The Better Sister

by Alafair Burke

  “To me,” Ethan said. “What happens to me? Where will I live? Do I stay in New York or go back to Nicky?”

  Guidry looked at me. We had already talked about my sister at the police station, but a final decision hadn’t been made yet about contacting her.

  “Do you mind if I talk to Ethan alone for a second?” she asked.

  “Why is that necessary?” I replied.

  “You had asked us for an accommodation for your family. He seems capable of having input on that decision.”

  “Oh my god,” Ethan muttered. “My dad’s dead, and you’re talking about me in code. I’m sitting right here. Yes, I’m perfectly capable of speaking for myself.”

  The rational side of my brain was telling me not to leave him alone with a police detective, under any circumstances, ever. I had seen the way something in Guidry had shifted, and I knew that she and her partner had been treating me as a suspect for hours, whether they meant for me to feel that way or not.

  But the other side of my brain was asking the same question as Ethan: What was going to happen to him next? I didn’t want them to call Nicky. Not yet. I had given them an abbreviated summary of the history there. All I wanted was to wait a day. One day for Ethan and me to deal with losing Adam on our own. But I understood why Guidry would want to hear it from Ethan directly.

  I told them I’d wait outside by the car.

  8

  Poppit

  Thread: Chloe Taylor/People for the Press Award

  Posted by BilboB

  Making sure everyone saw the video of our favorite feminazi getting yet another honor this week. Can’t the libs find someone else to slobber over for a while?

  Posted by SoxSuck92

  Can barely recognize her with all that makeup and ten layers of Spanx. I wonder if she called the cops on anyone with XY chromosomes who paid her a compliment.

  Posted by FireStarter

  These cunts won’t be happy until it’s illegal for men to speak before spoken to.

  Posted by JustTheTip

  She cleans up OK. I’d do her. It’d be a hate-fuck, but just sayin’.

  Posted by IncelMRA

  Went down the rabbit hole reconning this bitch last month. She’s married to her sister’s ex.

  Posted by Bighead

  @IncelMRA WTF? Seriously?

  Posted by FireStarter

  Where’s @KurtLoMein? He always acts like he knows her IRL. Dude, is that true? She’s married to her brother-in-law? Do you know the sister? We need deets.

  Posted by JustTheTip

  Is it bad to say I’d fuck the sister too? Just doing my part for the cause. LOL.

  9

  I sat next to Ethan in the back seat on the way home. He let me put my arm around him, and eventually rested his head on my shoulder and shut his eyes. I noticed Guidry glancing at us periodically in the rearview mirror.

  When Guidry took the fork onto Ocean Avenue, Ethan sat up. It was Saturday, the rare day when not even our entitled neighbors would dare think of having the landscaping done. He opened the car door to the sounds of birds waking and ocean waves high enough to hear from four blocks away.

  I counted a total of five police cars in the driveway and against the curb outside, three marked, two unmarked. Guidry had already warned me that it might be days before we could get back into the house. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to walk inside again.

  “We can be out of the way in the pool house,” I said as Ethan took in the unfamiliar sight of so many cars in front of our property. I’d gotten the all-clear to come and go there, since it wasn’t considered part of the crime scene. “We can ask them for anything we need from your room.”

  He nodded. I let him step out first and then asked Guidry in a low voice, “So we’re okay on my sister?”

  Adam was awarded sole custody of Ethan when he was two years old, but Nicky’s rights were never fully terminated. The arrangement was put to Nicky as a compromise, but Adam’s own lawyers had told him that a judge was unlikely to extinguish her parental rights, even with the evidence he had. Then, after we got married, we wrote a will that named me as Ethan’s guardian in the event of Adam’s death. But the lawyer had warned us that the provision wouldn’t be binding in a family court. If Nicky sought custody, the judge would have to look at Ethan’s best interests to determine who would finish raising him. On the one hand, I’d been with him nearly every day since he was four years old, and Adam obviously wanted him to stay with me. On the other, Nicky was his biological mother and wasn’t quite the train wreck she’d been fourteen years before, at least not on paper.

  I was still trying to process the reality that my husband was dead, and was already wondering if I’d have to wage a legal battle to keep Ethan.

  Guidry nodded. “I’ll wait until the end of the day.”

  “Thank you.” I was about to get out of the car when I stopped. “Hey, is there a way to confirm that Nicky was actually in Cleveland last night? You know, before you involve her in all this?”

  “Wow, that’s quite a loaded question, Mrs. Taylor.”

  “Can you please call me Chloe? Every time you say Mrs. Taylor, I wonder who you’re talking to.”

  “Of course. Chloe it is. Do you really think your sister might be responsible for your husband’s death, Chloe?”

  Did I? Of course not. But then why had I asked the question? “No. We just have a complicated history, is all. She’s basically been out of the picture since Ethan was a baby. To be honest, I’m not looking forward to whatever the next steps will be once she’s notified. And I’d feel better if I’m a hundred percent certain, just in case.”

  “Fair enough. You’re sure you don’t want to be the one to call her? She is your sister.”

  I was sure.

  The structure we called the pool house was actually a small cottage that happened to sit on the opposite side of the pool from the main house. Adam thought I was crazy when I decided two years earlier to add what was essentially a second house next to the three-bedroom, three-bath carriage house that was already our secondary home. “How are we going to keep the guests away?” he joked.

  I told him that we’d need it someday when Ethan was older and wanted to visit with college friends and eventually his own wife and children.

  What I didn’t tell Adam was that I wanted—no, I needed—a place to work that was more than a hallway’s skip from him and Ethan. As a partner at a law firm, Adam worked hard, but it wasn’t the kind of work that seemed to call for deep concentration. He was one of those men who was constantly fiddling with his phone, answering emails between holes on the golf course and returning calls between courses of a meal. He strategized and filed lengthy legal briefings with the court, but managed a small pack of younger lawyers who did the actual research and writing. Adam’s final role in the work product would be a quick line edit, often on the sofa as he watched the news.

  I, on the other hand, wrote essays, articles, and, so far, two books from whole cloth. Even my work as editor in chief of Eve required me to absorb every square inch of an entire magazine edition, with a close review of copy, layout, and content. In my office at work in the city, I keep the door closed, instructing my assistant to block all calls and visitors for hour-long blocks or more, knowing that I work best when I am assured there will be no interruptions.

  So what was I thinking when I was the one to suggest buying a house in East Hampton? I knew what I was thinking: I did it for Ethan and for Adam. I wanted Ethan to know some place other than New York City. I wanted him to have fresh air and the ability to ride a bike around the neighborhood without getting sideswiped by a bus. And I knew that Adam had never really come to love Manhattan. No matter how many years went by, he still flinched at the blaring sounds of sirens and needed a drink to calm his nerves after a crowded ride on the subway. A house outside of the city, near the beach, would be a paradise for them.

  But I should have realized that paradise meant I wouldn’t be able to get an inch
of work done. For a wife and a mother, there’s apparently no such thing as a “home office.” Home meant Adam and Ethan wandering in whenever they couldn’t find something, had a question, or stumbled upon a movie on cable they thought I’d be interested in. It wasn’t until I tried to do my job under a shared roof with my family that I realized that neither Ethan nor even Adam truly understood that my job involved actual work.

  And so then came the “pool house.” By the summer before, it had become evident that my intention all along was to have the essential Room of One’s Own. Once, when I disappeared into what was now my working space over a holiday weekend, I returned to the main house to find Adam brooding in the kitchen. “I wish you’d at least tell me when you plan to ignore me all weekend. I wouldn’t have bothered coming out.”

  I’d never need to worry about creating space between us again.

  I hugged Ethan as soon as we were inside with the door closed.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  For the first time since I had left the hospital with the police, I almost lost it all over again. He had just learned that his father had been killed, and he was worried about me.

  “Numb,” I said. “Scared.”

  “Scared that they could come back?” His eyes searched mine for an explanation. “Whoever did it, I mean.”

  I held him tighter, not knowing what to say. “The police will be patrolling the area, keeping an eye on us. We have the security alarm, too.” I thought again about Guidry asking me why Adam hadn’t set the alarm. I had given her a possible explanation, but I was wondering the same thing. We always set it before going to sleep. I tried to remember the few times I got back to the house after Adam had turned in for the evening, and could picture myself disarming and then resetting the alarm. But was I certain? Of course not. I knew how fragile memory can be, especially for those kinds of inconsequential details. And even if I was right, every routine had exceptions. Adam had been so tired. Maybe he drifted off without thinking about the alarm. It was another question I’d never have an answer to now.

  “What did Guidry talk to you about while you were alone?” That’s how I always avoided empty silences: with facts. Busywork. Things to check off the to-do list.

  “She said they needed to contact my mom, since you’re technically my stepmother. I guess you told her Mom still has rights to me.”

  “I wasn’t going to lie to her, Ethan. We’ll have to deal with it eventually. It’s going to be okay, though.” I had no way of knowing if that was true, but it was what we both needed to hear right then.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Hey, back at Kevin’s house, you looked at me for a second like maybe you wanted to say something to me in private.” I tried to pull up the image of his face in that moment. If I didn’t know my kid, I’d say it was rage. It was nothing I had ever seen in him before. Or were my perceptions shaped by my own sense of guilt? “Do you want to talk now? About Dad, or anything at all?”

  He shook his head.

  “So what exactly did Detective Guidry ask?” I realized how desperate I sounded.

  “How I felt about them calling Mom.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “I told her she’s barely my mom. And she’s, you know, a bunch of drama. So she said you guys worked it out that Mom would be called later, and was I okay with that. Honestly, I wish we didn’t need to tell her at all.”

  “Ethan.” Adam had always let Ethan believe that his mother had essentially abandoned him, but I knew the truth was more complicated.

  “Whatever. I just want to go to my room and be alone.”

  I couldn’t even give him that. The pool “house” was really just one big room with a wet bar in the corner, but it did have a tiny sleeping loft.

  “There’s clean sheets on the bed,” I said. He was halfway up the stairs when I checked with him one more time. “And you’re sure that’s the only thing the detective asked you about? Nicky?”

  “Yes.”

  Had they asked him about me? That is what I wanted to know. “Nothing else?”

  “No!” he said, clearly aggravated by my cross-examination.

  He was trying to be calm, I could tell, but I heard him start to cry almost immediately once he reached the bed.

  If only he had done that back in the Dunhams’ kitchen, I thought. Because I had seen the way Guidry looked at him. Whatever test she had in mind for how a kid should act when he hears his father’s been murdered, Ethan had failed it, and now the police were going to put our family under a microscope.

  10

  Detective Jennifer Guidry plucked another gelatinous piece of candy from the tear in the upholstery of the passenger seat of her department-issued Impala. If her count was right, it was the seventeenth one so far—not counting the one Chloe Taylor had found. She wondered how long Bowen had been stuffing them in there. If she had to guess, it probably started around the time she called him out for that weird thing he kept doing, rolling up little strips of Scotch tape and dropping them into a coffee cup. If only he were as obsessive and compulsive about police work.

  She closed the car door and made her way back to the Dunham house across the street, which she had left only forty minutes earlier. Andrea Dunham was still in her robe when she answered the front door.

  Andrea kept clutching at the collar to cover her chest, even though she was wearing some kind of tank top beneath it. Guidry thought about telling her to go upstairs and do whatever she needed to do to be less fidgety, but she was working on fumes and needed to get home to catch a few hours of shuteye.

  Andrea gave a small laugh when Guidry asked whether she and Chloe Taylor were close.

  “Sorry,” Andrea said, “but you saw their house, right? And you see the one you’re sitting in now. No, we don’t exactly hang out. The boys have been friends for years, though. They met in sports camp when they were ten years old. But we only know Chloe and Adam to say hi to them, coordinate play dates when the kids were little, that kind of thing. I can’t even believe it about Adam. She must be beside herself.”

  Guidry had assumed the two women weren’t friends. Chloe hadn’t even hugged Andrea when she left the house, just a thank-you for the coffee and for letting Ethan spend the night.

  “Do you know who they’re close to out here?”

  Andrea was looking up at the kitchen ceiling, searching for answers, but then a worried expression crossed her face. “Chloe’s not a suspect or anything, is she?”

  “This is standard for an investigation,” Guidry assured her. “We focus on the victim and work our way outward. Try to find sources of conflict, potential motives.”

  Andrea nodded. “They’re summer people, you know? They hang around with the friends they know from the city. I can’t really help you.”

  “Perhaps your son would have some names?”

  “Maybe. He spends time over there.”

  “That would be great,” Guidry said, as if Andrea had volunteered to wake her son. Andrea was about to leave the kitchen when Guidry stopped her. “It’s lucky the boys were here last night instead of at Ethan’s. Were they here all night, by the way?”

  Andrea waved a hand as if the suggestion were silly. “Don’t judge me, but I have no idea. Kevin’s room is in the basement, and there’s a walkout door from there, so he’s always coming and going. As long as he makes curfew, I consider myself lucky.”

  “And what time was last night’s curfew?”

  “One on weekends.”

  “And how do you know he made it?”

  She shrugged. “He’s a good kid. You’ll see.”

  She’d spent the requisite amount of small talk with Kevin—did he know Ethan’s family, could he name their friends—before turning to the time line for the previous night. “Before I go, can I just confirm that Ethan was with you until this morning?”

  “Yeah. We were out all night, just like driving and stuff. Got back here around 12:30, played some Fortnite. He was gone when I woke u
p.”

  “Where’d you drive?”

  “Cruising is all. Went as far west as Watermill. East as far as Montauk.”

  Guidry remembered cruising the main drag in Boston. At sixteen years old, she wouldn’t have been able to describe the details any better.

  “This was all after the movie?” she asked.

  “Is this like on TV? Where you make sure Ethan and I agree on what movie we saw? You can’t seriously think Ethan did something to his dad, right? Because that’s, like, crazy.”

  “Nothing like that,” Guidry assured him. “It’s standard to exclude members of the family first so we can move on from there.”

  “Okay, cool.”

  “Great,” Guidry said, jotting down the recited movie title before tucking her pen away in the spiral notebook.

  Walking to her car, she told herself she’d made the right decision going back to speak with Kevin Dunham. The name of the movie itself wasn’t especially noteworthy. It was the same film Chloe had mentioned when she accounted for Ethan’s whereabouts the previous night.

  The problem was that, according to Ethan, there had been no movie at all.

  11

  I’m standing at an altar, surrounded by white orchids, looking out at a sea of despondent faces. Everyone is wearing black. I think I’m wearing a veil, because when I look down at the pages on the lectern, I can’t read the words. I fumble with the netting in front of my face until I can make out the letters clearly. I begin reading automatically, not even processing the sentences that are coming out of my mouth. The people in the audience glance at each other in confusion and begin to murmur. They grow so loud I can’t hear my own voice. I look down at my notes and realize I brought the wrong speech. I’m thanking everyone for my award during Adam’s funeral.