The Wicked Sister

by Karen Dionne

  Or are none of these scenarios correct and I’m letting my imagination get the better of me? It’s possible that the footprints I saw are not Rachel’s at all. Maybe the poachers have a child with them. Maybe the smaller prints belong to a woman. Maybe they’re not poachers. Maybe they’re merely wildlife enthusiasts and all they’re taking is pictures. This camp is not far from the territory that White Bear claimed after he left his mother when he was a two-year-old. Did the hikers wander onto our property and stumble across White Bear and come back and build this blind so they could photograph him? If they did, and word were to get out about the rare albino black bear and curiosity seekers swarm us, eager to see for themselves, my research could be in serious trouble.

  There’s only one way to find the answer. I step boldly into the clearing, making sure to keep my hands where anyone who might be watching can see them. I scan the edges for movement, a reaction, the reflection off the lens of a camera, the glint of a rifle scope. I wish I had a rifle of my own.

  “Hello? Is anyone here?”

  No answer.

  “Rachel?”

  Still nothing. No one calls out to me or tries to stop me. Maybe Rachel is in an entirely different part of the forest. Maybe she doesn’t even know this camp is here.

  I go over to the campfire and am relieved to see that the pot holds only boiling water, and nothing more. The area beneath the hunting blind is enclosed with wooden snow fencing painted green to disguise it. It looks like a cage. Maybe the people who built the camp really are poachers, and they’re hoping to trap baby animals and sell them to the pet trade. This time of year, there are plenty of babies in our woods from which to choose: raccoon and fox kits, bear cubs, even our wolf pups could be targets.

  I go up to the fencing and peer through the slats. The interior is deeply shadowed. I can just make out something lying on the ground. It looks to be about the size and shape of a deer.

  Then the shape moves, and I see that it is not a deer at all.

  “Rachel?”

  I literally take a step back. I feel as though I’ve been punched. It’s impossible to process what I’m seeing. Someone put my daughter in a cage. I have no idea who, or why.

  “Mommy?” She sits up sleepily and rubs her eyes.

  “What on earth? Rachel, honey, what are you doing in there? Come over here to me.”

  She gets to her feet and comes close to the fencing. I stick my fingers through the slats to touch her face.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Uh-huh.” She yawns and stretches. “I fell asleep.”

  Thank God it’s only that. She seems unhurt. Which makes the reason for her captivity all the more puzzling.

  “I can see that. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I keep my voice light. Rachel is a sensitive child. If she doesn’t understand that there is something very, very wrong with this picture, I am not about to tell her.

  She shakes her head. My heart plummets. “I have to pee,” she says.

  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Okay, then. Let’s get you out of here.”

  I walk the perimeter. If someone put my daughter in this cage, there has to be a way out. The fencing is stretched taut and nailed with staples to the trunks that form the blind’s supports. The cage is so secure, it makes me wonder if it was built to contain an adult bear. Maybe the hikers aren’t planning only to take pictures of White Bear. Maybe they’re hoping to lure him inside and capture him. To what end, I’m not sure. And that still doesn’t explain what they did to my daughter.

  At last I find a section that looks as though it’s meant to fold back on itself as a gate. A gate that is fastened with a padlock.

  A padlock. I’m so furious I could scream. Surely, whoever took Rachel as their prisoner can’t think that they can keep her here indefinitely, that we wouldn’t come looking for her, that we wouldn’t scour heaven and earth until we found our missing daughter. I feel like ripping the cage apart with my bare hands, shredding and tearing and burning everything that I can find. These people are on my property. They put my daughter in a cage. I shudder to think what might have happened if I hadn’t found her.

  I look around for a hammer or a rock to smash the fencing surrounding the padlock. Beneath a pile of branches, I spot a wooden ladder. The ladder looks identical to one of ours that went missing weeks ago. If the people who built this place and imprisoned my daughter have been sneaking around the lodge stealing our stuff, then they’re a lot bolder and more dangerous than I thought.

  I prop the ladder against the platform and climb up to look for the padlock key. Then I reach the top rung and stop. On the floor is a blue plastic tarp. The tarp is covered with newspapers. On top of the newspapers, laid out meticulously from smallest to largest, are Diana’s flensing knives.

  EIGHTEEN

  NOW

  Rachel

  I wake up in a small, warm, dark place. It feels as though I’m in a cage, or a cave, though somehow, I know it’s neither. I don’t know where I am exactly, but I know this place is familiar. I’ve been here before, spent enough time in this place to recognize the contours and the odors immediately. It smells of dirt and something else. It’s crowded, but not unpleasantly so.

  I also know that I am not alone. Something is in this place with me. Something that’s not me. Something alive. I should be frightened, but I am not.

  I open my eyes. Instantly, the warm, safe feeling disappears, and reality intrudes. The old barn in which I spent the night is drafty and cold. The hay mound where I slept reeks of mold. It’s not dark as in my dream, thanks to the early morning light filtering through the rows of dusty skylights running the length of the barn under the eaves. And it most definitely isn’t warm.

  Still, the dream lingers. I had a therapist once who was a big fan of unpacking dreams to find their meanings. She said that everyone’s subconscious keeps working while they sleep, and that the seemingly random and disjointed thoughts and images my brain conjured up to entertain me during the night were the key to discovering what was keeping me at the hospital. She made me keep a pad of paper and a pencil by my bed so I could write down everything I remembered as soon as I woke up. I could have told her that the reason I wasn’t getting better had nothing to do with my dreams and everything to do with my visions, but I didn’t.

  I don’t put much stock in dream interpretation. Even the best and brightest experts don’t agree. Freud believed that dreams are the vehicle we use to bury our conscious thoughts. Jung believed that dreams reveal our secret thoughts, and that understanding them is essential for restoring our “psychic balance,” a term that always sounded way too out there to me, though this could have been my therapist’s phrasing given that Jung died before New Ageism became a thing.

  I have my own dream theory. I believe that dreams are nothing but the recycled pieces of whatever we thought or said or did that day. For example, if you dream that you’re being chased by a monster, it doesn’t mean that subconsciously you are terrified of dying; it’s just the leftover anxiety from whatever went wrong that day taking a different form, whether you forgot to do your homework, or you couldn’t find your car keys, or you were late to school or work.

  I also believe that dreams are sometimes the remnants of other days, and that having dreamed them, we can relive those days again. I believe the dream I just experienced is one of these. Now that I have dreamed it, I remember being in a small dark place the day my parents died. Hiding, obviously, though whether this was before or after they died, or whether it was in a closet or in the basement or somewhere else, I can’t say. Still, it’s a memory. A clue. One more piece of the puzzle that I am trying to assemble. Last night, I went to bed cold and tired and wet and discouraged by how little progress I’d made. This morning, things look a lot better. Since I’ve come home, I’ve learned that the last time I shot my rifle, I was in the forest. I also kno
w that something very bad happened in our woods. And now I remember that I spent some unknown amount of time in a warm, dark, safe place. All I have to do is figure out how everything fits.

  I unwind the blanket from around my legs and stand up. The barn is freezing. Goosebumps pepper my skin. A line of little drifts along the north wall where the snow blew through the cracks between the boards explains why the barn is so cold. Still, last night wasn’t the worst sleep I’ve had; that honor goes to the night I spent on the floor of a padded cell. A person might think that because the floor is padded it would be relatively comfortable. But when you think about what you’re actually sleeping on, including all of the various and sundry bodily fluids that have accumulated in the padding over the years, it’s enough to make you wish the floor was concrete. You’re not allowed to have a blanket or a pillow, and the staff who are monitoring the ceiling cameras twenty-four/seven won’t turn off the lights no matter how many times or how nicely you ask. Beating on the walls and screaming and crying gets the same non-response. The padded room is meant to calm patients after they’ve had an episode, but in my experience, after a few hours you come out so beaten and worn down from being so completely at the mercy of others, you’d do anything they told you to if only they would make it stop. Never mind the drugs.

  I drape the blanket over my shoulders and gather up my clothes to get dressed. My jeans and socks and boot liners are still wet. I shake off the straw clinging to them and put them on anyway, then slip through the gap in the back of the barn to relieve myself. Close by is the cemetery where my parents are buried. I’ve never visited their graves, though I used to come here with my mother to visit my baby brother. To be honest, the practice seemed odd to me then and still does. I understand that some people find it comforting to sit and commune with their dead loved ones, as my mother used to do with my brother, and I don’t begrudge them that. But I don’t have to visit the spot where my parents are buried to remember them. It occurs to me now that I don’t know how my brother died. Perhaps Diana does.

  I zip my jeans and hurry back to the relative warmth of the barn. Mice flee my footsteps. They don’t know that I am the last person on earth who would hurt them. I cross to the side facing the lodge and look out through one of the cracks. The lights are on in the kitchen. Smoke curls from the chimney. The windows are foggy with condensation. I can see Diana and Charlotte moving around behind them like ghostly shadows. Warm and well-fed shadows.

  I wipe my dripping nose on my jacket sleeve and open the connecting door to their studios hoping to find something to eat: a leftover candy bar, an apple core—and am immediately enveloped in a warmth so delicious it makes me shiver. I feel like an idiot. My parents used to talk about upgrading their offices to electric baseboard heat instead of kerosene space heaters, but when they weighed the small amount of time they spent in their offices against the amount of time they spent in the field, they concluded it wasn’t worth the investment. Given that Diana and Charlotte work in their studios full-time, it makes sense that they would have taken the plunge. I wonder if the entire property is now electrified. That first night as I was bumbling my way around in the dark, I never thought to turn on a light switch.

  There are other changes. The dividing walls that separated the offices have been torn down to make one large room. My parents’ desks, their papers, their research—the tape recorders and cameras that I was hoping to use to document Diana’s scheming—everything is gone. The loss saddens me more than I can say. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to take up my mother’s research without her records. If I’m lucky, their books and papers are in the boxes in the carriage house. They have to be. I can’t believe that Diana would have so little regard for our parents’ life work that she would destroy it.

  Less intrusive and a definite improvement are the small kitchenette and a door next to it that turns out to be a bathroom. I reheat the leftover coffee in the microwave and scarf down one of Charlotte’s homemade granola bars. My parents used to say that Charlotte could have opened a bakery, and I don’t disagree. I loved watching her roll out piecrust into a perfect circle on our marble countertop, then adding sugar and flour and a pinch of nutmeg to the blueberries I’d picked for the filling; taking the pies from the oven with a pair of scorched and stained oven mitts, the slits in the tops of the pies bubbling juice like a blue volcano. My father was always threatening to throw away her oven mitts because they were so ragged. Sometimes Aunt Charlotte would throw one of the mitts at him when he teased her like this and say that if he wasn’t going to be nice, he wasn’t going to get any pie, but we all knew she was joking. A poignant reminder of what my life was like in the early years, back when everyone was happy.

  I finish the granola bar and immediately pick up another. If Charlotte is keeping count, I’m in trouble. I grab the steaming coffee from the microwave and wrap my hands around the mug and carry it with me as I explore the room. In front of the row of windows on the north wall is an easel on which sits Diana’s latest oil painting: an extreme close-up of a bird’s foot along with part of its tail. Even though the painting is not yet finished, the level of detail she has managed to capture is truly astonishing. Every scale on the bird’s leathery skin, every barb and barbule on every feather seems to glow. Previously, I’d only seen photographs of my sister’s paintings. Now I understand why they have to be displayed behind ropes and glass to keep people from touching them. My sister is a famous artist, though I had no idea how famous she had become until one of my therapists recognized her from a 60 Minutes interview. She even has her own Wikipedia page. “The reclusive Diana Cunningham,” or “In a rare interview,” is how the articles about her usually begin. I used to read everything about her I could find until I realized that the articles inevitably brought up the family tragedy. Most stinging was when the articles praised her “selfless sacrifice” on behalf of her “profoundly traumatized sister,” as one particularly uncharitable writer put it. Unless a person also happens to be famous for something that she’d rather not be famous for, I promise they have no idea how discouraging it is to see yourself dismissed so negatively in so few words.

  Next to the canvas sits a stuffed bird identical to the one in the painting. Looking at the two together, it’s obvious how she achieves such stunning realism. I’m betting that I could match a catalog of my sister’s paintings with every bird on display in the gun room—each killed and mounted by none other than my taxidermist sister. I’m assuming her method is a closely guarded secret; at least, I haven’t read about her unique blend of taxidermy and painting in any of the articles. I can imagine the PETA people descending on her studio with pitchforks and torches if they knew. The thought of her studio surrounded by screaming protestors makes me smile. If there’s one thing my sister can’t stand, it’s a crowd.

  Across the yard, the kitchen door bangs. I grab a third granola bar and a bottle of water and hurry back to the unused part of the barn. Moments later, I hear the studio door open and close. I piece together their scraps of conversation and conclude that Diana’s paintings are going to be exhibited at a gallery in New York in a couple of weeks, and she and Charlotte need to crate the last of them to get ready, and Diana will be flying out early to do a series of interviews with Charlotte tagging along as her assistant. It’s hard not to feel jealous—especially knowing that not only am I not included in these or any other of their plans, but that Diana wants to set me up where she never has to see or deal with me again.

  As soon as I’m sure they’ve settled in for the morning to work, I slip out the back side of the barn and go the long way around through the woods to the lodge. I return the outerwear I borrowed yesterday exactly as I found it, hoping that neither of them will notice that the boot liners are now soaking wet, and run up the stairs to my bedroom. I take a blissfully hot, quick shower because the lodge has indeed been wired for electricity and the water temperature is not merely lukewarm as I remember, throw on dry clothes, and hurry
down the hall to my childhood bedroom, where surprise, surprise—the ravens are sitting on their nest. I open the window and stick out my head.

  “Hi. It’s me,” I say, suddenly shy.

  The female cocks her head and fixes me with one shiny eye. We remember, she says.

  “And do you remember the day my parents died?”

  We remember, she says again.

  “Tell me. Tell me what you saw that day. What you know.”

  All will become known, the raven who greeted me on my arrival says.

  Remember, his mate adds. Remember.

  I pull my head back inside. I feel like I’m talking to a pair of toddlers. When it comes to intelligence, ravens are on a par with dolphins and chimpanzees, but this pair are decidedly lacking. It’s no wonder I was never able to teach them to talk.

  I go over to the closet and take my box of childhood keepsakes off the top shelf. All the objects inside this box were important to me when I was a girl. I’m hoping they’ll reveal something now. I spread them out on the bed: a blue jay feather, the bear-tooth necklace my father made from the teeth of a bear that died of old age, a chunk of iron ore I found by the lake. I heft the rock in my hand, remembering how I thought it was a meteorite because it weighed twice as much as it should. A piece of quartz veined with copper. A robin’s egg. Clearly, I was a little girl who loved nature.