone snooping in the linen closet two years ago, she hadn’t been looking for something that would break her life apart. Who in their right mind would do that? Who’d search for a box of letters that would tell her a dozen truths she didn’t want to know? Who’d drink a quarter bottle of Jack Daniel’s every night to forget what she’d read? Who’d trash her arts programs applications, because she didn’t see the point? Who would, instead, work a mind-numbing, foot-killing job at Safeway forty hours a week?

  No one sane.

  So Eileen couldn’t be sane.

  But it wasn’t that she wanted to be this way.

  That’s what people like Claire and her perfect Harper Everly tribe didn’t get. Eileen heard what Claire called her behind her back, under her breath: Settler. Claire thought Eileen had a choice.

  Eileen hadn’t chosen to read those letters, though. She’d been looking for painter’s tape and had thought maybe some could be stashed away in the shoeboxes Mom kept at the back of the closet. She figured they contained boring stuff you’d normally keep there: clothespins and spare staples and tacks—and maybe painter’s tape, too.

  You just don’t think you’re going to get bad news in a linen closet.

  That’s what had happened, though: In one of those boxes, she’d found the letters.

  Eileen knew what hate mail was, theoretically. But nothing could prepare her for this.

  The letters were addressed to “Leslie.” Her mother.

  Well. Some of them read “Leslie,” while others opened with “You bitch,” or “Sinful whore.”

  There were nine letters total, composed in various handwritten scrawls and on different kinds of stationery. Nine letters from several strangers, and Eileen knew the shortest of them by heart:

  Bitch,

  We know it was him. You defended a murderer, and one day you will pay for your great sin.

  No one had signed the letters. Eileen guessed if she were to draw a Venn diagram, “People Who Write Hate Mail” would be a perfect overlap with “Goddamn Cowards.” No outside space.

  Did that mean it wasn’t a Venn diagram?

  The point was, the letters were bad, and they made Eileen realize, sharply, how bad people could be.

  Here was what she’d pieced together, after she’d read the letters many times over:

  These people were accusing her mom, Leslie, of defending a man they called Mark. And this Mark was a murderer. Each letter-writer knew this for a fact. Mark Enright was a cold-blooded killer, and Leslie had taken his side, and she was going to pay one day for these sins. The element that varied from letter to letter was the hypothesis for why Eileen’s mom had done these things. Some wrote she’d been deceived, or misled. Some said she’d been beguiled by “sexual sin.” (One of them actually said that, like a televangelist: “sexual sin.”) However, the majority of letter-writers were of the opinion that Leslie Sullivan was as guilty as the murderer named Mark. They wrote she was probably in on the killing of Mr. Enright, too. Those were the writers who included the most vivid prophecies of Leslie’s fate—how she’d burn in hell or die of cancer or, best of the lot, be murdered herself.

  “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood,” read one, “by man shall his blood be shed.”

  Straight from the Bible.

  Eileen wasn’t religious, but she recognized that much. Quoting the Bible, telling a woman she deserved to die. And these people could sleep at night.

  Eileen hadn’t slept, though. Not for days. Those letters had given her an answer to a question she’d never asked.

  Eileen looked different from her sisters. That had been obvious since she was a kid. It was hard to mistake their blue eyes, or to miss Murphy’s fiery curls and Claire’s blond bun. And then there was Eileen, with her black coffee eyes and hair. The family’s recessive genes had blatantly passed her over, and Eileen had been okay with that for a while. It made her unique, and she’d liked that.

  Until she’d found the letters.

  Until she’d put together the pieces, and everything made perfect, horrible sense:

  Eileen didn’t look like pictures of her dad, because he wasn’t her dad.

  She didn’t look like her sisters, because they were only half related.

  She’d noted the dates on those letters: 2002, the year of her birth. She could put two and two together. For months Eileen had believed she wasn’t John Sullivan’s kid. She was the daughter of a murderer.

  She didn’t know where this Mark had run off to, but she’d guessed why her mom had married John Sullivan so soon. She’d figured out, too, where the murders took place. One of those letter-writers had been brave enough to label their letter with a return address. They’d written from a town called Rockport, Oregon.

  All it took was a Google search of the town, plus “murder,” plus “Mark,” and Eileen had found out a whole lot. About Mr. and Mrs. Enright and their deaths, the trial, Mark’s acquittal, and how a woman named Leslie Clark had defended him on the stand. Eileen had even found Mark Enright’s artwork.

  Eileen knew everything. She hadn’t needed Cathy’s version of things.

  Mr. Knutsen, by contrast, had told Eileen something new: John Sullivan was really John Enright—not a random dude her mom had married, but Eileen’s uncle. As for Mom … she’d had a thing for Enright boys, hadn’t she?

  Eileen still didn’t know what to make of that development. She was processing, and she needed this house and its contents to do that. Maybe Patrick or one of his brothers had left behind a clue, a confession, anything that would give Eileen a definitive answer.

  Because if she hadn’t known about John Enright, what else had she missed? Or gotten wrong? What if the horrible truth she believed wasn’t true?

  Eileen was sick of the secret. She wanted solid proof. Either she was Mark Enright’s kid, or she wasn’t. Her heart beat with possibility. The chance of a no.

  Ch-change, ch-change, ch-change.

  Sure, she hadn’t wanted her sisters to know about the murders, but they still hadn’t learned Eileen’s possible connection to the story. She could keep that under wraps while searching for the truth.

  If it took longer than an hour to find that, then Claire could wait.

  Eileen stood in the parlor, studying the picture she’d found. Here were the three Enright sons: two fair-haired, one dark. A perfect male mirror to her and her sisters. The news articles she’d read online hadn’t included photos of Mark—something about his age and a judge’s court order. But Eileen didn’t need anyone to point out which of these brothers he was. She knew: He was the one who looked like her. The one with the dark hair and eyes, and the mole beneath his lip. She had a mole too, under her left eye.

  Was that the sign of a killer? Proof she had Mark Enright’s blood in her veins?

  If so, Eileen hadn’t been able keep all that blood inside herself. It had leaked out in an unlikely way, through brushes onto canvas, infusing the very paint with its wickedness, earning the reactions “bizarre” and “unstable.” Eileen had thought of her art as a way to find herself, to explore who she was, deep inside. Then, when she’d learned the secret, she hadn’t wanted to explore any further.

  Because what the hell might she find?

  Here he was, the killer himself, dressed in green plaid, dappled sun on his face. He was very real to Eileen, standing alongside Patrick and John. She looked into his photographed eyes. She almost hoped Mark Enright was coming back to town. She wanted to ask him a question, or two, or three thousand.

  She guessed that made her a bad sister. She’d known more than Claire and Murphy had when she’d started this trip, and maybe she should have w
arned them about the risks: that there was a possibility the murderous Mark would show up at his old house to claim what he thought was rightfully his. That seemed to be the theory of everyone in Rockport, anyway.

  What a theory it was, too. Probably bullshit.

  Still.

  Eileen needed someone to ask, because it couldn’t be Mom. Way before Eileen had found those letters, Mom had pulled away, spending longer shifts at work, claiming the family needed the money to cover their growing debt and the landlord’s hike in rent. Maybe that was true, but when Eileen had started working at Safeway and offered to give Mom half the money, Mom had cried and straight-out refused, telling Eileen that money was hers alone. At the time Eileen had thought Mom had simply been ashamed, insisting the job of breadwinner was hers, not her children’s. Now she wondered if Mom had felt guilty about taking the money for other reasons.

  After she’d found the letters, Eileen had suspected this: Mom didn’t want to spend time with Eileen. She’d stopped hanging out with her, stopped asking questions other than a perfunctory, “Doing okay?” And it could have been Eileen was imagining it, but she sometimes found Mom looking at her in a way that could be described as … frightened.

  Was it because the older Eileen had gotten, the more she looked like him? Did that make Mom afraid of her? Then again, Claire and Murphy weren’t murderer spawn, and Mom had pulled away from them, too. Had they been collateral damage?

  Those weren’t questions Eileen dared to ask. But these, about her real dad and what had happened in this house—she might have luck there. Eileen set down the photograph and, returning to the real world, found Murphy sitting at the piano, pressing a single key again and again.

  The kid could be a real freak.

  Claire was hanging outside, an asshole, refusing to enter the home on principle.

  “For all you know,” she’d told Eileen, “Mark could be waiting for us in there.”

  Claire didn’t really believe that, though. She was using fear to prove her point, a politician’s move.