“We’d be putting him out of his misery,” I said. “Like putting down a rabid dog.”
He wiped away his tears. “I know it’s gotta be done, but I can’t do it. You’ll have to.”
I sucked in my breath. “Me? I can’t kill your brother.”
“Why not? You just killed your sister,” he pointed out.
“Exactly! It’s your turn to kill a sibling.”
“You had to kill your sister. You had no choice. She betrayed you. It was you or her. That’s not the case with me.”
“It is the case with you. You just don’t realize it.”
“Just do it. Grab a butcher knife from the block in the kitchen. He’s asleep. Just cut his throat, fast, like this.” He demonstrated. I felt a chill. Was I sure it was John who was the killer?
They probably both were.
But Sam wouldn’t kill anymore. I would make sure of it. Today the Martin Brothers’ killing spree was over. Or it would be, after I stuck a knife in John.
“Okay,” I said. “Then what?”
Sam looked perplexed. “What do you mean?”
“What’s the other part of the plan?”
“We’ll figure that out. Once you do the deed.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Funny thing about killing. It gets easier every time you do it. Once you get over the initial shock, you enter a mindset where you wall yourself off, see yourself as the only one that matters. In my case, I told myself it was about survival. No matter what Sam said, I doubted John’s appetite for killing was satiated by watching Laurel and I fight to the death. I wouldn’t leave this cabin alive if I didn’t commit this final murder.
I stood in the kitchen for a long time, staring at the black-handled rows of stainless steel knives impaling the butcher’s block. One fast slash and it would be over. Sam and I could walk away. We would sell all our properties-the one in Lake George, my house, and Sam’s condo. Then take the money and go somewhere warm. Someplace where we wouldn’t be plagued by ghosts.
I stood on tiptoe and grabbed the top knife. The blade gleamed in the overhead light. I gripped it in my right hand, making a stabbing motion. A line from Shakespeare occurred to me. Is this a dagger which I see before me?
What was that from? Hamlet? Macbeth? I didn’t remember.
John’s door was open. It was silent inside. That struck me as off. He snored. I learned that during our Cape Cod trip. Was this a trap after all? I looked around me.
“Laurel?” John slurred. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” I said, making my voice soft and breathy like Laurel’s. It was a good imitation. Like most siblings, I spent a lot of time mimicking her when we were young.
I could barely make out his shape in the dark. He was sitting up against the headboard. My heart sank. I was expecting him to be asleep. It would be a lot harder if he was awake and aware.
He held out his arms. “Come to me, babe,” he said.
I obeyed, climbing across the bed to nestle in his arms, pushing aside the disgust I felt. It comforted me that John missed my sister. Whatever sickness he had hurt him more than it did anyone else.
“I had a horrible dream,” he said into my hair. “I dreamed we killed you.”
“Well, here I am. Alive. And now we can be together forever.”
“I love you, Laurel,” he said in a sappy voice that made me cringe.
“I love you too, John,” I said. “Forever.” I raised my protesting arm. My muscles were sore after the workout they’d gotten this morning.
The blade of the knife gleamed in the sparse moonlight falling through the grimy window. John never suspected a thing. Or if he did, he didn’t protest. I cut his throat, hard and fast as Sam showed me, and stayed with him, holding his hand until he slumped forward.
“It’s done,” I told Sam when I went back upstairs.
He shut his eyes and howled, an eerie sound that clutched my heart. I grabbed hold of his head and pressed it against my breast, stroking his hair as I rocked him in my arms. I said nothing. I just held him until he drifted back to sleep.
Then I went downstairs and turned on the bedroom light. There was so much blood. It had sprayed the opposite wall. I closed my eyes against the horror. When I opened them, the crimsons stains were still there. John was slumped over, head on his chest. I was thankful I didn’t have to look into his glassy, vacant eyes.
I took a deep breath. I’d seen a bucket in the bathroom. A mop behind the door. It was time to clean up my mess. First, I covered John’s form with the patchwork quilt from his bed. Studying the scraps of cloth, I wondered if their mother had made it herself. How could she had been abusive if she made a quilt to keep her son warm? I thought of the album in the crawl space upstairs, of the photos lovingly pasted in its pages by a maternal hand. Then I thought of Agnes going into debt to buy me whatever my heart desired on Christmas, despite torturing me the rest of the year.
One never knows what goes on behind closed doors, or rather behind the window dressing.
My life began with Agnes Ripple. Theirs began with an evil couple who were not their biological parents. None of our lives would end with them.
That’s what you think!
I gave that unwelcome, shrewish voice the finger. It fell silent, having witnessed my capabilities.
Ghosts flitted through the room as I scrubbed the walls. I sensed their presence, but I saw nothing but small movements out of the corner of my eye. I believed Lucy visited, and John’s adoptive mother, and countless other women who met their deaths within these four walls. I was afraid to ask Sam how many. I didn’t want to know the answer.
When morning came, Sam fetched a second tarp from the shed. “You’ll have to help me roll him up,” he said, his face white and pinched.
John ended up being harder to wrap than Laurel. I should have straightened him out last night while he was still warm and pliable, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. Now rigor mortis had set in, and he was contorted in an unnatural position.
“I’m sorry, John,” Sam wept, tears pouring down his face. I took his grief as a good sign. He was not beyond redemption. We could put all this behind us and live happily ever after. All it entailed was cutting out the rotten bits of our lives, so we could live anew.
John was too heavy to carry, even between the two of us. “This is why he came in handy,” Sam said, wiping away his tears. “He was great at moving bodies.”
“Terrific,” I said.
We dragged him across the cabin floor and down the porch steps. I winced at the hollow thump his body made on the wooden boards. To get him into the back of the Jeep, we both had to lift opposite ends, count to three, and give an enormous heave.
“We have to get rid of both bodies now,” Sam said. “While the snow is still frozen, so we won’t leave footsteps or drag marks.”
“Get rid of them,” I repeated. “Where?”
“We have a place. Had,” Sam corrected. “This is the last time it’ll ever be used.”
I climbed into the Jeep beside him and said nothing as he navigated it down the still unplowed road, in the opposite direction of Route 9, off into the wilderness. The ride was brief, maybe a minute or two. Then Sam drove down a steep incline, and in front of us was an abandoned cabin, a replica of his own. But the porch railings and steps were broken, the floorboards rotted with gaping holes, the glass smashed in the windows, and someone had spray painted JOHN 3:16 on the front door.
Sam hopped out of the Jeep and stood in front of the house, contemplating it. As I joined him, he said, “This was where Lucy lived.”
I shivered. “How long has it been empty?”
He shrugged. “Her folks left not long after her death. I don’t even know if they’re still alive. This place was forgotten decades ago.” He looked at me. “We better get started.”
Tugging the bodies was easier over the frozen ground. Sam said, “I wish I’d thought to bring one of the sleds. Woulda made this job a lot simpler.”
>
Wiping my brow, I said, “This isn’t that bad. Not like you’d imagine.”
Sam led me to a covered well on the edge of the clearing. I took a few step backs as he pried the cover off, afraid he’d push me in. Then it would be over for him. Me too.
He glanced at me. “You need to take Laurel’s sweater off.”
I shuddered. “I thought you did it already!” The last thing I wanted to do was look upon my sister’s dead face again.
“I forgot. And we need it. You’re going to have to wear it. Welcome to establishing an alibi. We’re going to be John and Laurel. We need to wear their outerwear when we drive home. When they come up missing, the police might pull the video taken from the cameras at the tolls. We need to appear to be them. It’s easy-all we have to do is wear the same clothes they had on when we drove up.”
“Won’t they notice there were four people on the drive up and only two on the drive home?”
Sam shook his head. “No. The cameras aren’t powerful enough to pick up the back seat. But you need to be wearing Laurel’s sweater for this to work.”
I took a deep breath. Unrolling the tarp reminded me of unrolling a tube of wrapping paper at Christmastime. To my relief, she was lying on her face. That relief was short lived when I realized I’d have to roll her over to take off her cardigan.
I hesitated. Sam raised his eyebrows at me.
“This isn’t easy for me,” I whispered. “I never meant for this to happen.”
“I understand that,” he said. “But it did. And unless you want to spend the rest of your life in prison, you need to get that fucking sweater off.”
Just do it and get it over with. I was surprised Agnes was still speaking to me.
I grabbed a stiff shoulder and pushed her onto her back. She didn’t feel like a person. She felt like a mannequin. That helped. Unhappily, her sweater was buttoned to the neck, not that I blamed her. It was frigging cold out here.
I looked up at Sam, who was watching me. “Can you help me?” I cried in frustration.
“All you have to do is ask, you don’t have to be a bitch about it,” he grumbled. As I unbuttoned the sweater, he lifted the body and helped me tug the sweater down her stiff arms. Unlike a mannequin or a doll, they didn’t move up and down. The worst moment was when the wool caught on her fingernails. I shuddered as I pulled it free.
I contemplated the sweater. There were rents in several places where the knife had penetrated. It was stiff with blood. The thought of wearing it for any length of time made my stomach turn.
“Say goodbye,” Sam said. I stole one last look at Laurel’s face, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t. I wished I hadn’t. Her face was a ghoulish purplish black. Her swollen tongue still protruded from her colorless lips. Her eyes were the worst. Bulging, they seemed to accuse me.
“Lucky it’s so cold out,” Sam said. “She’d be starting to smell by now.”
I turned away. “Let’s get this over with.”
We did John first, working together to hoist him to the lip of the well. “Bottoms up,” Sam said, giving him a hard shove. We both peered into the well as the body spiraled in free fall. We heard a splash.
“How come it’s not frozen?”
Sam shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe ‘cause it’s warmer underground? Come on, let’s get this over with.”
I didn’t want to be the one who pushed Laurel’s body into the well. But at the last moment Sam stepped back, and it was my shove that sent her tumbling into the depths. I took a deep, shuddery breath when I heard the splash.
“You okay?” Sam asked.
I shook my head. “It’s just hitting me. My nephews won’t be able to bury their mother. They’ll never even know what happened to her.” My voice broke.
“Come here,” Sam said, holding out his arms. I went into them. They were warm and inviting. “Put this out of your head. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”
I wish I could believe that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
It was chilling how Sam knew just what to do to cover our tracks. That afternoon we drove home. I wore Laurel’s sweater and my hair tucked into a stocking cap he dug out of the closet, because she was blonde, and I was brunette. Sam wore John’s plaid coat and his stupid hunting hat. We both took care to keep our heads down when we went through the E-ZPass toll booths, to shield our faces.
It was dark by the time we reached home. “Perfect,” Sam said. “I will drop you off a couple of blocks from your house. Make sure you take off your sweater and the cap. Leave them on the seat. Walk home, try to be seen. Wave at neighbors.”
“They’ll think that’s weird,” I said. I was unfriendly. A lifetime of Agnes’s verbal abuse had left me wary of people.
“Just do it. Then get your car. I’ll be waiting for you at the little dog park down the street from John and Laurel’s condo.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. I’m going to leave the Jeep at the condo after I wipe down the steering wheel and the seats. Then I’ll make sure it looks obvious they went on a trip somewhere. We need to smash their phones. I don’t want the cops to be able to ping them. And we’ll have to ditch the clothes we wore pretending to be them. I’ll weigh them down with a rock and throw everything into the first lake we see.”
I stared at him. “You really do think of everything.”
He grinned. To him, this was a compliment. “I’ve had a lot of practice, sweetheart.”
Sam pulled over to let me off. I took the sweater off, relieved to be free of the distasteful thing, and tugged my hair free of the cap. Christmas music blared from the radio. Sadness filled me. A year ago, I’d been shopping for gifts for my mother and sister. Now they were gone, and I was alone. Except for Sam.
I paused. “My cell phone,” I said.
Sam stared at me for a moment, then his expression cleared. “Oh, yeah.” He reached in the back for his duffel bag. I watched as he rummaged through it, then withdrew my cell phone with its peachy pink case. He handed it to me. It was at twelve percent charge, about to die. I looked up at him.
“You had it all along. You took it when we were at the diner.”
Told you so.
He shrugged. “Yeah, so. You knew I did. What’s the big deal?”
I shook my head. “Why would you take my phone if you weren’t planning to go through with it?”
He made a face. “It was part of the plan. It would have looked strange if I didn’t go along with it. What difference does it make anyway? You’re here. You’re alive. I chose you. Over Laurel. Over my brother. Over everyone. Isn’t that enough?”
I nodded. A week ago, those words will have elated me. Now, I wasn’t sure what I felt. Agnes had been my jailer, the Ripple house my prison. Perhaps I’d exchanged one warden for another. And now I was trapped in a prison of my own making.
Everything went according to plan. It violated my sense of justice. It wasn’t right that I could murder two people and get away with it. I was never even under suspicion. I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without Sam.
It was several days before Laurel was reported missing by her job. Then I was questioned by the police. I had already received very clear instructions on how to handle this from Sam. “Stick as close to the truth as you can,” he said. “You’ll remember the truth. You’ll forget the lies you told and get mixed up. The trick is to recite your lies so often your mind views them as the truth, and never, ever deviate from your story.”
We rehearsed in his condo. He played a cop, and I played myself. After each session, we went over all the areas I was weak. Then he drilled me again, till my answers became second nature.
“I thought she was in Lake George,” I said, wide eyed with innocence. “She and her boyfriend had plans to do some Christmas shopping at the outlets. Sam and I wanted to go too, but I had to work the day after Thanksgiving. Then I got sick.”
“Don’t be cute,” Sam warned. “Don’t speculate
. Don’t get dramatic. And be as honest as possible. You and Laurel didn’t have the best relationship. She wanted to sell your mother’s house to pay off her debts. Tell them that. Let them hear it from you. Don’t let them find out later from other sources, then it looks like you have something to hide.”
I stuck to the script. No, I hadn’t heard from her. Yes, that was normal. We weren’t close. We hadn’t been getting along very well since our mother’s death. But I knew she had financial problems. A lot of debts.
In the end, the police concluded John and Laurel skipped town to avoid paying their bills. “The two of them together had a crushing amount of debt,” the detective confided. “Their condo is in foreclosure. Both cars were being repossessed. No wonder they didn’t stick around.”
It was frightening to consider that a couple could vanish without anyone caring. Then again, the police investigated John and Laurel and figured out what kind of people they were. Shady as shit. It was a reasonable conclusion that they’d just picked up to start over somewhere else. “Happens all the time,” the detective concluded, as if he thought I would object.
“What about her sons?” I asked. I figured it would look strange if I immediately accepted his explanation.
He shrugged. “I’m sure they’ll hear from her eventually. If they haven’t already.”
It was over.
But I still worried. “What if someone buys that empty cabin?” I asked Sam, during one of the endless nights I couldn’t sleep. “What if they find the bodies in the well?”
“That well hasn’t been used in fifty years,” Sam said. “If someone bought the property, they’d just fill it in. No one uses wells anymore.”
Sometimes I thought of my sister’s body, and wondered what stage of decomposition it was in, as the flesh melted from the bones. I dreamed of her.
Then I began to hear her voice in my head. Just like with Agnes.
Wrath of the Sister Page 17
