What My Sister Knew

by Nina Laurin

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say. “You’re working with him? Why?”

  Lamb gives me a condescending look. “How do you think he got through all these years, first at the institution, then in prison? You certainly weren’t there.”

  I shake my head, incredulous. “You actually fell for his bullshit act. He’s got you in his thrall too.”

  “Hardly.

  “You can’t be this stupid.”

  “He got used to me after a while,” Lamb says. “He started looking forward to my visits, and I won’t lie, so did I. He’s a fascinating individual, after all. We talked a lot over the years. And after he got out of prison too. I helped him out when I could. He had time to tell me lots of interesting things.”

  “And you believed him.”

  “Was I wrong?”

  My gaze darts to the recorder. It’s silent and black, no little lights to indicate it might be working. But I know to tread carefully. An engineered confession is technically entrapment and can’t be used in court. But in these circumstances, who knows anymore?

  “So, Andrea, I know the real reason you’re here. You’re not going to surprise me. Should we get to it? It’s what you came here to do anyway. Confess. Correct?”

  “You really think I’m going to tell you everything now?”

  “Of course you are. I’m still missing a few pieces. What was the real catalyst? It can’t have been an offhand remark of your brother’s. I don’t buy it. I have guesses but it would be nice to find out if I was correct.”

  Careful. “I changed my mind,” I say as calmly as I can. “The interview is cancelled. I’m going home now.” I get up from the armchair so fast I get a flash of vertigo. He doesn’t move, watching me as I storm to the door, only to grasp at emptiness as I realize the handle has been removed.

  “Sorry, Andrea, but until we have your confession recorded on this device,” Lamb says behind my back, “you’re not going anywhere.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  “After we’re done,” Jonathan Lamb goes on, “I’ll open the door, and you’re free to go wherever you want. No need for violence or coercion.”

  “That’s an interesting way of putting it. Do you know where my brother is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re an idiot. You should have called the police.”

  “That wouldn’t really be in your best interest. They think you killed those two girls.”

  So he knows about Sunny. Has it been on the news already? Or did Eli tell him? I try not to dwell on the second possibility.

  “You know my brother is just using you, right? Isn’t that what you wrote in that little book of yours?”

  Lamb shakes his head. “But that book was based on a lie. Which kind of throws everything else into doubt, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. If you believe my brother. Who lies like he breathes.” Stall—I must stall for time while I look for a way out. “You seriously think he’s forgiven you for cashing in on his downfall? If you think that, you’re in for a big disappointment.”

  He answers with an infuriating shrug.

  “Where’s the handle?”

  Silence.

  “It has to be in here somewhere. Is it in your desk?”

  “There’s only one way out of here, Andrea,” he says calmly. Ignoring him, I go over to the desk and pull out the two small drawers. I yank them out and dump their contents onto the floor. Nothing even resembling a door handle.

  Lamb looks on serenely, unperturbed as I turn his office inside out. It means I’m not even warm. Do I have to rip out the floorboards? I sweep his sleek, new-looking Mac off the desk in one movement. It drops to the floor with a clatter that makes me wince but Lamb looks bored.

  “Just accept it,” he says. “Save us the time. Think about it—what’s the worst that can happen at this point if you confess? You were a child, and I’m sure you had your reasons. Say your manipulative sociopath brother made you do it. Or maybe you were just experimenting with some nail polish remover and the rug. Or hell, your stepfather touched you in naughty places. I don’t know—I’m sure you can come up with something. There’s no proof after fifteen years. They’re not going to put you away for life because of it.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m putting you in control of the narrative,” he says. “You should be thanking me. Who else has ever done that for you in your entire life?”

  Jim Boudreaux did, if only for his own selfish reasons. Eli did, after a fashion. And I’m still paying for it.

  “What does Eli think of that?” I throw volumes of psychology books onto the floor one after another. When I glance at Lamb, he remains unperturbed. Where is the door handle? I check each shelf—nothing but dust.

  “You can’t change what happened,” Lamb says. “But you can decide what happens next. Just stop wrecking my office, sit down, and say your confession into the recorder.”

  “Not going to happen,” I snap. In the middle of the destroyed room, I stop, panting, at a loss. There’s nowhere else to look.

  “Well, then. I’ll just let your brother frame you for two murders. But it’s a damn thin line between truth and a lie, Andrea. I’m asking you to see reason. You can’t stop what’s coming but you can control the damage. To an extent. They’ll go easy on you.”

  “So what happens then? You go off into the sunset with my brother? You don’t really believe that.”

  “You have a right to your opinion. But you’re not leaving this room.”

  I look around and then back at Lamb’s grim face. He’s starting to look impatient; I notice the tremor in his hands, the way he drums his fingertips on his knee.

  Do you know where my brother is? I asked him. And he said yes.

  There’s only one way out of here.

  Things are starting to add up.

  “There is no door handle, is there?” I say. His nostrils flare, a classic tell. I can’t suppress a small smile. “The door is rigged, right? It only opens from the outside.”

  “Sit down,” he says. “If you know what’s good for you.”

  “The door only opens from the outside, and since the two of us are in the room, I’m guessing there’s a third person somewhere in the house.”

  He opens his mouth to protest or threaten—I don’t know, because before he can speak, I yell my brother’s name at the top of my lungs.

  “Shut up,” he hisses. He jumps to his feet, eyes darting wildly from the door to me and back.

  “So it is him. He’s here. Doesn’t that make you an accessory to something?”

  “Don’t be stupid. He’ll only open the door once I give him the go-ahead. And I won’t do that until—”

  “Until I confess into your recorder. Got it. But the problem is you think you’re playing him when it’s really the other way around.” I take a deep breath and yell, “Eli! I know you’re out there. Open the door.”

  “He won’t listen to you.” Lamb’s voice is on the verge of yelling.

  “You can open it now! You hear me? I confessed.”

  Lamb lunges at me, taking me by surprise. My back hits the wall as he tries to wrap his hands around my neck. But he’s weak, in bad shape. I hear him wheezing. In a simple trick I learned working at the shelter, I bend his fingers the way fingers aren’t meant to bend, and he doubles over with a howl of pain. My knee connects with his forehead, sending him reeling sideways. He knocks the end table over, and the recorder clatters to the floor, breaking into three pieces.

  He flails, trying to get up. His gaze, filled with pain and fury, lands on mine.

  “You two,” he gasps. There’s a little blood in the corner of his mouth—maybe I knocked out a couple of teeth. “You are both completely fucked. You know that?”

  It occurs to me that he’s right. Maybe we are both toxic, doomed to never have a normal life no matter which one of us took the blame. Maybe it was spending the first couple of years of our lives watching our biological father beat the crap out of ou
r mom. Maybe it’s the bullies, or something we saw on TV or on the internet, or maybe it’s video games or whatever people usually blame. Maybe it’s because one, or both of us, was just born wrong.

  I don’t give a fuck, and who is he to judge me?

  “You’ll regret this.”

  “Probably,” I admit.

  We both hear the door rattle at the same time, and our heads turn toward it in unison, like puppets. His eyes widen in terror.

  Eli kicks the door open and bursts in. He’s holding something in his hand. A pistol, a strange-looking one.

  Jonathan Lamb opens his mouth, and I hear the hiss of breath as he draws air into his lungs—to say something, or to scream. I don’t have time to find out because my brother fires the gun one, two, three, four times, right into his chest.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Fifteen years earlier: the night of the fire

  Andrea is blinded and deafened. All her senses seem to have deserted her—except for pain. Pain is ever present. Consuming her, devouring her mind the same way the fire raced across the carpet, merciless, leaving nothing in its wake. Dazed, she can barely see through the reflections of orange flames dancing in front of her eyes, burned into them. But there, on the other side of the orange specters, is a familiar face. Eli’s face, his blue eyes wide and filled with terror. His cheek and forehead are smeared with soot, and underneath, he’s pale as death itself.

  “Addie!” It takes her a moment to realize he’s yelling—she just can’t hear through the roar that fills her ears. “Addie! What did you do? What the hell did you do?”

  Her shirt. Her pajama top with the cartoon characters, the one that’s too small—it caught fire too, and she needs to take it off. She fumbles with the hem, trying to pull it up, except her hands don’t feel like her hands anymore. They feel disconnected from her altogether, like she’s trying to operate one of those arcade machines where you fish out plushy toys with a claw.

  And the shirt—the shirt won’t come off. The shirt and her skin are now one. Melted into one another. If she tries to take it off, her skin will come with it.

  She squeezes her eyes shut and tries not to think.

  “Why did you do this? Why?” He’s practically crying. She opens her eyes and sees his face again, the soot now streaked with white stripes where the tears have washed it away. He grabs her shoulders, which sends unimaginable pain coursing through her. Her mind winks out momentarily but flickers back in.

  “Why did you do this?”

  She tries to remember but she can’t even remember how she made it out here. She remembers everything exploding into orange flames, and then—she thinks—she fell, facedown on the floor. Then someone dragged her, every inch of distance crossed echoing with pain in her upper body.

  And then she was outside, back on her feet somehow. That’s all she knows. She doesn’t know what to answer him. She doesn’t even understand the question. He shakes her again, and she raises her hands in self-defense. Her right fist unclenches, and something clatters to the ground.

  Her brother lets go of her shoulders, which doesn’t make the pain lessen in any way. She watches in confusion as he crouches and picks up the object, holding it aloft by the key ring. It swings on its short chain. The enamel reflects the flickering orange flames as they consume the house. Gold letters glimmer: COME BACK TO CAPE COD.

  She blinks away the tears that blur her vision, and for just a split second, her mind is clear. “Because that’s what you wanted,” she whispers. Wasn’t it?

  “What?”

  “You said you wanted them to die,” she repeats, louder. Tears are pouring down her face now, and there’s no stopping them. “You told me, and I did it. You told me. You told me.”

  “I never told you to do this.”

  She doesn’t dare look back at the house—neither of them does. She just knows that there, in the fiery inferno, is their entire life. Their stepdad, their mother, everything they’ve ever known.

  “Yes, you did.” Didn’t he? She’s no longer certain. The pain is making her sleepy.

  “I never meant for you to actually go through with it, you stupid little bitch.”

  Andrea shakes her head violently. She shuts her eyes but she’s still seeing red.

  “Don’t you know the difference between what’s real and what’s make-believe? You were never supposed to do it for real.”

  She’s weeping silently, tears seeping from under her eyelids that remain tightly shut.

  “You know what’s going to happen now? You’re going to go to prison.”

  When he doesn’t get an answer, he sighs. Andrea keeps her eyes closed when he takes her hand and presses the lighter into her palm, closing her fingers over it. It’s smooth and strangely cool, like a pebble.

  “Fine. We’re going to deal with this, okay? You won’t have to go to prison. No one will know a thing. It’s a fire; they happen all the time. All I need you to do is keep your mouth shut. Can you do it?”

  Andrea forces a tiny nod.

  “If anyone asks you anything, you know nothing. You woke up; the house was burning. That’s all. And this thing.” He squeezes her wrist, which only makes her hand clench tighter around the little lighthouse. “Keep it to yourself. Hide it, don’t show it to anyone, and when you can, get rid of it. Got it? Get rid of it.”

  She starts to nod but a moment later sirens and lights descend on them. She’s never seen fire trucks that close, and so many of them, lights blazing. They’re as big as a house. And someone is running toward them, yelling something indistinct.

  She doesn’t remember how her hand ends up in the pocket of her pajama pants. Her fingers unclench and release the lighter, which nestles at the bottom of the pocket.

  Then chaos breaks loose. She screams when someone drags Eli away while a paramedic pulls her toward an ambulance. More people, whose faces she can’t see, surround her from all sides. She keeps asking where her brother is, where her mom is, but no one will answer her—it’s like she’s not speaking the same language and they can’t understand a word she’s saying.

  She tries to remember her mother’s face, the last words they said to each other, but like a wisp of smoke, they slip out of her reach. Where her memories used to be, now there are only fire and ashes, and the lighter in her pocket gets lost in them too.

  Much later, at the hospital, one of the nurses will bring the lighter to her, never having figured out what it really is.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Jonathan Lamb drops without a sound. I can’t bring myself to look at the four jagged holes in his chest but I can’t look away either. Blood soaks through his shirt. Death must have been instantaneous—there wasn’t even a horrible last gasp as he realized this was it. No foam, no blood from the mouth. Just like that, here and gone.

  My brother and I look at each other without words. Even if I wanted to speak, my ears are ringing so loudly I couldn’t hear myself. My gaze wavers from his face to the gun he’s holding in his hand. It looks off—something is strange about it. I can’t quite figure out what. He’s not training it on me, not yet, but he doesn’t lower it either.

  Compared to the last time I saw him, he looks even thinner and, not surprisingly perhaps, older. No one could ever tell he’s only in his late twenties, or that we’re twins. He looks like he has a full decade on me. Maybe more.

  I watch his every move. He takes a couple of steps across the room and then nudges the remains of the recorder with the toe of his sneaker. “I take it you won’t be confessing any time soon,” he says. He’s smiling but there’s something cold and malicious in that smile.

  “Where did you get the gun?” I ask through the ringing in my ears that has dwindled to a hum.

  “His antique collection. It’s from the forties or fifties, I think. Still had bullets in it and everything.” He gives the gun an appreciative look, like a child with an expensive new toy.

  “He just left it lying around?”

  “Sure. In one of
his display cases. He trusted me, the poor bastard.”

  “This was the plan all along then.”

  He shrugs. “More or less. My plan did involve you confessing though.”

  “I guess it’s too late for that, huh?”

  “It’s not too late. You can always do it old-school, type it on his laptop or write it on a notepad…”

  “It’s not going to happen,” I say, enunciating every syllable carefully, “because there’s nothing to confess to.”

  He chuckles. “Oh God, Addie. Let it go! I’m not trying to trick you and record you. The paranoia is really getting the better of you.”

  “Was Sunny part of the plan too? Were you going to kill her all along?”

  He ignores me. “Anyway, I have a contingency plan. Come on. Let’s get out of here. This room reminds me of the loony bin.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Just two minutes ago you were bellowing for me to come help,” he points out.

  “Put the gun down.”

  “No.” He raises it, points it at me. Tilts his head and closes one eye. “Boom.” He mimics a gunshot. “I’m kidding. I’m not going to shoot you. It’s just insurance.”

  His gun points, unwavering, into the center of my chest. Slowly, I take a step toward him, and he backs out through the doorway until we’re both outside, in the hall.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. “You got them all. Everyone.”

  “Except for you.”

  “Except for me.”

  I gulp, glancing around for a means of escape. There are paintings and artistic photos behind glass on the wall. If I could get one and find a way to smash it over his head—

  Without warning, he shoots. It’s like a bomb going off inches from my ear, followed by myriad tiny bursts of pain like red stars blossoming on the side of my face. Glass flies everywhere, pointy little shards of it. Where there used to be a black-and-white photo of a vintage car, now there’s a crater in the wall. Blood runs down my neck and behind my collar.