“Except for the fact that you’d like to screw him.”
“Beth, I pay him.”
“Obviously, you wouldn’t pay him for that part,” she said. “That part would be volunteer.”
With horror, I realized that my cell phone was still recording. I reached out and stabbed the recording off.
Beth watched me do it. “Apparently, you don’t want to talk about sex,” she said.
“I’d prefer to talk about your sex life,” I shot back.
“We’re not at that part of the interview yet,” she replied, unfazed. “Maybe later. In the meantime, we’re talking about you.”
“I really wish we weren’t.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were mesmerizing, so large and deep, easy to get lost in, even now. She must have been impossible to resist when she was twenty-three. “For the record, I think this detective is probably exactly what he says he is,” she said. “He’s probably even nice. And actually single. But you’re never going to know if you let him stay a mystery because it’s more comfortable that way. That’s my advice.” She shrugged. “It’s your call. Make it.”
It wasn’t until hours later, when the lobster bisque was finished, the bill paid, and I was sitting at my desk at the end of the day, that I realized four things about that lunch with Beth:
One, she really had come to find out what had happened in the interview with Detective Black. And because I hadn’t called her. So she had at least one weakness.
Two, she’d said her mother had lived her whole life in shame. Why?
Three, she had deftly turned the subject away from her childhood, then made me turn the recorder off by embarrassing me.
And four, when I’d mentioned Mariana’s possible mental illness, Beth had been angry. That was what that cold expression of hers was, the dead voice that gave me the chills. Beth hadn’t been bemused or dismissive at the suggestion that her mother had been crazy. She’d been suddenly, icily angry.
When Beth was that angry, she was terrifying.
I was on the right track, which meant the answers were there. I just had to figure out where they were.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
October 2017
SHEA
My sister was the executive assistant to a bank CEO, which was where she met her husband, one of the bank’s lawyers. She and Will lived in one of the new low-rise condo buildings downtown, not far from the waterfront, in a neighborhood that had been built for well-to-do people like them. When I arrived for dinner, Esther answered the door in linen pants and a blouse that would have cost a month of our father’s salary growing up. By contrast, I was wearing dark jeans, a black tee, sneakers, and a stretched-out black hoodie, my hair in a ponytail. I looked like I’d just finished prowling the neighborhood, staring into everyone’s windows, but Esther made no comment.
We probably shouldn’t have liked each other, Esther and me. We were so different, even though we had the same black hair and dark eyes. Esther wore her hair in a fashionable layered cut that ended at her chin and looked amazing on her, and I left mine long and usually tied back. We probably should have hated each other, but we’d never quite managed it. We’d been through too much together.
Will gave me a hug in greeting. He smelled like aftershave and men’s deodorant, scents I wasn’t familiar with anymore. “It’s so good to see you,” he said.
I handed him the bottle of wine I’d brought, warm from my lap, where I’d held it on the bus. “It’s good to see you, too.”
In her early twenties, before Will, Esther had dated a man who hit her. I’d helped her leave him, packing a U-Haul in the middle of the day while her boyfriend was at work, shoving garbage bags of her belongings into the trailer as fast as we could. We may be very different now, years later—Esther successful and put-together, me a divorced wreck—but we still had the experience of the garbage bags in the U-Haul, of me sleeping with her those first nights in her rented apartment, eating Pringles out of a tube for dinner. When you share something like that with your sister, it never leaves you, for better or for worse.
Will went to the dining room to set the table, and I followed Esther into the kitchen, where she put my bottle of wine in her fridge and pulled an already-chilled bottle from an ice bucket. “Thank you for actually coming,” she said.
“Thank you for not setting me up with Will’s coworker.”
She gave me a tight smile. “You scared me off that one,” she said. “Well done. How was your day?”
I had gone to lunch with an infamous possible serial killer, but I looked at my sister and I couldn’t bring that up. For once, I didn’t want to talk about murder. “It was fine,” I said. “Same old, really.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You should get a promotion in that job. You’ve been there long enough. Supervisor or manager of the office. Or better yet, get out of there entirely. It’s a dead end. You don’t need some high-powered career, but you could definitely do better than that place.”
Extra money would be nice, I agreed, but the thought of moving up and managing other people gave me hives. “If something promising comes up, I’ll let you know.”
“You’re humoring me.” Esther scooped tetrazzini into bowls and chopped a garnish to put on top of it. “You don’t want to argue, so you’re saying what I want to hear.”
I was doing exactly that, but I didn’t want to fight. “Have you heard from Mom and Dad?”
“I talked to them yesterday. You should visit them. It’s nice in Florida this time of year.”
“Esther, it’s literally hurricane season.”
I got another tight smile, because despite her lecturing, my sister had a sense of humor. “Okay, then, you could call them more often. Or ever.”
I took a deep sip of wine. She was exactly right—I could call my parents more often. The Incident, when I was nine, had affected my relationship with my parents, even though none of us wanted it to. My parents had felt guilty that they hadn’t somehow protected me from my abductor, though logically they had done nothing wrong. Their guilt, in turn, made nine-year-old me feel guilty for causing trouble and making my parents feel bad. Esther felt both guilty for not being there to protect me and resentful that for a long time I got more attention than she did, followed by guilt about the resentment. And the cycle went round and round, among four loving, well-meaning people who had no idea what else to do, and it was still going round twenty years later.
Sometimes, I thought I might like the cycle to stop. But my parents were in Florida now, and things were bumbling along well enough. There was no reason to dig up old bodies.
I watched Esther sprinkle garnish on our dinners with her beautiful, manicured hands as we stood in her beautiful kitchen. I shouldn’t be here, in my circle of darkness, making things harder for her. She should probably have a better sister. But she was stuck with me.
Will appeared in the kitchen doorway and leaned on the doorframe. “I waited long enough,” he said to Esther. “Did you tell her?”
I went still, my glass in my hand. “Tell me what?”
“I’m working up to it,” Esther said, still looking at her garnishes and not at me.
“You said you’d tell her,” Will said.
I looked at my sister, at the tense lines at the corners of her eyes, and my stomach turned. Was something wrong? “Tell me what?” I said again.
“It isn’t a big deal,” Esther said.
“It’s a big deal,” Will replied, his voice calm. “It’s been a big deal for two years.”
“Tell me,” I said, trying not to panic. “Please tell me.”
Esther sighed, the breath coming out of her from so deep that it changed the shape of her shoulders. Emotions flitted across her expression one by one: fear, stress, tense excitement, a hollow sort of sadness. She stopped fidgeting with the garnishes and turned to look at me. “We’re starting IVF next week,” she said.
I tried to compute this. “IVF? As in having a baby?”