Max didn’t know how to sugarcoat it. And she might be wrong. But if she was wrong, she’d spend a small fortune tracking Carrie Voss down and hauling her ass back to her sister.
“Did Carrie have a charm bracelet like yours?”
Faith frowned and stared at her wrist. “Yes, why?”
She pulled out her phone and showed Faith the photo from the crime lab.
“What’s that?” Faith asked.
“Is this your sister’s?”
“I—I don’t know.” But her voice rose and Max knew she was lying.
“It is, isn’t it?”
Faith’s lower lip quivered. “It looks like it. She—I—I got her a butterfly like that when she graduated from high school. But there’s lots of butterfly charms. Where did you find it?”
Max said quietly, “The police found it.”
“No.” She shook her head. Max didn’t say anything for a long minute, and Faith put it together. “No—not at the campus. The bones they found? No. Not Carrie. It can’t be Carrie. Bascomb said the bones were more than a decade old. Carrie sent me a postcard six years ago!” She covered her mouth and ran down the hall.
Max didn’t have anything she could say that would make Faith feel any better, not right now, so she focused on the postcards.
Faith said she received the first postcard six months after Carrie left. It was postmarked in December. That meant Carrie had left the previous June.
The same month that Lindy was killed. One week before high school graduation.
Max made a list with all the postmarks—day and location. New York. France. England. Australia. England again. Germany. Nearly every European country. There were sixteen postcards total over a seven-year period, but several were clumped together—the last three were all sent a week apart. From France, Italy, and Ireland.
Max had a hunch that Carrie never sent these cards, but there was one easy way to prove she didn’t. Only, she wouldn’t be able to get the information. Only law enforcement could find out whether Carrie Voss had a passport and if she’d used it.
The chances were, she died the night she wrote the note to her mom and sister, and was buried on the Atherton Prep campus.
Max looked carefully at each postcard. The picture from Australia looked familiar. She turned it over and read the inscription.
I’m in beautiful Australia! It’s summer here, totally the opposite of the U.S., ha, ha. I could live here forever. Maybe I will. Carrie
All the other messages were just as generic. Nothing personal. Nothing asking about Faith or giving an address where Faith could write back.
Someone else sent these cards so Faith wouldn’t report her sister missing. Max was certain of it.
She looked at the last card sent. Six years ago next month.
Six years ago. France. Italy. Ireland.
William had been on his honeymoon then. He’d been married in the middle of April, then went on a honeymoon for three weeks, to France, Italy, and Ireland.
Nausea washed over Max and she put her head down for a minute. She had to have remembered wrong. She did the math again; it was right. But William—if Carrie Voss was dead, if she’d never gone to Europe, someone had to have sent these cards. And William was in Europe when the last three were sent.
What about the others?
Max took pictures of each card, front and back, then went upstairs to where she heard Faith softly crying. She knocked on the door.
Faith opened it a moment later. “I—I think I always knew she was dead.”
“I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“Are you positive?”
“No. Not one hundred percent.”
“But you think that—the remains—that it’s Carrie.”
Max nodded. Faith stifled another cry, but controlled herself. “I know how you can find out,” Max said.
“How? They only found a couple bones.”
“I’ll call Detective Santini and tell him what we’ve figured out and they can compare your DNA with hers.”
“I should have called the police,” Faith said quietly.
“Why? Did you doubt Carrie wrote these? Was it her handwriting?”
“Because—I don’t know. I thought it was her writing. I didn’t think anything of her leaving. She did it all the time. She wasn’t even living here full time—she’d just come back from college, and was already looking to live with a friend because she and Mom fought so much. And we weren’t all that close, but—I should have realized she wouldn’t have just gone off to Europe without saying good-bye. In person.”
“You had a reason to think it.”
“She always wanted to go. Always. She had posters in her bedroom, she wanted to study abroad—yeah, it was believable, but just like that?”
“Faith, this isn’t your fault. We don’t know what happened.” Max asked the hard question. “You said she was having trouble with a boyfriend.”
Faith slumped against the door. “She was seeing someone at college. She never told me his name or anything, Mom said she was probably sleeping with one of her professors.”
“And your mom thought she was pregnant.”
“My mom was paranoid about Carrie getting pregnant. Mom got pregnant in college. Got married, had Carrie and me, got divorced because they fought all the time. My mom was very bitter about it. She dropped out of college to raise us, she didn’t want the same thing to happen to us.”
“Why did she think that? Did Carrie say something?”
“Carrie denied it. But, deep down, I thought she might have left because she got an abortion, and she didn’t want us to know. The way Carrie thought—she might have thought our mom would hold it over her forever. It wasn’t a good year for any of us.”
New tears rolled down Faith’s face. “I love my sister, but after she left, there was no more drama.”
“Do you have any idea who Carrie had been seeing that spring?”
“No. But I have a box of everything she left. It’s in the guest-room closet. I’ll get it.”
Max knew she should tell her no, to give it to the police. But she didn’t. She wanted to see the box.