The Bad Sister

by Kevin O'Brien

  “Are you finished now?” Ellie asked with an edge to her voice. “Because I’d like to say something. First, I think I know what sensitive information you’re referring to...” It was obvious he was talking about Rachel’s real parentage. “Hannah told me about it in confidence. I didn’t coerce it or extract it from her. She volunteered the information. And I promised her that I wouldn’t tell anyone or discuss it with anyone. So—I’m not going to discuss it with you, Father. But I’ll say this much. I have no intention of writing some big exposé on the subject. I never did. And I really resent your implications.”

  “And I resented getting a very angry phone call at the rectory last night from Mr. and Mrs. Bonner. They were quite upset, and I don’t blame them—especially after everything they’ve done for this school and the archdiocese.”

  Ellie didn’t shrink under his intimidating gaze. At least now she realized where he’d gotten all this biased information: Hannah had told Rachel, and Rachel had told her parents.

  Ellie took a deep breath and then let it out. “Well, you can call back the Bonners and tell them they have nothing to worry about with me. I have no desire to stir up a scandal. I don’t intend to embarrass them or their daughter or anyone in the O’Rourke family. I promised Hannah that I wouldn’t say anything, and I meant it.”

  “I hope that’s true,” he said, still glaring at her as if she’d done something wrong. He’d probably expected her to cower and apologize all over the place. It was obvious he didn’t like being talked back to. He cleared his throat. “In the meantime, I’d like you to stop spending so much time with Hannah O’Rourke. This kind of close friendship between a teacher—an older, single woman—and her young, naive student is very disconcerting.”

  Ellie almost laughed at the innuendo—and this, coming from a man who kept a shrine to his mother in his office. But Ellie shifted in the chair again and squinted at him. “What exactly are you insinuating, Father?”

  “I’m not making any insinuations,” he said. “I’m telling you to stop seeing this girl outside of class.”

  “Well, she’s my student. I can’t very well prevent her from coming to see me on her own.”

  “I can,” he said firmly. “We have at least a dozen applications on file from journalists who would like to teach here, all of them very qualified.” The bland, joyless smile returned to his face. “Of course, we’d hate to lose you. I really don’t want it to come to that. You understand, don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” Ellie replied. “I’ll tell you what, Father. Outside of class, I’ll do my best to avoid Hannah O’Rourke. Will that make you and the Bonners happy?”

  He seemed to consider it for a moment, and then he slowly nodded his head.

  “Is there anything else, Father?” she asked, getting to her feet.

  O’Hurley stood up, too. “Thank you for coming in on such short notice.”

  Ellie headed for the door and opened it.

  “Oh, and Ellie,” he called. “It would be nice to see you at mass on Sundays. It sets such a good example for your students.”

  She stared at him. “Good afternoon, Father,” she said.

  Then she got the hell out of there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Sunday, 11:39 P.M.

  I wanted 2 C Chicago n took d train there. Already made some new friends. Staying w/them. Don’t worry bout me. Having fun. Screw school. C U in a few days.

  He pressed the send icon. He figured this would keep Hannah and her parents from calling the cops for a while longer. Without the police involved, he could hold on to Eden’s phone. No one would be trying to track down its whereabouts yet. He liked getting those distressed, angry texts and voice mails from Hannah. There was something titillating about it—almost as pleasurable as watching Hannah on the nanny-cam, alone in her room at night. He’d seen her naked a few times now, and he often reran that footage again and again. Like most surveillance videos, it was murky and grainy. But it was still a turn-on just seeing her undressed and so unaware of his spying eyes.

  He stood at the end of his driveway by the large rural mailbox. The illuminated screen of Eden’s phone lit up his smiling face.

  Stars filled the night sky, and everything was so still. This close to autumn, even the crickets were quiet. He couldn’t hear anything—no city sounds, no traffic noise, no dogs barking.

  No one screaming for help.

  He ambled down the driveway, toward the house. From the outside, the dilapidated, two-story farmhouse looked unoccupied. Even with the lights on, as they were now, it appeared as if someone had left them on in the long-deserted house to discourage squatters and break-ins—not that there were many homeless people out here in the middle of nowhere.

  Though it was a clear night, he kept the phone light on to navigate around the potholes in the driveway. He had found the phone in Eden’s purse, which her abductors had stashed in the back of the SUV—along with two shovels and a saw. Obviously, once they’d gotten whatever they wanted from Eden, her two captors had planned to make sure no one would ever find her.

  He’d been following Hannah’s half-sister most of Friday night before realizing he had company. He’d been hoping Eden would stay out past midnight because it was imperative he take her on the twelfth. That was the fiftieth anniversary of Crystal Juneau’s disappearance. He’d already loaded up the minivan with a policeman’s nightstick, pepper spray, duct tape, and a blanket to cover her up in the back of the van.

  But all his plans had seemed spoiled by the ominous presence of the gray SUV. It was almost as if they had the same plan he did. He’d been watching Eden for several nights now. She’d used that shortcut through the woods to town and back. It had seemed like the ideal spot to abduct her—close to where the trail ended, so he’d have the minivan parked nearby. The guys in the SUV were waiting for her in that same location. He had to hand it to them for their theatricality. They were dressed as nuns. He’d watched them load Eden into the SUV, and then he followed them to the self-storage lot in North Waukegan. He’d been worried they might catch on that someone was on their tail. But apparently, the SOBs were pretty cocky about how clever they were.

  He was pretty clever himself. On Saturday morning, he’d rented a locker in the same lot so he’d have a code to come and go as he pleased. He never went far. He watched them for most of the day, sometimes from his minivan with a pair of binoculars and sometimes from a better angle in the woods on the other side of the tall barbed-wire fence. Late Saturday night, he made his move.

  He’d figured it might be tough going, since the guys were pros. But he’d caught them by surprise. The biggest challenge had been making sure he killed them out of range of the cameras stationed around the self-storage lot.

  After loading Eden into their SUV, he’d gone back and taken their wallets. Then he locked up the storage unit. Unless they had a third partner, it could be weeks before anyone found their bodies in there.

  He’d left his minivan parked two blocks away from the lot on a residential street with dumpy-looking houses. The van was a piece of shit, and it was a safe bet no one would want it.

  At just past midnight, almost twenty-four hours ago, he’d driven Eden in the SUV back here—to her new lodgings in his backyard.

  He planned on getting rid of the SUV tomorrow, maybe park it somewhere with the keys inside. He’d take it to some sketchy neighborhood in North Chicago. The SUV would probably get stolen or stripped before he even finished Ubering back to where he’d left his minivan near the storage lot.

  On Google, he didn’t find anything about the dead guys. Obviously the IDs were fake, and the names aliases. No surprise there. The guys were criminals. The funny thing was, if they were kidnappers, they’d picked the wrong girl from bungalow twenty to abduct. The Bonners were the ones with all the money.

  He had a theory about why Eden O’Rourke had been taken—and what they wanted from her. He’d have to ask her what had happened during those twenty-six hou
rs she’d been held prisoner inside that storage unit. They might have talked freely in front of her, since they’d planned on killing her and burying the body.

  But he really wasn’t in a position to chat with Eden right now. Sonny Boy had strict orders not to fraternize with the prisoner.

  He walked around the side of the house through the overgrown weeds. In the backyard, he stopped to pick a few burrs off his socks. The old tire swing was perfectly still as it hung from the big tree limb.

  He didn’t hear a sound from the shed.

  As he moved closer to the shed, he put away Eden’s phone and took out his own. He turned on Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back.” He cranked it up. He found a small stone on the ground and hurled it at the shed. It ricocheted off the wood siding.

  He switched off the music.

  That was when he finally heard her.

  But even as he stood a mere ten feet away from the shed, the screams inside were still muffled. She banged on the door. “Is anyone there?” she cried. “Can you hear me? Please, help me!”

  On his phone, he switched over to what was being monitored inside the shed. With the camera bracketed so close to the ceiling, he felt as if he were God looking down at her. The lighting was bad, and the image was fuzzy, but it was thrilling just the same. He couldn’t help feeling powerful. She was so vulnerable, totally at his mercy. She kept pounding on the door and kicking it.

  She didn’t have a lot of room to move around in there—less room than the dog had had last week. This time, his captive bitch had a cot, a desk and chair, and a deep pan with a lid that doubled as a chamber pot in the corner. He’d stocked the place with plenty of bottled water, juice boxes, granola bars, and other snacks. He even got her a toothbrush, toothpaste, and some moist toilet packs. And as Lyle had done for Crystal fifty years before, he’d provided her with a Bible, too.

  Eden continued to scream out in agony. The microphone inside the shed was picking it up—making for a slight delay as the screams came over his phone. She kept beating at the door. But she looked like she was getting tired.

  “Nobody can hear you, Eden,” he finally called to her.

  “Who’s there?” she cried. “Goddamn it, where am I?”

  “Far away from ears other than my own,” he said, proud of how poetic he sounded. “So you can make all the noise you want. I don’t mind. It’s easy to tune you out.”

  On the phone screen, he watched her back away from the door. She plopped down in the chair. He could hear her muffled sobbing on his phone.

  “Eden?” he called. “Wish me luck tomorrow, okay?”

  On the screen, she looked up at the camera. She was a smart one. She seemed to know he was watching her. “Wish you luck?” she said to the camera. “What the hell for?”

  “I’m killing the first one tomorrow night,” he said.

  Then he switched off the phone and started toward the house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Monday, September 14, 2:00 P.M.

  Hannah hurried into the classroom with the last wave of students. She stopped by Ellie’s desk. “Could I talk with you after class?” she whispered, a fretful look on her face.

  “Sure,” Ellie murmured, nodding briskly.

  Ellie thought about the chewing out she’d gotten yesterday from Father O’Hurley. He’d warned her to stop seeing Hannah outside of class. Okay, so we’ll talk in the classroom, Ellie figured.

  Hannah probably wanted to talk to her about Rachel again. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that Hannah’s other half-sister, Eden, hadn’t shown up to class today.

  All during the session, Ellie kept glancing over at Eden’s empty chair. From what she could tell, Eden seemed like the type who wouldn’t give a second thought to skipping a class.

  Now and then, Ellie glanced at Nick Jensen in the back row. Sometimes, their eyes met, and it made her nervous. He really was handsome, as a few of his massage clients had pointed out in their reviews. Was that why she couldn’t trust him, because on some level, she was attracted to him?

  At the end of class, Ellie noticed Nick joining the bottleneck of students headed for the classroom door.

  Hannah came up to the front of the room, where Ellie sat on the edge of her desk. Ellie felt a strange knee-jerk reaction to this little conference—a barrier automatically going up because the two of them weren’t supposed to be socializing. She managed to smile at Hannah. “How was your weekend?”

  “Okay, I guess,” Hannah said. “Listen, I just wanted to double-check that you won’t tell anyone what we talked about on Friday.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Y’know, about Rachel and me being half-sisters?”

  Ellie glanced over toward the classroom door and spotted Nick Jensen lingering in the hallway. Hopping off the edge of the desk, she marched to the door. “Did you need anything, Nick?” she asked pointedly. “Are you waiting to see me or Hannah about something?”

  Smiling, he backed away. “I—I just wanted to ask you if I need to use footnotes for that article due on Wednesday.”

  She frowned. “Get yourself a copy of the Tribune and see how often reporters use footnotes in their articles. Then you figure out if you should use them in your article. Does that help you? Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes, thanks,” he said with a dazed laugh, obviously at her officious tone. He backed away a few more steps. Then he turned and continued down the corridor.

  Ellie stepped back into the classroom and closed the door behind her.

  Hannah looked amused. “You really don’t like him, do you?”

  Ellie shook her head. “I don’t trust him. Haven’t you noticed? Every time you and I talk, he’s hovering nearby.” She sighed. “Anyway, regarding your situation with Rachel, my lips are sealed. I don’t intend to tell anyone about it. Did you mention to Rachel that I know?”

  Hannah nodded. “She wasn’t too happy about it.”

  “Neither were her parents. I gather Rachel said something to them, because they called the vice president of the university, and he called me in yesterday for a little chat.”

  Hannah grimaced. “Oh my God, did I get you in trouble?”

  Ellie stole a look toward the window in the classroom door. She didn’t see anyone in the hallway. She turned to Hannah again. “Don’t worry about it. I’m a big girl.”

  She wanted to say something to Hannah about making other friends or finding someone else she could make her confidant. As out of line as Father O’Hurley had been yesterday regarding their disconcerting teacher-student relationship, he had a point. She was Hannah’s teacher, not her BFF.

  She took a deep breath. “Listen, Hannah, maybe you should talk to Eden more about this, and get her perspective . . .”

  “She’s gone.” Hannah heaved a sigh. “Didn’t you notice?”

  “Yes, I noticed. I just figured she’d skipped class. What do you mean gone?”

  “She went out Friday night and never came back.” Hannah shrugged, but still had a distressed look on her face. “She’s done this before—disappeared for days at a time. She switches off her phone and won’t answer any calls or texts. It drives my parents crazy. Anyway, I figured she’d show up last night—in time to get some sleep before classes today. Then around midnight I got this weird text.”

  “Weird in what way?” Ellie asked.

  “She told me she’d taken the train to Chicago. She said she’d already made some friends there, and she was staying with them. She also said, screw school, and told me not to worry about her.”

  “Well, I guess that explains it,” Ellie said.

  “I know it sounds crazy, but it didn’t seem like Eden.”

  “Hannah, I don’t know your sister very well, but it—it sounds like her to me.”

  “I keep thinking she didn’t send that text. I mean, she’s texted me a lot, and I know her style. She never uses ‘D’ for the word ‘the.’ That was just one thing that was off. She also told me not to worry about her. Eden does
n’t think that way. The woman who raised her, I don’t think she gave a shit if Eden disappeared for hours or days at a time. So it always seemed to surprise Eden that my parents worried about her when she went off on her little adventures. My point is, it would never dawn on Eden that I’d be worried about her. So why would she say that in her text?”

  “Have you talked to your parents about this?” Ellie asked.

  “I talked to my brother on Saturday morning. He wasn’t really concerned. Like I say, it’s happened before with Eden. It’s just this text last night . . .”

  “You think something might have happened to Eden, and someone else sent this text?” Ellie asked.

  Hannah nodded. “You’ll think this is crazy, too. But after we talked on Friday, I went online and read about those murders here on campus fifty years ago. That fire in the laundry room the other night, it happened exactly fifty years after the girl killed her baby and set it on fire, right? Well, this other girl—her name was Crystal Juneau—she was abducted just three days after the baby-killing incident, September twelfth. I keep thinking, Eden might have been out on her own Friday night—past midnight. Saturday was the twelfth. Maybe someone abducted her on Saturday, maybe the same person who started that fire Wednesday night . . .”

  With a hand over her heart, Ellie stared at Hannah. “You think someone is copying the timetable of the Immaculate Conception Killer?” she whispered.

  Hannah sighed. “Like I said, I know it sounds crazy.”

  Not really, Ellie thought. As a reporter, she’d encountered crazier things. But she didn’t want to encourage Hannah to think along those lines. The poor girl already seemed worried enough.

  Ellie reached over to stroke her arm, but then she thought of O’Hurley again and his assessment of their relationship. She touched Hannah’s arm for just a second before pulling away. “Listen, Hannah, I’m sure it’s nothing. But why don’t you text Eden back or call her? Tell her that you need to hear from her. Tell her that if you don’t hear from her, you’ll have to call the police. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to talk to your parents about this.”