The Good Sister

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Angel inserts it into the lock and turns the knob.

  “It’s time, Carley.”

  She expects to hear her captive whimper or moan as she opens the door, but the girl doesn’t make a sound. Angel reaches up, feels around on the wall for the light switch, and flips it on.

  The closet is empty.

  The shrill ringing of a telephone shatters the silence.

  Jen gasps and stops pacing.

  “It’s your cell.” Thad, who was also pacing, is already beside her. “Who is it?”

  Jen’s hand shakes as she reaches into her pocket, fumbling for the phone.

  Carley . . . please let it be Carley . . .

  Her heart sinks when she sees the number on caller ID.

  “It’s just the school again,” she says. “Sacred Sisters. Probably another automated announcement about the dance, or . . .”

  It rings again.

  “Maybe you should answer it, Mom.”

  She glances at Emma, sitting between her grandparents on the couch, looking like a small, frightened little girl. Then she looks at Thad.

  “Should I pick it up? I’m afraid to tie up the line even for a second, in case Carley tries to call.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  It rings a third time. Fraught with indecision, Jen makes up her mind. She presses the talk button.

  “Too late,” she tells Thad, shaking her head and going back to pacing. “It already went into voice mail.”

  “Hi! This is Jen! Please leave a message and I’ll get right back to you!”

  With a strangled cry of frustration, Carley disconnects the call.

  Crouched on the floor of the principal’s office with the desk phone in her hand, she can hear footsteps out in the hall.

  Sister Linda is on the hunt.

  It’s only a matter of time before she finds Carley.

  She can make one more phone call and pray that she can get her whispered message across in time to be rescued.

  One more call . . .

  Her mind races, running through her options.

  Should she try the home number?

  What if no one is there?

  Her father’s cell?

  What if he doesn’t hear it ring? He hardly ever does.

  Emma always answers her phone immediately, but they took it away from her . . .

  And Carley doesn’t know Aunt Frankie’s number by heart. It’s programmed into her own phone.

  She knows her grandparents’ number, but they’re hard of hearing, and she has to whisper.

  She should just call 911. It’s what she should have done in the first place, but her instinct was to dial her mother.

  Frustrated, Carley holds her breath and swiftly dials again.

  Please please please please—

  “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

  “My name is—”

  “Hang up the phone.”

  Sister Linda is standing over her with the gun.

  Trembling, Carley obeys the command, cutting off her lifeline.

  The Addams House is crawling with cops, its stately foyer bathed in fluid red light from the spinning domes of the police cars parked out front. Sitting on the grand stairway with Bobby and Glenn, Al listens to the footsteps overhead and below and to the methodical voices and the squawk of police radios coming from the dining room. It’s impossible to make out what they’re saying, but he’s pretty sure they’re trying to ID the hideous corpse in the dining room.

  Bobby shakes his head. “It’s got to be her. Who else would it be? It has red hair and everything.”

  He’s talking, of course, about Al’s macabre discovery; speculating about whether the dead body belongs to Ruthie Bell.

  Al shudders, thinking of long strands of hair he glimpsed projecting from the black skull before he bolted from the room.

  “It sure as hell looked like her,” Glenn agrees. He and Bobby got only a quick look as Al dialed 911.

  “Why 911?” Bobby asked when he hung up. “Don’t you think she’s a little too far gone to be rescued?”

  Leave it to Bobby to be a wise-ass at a time like that.

  “I’d think the hair would have fallen out by now,” his brother comments now. “You know, if it were Ruthie Bell. She’s been dead twenty-five, thirty years. Wouldn’t she have been a skeleton by now? Or dust?”

  Glenn shrugs. “She was embalmed, and . . . it would just depend on where she’s been for all these years, and under what conditions. Bodies can hold up pretty well in an airtight, watertight compartment, so . . .” He shrugs again.

  “Do you think someone dug her up from the cemetery in California,” Bobby asks, “and brought her here?”

  “If she was ever even buried in California.” Al shakes his head. “I wonder . . .”

  “Why? Where do you think she’s been?”

  “I have no—” He breaks off, hearing footsteps pounding up the cellar steps into the kitchen.

  “Hey, Sarge,” a cop’s voice calls, “I think I know where she came from. Come take a look at what we found down there.”

  “Please don’t—”

  “Shut up!” With a gloved hand, Angel jerks Carley by the arm, forcing her into the gym. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Get what—”

  “Shut up!”

  She drags Carley over to the raised platform covered in green indoor-outdoor carpeting meant to evoke grass. Backed by a latticework white arch entwined with plastic ivy, the platform holds a pair of matching thrones left over from the set of an ancient drama department production of The King and I.

  It’s where the royal court would have been crowned at the dance.

  It’s where Carley Archer will die.

  “I can’t stop thinking about what they did to her,” Jen tells Frankie.

  They’re in the kitchen now, under the pretext of making coffee. When Jen asked if anyone wanted some, her father said yes. Her mother immediately scolded him, then said she would make it. But Jen welcomed the distraction.

  Frankie, who trailed her in here saying she’d help, leans morosely against the counter. “You can’t stop thinking about what who did to her?”

  “Those girls. The ones who voted her Spring Fling princess, and—God only knows what else. She was so happy that day—” Jen’s voice breaks. “How could they have been so cruel?”

  Frankie shakes her head. “The school should have handled it differently. When I think about what that social worker said to her . . .”

  “Sister Linda?”

  “Yes. Carley told me about it last night. It’s been bothering me ever since.”

  “Why? What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘There are none so blind as those who will not see,’ almost like it was Carley’s fault for believing the girls really wanted her to be their princess.”

  Jen drops the coffee scoop back into the can of grounds. “None so blind . . .”

  “It’s an old saying. It means—”

  “No,” Jen cuts her sister off, “I know it is. I just . . . I’ve heard it before.”

  “Right. So have I. Like I said, it’s an old . . .”

  Jen closes her eyes, remembering, and her sister’s voice fades away, and the pungent aroma of coffee grounds gives way to the stomach-turning fragrance of Stargazer lilies.

  Angel gestures at the knife lying at Carley’s feet.

  “Pick that up.”

  “No . . .” Trembling, Carley shakes her head.

  “Pick it up!”

  Still, Carley doesn’t move. “Please, just . . . Why?”

  Angel wants nothing more than to pick up that knife herself and drive it into the girl’s heart.

  But that would be a waste. This has to be done right. Her fing
erprints need to be on it.

  “Why?” she asks. “Because you have to pay. Your mother has to pay for what she did to my sister.”

  “Your sister . . . ?”

  “She killed herself. She left me all alone. And now you’re going to do the same thing to your mother.”

  Carley’s legs wobble. “I don’t—”

  “Shut up!” Angel snarls. “Shut up and do what I told you to do. Pick up that knife!”

  Yes, all she needs to do is pick it up, and then Angel can take it from her and use it to slice open her veins.

  Carley still isn’t budging.

  Panicky, Angel tries a new tactic.

  “If you don’t do what I say”—her voice is deadly calm—“I will go to your house, and I will use this knife on your mother and your father and your sister. Do you understand?”

  She sees the stricken look on Carley’s face.

  Sees the resignation in her eyes.

  Sees her bend over, at last, to pick up the knife.

  Jen is back at Sacred Sisters, exhilarated about the Spring Fling dance.

  She’s been voted sophomore princess. Her date, Mike Morino, was voted sophomore prince at Cardinal Ruffini. When the time comes, their names will be announced and they’ll climb the steps to the platform and pose for pictures.

  Jen is wearing a beautiful dress the soft shade of cotton candy. Mike loves her in pink. There’s a pink corsage pinned to her dress—much too close to her nose.

  When the florist truck pulled up in front of the Bonafacio house this afternoon, Jen was excited until she saw what was in the clear plastic box.

  The blossom was gigantic and waxy and a gaudy shade of pink.

  “It’s a Stargazer lily,” her mother told her. “I love the way it smells, don’t you?” Jen didn’t. She thought it stunk to high heaven.

  But when Mike came to pick her up—late as usual, long after her older sisters had left, one by one, with their own dates—she politely told him she loved it. She let him pin it to her spaghetti strap as her mother took pictures.

  “Your friend Debbie helped me pick it out,” he told Jen. “She said you were wearing a pink dress just for me.”

  Jen made a mental note to tell Debbie to go with a nice, muted pastel next time she helped Mike choose a corsage.

  Finally, they’ve made it to the dance. The gym is crowded. A couple of Mike’s friends pull him aside to whisper in his ear, and they all snicker.

  “What’s going on?” Jen asks him, but he just grins and shakes his head.

  They’re walking toward the dance floor when Jen spots Ruthie Bell. She’s wearing an enormous pink dress that can best be described as a “frock,” the kind of dress the bridesmaids wore at Jen’s parents wedding back in the fifties. Her gingery hair is pulled back in a ribbon that matches the flush poking through the freckles on her cheeks, and she’s walking right toward them.

  Jen smells mothballs as Ruthie approaches, a scent strong enough to permeate the perfume of the lily pinned inches from her nose. Then she sees that Ruthie, too, is wearing a Stargazer corsage.

  Debbie comes up beside them. “Mike, there you are! Ruthie’s been looking for you! I really hope you didn’t stand her up!”

  Ruthie steps closer . . .

  Closer . . .

  Close enough to see that Mike has his arm around Jen.

  Ruthie stands there, taking it in, and then she shakes her head, with tears in her eyes, and murmurs something.

  Somehow, Jen hears it above the laughter and the music.

  “None so blind,” Ruthie Bell says to herself, and she flees the gym.

  Jen turns to Mike. He’s laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “Are you kidding, Jen? Ruthie!” Debbie is laughing, too. “She thought Mike invited her to be his Spring Fling date! Can you imagine?”

  “Why did she think that?” Jen looks from Debbie to Mike.

  “Who knows? She’s crazy.”

  Before Jen can ask any more questions, the loudspeaker clicks on. “We’ll now present the royal court . . .”

  The whole time she’s there on the platform, clasping Mike’s arm as flashbulbs flash, she smiles. Smiles so hard her jaw and her cheekbones hurt.

  The minute it’s over, when Debbie comes up to gush, Jen pulls her to the door.

  “What? Where are we going?”

  “Outside. I need some air.”

  “But it’s raining.”

  “I don’t care. Just tell me. Tell me why Ruthie thought Mike invited her to the dance.”

  Debbie burst out laughing. “Did you see the look on her face?”

  “Are we talking about Ruthie?” Mike is there, too. He’s followed them. He’s grinning.

  “Who else?” Debbie indicates Jen. “She wants to know what happened.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “I was about to. Should I?”

  Mike shrugs.

  “Promise you won’t tell, Jen,” Debbie says.

  “Don’t worry. She won’t tell. She’s good with secrets. Right, Jen?”

  She can’t answer. She’s shivering. The night is turning colder. The rain is supposed to change over to snow in the morning.

  Mike puts his arm around her.

  And then they tell her.

  They tell her what they did to poor Ruthie Bell.

  “Jen?”

  She blinks.

  Frankie is waving a hand in front of her face.

  “Are you okay?”

  Jen nods, reaching again for the coffee scoop, numbly thinking about that night. About how she broke up with Mike—for the first time, anyway—the following morning.

  And about Ruthie Bell, who was killed in a car accident in a snowstorm, a scant twenty-four hours after she’d fled the Spring Fling dance.

  When Jen heard about the accident, she wondered . . .

  She still wonders. All these years later. Wonders if Ruthie was so distraught that she drove her car into that tree on purpose.

  There was no funeral Mass or Catholic burial. Why not?

  Because Ruthie killed herself, that’s why.

  She didn’t slash her wrists like Nicki did, or hang herself like Taylor did, but . . .

  The roads were bad that night, a sheet of ice. It wouldn’t have been very hard, under those conditions, to make a death wish come true.

  Someone—Ruthie’s parents?—might have guessed it, or maybe they even knew for sure. Maybe they covered it up somehow.

  Jen never told a soul what she suspected.

  Like Mike said a long time ago—she was good with secrets.

  Most teenagers are.

  “Frankie,” she says, “you don’t think that Peeps page Emma saw really belonged to Carley, do you? You don’t think she really does want to kill herself?”

  Her sister puts an arm around her in an effort to be reassuring, but Jen can tell she’s choosing her words carefully. “Even if the thought has crossed her mind . . . look, I think she has a lot of problems, and I think she’s been depressed, but . . . she’s got one hell of a support system in you and Thad, and she’s a strong kid. She’ll come through this.”

  “Whatever ‘this’ is . . . and if it’s even up to her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If someone is manipulating her—if those other girls are trying to hurt her . . . I keep wondering how far they’ll try to push her.”

  “I hate to say it, but . . . kids can be really cruel.”

  “I know they can.” Jen swallows hard and closes her eyes, again seeing Ruthie Bell’s face.

  Carley’s trembling fingers close around the knife handle.

  “Good girl,” Sister Linda says. “Now hand
it to me.”

  Carley thinks about what’s going to happen.

  She thinks about the other knife—Johnny’s pocket knife.

  The day she’d talked to him near the closet—the day she’d been voted Spring Fling princess, her last happy day—she’d seen him use a pocket knife to peel an apple. She remembered that he’d stashed it on the shelf behind the bottles of cleaning supplies.

  It was still there. She’d managed to work open the blade; managed to saw through the rope that bound her hands until it frayed enough to break.

  She tried the door to make sure it wasn’t locked from the inside. Luck was with her. She untied her feet, pulled the gag from her mouth, and slipped out of the closet mere seconds before she heard footsteps approaching.

  She went up the back staircase as Sister Linda was coming down the front . . .

  All for nothing.

  She managed to escape, and she tried to call for help, but it wasn’t meant to be. She just wasn’t quick enough, or strong enough, or smart enough, or brave enough . . .

  Now no one will ever know that she really did try, though.

  That she almost made it.

  Almost . . .

  No.

  No!

  Almost isn’t good enough.

  It’s her mother’s voice, now, that’s in her head. That’s what Mom always says.

  Almost isn’t good enough, Carley. Don’t settle for it. Try harder.

  I will, Mom. I will . . .

  Adrenaline and resolve surge through her.

  Now will not be the hour of her death.

  Seeing the white-draped stretcher roll into the foyer, Al reaches for the banister to pull himself to his feet. Beside him, in silence, Bobby and Glenn do the same.

  They watch as a female police officer accompanies two attendants to the front door and opens it. The men roll it onto the porch, then carry it down the steps and along the wet, shiny pavement toward the waiting van from the medical examiner’s office.

  Closing the door, the police officer looks up at them.

  “Was that Ruthie Bell?” Al asks, a bit hoarsely.

  “We think it probably was, based on the evidence we found in there, but—”

  “You mean the computer and the notebook?” Bobby asks.

  The officer shrugs, shaking her head as if to indicate that she can’t say anything more. Then she tells them that someone will be back shortly to take additional statements from them, and returns to the dining room.