The Bad Sister

by Kevin O'Brien

  But she fell silent as the sister took another step toward her. The nun towered over her. Eden glanced down and noticed the men’s shoes under the hem of the black garment. Looking up again, she saw his five o’clock shadow—and the cold stare from his eyes.

  Before she could move, he lunged toward her.

  Everything went out of focus. The grocery bag fell out of her hands.

  He took her in a headlock.

  Gasping for air, Eden helplessly tugged and clawed at his arm. He pulled something out of the sleeve of his tunic. Eden only caught a glimpse of it—a piece of cloth in a plastic bag. He held the bag up close to her face. She heard the plastic rustling as he plucked out the rag.

  She realized he was wearing some kind of surgical gloves. He slapped the piece of cloth over her nose and mouth. It was wet and smelled of some chemical.

  Eden tried to struggle, but she couldn’t move her head. She thought he might break her neck. She felt her whole body shutting down. Her arms fell to her sides.

  Eden desperately tried to get a look at his face. But the way he held her head, all she could see were the treetops. They seemed to be swirling.

  Then it was just blackness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Saturday, September 12, 11:52 A.M.

  “God, it’s noisy there,” she said into the phone. “Where are you?”

  Sitting on the living room sofa in her summer pajamas, Hannah was alone in the bungalow. She’d just called her seventeen-year-old brother, Steve. With the two-hour time difference in Seattle, she’d expected to catch him at home, having breakfast. But when he’d picked up and said, “Hey, Han,” she’d heard a lot of racket and other people in the background—like he was at T-Mobile Park or something.

  “I’m at Biscuit Bitch—at Pike Place Market,” he explained.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Eating breakfast,” he answered. “I’m having a Cheesy Pork n’ Bitch. That’s a biscuit with gravy and cheddar and shredded bacon. It’s bitchin’.”

  “My guess is you go there so you have an excuse to say ‘bitch’ a lot.”

  “Actually, it’s really good. Plus I have a gymnastics meet at two, and they say you’re supposed to eat a lot of carbs before a big sporting event.”

  “I think you’re supposed to do that the night before, but what do I know? Are you there at the restaurant with anybody?”

  “Nope.”

  She wasn’t surprised. Her brother was always kind of a loner. “Who’s keeping the home fires burning?” she asked. “Where are the ’rents?”

  “Gabe has a football game. So Mom and Dad went there to cheer him on.”

  She wondered why her parents were playing favorites with her twelve-year-old brother. “Well, who’s cheering you on?”

  “Nobody. They offered, but I get nervous whenever Mom and Dad are in the audience—especially Dad. Every time I’m ready to get up on the side horse, they act like I’m stepping in front of a firing squad. Anyway, I have a new routine, and I don’t want to screw it up.”

  “I wish I were there,” Hannah said. “I’d cheer you on.”

  “That’s really sweet of you to say,” Steve murmured. “Are you feeling all right? Is this really Hannah? Who are you? What have you done with my sister?”

  “Very funny.” She laughed despite herself. The truth was she’d had a major attack of homesickness this morning.

  “How’s Eden? Still driving you crazy?”

  “She’s been out all night,” Hannah sighed. Getting to her feet, she wandered over to the bedroom door. “I haven’t seen her since about five-thirty yesterday afternoon. I called and texted her, and of course, no answer.”

  “Of course,” he said, sounding unconcerned. “I guess she’s up to her old tricks.”

  Leaning against the bedroom doorway frame, Hannah stared at Eden’s bed. Her half-sister had actually made the bed yesterday morning. It was strange to see it looking so neat and tidy—unslept in. “I was up until four this morning,” Hannah said into the phone. “I practically climbed the walls worrying about her.”

  “You really shouldn’t, Han. Eden can take care of herself. You know how she gets. She’s probably off on one of her solo adventures. I’ll bet she’s been out all night exploring Chicago. She’ll drag herself in there later today, crash, and take a three-hour nap.”

  Even though she was on the phone, Hannah nodded.

  After last night’s tense discussion with Rachel, Hannah had hoped to talk with Eden about it. If nothing else, she could always count on her to be honest. Would Eden think it was so horrible that she’d confided in Ellie Goodwin about their big family secret? Hannah had decided to wait up for her.

  She’d passed the time online, looking up articles on the murders that took place on the campus back in 1970, when it was Blessed Heart of Mary College. According to the Wikipedia write-up, the “Immaculate Conception” murders were preceded by two disturbing events that occurred at the college the previous week. The first of those events was when eighteen-year-old Linda Mackevich secretly gave birth in one of the bungalows and then strangled her baby and set it on fire. Hannah looked up what happened to the girl after that: She was committed to an insane asylum and, over the years, was moved from one institution to another. Then in 2009, Linda Mackevich died of cancer at age fifty-seven while confined at Garfield Park Behavioral Hospital in Chicago.

  The second disturbing event was the disappearance of a sophomore, Crystal Juneau, only a few days after the infant’s murder. Hannah saw her photo: a pretty girl with long, dark hair parted down the middle. As a kid, Hannah had been a fan of That Girl reruns, and Crystal reminded her of a young Marlo Thomas. There was some confusion as to exactly when the girl had been abducted. Two days after Crystal had gone missing, her fraternal twin, Cynthia, also attending Blessed Heart of Mary, found a note on her bed from her sister assuring her that she’d just needed to get away, and she was all right. But that was the last communication from her.

  Crystal, in fact, had been abducted by the Immaculate Conception Killer, Lyle Duncan Wheeler. He’d forced Crystal to write that note. He kept her locked up in a shed in his backyard, where he routinely raped and tortured her. In a matter of days, he’d strangled two students and one teacher—before breaking into bungalow eighteen, where he stabbed and strangled two of the girls who lived there.

  Ensconced on her bed at three in the morning, Hannah couldn’t help looking up from her laptop at the overgrown garden outside her window, where bungalow eighteen had once stood. Suddenly, the murdered girls next door had names and faces. Nineteen-year-old April Hunnicutt was a chubby-faced blonde with a dimpled smile and short, wavy hair. She looked like she’d had a wicked sense of humor. One of the articles Hannah read mentioned that April was a Beatles fan, and the oldest of five kids. Her housemate downstairs, eighteen-year-old Debbie Metzger, had studied ballet and theater. She’d been stabbed twenty-six times. In the bedroom, next to where police found her body, stood a bookshelf filled with plays by Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, William Inge, and others.

  It was strange to think that, while these two girls were being murdered and a third narrowly escaped, another girl had been sleeping soundly here in this room, so close to all that horror and carnage.

  Small wonder Hannah had had trouble falling asleep after climbing into bed and switching off her light at four this morning.

  She woke up shortly after eleven—only to see Eden’s bed still vacant and tidy. For a few minutes she heard Rachel talking to someone on the phone in the living room. Hannah still felt weird about their discussion the night before, so she stayed in bed—until she suddenly heard the front door open and shut. She thought it was Eden, finally returning home. Throwing off her sheets, Hannah jumped out of bed and rushed into the living room. But it was empty. Out the front window, she spotted Rachel climbing into the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car. Her driver, Perry, closed her door for her. A minute later, he was in the driver’s seat, an
d off they went.

  After everything she’d read last night, Hannah didn’t especially like being alone in the bungalow, even in the daytime. She was lonely, too. Her brother had a morbid fascination with old true crime stories, especially serial killings from yesteryear. If he weren’t such a sweet guy, she’d be worried about him. She’d figured Steve would be interested in hearing about the Immaculate Conception murders. Plus, maybe he’d heard from Eden last night or this morning. Finally, even though she’d gotten into trouble last night for opening her big mouth, a part of her wanted to tell Steve about their father’s other child. Why should she be practically alone in this?

  “Hannah? Are you still there?” Steve asked over the din in the background.

  With the phone in front of her, she sat down on her bed and sighed. “Yeah, I was just spacing for a second. Listen, how are Mom and Dad doing?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “I mean, are they, like, getting along okay together or do they seem on the brink of divorce? I keep thinking, now that Eden and I are gone, one of them will end up moving into her sty down the hall or into my room in the basement.”

  “No, they’re still sleeping together.”

  Ever since things had gone to hell two years ago, their dad hadn’t been the same. After having been laid up in the hospital for weeks, he’d come home looking older and paunchier. Plus he’d been publicly humiliated. He’d become a national joke. Yet, oddly enough, he got a lot of fan mail from women, but they were obviously the same kind of crazies who wrote to serial killers in prison. It used to be that people thought her mother was lucky to be married to such a handsome, charismatic guy. That just wasn’t so anymore. Besides, once the truth had come out about all her dad’s womanizing, the same people who had thought her mother was lucky now considered her a total saint or a total chump.

  Hannah had thought her going off to school would change things, and maybe her mom would finally dump her dad. But then, she hadn’t counted on her dad becoming so pathetic and needy. Maybe her mother liked him that way.

  She wondered how her mother would react to the news that he’d fathered yet another illegitimate child way-back-when—and with her own sister, no less.

  Suddenly, Hannah didn’t want anyone in the family to know, at least not right now. As much as she wanted to unload the news on Steve, she couldn’t do that to her brother. It was too much. And, hell, it would throw him off his game today. For now, it would have to stay a secret between her and her two half-sisters—and Ellie Goodwin.

  “Hey, I haven’t told you yet,” Hannah said. “But I’m living next door to this garden that looks kind of like a cemetery. But there used to be another dorm bungalow in that spot. And two girls were stabbed and strangled there fifty years ago.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m serious as a heart attack. I can’t believe Eden didn’t say anything to you about it. You can look it up online—the Immaculate Conception murders in 1970, back when this place was Blessed Heart of Mary College. It’s all really creepy and sad—and right up your alley. Check it out. You’ll be all over it.”

  Hannah talked with her brother for another ten minutes. She kept hoping Eden would walk in before she hung up with Steve, but no such luck.

  Slouched on her unmade bed with her back against the wall and the phone in her hand, she listlessly stared out the window. She thought of the two girls murdered in the house that used to be there—where the statue of St. Ursula now stood amid the chrysanthemums. She thought of the others whose young lives had been cut short by the Immaculate Conception Killer. She imagined them as grandmothers now—and not the rocking-chair, crocheting variety either. They would have been around seventy years old, still active, vital, and hip.

  After murdering those two girls in bungalow eighteen—and inadvertently letting one witness escape—Lyle Duncan Wheeler returned to his home in a rural area outside Waukegan. He went to the shed in his backyard and slit the throat of his prisoner, Crystal Juneau.

  Biting her lip, Hannah glanced down at her phone. She googled the name again. She wondered how many days had passed between the baby-murder and Crystal’s disappearance. After a few minutes, she found the answer. It had been only three days. Crystal Juneau had vanished on September 12, 1970.

  Fifty years ago today.

  Hannah lowered the phone and gazed at Eden’s unslept-in bed.

  She shuddered violently.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Eden had no idea how much time had passed—hours or days—since she’d been attacked in the woods. Lying in the dark on a cot, she kept seeing that man disguised as a nun, his face a blur. He’d lunge at her again, and Eden would recoil. She’d want to cry out, but couldn’t. As if struggling to wake from some nightmare, she’d try to sit up.

  But she was strapped to the cot—like some kind of mental patient. Duct tape around her wrists tethered her hands to the sides of the cot. A wadded-up rag was stuffed inside her mouth. It had been in there for so long that it tasted like puke.

  Her last memories were of those woods, that minivan following her, and Nick What’s-His-Name being so phony-friendly to her in the café. Sometimes those images came back to her all distorted—like a reflection in one of those store security mirrors.

  She’d been sleeping on and off ever since the woods. During the off-periods, she hallucinated. One moment, she was tied to a steamer trunk in the cargo area of a ship; and the next, she was in a crypt hidden in the garden next door to her bungalow. At times, she was lucid enough to figure out where she was—either someone’s garage or one of those storage lockers people rented out for junk they didn’t know what to do with. The place was cold and smelled musty—like wet, dirty concrete. It wasn’t completely dark. A bit of light filtered in through a vent up on the wall—just enough for her to make out that someone had set up a couple of folding chairs near her cot.

  She wasn’t completely alone the whole time. A man had come to talk with her every so often. Each one of his visits was preceded by a click and a mechanical humming noise. Then the big door would open from the ground up. In one of those instances, the daylight blinded her, and she couldn’t see who was coming in; but most of the time, it was dark and she still couldn’t make out his face. In what must have been one of her hallucinations, she was almost certain her visitor was a priest. He sat in one of the folding chairs and started reading to her. Eden thought he was giving her the sacrament of Last Rites. She remembered crying and trying to tell him that she didn’t want to die.

  She could barely figure out what was happening to her—let alone why. She only knew she’d never been so scared in all her life.

  Escape seemed impossible. Even if she hadn’t been strapped to the cot, she doubted she could make it halfway across the room because she was pumped full of drugs. Her visitor had given her several shots in the arm. He must not have been too skilled with a hypodermic, because her arm was sore as hell. On two of those visits, after giving her a shot, he had asked her a bunch of questions. It was the only time he took the putrid rag out of her mouth. Plus he gave her some water, so she almost welcomed the interrogations. He also switched on his phone for some light—enough for him to find a vein in her arm for the needle. She liked the light. And he was always very friendly. He talked in a soothing voice and assured her she’d be all right. She never saw his face, but she kept thinking of Nick What’s-His-Name from the café. He served up that same fake-friendly attitude with all of his questions. And this one with the needle was asking about the same things—the detective that Cassandra, the woman who raised her, had hired; Rachel Bonner; and her father in Seattle.

  Eden always answered honestly. She didn’t know the detective’s name. As far as she knew, he’d been hired ages ago when she was a little kid. He might have worked for Cassandra again. Cassandra had been obsessed with Dylan and the different women he’d been with; and it only made sense that she’d had him investigated again and again. But Eden wasn’t sure. Yes, the detectiv
e probably gave Cassandra documents, but Eden had no idea where they’d been stored. They hadn’t been among any of Cassandra’s things after she died. Eden knew she had an older half-sister somewhere out there. Dylan O’Rourke was the father. But Eden had no other details. She’d never heard of Rachel Bonner or her family—not until she got the news that Rachel would be her housemate at Our Lady of the Cove.

  Eden didn’t care that she was giving away family secrets. The guy gave her a little more water whenever she answered a question. And each time, he thanked her for being so cooperative.

  She tried to figure out when he’d come in here last. She was thirsty again, and hungry, too. She’d also wet her pants sometime recently. It was so humiliating and horrible. But Eden told herself that she couldn’t start crying. Her nose would fill up with snot, and with this awful rag in her mouth, how would she breathe?

  She heard a click. She twitched at the humming sound of the big door lifting. Squinting toward the opening, she saw it was nighttime. She’d noticed some light coming through the vent just a minute ago, and now realized there must be a security light outside near the vent opening.

  She realized something else: There were two men now. Were there always two? Was she just too out of it to notice? Or had the man recently recruited someone else?

  One of them shone a flashlight at her, and suddenly, she couldn’t make out a thing—just the blinding light getting closer and closer.

  “I see you’re awake, Eden,” her interrogator said in his fake-friendly tone.

  The big door started to descend. The gloomy room turned darker and darker.

  “I’m giving you something that will help you sleep, Eden. This will all be over soon. We’re letting you go.” There was a pause. “Give me some light . . .”

  She realized he was talking to his friend now. The flashlight beam swept over the man hovering near her—onto the hypodermic in his hands. As he guided the needle into her arm, Eden winced at the pain. With the light on her arm, she could see the other puncture marks and the purple bruising.