The Third Sister

by Sara Blaedel

  She glanced up at the clock. “A few hours ago. If you leave now, maybe you can catch up to her.”

  The brothers looked at each other.

  “What was she driving?” the younger one said.

  Ilka shrugged. “It’s a light-colored car. Silver-gray, I think. But probably your best bet is to wait outside the police station for her.”

  “Which police station?” Miguel asked, as if he were testing her. But again, Ilka shrugged.

  “I’ve heard you have good connections, surely you can find out. I’d think the one in San Antonio is a good bet.”

  “Why should we believe you?” Juan said.

  “That’s entirely up to you.” She stood up. “The question is, can you afford not to believe me. Lydia isn’t here. She left a few hours ago, and I’ve just told you what she told me.”

  “And why should we believe Javi would run off with the money?”

  She shrugged once more. “That’s what she told me.” Suddenly she couldn’t remember if she’d pushed the desk upstairs back in place, to hide the space where the bag was hidden.

  The two brothers looked at each other again and spoke in Spanish, which Ilka didn’t understand. Miguel scowled at her, but then they nodded and walked out the back door, slamming it shut behind them.

  Ilka turned to Leslie. “Okay, let’s make the sofa up for you,” she said, trying to sound cheery. Her half sister nodded, as if nothing had happened. For a moment Ilka wondered if Leslie was even aware of where she was, what was going on.

  She locked the back door and checked to make sure the front door was locked too, then went upstairs to find bedding for Leslie. A folded-up rollaway bed stood in the storage room across from her father’s room; she planned on sleeping on it now that her father was back. She grabbed the pile of sheets on the bed and stuck it under her arm. Her father: She hadn’t thought about him since the Rodriguez brothers left. Maybe she should call Amber and ask if he’d left. Suddenly she didn’t like the idea of him out there alone after what had just happened.

  She rejoined Leslie and showed her the bathroom, then she offered to make something to eat while her half sister took a bath. She found cup noodles in the back of a cupboard, so she turned on the electric kettle. She also picked up two tea bags.

  When she heard water draining out of the bathtub, she carried the tea and noodles into the arrangement room and waited. Leslie came out in a bathrobe—the one Ilka normally used—and a towel wrapped around her head.

  “Is there Wi-Fi here?” Leslie sounded as if that were more important than food.

  Ilka nodded and gave her the code, then sat in a chair and watched Leslie eat. “Do you think you can fall asleep?”

  Her half sister nodded. “Our doctor gave me some pills. I’ve been taking them since they arrested Mom.”

  Maybe the doctor should have made sure she had someone to talk to instead, Ilka thought.

  They sat in silence until Leslie had finished the noodles. Ilka said good night and shut the door. She was holding her phone, about to try Lydia one last time before going to bed, when she heard her father out in the reception.

  “Has she been here?” he asked as she walked up to him.

  She shook her head, then she told him the Rodriguez brothers had stopped by. And no matter how stupid, idiotic, and irresponsible her father might have thought her lies were, he smiled when Ilka said she’d sent them back to Texas.

  It was not until she was stretched out on the rollaway bed that she realized she hadn’t told him that Leslie was there. He’d been so focused on talking about Amber that when they finally said good night, they were both all talked out. Which is why she hadn’t mentioned all the money in the storage space in his room either.

  12

  Her father was still asleep when Ilka tiptoed in the next morning to get the bag. As quietly as possible she lifted the desk, moved it away from the wall, and opened the door to the storage space. A few moments later, after pushing the desk back, she scribbled a note to tell him she was going in to see Artie. She stood a moment with the bag in hand, looking him over.

  Leslie is sleeping in the arrangement room, she added in the note. Call if Lydia shows up. See you later.

  On the way to the car, she stopped by Lydia’s apartment, but the door was locked. It looked deserted, just like the last time she’d checked. The thought of the nun somewhere out there on her own worried her; she cursed herself for telling the Rodriguez brothers about the papers. Essentially, she’d given them another reason to look for her, and Ilka knew they would do everything in their power to stop her from getting to the San Antonio police headquarters. Mostly, though, she hoped they were so intent on stopping her that they’d left Racine immediately.

  It was just past ten when she stepped out of the elevator and headed for Artie’s room. The ward smelled of coffee, and the nurses were moving briskly between beds. Her mother had texted her, asking her to call back, but Ilka decided that would have to wait. She stepped aside for a porter pushing a patient in a hospital bed. She thought it might be Artie, and she glanced down as they passed, but a woman with short blond hair stared up at her. She looked frightened.

  A voice called her name from the office where she earlier had paid for Artie’s room. She turned and saw a woman waving at her. Her stomach sank; were there more problems, bad news? Slowly she walked back to the office.

  “We still don’t have a copy of Artie Sorvino’s insurance policy.” The woman sounded anything but patient. Which was odd, Ilka thought, given the large sum of money she’d already paid into his hospital account. Ilka sounded more annoyed than she would have wished when she repeated that they were still in the process of finding the policy.

  “The papers have to go through administration, they have to be in our database, it’s standard procedure.”

  “I thought we’d already informed you, we’re trying to find his insurance policy,” Ilka spat out. She offered to put more money in his account, if that was the problem.

  The woman shook her head. “In cases when a patient’s treatment extends over a longer period of time, we need to confirm that the patient is insured.”

  “I’ll talk to Artie about it,” she said. They hadn’t even bothered to call when they brought him out of his coma, she thought. And they knew very well that she hadn’t yet had the opportunity to ask him about it.

  The wall between Artie’s eight-bed room and the hallway was lined with tall metal lockers, the kind she’d seen in dressing rooms. Ilka asked a nurse which of them was Artie’s, and how the digital locks worked. His was second to the left, and Ilka was told she could choose a four-number code. The nurse asked her to write the code down and give it to the office, in case hospital personnel needed to get something out of the locker. Ilka stuffed the bag in the locker and punched in her mother’s birth date on the lock’s black buttons.

  Several of the other male patients in the room were napping. Coffee cups and small containers of yogurt lay around on their bed tables—obviously they’d been awake—but the buzz of visiting friends and family the day before was gone, and the room was quiet and lifeless. Some were receiving oxygen or hooked up to a drip, and tubes and monitors were connected to machines foreign to her. A medical assistant was taking blood samples, filling up one glass tube after another while the patient lay with eyes closed.

  Artie was asleep, and there were no cups or any signs of his having eaten breakfast on his table. Ilka carried a chair over to his bed, and she was about to sit down when a nurse appeared in the doorway. Ilka expected to be told that she wasn’t allowed to be there before visiting hours later that morning, but the woman said hello and pulled the curtain around Artie’s bed.

  “I’m guessing you don’t want to watch the other patients being washed.” The nurse winked at a grateful Ilka.

  Artie’s hand lay on the blanket, and she held it, caressed it with one finger.

  She was lost in thought when suddenly he whispered, “Hi.”

  H
is voice was feeble, but he looked at her in his familiar Artie way.

  “Hi,” she whispered back, very much aware of the tears filling her eyes. She stood up and leaned over, put her cheek to his. “Hi.”

  She didn’t dare hug him, not knowing how much pain he was in, but she didn’t move away, either. It felt so nice, the warmth of his cheek. Her tears dampened the pillowcase.

  She straightened up and wiped away her tears. “How are you?” she asked, her voice husky. She glanced around, then turned and pulled out a few tissues from the box on his table to blow her nose. She stalled for time to get a grip on herself.

  He didn’t answer, but he followed her with his eyes. For a moment she was afraid he didn’t recognize her, or that he was mixing her up with someone else and was wondering why she’d bent over him like that.

  She folded the tissue and dried her face off one last time. “Are you in pain?” she finally asked; the silence between them suddenly felt awkward, as if she’d barged in on him.

  He raised his hand off the blanket. “Come here.”

  She turned back to him and took his hand. He lightly pulled her toward him, and she leaned over again, thinking he wanted to tell her something, but instead he kissed her cheek.

  “Thanks,” he whispered in her ear.

  Now she was sure he thought she was someone else, that the blow to his head had affected his short-term memory. She was about to explain that she was Paul’s daughter from Denmark when he began talking again, in a whisper. It made her think his voice had lost its strength.

  “They told me you’ve been here since I came.”

  Ilka was about to say that wasn’t true, though she’d wanted to stay with him, but really, there was no reason to start explaining about why she’d had to leave. Anyway, not until she could bring it up more casually.

  “Thanks,” he repeated.

  She stroked his cheek and asked again if he was in pain. There was something about his face when he spoke. As if some part of it wasn’t moving when he changed expressions.

  “Have you seen what they did to my hair?”

  He was still wearing the stocking cap, but she nodded. “They had to do it, to insert the tube and drain the pool of blood in your head.”

  “I’ll probably never have hair that long again.”

  Ilka smiled but didn’t say how pleased she would be if that were the case.

  She cupped her hand against his cheek. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  His eyes grew dark, as if alarm bells were ringing inside his head.

  “No, no,” she hurried to say, “it’s nothing bad. On the contrary, it’s good news.”

  Artie relaxed, though he still looked wary. Ilka slid her hand away from his face and sat down. “My father isn’t dead. It was just a story Sister Eileen made up, to protect him from the people who also attacked you. He got off a lot easier than you did, because she was there.”

  Artie’s eyes began darting around. She explained that her father had been hiding in Key West, staying in his house. “He had no choice.”

  She heard the certainty in her own voice, how convinced she suddenly sounded. She really did understand; Lydia had had to get her father out of there. She also knew how much Artie blamed himself for not being there the night he thought her father had been killed. And how badly he’d felt at not being able to help with all the practical matters that followed.

  “They did it to save him. But I think it’s best that he tell you just what happened.”

  “How is he?”

  She told him that he’d been at the hospital the day before, and that he was planning on coming again later that day.

  As weak as he was, Artie was clearly moved by this news.

  “He felt so terrible seeing you lying here. We all feel terrible about it.”

  “What about Sister Eileen?” It was as if he could sense she was keeping something from him.

  “We were here with you after they brought you in. She sat with you the first night while I slept.”

  “Where is she now?”

  He was watching her closely, and she looked away to avoid his eye.

  One of his eyes was still swollen, though now it was a yellowish brown instead of black. He had a large purple bruise above his left temple. Speaking was obviously difficult for him, but his eyes were focused and clear.

  She leaned forward, and in a voice low enough that no one else in the room could hear, she told him about Lydia Rogers. The whole story, from start to finish. Including how they had parted, the automatic weapon, everything that had been said. Then she told him what Fernanda had said.

  “Of course, I didn’t know anything about that when I left Sister Eileen. I was practically in shock when I read the articles about her in the newspapers. I was scared.”

  She paused. Artie had closed his eyes when she’d started talking about the sister, though once in a while he’d peeked out, but now he looked at her.

  “Lydia Rogers,” he said, as if he were tasting the name. “I found out about Fernanda and the kid. But not until several months after they moved in. I figured out Sister Eileen wasn’t living in that little apartment by herself. At first it was the food she took over. Then I started seeing these clothes on her line that didn’t look like hers.”

  Ilka realized he was ignoring what she’d told him about the shooting in San Antonio. He closed his eyes again. “I had a girlfriend once, the first great love of my life. But it didn’t take long to find out, she was on the run from a man who thought he owned her. That’s why I recognized the pattern. I hid her myself back then, until her ex found us and took her away.”

  “I’m scared that something’s happened to Lydia,” Ilka whispered. “And it’s all my fault.”

  Artie raised his hand again and gestured for her to take it. “It can never be your fault. She should have told you the truth, told all of us the truth, instead of thinking that stupid idea of Paul being dead would make everything go away. I’m just sorry she didn’t dare trust us.”

  He sounded reproachful, but not bitter about how her lack of trust had ended up so disastrously for him.

  “She was trying to protect us,” she said. “She thought she could handle it all.”

  Ilka hadn’t told him about all the money in the bag. Only about the papers that could prove Lydia’s innocence.

  He squeezed her hand. “Lydia will be okay. She’s smarter than they are, and she’s already saved her nephew and his nanny.”

  Ilka felt tears welling up again. From relief that he was alive, she thought. Though it could just as well have been from the worry on his face as he spoke. Also, she noticed him wincing when his mouth moved; obviously he was in pain. Ilka had been so happy to see him alive that she hadn’t really picked up on how badly he’d been hurt. He looked like an older, weaker version of himself. He had a long way to go before he was the man he had been. If he ever got that far.

  “I offered to help Sister Eileen,” he said. “And I told her I’d keep everything under my hat. She trusted me, and she brought out Fernanda and her nephew. At first, I figured it was the sister’s kid, but then she said she knew him through her brother. I never asked if her brother was the one Fernanda and the boy were running from, it was none of my business. Anyway, I knew from my own experience that it’s hard to talk about stuff like that. I thought I could help my girlfriend back then, but no. She was always on the run, and finally we lost contact. I gave Lydia the keys to my house and told her Fernanda and the boy were welcome to stay, if they’d look after the gallery, sell some of my things once in a while.”

  He smiled, though it looked more like a twitch.

  “And they’re very happy you let them stay.” Ilka told about meeting them at the house when she picked up her father. “They’ve made a good life for themselves down there. They’re safe.”

  Two nurses had begun talking and bustling about at the bed nearest the door. One of them pulled back the curtain from around Artie’s bed, and a cart w
ith cleaning supplies was rolled into the room.

  “I’d better go.” She smiled at him while searching for words, to make him see how much it meant to her that he was conscious now, back to life.

  “Have you talked about it?” A nurse in the doorway was staring at Ilka.

  “About what?” Artie was back on alert, as if he’d been expecting all this time that the worst still hadn’t happened to him.

  “They’ve asked about your insurance, and I’ve been holding them off until we could talk,” Ilka explained.

  “Yeah, of course.” He told her he was insured through the funeral home, and that the policy was probably in a file folder in the office. “Paul knows where it is. And if you can’t find it, I have copies of old receipts at home.”

  Ilka promised to find it. “Is there anything I can get you from the house?”

  His eyelids were half closed now. At first, he shook his head, but then he told her he wouldn’t mind having his iPhone pods. So he didn’t have to listen to all the yakking going on around him. He thought he had a pair in the preparation room. His phone lay on the bed table.

  She could imagine him lying there, listening to the Beach Boys. It would definitely be good for his spirits, she thought. She leaned over to kiss him goodbye. For the first time since returning from Key West, she felt at ease, knowing Artie was going to make it.

  On the way out, she stopped at the office and promised to find his policy number when she got back to the funeral home. They didn’t ask about the locker, and she didn’t give them the code.

  Back at her car, she noticed that her mother had called again. Three messages on her answering service and a text asking her to call back.

  Suddenly she longed to hear her mother’s voice, but that would have to wait. Not until she knew what to tell her, she thought. She stuck the phone back in her pocket.

  13