“Who am I not pissed off at would be a shorter answer,” he said. “Our fucking government, for one. The shitty things they made me do over there. Made me…” He gave an angry shake of his head. “You don’t even see people as human beings after a while when you’re there, you know?” he said. “And I’m pissed at our parents. Our lying prick of a father and our ice queen of a mother. And our selfish bitch of a sister!” His face was red and damp with sweat, his breathing loud. “She took up all the air in our family. There was nothing left for anyone else.”
“But,” I said carefully, “did you ever stop to think of what it was like for her, growing up?” I asked. “The pressure on her?”
“Hell, no!” His anger shattered the sacred feel of the woods. “Nobody ever forced her to play the violin. Nobody told her to kill her fucking teacher. Everything was handed to her on a silver platter and she took it all for herself!”
I ran my fingers through the pine needles. I could hear his hard, fast breathing and I made my voice as calm as I could to counter his rage. “I try to understand why people do what they—”
“Shut up with the counselor voice, okay?” he said. “I hate when you do that!”
I was stunned. “I’m only trying to—”
“You turn into some automaton, like you’re programmed to say all this fake, warm, fuzzy shit that has nothing to do with reality.” He looked at me, his face flushed. “You went to school for what? Five years? Six years? And then you think you’re equipped to pick at people’s heads when you haven’t even lived in the real world yet? Maybe you can manage a thirteen-year-old. Fourteen-year-old. But you are way the hell out of your league when it comes to me, little sister.”
I felt as though he’d picked up his shotgun and smashed the stock of it into my stomach. “Danny.” I wasn’t sure what else to say, the hurt I felt was so intense.
“You don’t get me at all, okay?” He grabbed the shotgun as he jumped to his feet, sending my heartbeat into the stratosphere. He looked down at me, the pale blue of his eyes ice-cold. He leaned over so those angry eyes were no more than two feet away from me. “It’s not my mind that’s sick, Riley,” he said. “It’s my soul. And there aren’t any drugs that are going to fix that.”
He turned and walked back into the woods, his stride long and quick despite the limp, and I let out my breath in relief. I waited a moment, trembling, then got to my feet and followed him at a distance, my legs rubbery. I didn’t want to catch up to him—I couldn’t possibly talk with him right now after that outburst—but I needed to keep him in my line of sight. I would never be able to find my way out of the woods alone. Thank God for his red T-shirt! My eyes burned as I followed it from a distance, and I was crying before I realized it. I ached from the sting of his cutting words. Had he thought that little of me all along? Like I was nothing more than an undereducated charlatan with a “fake counselor voice”? Not only did I feel as though I’d just lost my brother, it seemed I’d never had him to begin with.
I thought about all he’d said as I followed him through the pines from a safe distance. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be Danny. To grow up with parents who told you your memories were crazy. Then to be commanded to do things—maybe torture people? Maybe kill them?—against your will. Against your values.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I was way out of my league. I’d been a terrific student—I hadn’t wasted a moment of my time in school—and I knew plenty about healing the troubled mind.
But no one had taught me a thing about healing the soul.
14.
When I got home, hurt and shaken from the conversation with Danny, I took a yogurt from the refrigerator and sat on the porch, but I lost my appetite after the first bite. Danny had heard the gunshots. He’d seen blood on the floor. What else had he seen that my parents tried to erase from his memory? When I thought about that conductor from the Rome festival tape lying dead in the living room, shot through the eye, I felt sick to my stomach. I hadn’t even seen the image that was troubling me, yet I couldn’t get it out of my mind. What must life be like for my brother?
I put the yogurt back in the refrigerator, then returned to the porch with my laptop. Even with the overhead fan on full speed, I was hot, but I didn’t care. I wanted to know something about the man who seemed destined to haunt me now. According to the newspaper articles, Steven Davis had had no children but he did have a wife. How had that woman fared without her husband?
I searched the archives of the Washington Post for his name, and quickly discovered how many different Steven Davises there were in the news. I added the word killed and that narrowed down my search significantly. I found many of the same articles that my father—and mother?—had kept in the box, but there were more. His obituary, to begin with, which said that he started playing violin at age five, the same as my sister. He was a natural talent, the obituary read, and beloved by his students. He’d studied at Juilliard himself and played for five years with the National Symphony Orchestra.
Members of the symphony remembered him as “charming and a perfectionist, exacting and passionate about his performances.” There was a picture of him with his violin, a black-and-white portrait in which he was unsmiling but not stern. Just flat-out handsome in this photograph, with a touch of gray in the dark hair at his temples and a perfectly symmetrical face that looked like it had been carved from stone.
I Googled his wife, Sondra Lynn Davis, and hit a page full of links to a blog: “Never Forgotten: A Meeting Place for Families of Murder Victims.” I stared at the link for a full minute before finally clicking on it.
The image at the top of the blog was a heartbreaker. A couple stood with their backs to the camera as they watched the sun rise over a milky gray ocean. The man held the woman’s hand to his lips, the gesture unmistakably tender and intimate. Even though the figures were mostly in silhouette, I knew who they were. I knew the man thought he was far too young to worry about dying.
Before I could get any more lost in the picture, I lowered my eyes to the introductory blog post.
NEVER FORGOTTEN:
A Meeting Place for Families of Murder Victims
On October 27, 1989, I lost my husband and best friend, Steve Davis. Steve was a brilliant musician. He performed for years with the National Symphony and later opted to teach at a university in northern Virginia so he didn’t have to travel as much and could be close to home. He was a loving and devoted husband. He taught violin students privately, and that is where the end began. It wasn’t the desire to make extra money that drove him to take private students, but a desire to help as many people learn as possible. This is how he ended up with Lisa MacPherson as a student.
Lisa started with him when she was just five years old. He taught her on a one-eighth-sized violin and she showed a great deal of promise, so he worked extremely hard with her. From the time she was small, she was as driven as he was. Of course, she was only one of his many students, but I think she reminded him of himself, since he started playing at the same age and with the same excitement. Every great teacher wants to inspire one of his or her students to reach amazing heights, and for Steve, Lisa was that student. She was clearly on her way to the top, thanks to his commitment to her. He lined up concert engagements for her, spoke to music schools on her behalf, and took her and his other most gifted students to Montreal and Rome to participate in music festivals. He put his heart and soul into his students.
I’d met all of Steve’s students over the years. They were all talented and unique and intriguing. I believe every passionate musician is a little quirky, Steve included. But Lisa always struck me as more than a little quirky. I felt there was an instability there that had gone unrecognized and therefore untreated. Steve brushed off my concerns. As long as she played beautifully, he wasn’t worried about her mental health. He should have been.
Lisa’s commitment to her music began to deteriorate during her teen years, and her playing suffered as she explored working with other teachers. In his distress over how Lisa seemed to be derailing her own career, Steve wrote to an old friend at Juilliard, which was one of the schools where she was applying. He told this friend that Lisa had lost her edge and somehow word of his letter got back to her.
Steve felt so guilty over writing that letter. For a full week, he couldn’t sleep and he grew quiet and hard to reach. Finally, he decided to go to her house to apologize. That’s when she essentially ambushed him, shooting him in the head with her father’s gun. He died instantly.
Lisa MacPherson was about to stand trial for his murder when she “drowned herself” in the Potomac River. However, her body was never recovered and I believe she faked her suicide. The police stopped looking for her, but I’ll never stop searching. I hired a private investigator who found some leads, though he couldn’t get the authorities to follow up on them. A $25,000 reward for information leading to her whereabouts remains in place, but in a way it doesn’t matter. Nothing will bring my beautiful husband back.
Time doesn’t heal. Maybe you no longer cry every single day but the pain is still there. Steve and I were working on having a family when he died. We’d waited a long time—maybe too long—both of us wanting to have established careers before we added children to the mix. I was undergoing fertility treatments at the time of Steve’s death and we’d been optimistic about our chances. Our children would be in their late teens and early twenties by now if we’d succeeded, and I mourn the lost chance we had to create our family.
Ten years ago, I realized I am not alone in my sorrow. Thousands and thousands of other people have lost their loved ones to murder. That’s when I started this blog. It’s a place for you to share your own journey and where we can support one another. If you’ve lost someone you love to murder, you are welcome to share your story here.
* * *
I didn’t know how many times I read that blog post, sitting on the porch in the breathless heat. I was looking between the lines for … something, I wasn’t sure what. My emotions were in turmoil and I felt the confusion physically: a pain across my chest, a knot in my stomach. My sister’s body had never been found, and the thought of her bones lying undiscovered somewhere in the river was unbearably upsetting. I thought of all the times my parents must have pictured Lisa taking her last breath, maybe panicking in that dark, ice-cold water before finally losing consciousness. No wonder they’d tried to protect Danny from the truth. And no wonder that, even when my mother had been in the same room with me, she often seemed so far away.
I was stuck on the phrase “I felt there was an instability there.” I thought of the girl in the tapes again, always standing a little off to the side with Matty … unless she was called forward to perform. She hadn’t fit in well with all those other teens, had she? Had there been mental illness that had gone unrecognized and untreated, as Sondra Davis suggested? I felt sorry for Sondra, still grieving for the children she might have had, and hiring investigators to find my dead sister. More than twenty years had passed, though, I thought. Sondra needed to let it go. I wanted to write to her, although I knew I never would. I wanted to give her my condolences and tell her I was certain, absolutely certain, that Lisa never meant to kill her husband. But then, it was easy for me to say she must have killed him by accident, because that would be the only reason I could imagine killing someone.
But she wasn’t me, was she?