The Third Sister

by Sara Blaedel

  He got in the car and slammed the door shut, and moments later he was gone.

  Ilka stood in the driveway, shaken by his anger. Up on the road, a white Toyota with HAPPY HOMES written on the door slowed and turned in. The driver approached slowly, as if he wasn’t sure it was the right address.

  She stood her ground as he parked and shut the car off. A chubby man holding a briefcase under his arm got out and walked toward her. His coat was unzipped even though it was starting to rain.

  “Good afternoon. Are you Mrs. Sorvino?”

  All Ilka wanted to do was sleep. To turn her back on him and walk inside and jump into Artie’s bed under the blankets.

  She shook her head but asked if there were anything she could help him with. A strange blend of numbness and fear overtook her. His voice sounded distant; Ilka barely understood the words coming out of his mouth.

  “I’m here to assess Mr. Sorvino’s house. He contacted us earlier today and said he’s interested in selling.”

  “Selling? The house?”

  The real estate agent smiled politely. No doubt he was thinking she must be a relative with limited intellectual abilities, someone to humor so he could pull off the deal.

  “He contacted you today because he wants to sell his house?” Ilka said.

  He nodded and showed her a key. “I’ve just been by the hospital; I picked up the key and written permission to go inside, since he’s unable to let me in himself.”

  He reached to open his briefcase and show her the paper, but she simply nodded and told him the house was open.

  Artie had seen through her, had found out she couldn’t be trusted. Couldn’t be counted on. She flashed on him lying in his hospital bed, calling the insurance company because he’d sensed something was wrong, that she was lying when she assured him everything was fine. He knew the hospital would be sending him bills from now until he died if he didn’t do something about it himself.

  Ilka turned her back on the real estate agent and slowly walked up to the highway. She headed for Racine in a fog of tears and rain, crushed that she couldn’t find a way to help Artie. And scared stiff that the Rodriguez brothers had found Lydia.

  23

  Ilka yelled and cursed all the way back to town. The sorrow she’d felt had given way to fury; she didn’t feel cold, even though her clothes were soaked and her legs almost too weak to carry her. She built up a wall of anger against her father. This was his fault—that they had landed in a situation where a calamity of this magnitude could happen. That the fucking insurance policy had disappeared in the pile of blackmail letters and advertisements. Who the hell was so stupid and irresponsible that they didn’t use a bill payment service to automatically handle important bills? Ilka’s cheeks stung with rage as she sped down the highway, screaming her lungs out. It was his fault for going underground. It wasn’t one bit fair that she was solely responsible for the consequences. Or that Artie now had to sell his house.

  When she finally reached the funeral home and kicked her wet shoes off in the hallway, she was ready to tear into her father, the stream of bitter words dammed up right behind her lips, ready to gush out. She made a quick search of the house, but to her annoyance she couldn’t find him.

  Leslie wasn’t in her room either, but when Ilka neared the reception area, she heard her mother and Jette taking off their coats as they talked about the caustic odor from the prep room. It had been a long time since Artie had worked in there, but the smell still hung in the hallway.

  Ilka couldn’t hold back her rage; she erupted at the two women, words gushing out of her in waves as she tried to make them understand, how it was not her fault Artie was lying in the hospital without insurance and might not ever fully recover.

  “I tried to help,” she said, over and over again. “But now he knows I couldn’t, I let him down, and he’s not even sure he’ll ever be able to work again.”

  The words kept coming, and she barely noticed when her mother helped take off her wet sweatshirt and wrapped her in a blanket before settling her in an easy chair in the reception. Suddenly Ilka noticed how badly she was shaking, and she clutched the blanket and pulled it close around her.

  “You need to eat, something nourishing,” Jette said. “Let’s go to the hotel, we’ll have dinner together down there.”

  They ordered her up to her room to change into dry clothes, as they debated whether or not to turn out the lights in the funeral home. The hotel was the last place Ilka wanted to go. She tried to wall off her fear, but images kept running through her head: the Rodriguez brothers and Lydia, the empty bag, men throwing the nun into Lake Michigan with a cement block tied around her. Or maybe she was in the trunk of their car, screaming for help.

  Later, when they sat down at a table in the hotel restaurant overlooking the harbor, she finally surrendered her worries. Her mother insisted she order a decent meal, something other than burgers and fries. As the waiter was picking up the three bowls of soup they’d decided on as a starter, Jette walked out of the restaurant. A few minutes later she returned and told them she’d asked the reception to add a single bed to their room.

  “So you can stay with us tonight,” she said. The waiter brought their chicken and a large bowl of steamed vegetables.

  Ilka looked at her in surprise, but instead of protesting, she nodded. Right now, she couldn’t care less where she collapsed for the night, as long as she could get a break from all the thoughts dragging her down.

  “But remember,” her mother said, leaning toward her, “it’s only money we’re talking about here. No one has died. Surely we can figure it out.”

  “But we don’t have any money, we can’t help him,” Ilka said. “And over here if you don’t have insurance, you need to show them cash.”

  “There must be some way,” her mother insisted.

  “When the hospital finds out he can’t pay for the treatment he’s already been given, they’ll do everything they can to get their money. That’s why he’s putting his house up for sale.”

  Ilka explained that they would send out a debt collector. “And because he owns a house, he’ll be forced to sell it to pay his debt. He’ll have to liquidate all his assets.”

  “What about that lovely place in Key West?” her mother asked.

  “They’ll take that too, if they have to.” She’d shown her mother a few photographs from the gallery and the main street of the town. “If you have anything of worth that can be sold, they’ll do anything to get their hands on it.”

  “But not everyone owns something so valuable,” Jette said.

  “Hospitals get rid of those people as soon as they can.”

  “But Artie does own property, so everything will be okay,” her mother said. For a second, she looked relieved, even though she’d never met the man.

  Ilka shook her head. “No, everything won’t be okay. He might be able to pay for the treatment he needs, but when he gets out, he won’t have a home to go back to.”

  Ilka was about to embark on a long harangue about the American system, but her mother interrupted by clapping once and announcing it was time to go to bed.

  It was hard to say which of the two women snored the loudest: Jette, who had stood on her head for several minutes as part of her evening yoga ritual, or her mother, who had fallen asleep with a book in her hands.

  Ilka’s rollaway bed had been shoved in under the window, where narrow shards of light from outside tattooed the blanket in the dark room. The sounds from Lake Michigan felt like heavy waves lapping over her as she tried to fall asleep.

  She thought about the time Flemming had left her. She’d known he was going to; she’d certainly given him reason enough. Back then she’d thought she would never be able to get control over her dark side. Find the strength to fight off the urge to let go. To disappear.

  It was the racetrack, again. About a year after she’d lost all the money Flemming had saved up for his son’s confirmation. Late that summer they had planned on vacatio
ning in Nice. They’d been looking forward to it; they’d rented a car and a room in a boardinghouse up in the mountains, at Bargemon. The sun had been shining all day at the racetrack, and it was about to go down when Flemming found her, just as he had back when they’d first met. She’d lost on that day too, and her fragility had attracted him.

  But it didn’t the second time. What hurt the most was that he didn’t even really get mad. Only sad, very sad. So much so that Ilka immediately believed their relationship was broken beyond repair.

  Fortunately, she’d been wrong. And she had her mother to thank for that. She’d come by to care for Ilka in the days that followed. The first day with food, fresh tulips, milk. The next day she simply sat with Ilka, who refused to get out of bed or even eat. That might have been the day she’d begun reading out loud; Ilka wasn’t sure anymore. It could have been later on. Anyway, her mother had read for her as if she were a small child. The days flowed by as she listened to her mother’s stories, and the intimacy that grew between them during their daily routine had the same effect on her as a poultice, applied at the moment of greatest need. Slowly, Ilka began to heal, and to this day she was convinced that her mother had gone to Flemming and persuaded him to give Ilka one more chance, even though the two of them both insisted it wasn’t true.

  The important thing, though, was that Flemming came back to her, and it had been the very last time Ilka had set foot on a racetrack. But lying there in the hotel, with ribbons of light shining in from the marina, remembering how absolutely horrible she’d felt, Ilka realized she was willing to risk that pain and sense of loss if it could somehow free Artie and Lydia.

  24

  Ilka hadn’t fallen asleep until late that night. Her thoughts had grown darker as the hours passed, until finally she was sure there was no way out for Lydia, plus Artie would end up disabled and never forgive her. When she woke up the next morning, she felt woozy. She gazed around the room. Her mother and Jette were gone, their bed neatly made.

  Her lanky body ached as she slowly crawled out of bed. It was nine thirty. Her mother had left a note in the bathroom, informing her that they’d left for the funeral home and that the hotel served breakfast until ten.

  Only a few guests were still sitting in the breakfast section of the hotel’s foyer. Starbucks coffee stood on a counter, with cornflakes, milk, and a toaster for the white bread. She poured herself a cup of coffee and toasted a slice of bread. She turned to look for a table, and there he was, standing with a cup in his hand, eyeing her. The man from Texas.

  Ilka whirled around to drop everything and run, but she caught herself. Maybe she was safer here than anywhere else. She took a moment to gather herself, then she walked over to sit at a table close to the hotel’s reception desk.

  “I don’t know where she is,” she said, when the man approached her.

  “May I have a seat?” He nodded at the chair across from her.

  “I’d rather you didn’t. I know you’re looking for Lydia Rogers, but you’re too late. Your friends have already found her.”

  He studied her for a moment, then he shook his head and pulled the chair out to sit down. “You’re wrong, the Rodriguez brothers are no friends of mine. I’m guessing that’s who you’re talking about.”

  Ilka nodded.

  He held his hand out to her. “My name is Calvin Jennings. I’m here to help Miss Rogers.”

  She shook his hand reluctantly. Something about his face reminded her of an actor. Ed Harris. Maybe it was his eyes, his high forehead.

  “I’m a Texas policeman. I took part in the investigation, back when Lydia’s brother was killed. I never pegged her as the Baby-Butcher.”

  Ilka hadn’t touched her toast, and now a young woman was clearing the tables.

  “We already knew back then that the Rodriguez brothers headed up a drug cartel—in fact, we were zeroing in on them when Lydia’s brother showed up. He wanted to go into the Witness Protection Program in exchange for telling us everything he knew. He had records of every delivery he’d been a part of.”

  Ilka was starting to believe this man. She sipped her coffee and listened.

  “Then Ben Rogers was killed, and in no time flat all the evidence was pointing to his sister. It was my job to dig around in her past, and I found out she’d been a member of a religious cult—God’s Will, they call themselves. A man named Isiah Burnes has been leading it for forty-two years. It started in Utah then expanded to a little town in West Texas, where Lydia and her brother happened to live. The members of the cult are completely shut off from the outside world, but because they’re Christian, and their financial situation is solid, they have the support of the locals. Unfortunately, that includes the police and local authorities. Right off the bat I knew this story about Lydia Rogers being behind these brutal crimes—the mutilated corpses of babies—came from the Rodriguez family. They happen to have close ties with God’s Will. Lydia left the cult, which they don’t allow, and up pops this chance for them to punish her. And they took it.”

  Ilka caught herself staring at him, holding her coffee cup way too high in the air.

  “But we searched for her anyway, put out an APB, went to the press,” he said, disgusted by the memory. “It ended up being a regular manhunt. We found evidence that the Rodriguez family planted two baby corpses in her backyard to tie her to the case, which made me even more interested in her.”

  “But if the police knew it wasn’t her, why didn’t they stop searching for her? The last twelve years she’s been living underground with a death sentence hanging over her. How could all of you let this happen?”

  “She did shoot three men. And back then it was a big relief for everybody when we identified a guilty party that very afternoon. People were terrified; it was all anybody talked about, these little corpses of babies. We needed somebody we could point to. Lydia got caught between her brother and the Rodriguez family, and we had strong evidence against her.”

  “But still!”

  He hesitated for a moment. “I talked to her the day she fled from Texas.”

  “You were the one she called, to report that her family had been killed?”

  Jennings nodded.

  “You let her get away.”

  He nodded again. “We’d just heard that Enrique Rodriguez was among those killed, and that his brother Javi had been in the house. She’d never have had a fair chance in Texas. And I felt bad about not getting there in time to help her brother—I felt guilty as hell about that. He and his family were wiped out, right after he’d come to us asking for help. We didn’t take it serious enough.”

  He looked away for a moment. “I just wanted to get her out of there. That way I figured there was a chance we could still bring the guilty ones to justice, the Rodriguez family. She’d been in the house, she was a main witness, but I needed time to gather evidence and make the case. And that wasn’t going to happen if Lydia was in custody. Then I found out about the cult, and I realized they’re the ones who wanted to pin this on her. It made me even happier she’d managed to get away.”

  “But you knew it wasn’t her! Surely you could have put her someplace safe and helped her?”

  “We had a different sheriff back then. It was more important to him that we had a guilty party than the guilty party. And for years he benefited from the protection the cult gave him.”

  “Protection?”

  “The cult has a peace force they call the God Squad. Isiah Burnes’s private army, is what it boils down to. They keep folks in line, and they deal with the people who either get thrown out or leave the cult. Lydia and her brother were born into God’s Will, and children of parents who have devoted their lives to the cult automatically belong to the cult. They become the cult’s children, you could say. I don’t know how much you know about these things.”

  Ilka shook her head. “Nothing.” Of course she’d heard stories of Jehovah’s Witnesses, members who were expelled or chose to leave, but she didn’t think they actually had
their own militia, with the power that Jennings described.

  He folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. “There’s been serious accusations leveled against Burnes. Polygamy, sexual intercourse with minors, abuse. It’s a religious cult with its own rules and laws. According to God’s Will, a man has to have at least three wives to pass through the gates of heaven. But it’s common for the older men to have a lot more than that. Girls born into the cult are given a number at birth. They don’t have a name until the day they turn twelve, when they get baptized and declared ready for marriage. Nobody’s interested in the boys, though. When they grow up, they’re competition to the older men, who aren’t about to share their girls and women. When a male baby is weak, they throw him away. I’m talking literally here. They take him out in a meadow and leave him. I’ve heard some mighty gruesome stories about women who don’t get to nurse or take care of their baby boys; the children grow up with no physical contact with their mothers. The ones who survive are sent out to work when they turn five or six. And a lot of them get thrown out and have to fend for themselves the day they turn fifteen.”

  “Where do they go?” Ilka said.

  “They drive them out of state and just dump them somewhere, and they don’t know anybody, they don’t have any money. Boys who’ve never lived outside the cult. A lot of them kill themselves or become criminals, it’s just so hard for them to make their way in life.”

  Jennings folded his hands, a funny look in his eyes. “Lydia’s brother was one of the boys who were thrown out.”

  “But Lydia stayed.” Ilka pushed her cup aside. The coffee was cold.

  He nodded. “She stayed, yes. Until her brother managed to get her out. There’s a kind of underground railroad that helps women and children escape from the cult. A woman by the name of Alice Payne runs it. She’s the one who helped Lydia and her brother back then, and now Lydia helps her. Lydia managed to live in freedom for four years, until her brother and his family were murdered.”