The Good Sister

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  He’s undoubtedly thinking about his own three teenage girls at home. Al’s nieces are all bubbly, well-adjusted kids. But then so, he hears, was Morino’s daughter. Al is grateful that his own kids are past high school and seem to be thriving young adults—although you just never know.

  “You know, I’ve always thought Mikey had it all,” Glenn says, “but right now I wouldn’t trade places with that guy for all the tea in China.”

  “Tea?” Phil shakes her head as she slides three glasses of bourbon across the bar toward them. “Forget tea. And forget your damned wallet. This round’s on the house. You want wings, boys?”

  Al shakes his head and takes a sip of the bourbon, relishing the burn. “On a diet, Phil. Been trying to eat right and exercise.”

  “Good for you. Check out the salads. We’ve got a new one with chicken tenders in it.”

  “That doesn’t sound very healthy.”

  “There’s spinach in it, too.” She hands over a couple of laminated menus and a printed sheet of paper headed “TONIGHT’S SPECIALS,” then heads into the kitchen.

  “What kind of exercise you doing, Al?” his brother wants to know.

  “Walking, so far . . . starting off slow, you know. I just walked over here, and—”

  “This is only two blocks from your apartment.”

  “I walked this morning, too.”

  “What, from the door to your truck?”

  “No, I walked the dog around the neighborhood.” Sensing that Bobby’s warming up to bust his chops, Al heads him off. “Hey, remember the old Addams House?”

  “What about it?”

  “I thought it was empty, right?”

  “It is empty.” Glenn sets down his half-full glass, then picks it up again. “Why?”

  “While I was out walking this morning, I thought I saw someone in there. And the same thing happened the other night. And today, I heard the smoke alarm going off.”

  “Yeah? Maybe it was a ghost.”

  “Yeah, sure it was,” Al tells Bobby, rolling his eyes as if that’s the most ridiculous thing he ever heard.

  “I’m serious. If anyone was ever going to come back to haunt a place, it would be Old Lady Bell. She was one scary lady. Although that whole family was a freak show. Remember what Ma used to say about them?”

  Al nods, remembering the day he told Sandra about that, when she was getting ready to list the Bell house. “Yeah, Ma was all upset after the daughter was killed because they weren’t having a wake or funeral Mass.”

  “You think your mother was upset?” Glenn speaks up. “My pop embalms her, gets her all set to be laid out, and then he finds out that there’s no wake, no funeral, and they haggle with him over the bill. I remember I rode over there with him the day he delivered the casket. They said they were going to bury her out West, where they came from, and—”

  “Wait—you guys just deliver a dead body like . . . like a pizza?”

  “Well not exactly like that, but yeah. If it was being released to the family and they’d made arrangements for transport, we’d drop it off, along with personal effects. That day, I had to carry the package that had the dress she was wearing when she died. It was pink, and it was . . . messed up,” he says, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

  “So that’s it?” Bobby asks. “You and your father just show up at the door—‘Here’s your dead daughter, here’s her bloody dress, see ya later’?”

  “Well, there was paperwork, and God knows these days there are more hoops to jump through, but . . . What are you going to do? In the end, the family gets to bury their loved one wherever they want.” Glenn sets down his glass again. This time, it’s empty.

  “Poor Ruthie Bell.” Al shakes his head sadly. “She never had a chance. Her mother was a crazy freak, her father was a dirty old man—remember how he used to leer at all the little girls on the playground? And Ruthie’s kid brother . . .”

  “Don’t even get me started on that little sissy.” Bobby rolls his eyes.

  “He might have been a sissy, but he was no mama’s boy, that’s for sure. He had his dearly departed mother cremated—probably not something a conservative person like her would have wanted—and he left her ashes sitting on a shelf in my funeral home.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.” Glenn signals Phil to bring them another round of drinks. “I tried getting in touch with him a few times—he lives on Long Island now—well, he did. But the phone was disconnected and the e-mails bounced back. I guess he fell off the face of the earth after she died. Just walked away and abandoned her remains, and the house—”

  “And everything that was in it,” Al puts in. “The stuff is sitting in one of my storage units. The rent automatically gets paid every month, though. Maybe you should have charged him up front for shelf space for his mother, Glenn.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I’ll just drop her off at the house as long as it’s empty, especially if she’s haunting it anyway.”

  “It might be Ruthie Bell’s ghost, though,” Al points out, mostly kidding around—mostly. “Or maybe it’s the old man’s, or . . .”

  Sandra’s. Is it Sandra’s? She died in a fire. Would her ghost make its presence known by setting off a smoke alarm?

  “Or it might just be kids in there,” Glenn says, “doing what kids always do: drinking and writing graffiti on the walls and smoking pot.”

  “You talking about the Addams House?” Phil asks, standing in front of them and pouring three more bourbons.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “I heard you say Ruthie Bell. I remember her. She died in a car wreck in a snowstorm. Had her license only a couple of days and slammed into a tree. I was spooked to drive if even a few flakes were falling for a long time after that.” Shaking her head, she hustles away as the three of them drink from their refilled glasses.

  “So which one of the Bells do you think is haunting the house?” Al muses.

  “Why don’t you go find out?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I love it when you two get into it. Just like the old days.” Glenn grins and shakes his head. “I don’t remember either of you ever going through with that dare.”

  “And you did?” Bobby asks.

  “Hey, I spent most of my time in a funeral home. No one ever questioned whether I had guts.”

  “I was thinking,” Al says, glass poised in front of his mouth, “that I should go over to the Addams House and check things out. If kids are vandalizing the place, it’s a real shame and it should be reported before they burn the damned place down. I think I’ll go over in the morning.”

  “Why wait?” Bobby asks with a gleam in his eye. “Why not go tonight?”

  “Want to come with me?”

  “Nah, the game is on.”

  Al gestures at the TV. “Who cares? They’re losing. And you’re the locksmith, remember?”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “Come on, boys,” Glenn says. “Drink up and let’s go take a walk.”

  Seated at her desk in the cluttered office tucked away in the back of the second floor, Angel takes one last look at Carley’s laptop screen.

  Nice. Very nice.

  The suicide note had been composed months ago, along with Nicki’s and Taylor’s. Angel uploaded it onto Carley’s computer just now, after painstakingly deleting every trace of correspondence she’d ever shared with Angel 770.

  This note, like the others, contains just the right mixture of contempt and despair. When Jen Archer reads it—in the very, very near future—there will be no doubt in her mind that her daughter hated her.

  But this note was trickier to write than the others.

  Debbie Olivera and Mike Morino had made themselves easy targets.

  Those two were puppets in my hands, just like the Sacred Siste
rs girls.

  Angel had instigated the bullying of Carley Archer, to be sure. But left to their own devices, the girls did the rest, and the bullying took on a life of its own.

  Evil has a way of doing that. You just have to use it to your advantage, and Angel learned to do just that.

  It all began a few months ago with the creation of dummy Peeps profile pages for both Carley and Nicki. Angel blocked the girls themselves, along with everyone in their immediate circles, from viewing them.

  Then she had “Carley Archer” send a note to the real Nicki Olivera, as well as to the handful of Sacred Sisters girls with whom she’d connected on the social networking site. The note said that she’d created a new page so that her parents wouldn’t see what she was up to online. No one questioned it. A lot of the girls did stuff like that.

  Then it was just a matter of having “Carley” alienate every tentative new relationship she’d established, slamming the girls online, criticizing their photos, bragging about herself and claiming she’d cleverly cheated her way to her good grades . . .

  She alienated Nicki in the same manner—and vice versa.

  From Nicki’s new dummy Peeps page, Angel sent the insults “Nicki” supposedly wrote about Carley’s hair and appearance.

  As for the coldhearted texts the girls exchanged . . .

  These days, kids never dial actual phone numbers when they want to call or text a friend. They simply pull up the friend’s name—or in some cases, just a photo—from the list of contacts on their smart phone, press a button, and the phone connects to the preprogrammed number.

  All Angel had to do was get her hands on both girls’ cell phones long enough to alter their contact information for each other. It was easy enough to do with Carley: she dutifully left her phone in the locker room during gym. Nicki’s phone was harder to obtain, but not impossible. She was careless enough to walk around the Galleria one day with her shoulder bag unzipped. Trailing her, Angel plucked the phone out, changed the contact information for Carley, and then turned in the phone to mall security, saying someone must have dropped it. It found its way back into Nicki’s hands, and the trap was set.

  From that point on, text messages Carley and Nicki thought they were sending to each other were actually now going to Angel; their voice mails to an in-box with an automated greeting. It was Angel who answered their texts to each other; Angel who listened to the voice mail messages; Angel who deleted them and didn’t return the calls. By the time Carley and Nicki ran into each other again face to face, the cold war was on.

  Human nature, Angel has decided, is a wonderful thing.

  Social networking as “Rachel Riley,” Angel connected with several of the Sisters freshmen and planted the seed for the Spring Fling prank as well as the math test debacle. She never mentioned Carley by name, just talked about how satisfying it would be to have a laugh at an enemy’s expense.

  By then, Carley was everyone’s enemy. Even Nicki’s.

  What a shame that in the end, Carley and Nicki never even realized that they were victims of their own behavior. If either of them had simply reached out to each other in person, all of Angel’s efforts could have been undone with a simple conversation.

  But Angel was counting on the fact that they wouldn’t do that, well aware that modern teenagers are, for all their “connections,” isolated in an unprecedented way, tending to their relationships on screens and keyboards.

  Some adults are just as guilty.

  After getting to know both Mike and Debbie from afar, Angel could see that the two of them had a lot in common. Far more than Mike seemed to have in common with his ex-girlfriend Jen.

  It took some fancy manipulation to get him and Debbie into a room together, but once that happened, human nature—or in this case, their own fatal flaws—took over.

  Engaged in a full-blown affair, they became careless enough that they wouldn’t question whether either—or even both—of their daughters had stumbled upon their secret. And teenage girls are such emotionally volatile creatures that it’s entirely conceivable that a parent’s adultery might be sufficient motive for suicide.

  But Jen Archer is different.

  She was never going to have an affair, or make any other glaring misstep.

  It’s been obvious from the start that she loves her husband, that she’s a fine, upstanding, moral citizen and, above all, a good mom. It wasn’t easy coming up with a legitimate reason for her own daughter to hate her.

  But I did.

  Rather, Carley did, when she poured her heart out to strangers online, describing how she felt as though she’d let her mother down when the whole Spring Fling princess debacle unfolded.

  i feel like she wishes i could be more like her, she wrote on one of the bullying forums.

  And, sometimes i think shes ashamed of me even when she claims shes not . . .

  And, no matter what she says abt loving me the way i am, i bet if she could snap her fingers and make me beautiful & popular she wd do it in a heartbeattttttt . . .

  Naturally, Angel fueled the fire at every opportunity and ran with that theme for the suicide note, embellishing until it became the heartbreaking masterpiece it is now.

  With gloved fingertips, Angel pops the memory stick out of the laptop and starts to pocket it before remembering that she doesn’t have pockets; she’s not wearing the nun’s habit she usually has on when she sits at this desk.

  She did wear it into the building earlier, and it was a good thing, because Johnny the janitor was here.

  He didn’t seem surprised to see her. He told her the principal had instructed the head custodian to have him change the sign out front to indicate that the dance had been canceled and that grief counseling would be offered at school tomorrow afternoon.

  “You heard what happened, right?” he asked. “That girl who killed herself?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Angel told him. “I’m going to be counseling the girls and I have some things I need to do to get ready.”

  Johnny nodded, disinterested, obviously in a hurry to get going.

  “Big plans today, Johnny?”

  “Yeah—going home to watch the Sabres game. Have a great day, Sister Linda,” he tossed over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “I mean . . . well, maybe not so great. I’m sorry about what happened.”

  Angel nodded. “Many people are.”

  I am not one of them.

  The first thing Jen sees when she looks at Carley’s phone is a new text message on the home screen:

  where ru? im worried and i have a great surprise for u

  “Who the heck is that from?” Thad asks, looking over her shoulder at it.

  “I can’t tell . . .”

  “Here, give it to me.” Emma reaches impatiently for the phone, then seems to think better of her attitude and softens her tone. “You guys aren’t very good at tech stuff. No offense.”

  Jen hands the phone to her. Obviously, someone out there noticed Carley’s communications blackout. No wonder she was so upset last night.

  It’s nice to know that she has at least one friend. And whoever it is just might know where she is.

  Emma looks at the phone and gasps.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  Wordlessly, Emma points at the name at the top of the screen, indicating the sender of the text.

  Nicki.

  Carley opens her eyes to blackness.

  For the first couple of moments, she thinks she’s at home, in her bed.

  Then she feels the throbbing in her head and hard concrete beneath her and it comes back to her.

  She’s at school, and Sister Linda . . .

  Something is terribly wrong with Sister Linda.

  “Where’s . . . where’s Angel?” Carley had asked her, bewildered, when she first saw her standing there in the gym.


  “There’s no Angel, Carley. Not the way you think. There’s just me. I’m your angel . . . your Angel of Death,” Sister Linda added with a grin.

  Carley still didn’t understand what was going on.

  Then she saw the gun.

  “Come on, Carley,” Sister Linda said, aiming it at her. “Let’s go.”

  She forced Carley to walk down the stairs to the basement of the school. She tied Carley’s hands and feet and put a gag in her mouth, then shoved her, hard, into a storage closet.

  Carley must have hit her head and blacked out.

  Now Carley’s lying on the floor, alone in the dark. She goes over what happened, trying to piece together the bizarre series of events. But it’s like trying to work a jigsaw puzzle without the picture from the box . . .

  No, like trying to work a puzzle using a bunch of scattered pieces from different boxes, and none of them fit together.

  What about Angel?

  Was Angel . . .

  Carley faces the harsh truth: She doesn’t even exist.

  There is no kind, empathetic friend from California who knows just how it feels to be bullied; who spent her allowance and birthday money to pay a surprise visit, just for today, because she knew what Carley had been through and she wanted to cheer her up.

  There’s no Angel.

  Jolted by the loss, Carley allows despair to overtake her at last.

  First Nicki, and now Angel . . .

  It’s too much to bear.

  Carley rolls onto her side, staring into the blackness, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  Angel stashes the memory stick in a desk drawer and stands up. She smooths the full pink skirt, enjoying the feel of the taffeta fabric against her legs.

  The dress is one of only two things she took with her from her parents’ house when she left home on her eighteenth birthday.

  She’d found it years earlier, not long after Ruthie’s death. It was still tagged from the coroner’s office, wrapped in plastic and tucked away in the bottom drawer of Ruthie’s dresser; still stained in Ruthie’s blood.