The Third Sister

by Sara Blaedel

  She stopped to get her bearings when she entered the dim basement, but there were no signs telling her where to go. The heavy odor of cauliflower hung in the air; the hospital’s kitchen had to be nearby. Ilka tried a door, which opened up to a wide, brightly lit hallway filled with empty hospital beds. Some of them lacked mattresses; others were filled with stacks of hospital linen.

  She hurried past all the beds to the ELEVATOR sign, her footsteps echoing the entire way. Artie was on the sixth floor, but she didn’t know if this was the right section of the hospital. The elevator clanked loudly when it stopped and the door opened. It rose slowly, and when she stepped out, she recognized the waiting room. She’d reached his ward by the service elevator.

  She smoothed her hair, which was easy enough; the hair she’d been born with was straight as a string. Like a rag doll’s hair, as one of the catty girls in her class had once said. Back then she’d felt bad about it, but it was true. She squared up her coat then walked to the ward’s office, where a middle-aged woman sat behind a computer screen, talking on the phone.

  Ilka had slipped a rubber band around the bills, and when the woman hung up, she held the bundle out. “I’m here to see Artie Sorvino. Maybe you’re the one who called me earlier today, about paying for his stay here?”

  The woman nodded. “Yes, I’m the one.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you about his insurance; we haven’t found the information yet. But this should be enough for his treatment so far. Put the rest in his patient account.”

  The woman accepted the bills without batting an eye and slipped them into a machine. A moment later Ilka heard a hectic rustling sound as the money was counted at lightning speed. She handed Ilka a receipt, confirming that eighty-seven thousand dollars had been deposited in Artie Sorvino’s patient account.

  Ilka sent a silent thank-you to Lydia in the coffin.

  The woman’s face was still blank. “Would you prefer the patient be moved to the hospital’s private patient unit?”

  Ilka didn’t doubt the level of service was much better there, but for the moment she just hoped the doctors and quality of treatment were the same where Artie was. She shook her head and explained that the money in his account was solely for his treatment.

  “Can I go in and see him?” Twenty minutes had already passed—their head start was almost certainly wiped out—but the real question was whether the men looking for Lydia Rogers had been arrested, or if they’d caught on before the police got there. She had to see Artie before leaving for Key West, though, if for nothing else than simply to stroke his cheek.

  Just outside his room, she spotted the head doctor who had treated him when he’d been brought in. He’d been unconscious, and the doctor said they’d found a significant accumulation of blood in the back of his head. A tube had been inserted to drain the blood, which the doctor said should help. She’d also told Ilka and Lydia that Artie would be put into an induced coma to help his body recover.

  “Is he awake?” Ilka wanted so much for the crisis to be over, but the doctor shook her head. They’d decided to keep him in the coma the rest of the week, after which they would reassess when to bring him out.

  “He’s stable,” she said, and then assured Ilka that his condition hadn’t worsened. “But his injuries are serious, and we can’t know how they will affect his brain when he wakes up.”

  “Does that mean nothing will happen this week?” Ilka explained that she planned on being gone. “Maybe four days.”

  “That won’t be a problem. And I promise, you will be contacted if there’s any change in his condition.”

  Her voice turned serious. “But you should know that he’ll need extensive testing and medical treatment going forward. And he’ll also be in for an extended rehabilitation. Both from the injuries he sustained and from his time in a coma, which will weaken him. A physical therapist will be treating him daily, moving his arms and legs, but that doesn’t maintain muscular strength.”

  Ilka nodded. She was enormously relieved that the doctor was thinking long-term, which surely meant they expected him to make it, she thought.

  “And you have my number?” she asked, even though the office had already contacted her for money.

  The doctor nodded. Ilka mentioned that Artie’s bill had just been paid, and she asked her to please not hold back on any treatment.

  Artie lay by the window. The first day in intensive care he’d had a private room, but now he was in with two other patients. One of them slept with his head leaning back and mouth open—it was abundantly clear he was still breathing. The other lay in bed reading. He watched her pass by, and when Ilka nodded at him, he immediately hid behind his book.

  Someone had folded Artie’s hands on top of his blanket, and his shaved head was covered with a bandage that also shielded from sight the tube in the back of his head.

  Ilka stroked his cheek and cupped her hands gently around his face. It was so nice to feel the warmth of his skin. She ran her finger over his lip. He looked peaceful, and without thinking she leaned down and kissed him. She felt she was letting him down by leaving him behind all alone, and she was ashamed when the thought crossed her mind that his coma gave her a convenient excuse—that she was practically leaving with the hospital’s approval.

  She had no idea how she’d tell him that her father wasn’t dead. That it had been a cover-up. But that was something her father would have to do, she decided.

  Ilka kissed him one last time before walking out without a glance at the other two patients. She hurried to the elevator and took it down to the foyer, where she jogged over to the kiosk and bought water and a few sandwiches for the trip.

  She glanced around the large area by the entrance, at the sofa groups on both sides of the information desk, but no one resembled the two men she’d left behind at the funeral home. A crowd was waiting for the next elevator up, and she squeezed through to a door beside the porters’ elevator. Moments later she was in the basement, making her way past the empty hospital beds.

  Outside, another hearse had pulled up and parked behind her. A young guy behind the wheel was talking on his phone. Ilka hesitated, but she decided she didn’t have time to wait for him to leave. She walked to the rear door and opened it, then tapped on the coffin a few times and lifted the lid a crack. She tried to make it look as if she were arranging something inside while she spoke to Lydia.

  “Are you okay in here?” The nun peered up at her, and for the first time Ilka wondered if she was getting enough oxygen. Should she even be in there?

  “There’s a guy parked right behind us, but I can drive off to the side and you can get up front.”

  But Lydia wanted to stay in the coffin. She rose on her elbows and unscrewed the lid of the water bottle Ilka handed her.

  “Do you need to pee before we leave?”

  Ilka glanced at the guy behind them. He was staring directly at her now, with no phone in sight.

  Lydia shook her head and drank more water, then grabbed the sandwich and said she was ready to go.

  Ilka ignored the guy and quickly shoved the lid in place, though this time she left it open a crack. She walked around the car and got behind the wheel.

  Forty-five minutes had passed since they’d left the funeral home. She punched in their destination on the GPS and was informed it would take twenty-four hours to reach the tip of the Keys.

  3

  Seven hours later, somewhere in Kentucky, they ran into road work. Ilka had left the freeway to find a rest stop. They’d already paused once for Lydia to stretch her legs and go to the bathroom. She’d insisted on keeping out of sight while they drove. Ilka felt it was unnecessary, that they were far enough away from Racine, but Lydia had just looked at her blankly before crawling back in and getting settled.

  They were behind a long line of cars at a temporary stoplight, waiting to cross a river bridge with one lane closed for repairs. The line of cars zipping past them from the other side was endless. Ilka felt sur
e many more of them were allowed to cross than from their line; whenever it was their turn, they advanced only a few short spurts before stopping. She noticed woods on the other side of the river they’d have to drive through to get back to the freeway.

  Ilka rolled her window down and swore. They were wasting so much time. Her phone rang, and she checked the display. Her mother. She thought about answering but put the phone on mute and waited for the silent ringing to end. It still boggled her mind that her father was alive, and she couldn’t imagine how her mother would react to the news. Telling her would have to wait until she’d found him.

  She was still holding the phone when the line began moving again, and she straightened up in her seat, expecting to cross the bridge this time. But again, the line stopped, and she yelled out the window.

  She googled Lydia Rogers and stared in astonishment at the number of articles that popped up. Had she spelled the name correctly? She checked; yes, she had. After enlarging the photos on her phone’s screen, she saw it was the sister, with longer hair that fell gently onto her shoulders. In other photos her hair had been styled up, and her face was of course younger, but it wasn’t difficult to recognize her. Ilka clicked on the first article and gaped at the headlines.

  “The Baby-Butcher of San Antonio.” Shocked, she scrolled down through the first row of headlines. “Baby-Butcher Wipes Out Own Family,” “Rogers Behind Stolen Bodies of Babies,” “Fleeing from the Police,” “Drug Smuggling.”

  Ilka enlarged the text to find out what these gruesome acts had to do with the photos of Lydia. A moment later the drivers behind her began honking—cars in front of her were already crossing the bridge. She tossed her phone aside, and when she floored it the hearse lurched forward.

  She stared in the rearview mirror at the shiny lid of the coffin. Her knuckles were white from gripping the wheel, she noticed. She badly needed cigarette smoke deep in her lungs; she craved the dizziness that would dull her growing nausea as her brain processed the short headlines.

  The cars behind them had long since passed her when Ilka spied a rest stop ahead in the woods. She turned in and sat motionless for a long time, staring again in the mirror at the coffin while considering whether to call the police or get in the back and lock the coffin. Instead she reached in her bag and grabbed her pack of cigarettes, then pushed in the cigarette lighter—one of the advantages of driving an old car. She opened her window a crack, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the headrest, waiting for the tobacco to reach her nerves. A wave of dizziness finally rolled over her, and she savored the moment. After stubbing the cigarette out, she reached for her phone.

  The events described by the headlines had taken place in Texas in 2005, and there was no doubt they referred to Lydia. Among other things, she had been accused of killing infants and stealing baby corpses from the morgue and out of graves, after which she filled them with drugs and smuggled them over the border from Mexico.

  One of the photos was of a ten-month-old baby, Gina, one of Lydia Rogers’s many victims. The baby was obviously dead in the picture, but she was dressed in red pajamas with small bears. She’d been taken from a morgue and was found by the police when a younger woman (not Rogers, the article stated) attempted to cross the border into Texas with the baby “asleep” in its baby buggy.

  “Stuffed Babies” was how the journalist described them. Ilka was dumbfounded. There was also a photo of the house where Lydia was said to have lived before fleeing. Two gutted baby corpses had been found in her backyard. Two pouches for drugs.

  Another headline, “The Brutal Baby-Butcher Strikes Again,” was followed by a long article about how Lydia Rogers had shot her brother and his wife and their two daughters. She’d also shot several men who had tried to rescue the family. A manhunt was formed, which led the authorities to the two baby corpses. The article named Lydia as the head of the dead-baby smuggling ring that had been operating for several years.

  Ilka was so absorbed in reading the articles that she didn’t hear the car pulling into the rest stop. Nor did she hear the footsteps approaching. She was startled when a man flung her door open and dragged her out onto the ground, her phone flying through the air. Before she could react, he’d bound her hands behind her back with plastic cable ties that cut into her wrists.

  A bandanna covered the lower half of the man’s face. As he was about to slide into the hearse, she kicked him and screamed, “What the hell are you doing!”

  In a second he was all over her again. He opened her mouth with hands that stank of motor oil, ripped off his bandanna, and stuffed it into her mouth. She gasped for breath and tried to kick him again, but he grabbed her ankles and bound them with another thick cable tie. He began going through her coat pockets, and when he came up empty, he rolled her onto her back and pressed against her, hard.

  “You have a wallet?” he hissed. He sounded younger than he looked.

  Ilka shook her head.

  He was wearing a denim jacket and torn jeans. He worked his hand into her pant pocket, which reminded her of the twenty thousand dollars in her bag, money she had taken from Raymond Fletcher’s office the day before. The old man had originally given her the money to help her—a welcome-to-the-family gift, as he put it—but when she found out what an asshole he really was, she threw the money back into his face. After he was killed, though, she had entered his office and grabbed it out of his desk drawer. No one knew she’d returned the money to him, so no one would ever know she’d reclaimed it. The bills were in an envelope in her bag.

  Was this guy somehow reading her mind? He jumped in the front seat of the hearse and started rummaging through her bag. He smiled in satisfaction as he pulled out the envelope, then he leaned across the seat and went through the glove compartment and side pockets of the doors, checked underneath the seats. Finally, he turned his attention to the coffin in back.

  “Nnnnnn! Nnnnnn! Nnnnnn!” Ilka struggled to yell through the handkerchief in her mouth, but by then he’d already opened the rear door. From the ground she watched as he prepared to pull the coffin out. Suddenly the lid opened, and Lydia sat up with her gun pointed at him. He stepped back in shock, and a second later she shot him first in one knee, then the other. He fell to the ground screaming in pain.

  Ilka stared in disbelief as Lydia crawled out of the back, still holding the gun. The man looked up at her, silent now, his mouth contorted, his eyes wide with terror.

  Lydia walked over and pulled the bandanna out of Ilka’s mouth. The guy started screaming again.

  “Shut up,” she snarled, pointing the gun at his chest.

  Ilka could barely breathe, but she managed to say, “He took my money.” She explained about the twenty thousand dollars.

  The man clamped his mouth shut as Lydia approached him. She found the bulging envelope in his denim jacket, then went through his pockets and fished out a black wallet, cell phone, and Ilka’s cigarettes.

  She pulled out a knife and cut Ilka free, then helped her to her feet. “Did he steal anything else?”

  Ilka shook her head and took the money, all the while watching Lydia out of the corner of her eye. Nothing about this woman resembled the nun she’d known from the funeral home, and Ilka was still so shocked by what she’d read that she couldn’t look her in the eye. Lydia made no attempt to hide the gun; on the contrary, she wielded it as if she might start shooting again at any moment.

  Ilka rubbed her wrists as Lydia looked around inside the hearse.

  “Where’s my bag?”

  The guy was beginning to moan again, loudly, as he crawled toward his car. He left a trail of blood behind him.

  Ilka didn’t understand. “What bag?”

  “The one I packed, my travel bag.”

  “I didn’t load any bag,” Ilka said. She thought a moment, then she remembered the dark-blue bag with the leather handle. “It must still be in the garage.”

  “You can’t be serious.” For a moment Lydia looked like herself again. “You didn�
��t bring it along?”

  Ilka shook her head. “No—it must be in the garage,” she repeated.

  “Take me back to the funeral home.” Now Lydia was sneering at Ilka. Her eyes were black, and she pushed the barrel of the gun against Ilka, who staggered back against the hearse. “Now!”

  Lydia’s face was contorted with rage. The gunshots from a few minutes earlier were still ringing in Ilka’s ears, and she knew she should follow the woman’s orders, but she shook her head.

  “No.” She kept shaking her head. “I won’t. If you want to go back to Racine, you’re on your own.”

  The image of Lydia from the newspaper articles was frozen in Ilka’s mind. She wanted nothing more than to tuck her tail between her legs and run.

  “Give me the keys.” Lydia held out her hand and stepped close to her, so close that they were touching.

  Ilka’s head began spinning; Lydia was short, but her fury made her seem ten feet tall. She glared up at Ilka with a look on her face she’d never shown as a nun.

  Ilka caught herself breathing in short spurts, and she straightened up. She wasn’t about to let Lydia see how frightened she was. “No,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Go ahead, shoot me. I just want to go down and find my father, I don’t want to get mixed up in this.”

  They stood for a moment, staring at each other.

  “I hope for your sake I never see you again,” Lydia spat.

  She’s going to shoot me after all, Ilka thought. But Lydia turned on her heel and walked over to the man at the car. Ilka slumped against the hearse, shaken but alive. She didn’t hear what Lydia said when she bent over the man. He shook his head and said something as he started to hand her his car keys, but the woman stood up and walked away. Back in the direction they’d come from.

  Ilka slowly got to her feet when Lydia disappeared behind the trees. Her legs were shaking, which annoyed her. She clasped her hands tightly in front of her.