by Nancy Geary
“Perhaps the voice of your sister’s blood cries from the ground,” Elvis suggested, picking up on her biblical reference.
“What were you doing in her room?” Frances asked. The crack in her voice revealed her uneasiness. The invocation of the most famous of sibling rivalries seemed particularly haunting.
“I don’t understand what this is all about.”
“We need to know what you saw in Hope’s room, what you remember. It could really help.” She sounded more imploring than she’d intended.
“I want you to go,” Penelope mumbled, although her voice contained no shred of resolve.
“Look. We’re trying to do this the easy way. But believe you me, things can get much more complicated,” Elvis said. “Hope’s murderer is still at large, and we’re quite sure you know something you’re not saying.”
“What can I tell you?” she asked as she slumped into her chair. Her fingers gripped the arms, and her knuckles turned white. “My sister’s dead, but I didn’t hurt her. And I don’t know who did. Yes, I was in her room, but I never saw her.” She sighed, a mixture of exhaustion and despair.
“Why’d you go in?”
Penelope’s shoulders slouched and she dropped forward, covering her face with her hands. “The morning of her wedding, she’d asked me to bring her some medication, a prescription that Mom had. I don’t even remember the name of the drug. She said she needed it badly.” Her words seemed to echo in the room, and neither Frances nor Elvis responded immediately, waiting for the sound to diminish.
“Did you get it for her?”
Penelope looked up. “She wanted the pills. She was in pain, anxious, truly a mess of nerves. She knew what they were and where they were located. All I did was bring them to her. I was a gofer, nothing more.”
“Did you see her take any of them?”
“No.”
Frances thought for a moment. Had Hope been tranquilized at lunch with Teddy? Frances had attributed her oddity to prewedding jitters. “What happened when you got them for her?”
“She gave me that sweet smile of hers. Then thanked me. Thanked me for being her sister. That’s it. I left.”
Frances took a few steps toward her cousin and lowered her voice. “Did Hope know about your feelings for Jack?”
Penelope’s eyes widened at the reference. Then she shook her head. “No, or at least I don’t think so. I never said a word.”
“Did you know Carl LeFleur?”
“Hope’s other boyfriend? I never met him.”
“Did you tell anyone you’d given her the prescription?”
“No.”
“What you’re talking about is several hours before the relevant time period,” Elvis said. “Why did you go in her room shortly before the ceremony was scheduled to begin?”
Penelope started to cry. Her sobs grew louder, and she gripped her hair with her fingers, seeming to pull it from her head. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes, obviously trying to regain composure only to be overcome once again with tears. When she finally spoke, she gasped for air between words thick with mucus. “I knew Hope was in trouble. Anyone could tell that. She was frantic about getting married. When she asked me for the medication, I got it for her not because I wanted to help, but because I wanted her to make a fool of herself. If she was drugged, I figured she’d fall asleep in her plate, say something wildly inappropriate, be unable to dance. I wanted Bill and Mom and most of all Jack to see how imperfect she could be. I wanted her to fuck up in some way that no one could forget.” Penelope shuddered, as if her own words were difficult to hear. “I’m not proud of what I did. But I didn’t hurt her.”
Elvis shot a glance at Frances, obviously surprised by this disclosure. She closed her eyes for a moment, realizing how painful these words would be for her aunt and uncle to hear.
“You must be thinking, why? I’m her sister, after all. Why would I wish her harm? Frances knows. She knows I wanted Hope’s husband. I wanted Jack for myself. But I didn’t have a prayer. He was so enamored of her that she could do no wrong. A public display of her inability to function would be his punishment, his reminder that he should have picked me.”
She turned away and walked over to the window, seeming to stare out across downtown Boston and into Faneuil Hall marketplace filled with tourists. “I’m not Bill’s daughter, and that half difference between me and Hope represented a chasm between us, our circumstances, and how we were perceived. My whole life I’ve come second,” she said, gritting her teeth. “You know, if you look at me, at what I’ve accomplished, it was never good enough. I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. I graduated from law school. I’m on track for partnership at a good firm. I earn a good salary and own my home. But nothing I did changed our relative worth. Hope was the cherished child. No one told me she was adopted until her death. Bill simply announced before the memorial service for my half sister that we weren’t blood relatives. How sick is that? All I remember as a child was that I went to stay with Teddy, and when I returned home, Mom had a baby. I didn’t know about gestation. I didn’t put two and two together. I was three years old. But suddenly they were the perfect family, and I was the extra, the one who didn’t fit, just like that Sesame Street song kids sing about ‘One of these things is not like the others. One of these things doesn’t belong.’ That was me. The fourth grid that didn’t belong in the picture.”
That there could be such anger within the embracing home Adelaide had created was incomprehensible to Frances. But she had to admit that her time in that house had been brief; her sporadic visits had captured the illusions of a family life but not its essence. And she knew as well as anyone what it meant to be the product of a first, failed marriage.
“I’m never going to have children because it’s too easy to damage them. A forgotten field hockey game, a perfect test score that goes uncelebrated, each time I was filled with shame and a sense of inadequacy. It’s taken me my whole life to accept myself—to not hate who I am each and every day—because of how Bill and Mother treated me. And then when Jack rejected me and chose her, I felt the same sense of failure all over again. I hate them all. Now Mom and Bill have lost the symbol of their special bond, and nothing can bring her back.” She sat back down at her desk, pushed a stack of papers to one side, and rested her head on her forearms for a moment before sitting upright again. “And maybe they deserve it.”
Frances listened, numb. The power of anger, the intensity of emotional damage, imbued Penelope with self-righteousness. She seemed possessed.
“But when she didn’t show up at the church on time, I panicked. I don’t know what I thought, but she’d seemed desperate and I suddenly feared she’d take too many pills. So I went back to look for her, to look for the pills. I never saw either.” She walked over to the window and looked out at the city of Boston below. “I went into that bedroom out of a guilt I didn’t deserve, a guilt that said, ‘What if she harms herself? And if she does, will I be blamed?’ I decided I should take the pills away. When she wasn’t there, I figured I’d overreacted. She’d gone to the church. I never dreamed...” Her voice dropped off.
Her cousin’s hatred, a hatred born out of low self-esteem, was shocking, but Frances didn’t know whether to be enraged or saddened. Although their manifestations differed, both Hope and Penelope had suffered tremendously from some misdirected force within their family. She needed to call Sam, to hear the voice of kindness, of consideration, to be reminded that such qualities still existed in people she knew. As she and Elvis departed, she told him that she would catch the commuter rail back to Manchester. As considerate as he’d been to play chauffeur, she needed to be alone.
The nearly three-mile walk from the train station back to the Lawrence home invigorated her. She moved at a brisk pace, swinging her arms and stretching her muscles. She paused at the entrance to the driveway and inhaled deeply, feeling the salty sea air fill her lungs. Both her aunt’s and uncle’s cars were in the driveway, and she knew she should go inside
and apprise them of the status of the investigation, but she couldn’t bear the conversation. Michael’s arrest had provided a sense of closure for all of them, and the latest developments were certain to cause tremendous pain. Meanwhile, how could they be expected to go on with their lives knowing that one family member had turned against another and that the way they’d chosen to raise their two daughters had contributed to such bitter animosity?
Frances’s thoughts wandered to the murder of Clio, her own stepmother, more than a year before. She’d felt detached at the time, numbed by the experience yet driven by the urge to prove to her father that she could help, that she would find the killer. All she’d discovered was a family so fragmented and emotionally bruised that it had turned on its own members like a wild animal that eats its young. But she’d never expected the violence, the hatred, to spread beyond her nuclear family. That Adelaide’s family was equally beset by animus seemed inconceivable. Perhaps her only salvation was to say good-bye once and for all to the torment of her father’s gene pool.
Instead of going inside, she turned up the dirt path to the guest cottage that Teddy called home. She had wandered along it hundreds of times as a child, feeling the pine needles beneath her bare feet. The narrow path had a magic quality as it wound its way through the trees, and she remembered how easily it had stimulated her imagination; she’d pretended to be Hansel and Gretel leaving bread crumbs in the woods, or an ornithologist tracking a rare species of bird, or a detective searching for clues. Infinite possibilities. That’s what summers in Manchester had been about. Her imagination could soar because life itself was simple: There was a routine to the day, a fixed universe, and few surprises. The ice-cream parlor offered only five flavors—vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, mint chip, and peppermint—and a quarter actually bought twenty-five pieces of candy. The bike shop inflated tires for free. A tragedy was getting her kite stuck in a tree or losing a tennis ball in a patch of poison ivy. Twenty years didn’t seem long enough to have changed that world.
“Teddy!” she called as she opened the screen door. She stepped inside, and it swung shut behind her. Her grandmother’s three dogs pulled themselves up off the braided rug and wandered over to sniff the newcomer. She leaned over to rub their heads. “Teddy!” she called again.
“I’m in here.”
With the dogs padding slowly behind her, she moved through the living room in the direction of the voice. She heard odd electronic sounds followed by a computer-generated America Online voice, “Welcome. You’ve got mail.” Peering around the corner, she saw her grandmother in a pink quilted bathrobe and matching slippers, seated at a small wooden table and staring at a monitor. She had pulled the discolored lace curtains shut to block the reflection of the afternoon sun on her screen but still kept her face only inches away. With her arthritic right hand, she navigated the mouse and clicked on an icon.
Frances chuckled.
“What do you find so amusing?” Teddy asked without a trace of humor in her voice.
She didn’t know how to respond. Although her grandmother had always struck her as progressive, the idea of Teddy on the Internet seemed incredible.
“This blasted machine is so slow. Bea was telling me just yesterday that I should invest in some sort of highspeed access through the cable company, and I think she’s right. I’m just not sure whether I can get it up here.”
Frances covered her mouth to try to squelch a further outburst. She imagined the group of women, all over eighty, discussing the pros and cons of cable versus telephone connections over lunch at the Singing Beach Club or a game of mah-jongg. “How did you learn this?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I learned the same way everyone else does. I asked Bill to get me a computer, and he ordered this one. He found some nice fellow, a what-do-you-call-it.” She paused to think. “An ITS consultant, that’s what he was. He came and set everything up. He explained the basic information to me and left me with several books for beginner computer users. I taught myself the rest.”
“You get e-mail?”
“Absolutely. Perhaps I’ll send you one if you take that smirk off your face.”
“You never cease to amaze me,” Frances said. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m looking to see whether the chancellor has responded to my inquiries.”
“Chancellor?”
“Of the Episcopalian diocese. He’s a glorified lawyer. But he’s a terribly nice man at a firm in Boston.”
“How did you meet him?”
“I didn’t meet him. We’ve just communicated by e-mail. I thought he might be less inclined to think I’m some old coot if I limited contact to the computer. He probably thinks I’m both younger and more reasonable than I am.” She glanced back over her shoulder and smiled at Frances. “I’m trying to find out about Father Whitney.”
“Find out what?”
“Whatever I can.”
“Why?” Although Teddy had mentioned several times over the last week that she had reservations about the Church of the Holy Spirit, her comments had been limited to the negative impact it had on Hope.
“The Cabots have set up that foundation in memory of Hope, and Adelaide is wanting the money to be turned over to the church. Between you and me, I think they’re trying to tithe their way to heaven. I say good luck. But the real issue in my mind is whether a church of that small size is equipped to deal with a lot of money and a serious responsibility. I want to know whether dollars will be spent redecorating the parish hall or whether we’re going to get some good Christian service for the money. I would hate to see it wasted,” Teddy replied.
“Father Whitney doesn’t give that impression.”
“He may be quite devoted to his flock, but money can have a distorting effect. Some say you have to be better than a priest not to let it go to your head.”
“I thought money wasn’t supposed to matter to the truly pious. Isn’t there a ‘God takes care of everything’ mentality?” Frances said with more than a hint of sarcasm.
Teddy sighed. “I see you inherited one thing from me.” With that, she turned back to face her screen. “Now, I’m extremely busy, if you don’t mind.”
“Good luck.” Frances patted her back and left her to her attempts at cybercommunication with the Episcopalian chancellor.
Frances slipped in the back door, stopped briefly in the kitchen to grab a homemade chocolate-chip cookie from the green Bremmer wafer tin by the toaster, and mounted the stairs to the second floor two at a time. She wanted to get up to her bedroom unnoticed. She pushed open the door and saw that everything had been tidied in her absence; the bed was made, a stack of clean towels was piled on the chair, and her laundry had been washed and folded. The miracle of a housekeeper.
On the bedside table by the telephone, Frances noticed two messages. One indicated that Elvis had called. The other was a note from Adelaide saying that dinner would be at seven. She glanced at the numbers on the electric clock. Only thirty-three minutes remained. It had been a long day, and what she really needed was a hot bath, a glass of wine, and an early bedtime.
She flopped down on one of the twin beds, kicked off her shoes, and stretched her arms over her head. Then she reached for the telephone and dialed Sam. He picked up on the second ring.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Frances bit her lip, realizing that just the reassuring sound of his voice was enough to make her eyes fill with tears. The combination of stress, exhaustion, and sadness had taken its toll. He repeated his question. “I’m fine,” she replied. “Just missing you.”
“Fanny, you can’t fool me. ‘I’m fine’ is your least favorite expression in the world. It means you’re not fine but you don’t want to talk about it. You’re not Atlas.”
“How are the dogs?”
“Great. I’m sure they miss you, if that’s what you want to hear. I had them out on the tractor all day, and they came home and crashed. They must have done fifty laps around that field. He
rding instincts gone amuck.”
Frances closed her eyes, imagining the scene of Sam riding his John Deere, plowing the soft brown earth to ready it for the fall planting while her crazy mutts chased their tails. She wished she were there.
“Any leads?” he asked.
“So much has happened,” Frances began, and relayed what she had learned thus far. What she described had an almost surreal quality; reporting details aloud reinforced the strangeness of recent events: Michael’s arrest, then his accusations against Penelope and Carl, and still the many open questions. When she finished, Sam was silent for several moments. She listened to his breathing on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally.
“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” Frances replied, trying to sound in control. “But thanks.”
“I’m sorry for you because I know how hard this investigation is. Once again it’s your family, and I think from what you’re telling me, some childhood illusions are being shattered, and that’s probably worse than anything.”
Sam had a capacity to sense how she truly felt without her having to articulate her feelings. He was the most intuitive person she knew. Once again, he was right. She’d struggled to have her memories seen through a specific filter, and now the lens itself was distorted. “Could I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything you like.”
“Did you and Rose ever consider having children?” She heard the hesitancy in her voice, her reluctance to bring up Sam’s first wife.
“We did. And I’ll tell you, after Rose died, I wished more than anything that we had. I wanted to still have someone who was a part of her.”
“So why didn’t you?”
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line, and Frances wondered whether she should drop the subject to relieve him of the need to relive his past. Just as she was about to retract the question, she heard his voice.
“At the time that we were building our life together, we talked incessantly about whether we could do it, what kind of parents we would be. And we got nervous. We were insecure about whether we were good enough to create life, let alone care for a person with the combination of stability and creativity that we both recognized a child should have. We questioned whether we were smart enough or imaginative enough or loving enough to nurture a child’s development. And so we abandoned the idea.”
