The Deadly Sister (11 page)

I
shoved the drawings into my bag as I slammed out of the trailer—and I got them out of view just in time, because before I could get to my car the door to Brian’s parents’ trailer opened. Mrs. Andrews stood in the light and stared in my direction. “Hello?” she called. “Who’s there?”

I could have bolted for my car. But she would’ve had a good view of it as I drove off. She’d realize who I was as soon as she put her mind to it.

“Hi, Mrs. Andrews,” I called, “I was just trying to find Brian. Is he home?”

“No,” she called, her arms crossed. “He’s at youth symphony.”

“Right, of course. Okay. Thanks, anyway!”

“Abby Goodwin?” she called.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Come talk to me for a moment. I’d really like to speak to you.”

Fear dropped my arms to my sides. “I don’t know. My parents are expecting me back.” That was dumb. She already thought I was coming to see Brian—I couldn’t exactly claim that my parents were expecting me home right away. I’d have to give up. “Okay, sure, no prob.”

Mrs. Andrews held the door open for me. She had one of
those entirely unextraordinary faces, blank and trusting. Firm, glittery eyeballs behind thick glasses. “Thanks, Abby, come in.”

She sat me at a kitchen barstool and served me a cookie on a napkin. Dry knobs of chocolate rolled off the top and pinged on the floor. It was one old cookie…a cookie, I realized, that had been made well before Jefferson died. I ceremonially broke it in half but couldn’t bring myself to eat it.

“I didn’t realize you were friends with Brian,” she said. “I’d always thought of you as closer to Jefferson.”

“Jefferson and I weren’t too close. Same year in school. I’m sorry about your loss, Mrs. Andrews.”

“Jill. And thank you.” Her words had no color. “But you’re Maya’s sister, of course. So you would have spent plenty of time with Jefferson one way or another, right? When he came over to tutor her? How is Maya?”

“I don’t really know.”

“I want you to know I don’t think it’s true. That she—” She closed her eyes and mustered up some internal strength. I could almost hear the wheeze of tears peaking and subsiding somewhere just beyond where her voice began. “—killed Jefferson. Doug wanted to get a restraining order after it was clear she’d become obsessed. But I told him she was just a teen girl. We’ve all had deep crushes that are close to craziness, right? I hope I wasn’t wrong. Jefferson seemed to invite feelings like that from young ladies.”

“You weren’t wrong,” I said emphatically.

“He was really a remarkable young man. I’m not saying that just as his mother. The stories I could tell you about him.” She looked like she was about to totally lose it, but she cleared her throat. “Doug said he found you with Brian last night,” she said.

“Is he home right now, your husband?” I said, my fear suddenly doubling.

“He’s in bed. Tell me, have you found anything unusual about Brian while you were spending time with him?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Really, nothing unusual at all, even though he just lost his brother?”

“Well, yeah, of course he seems depressed and different because of that,” I said, trying to sound convincing.

“Have you ever been at all…curious about him?”

“I don’t get what you mean,” I said, crumbling half of the cookie between my fingers before I realized what I was doing.

“I never have any idea what he’s thinking. Now less than ever. He’s a complicated boy.”

I leaned forward. I couldn’t come right out and say,
Do you think Brian killed his brother?
So instead I asked, “Are you wondering whether he…did something wrong?”

She sat and glittered at me for a moment. “No,” she sighed. “I’m just wondering whether he might know something that he hasn’t told me.”

I debated how to answer. “He had a lot of negative feelings about Jefferson. I bet you know that.”

“Not really. I know they’re very different boys.”

It was unnerving and sad, telling a mother about her sons’ lives. “I’d try to keep your son out of everyone’s attention, Mrs. Andrews,” I said. “He’s not the grieving sibling most people would expect. It could be a little shocking.”

“Okay,” she said. Obviously, I hadn’t given the kind of answer she’d been expecting. What had she wanted, unconditional sympathy, faked understanding? A stumbling confession about my sister? Maybe she herself didn’t know. Either way, I’d wounded her deeply. Or just revealed the wounds aching under the surface. The bruised skin beneath her eyes rippled and the lines around her mouth fell even more vertically.

“You mentioned other girls being crazy about him?” I asked, hoping I might be able to learn something.

Mrs. Andrews sighed. “He was on his phone all the time. Some would call our line if he wasn’t picking up his. His father didn’t like that, I can tell you. But it was nice he had so many people that liked him. We never had to worry about him being a loner.” (Left unsaid:
Unlike Brian.
)

“Did you ever talk to Caitlin?” I asked, fishing.

She shook her head. “I don’t remember that name.”

“Cheyenne?”

“Oh, she was the smart one, wasn’t she? I liked talking to her whenever she’d call. Very polite.”

“And Rose was over here, after?”

“Yes. Rose was a big help. That poor girl. She truly loved him. But then again, you all loved him, didn’t you?”

“Everybody loved him,” I said. Because it was the easy thing to say.

“Look,” Mrs. Andrews said, eyeing the clock, “I won’t keep you any longer.”

“’Night,” I said. “Tell Brian I stopped by, okay?”

“I will.”

As I left, I thought about the pictures in my bag. Jefferson, crisscrossed by half a dozen knives, his head parted by an ax. Then I thought about Mrs. Andrews, alone in a dim kitchen, cleaning up the bits of cookie I had nervously sprayed all over her floor.

A
s promised, my mom was waiting for me in the driveway. She was dressed in old sweatpants that had permanent wrinkles around the knees and was reading a drugstore romance beneath the motion sensor light, waving her hand whenever it shut off. She jumped to her feet as I pulled into the driveway. It was nearly nine.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said before I’d even gotten out of my car.

“It’s okay, honey,” she said, hugging me as soon as I was near enough. I could feel her soft breath at the base of my hairline. Cody leaped against us. “Thank goodness you came home.”

“Of course I came home. Of course.”

“This has been so hard for you, I know. I’m so desperately sorry that you have to go through all of this. I don’t know if I’ve said that well enough yet. With one daughter missing, it’s too easy to neglect the one who’s left.” Perhaps for comfort, she was wearing a Christmas sweater, the same one she was wearing in the big family picture in the hallway, clutching a baby Maya. It was giving off a damp wool smell under the humidity of her tears.

“You, too, Mom,” I said. “Is Dad pissed?”

She laughed a little. “You could say that. But don’t worry about him. He’ll be better by morning.”

“I don’t want to have to talk to the police again,” I said.

“Shh,” she said. “You shouldn’t have sent us from the room, then. Why did you do that? But, shh, not to worry now. Maya will be back and this will all be cleared up. Life will be back to normal soon, you’ll see.”

“I hope so,” I said, shuddering.

“Where were you, just now?” she asked.

I told her about Cheyenne, how we’d had a fight yesterday (I said it was because of the pressure we were all under, and my mother apparently didn’t see the need to ask for any details), and how I’d spent the day with Brian and met his parents. By bringing them up I staved off any questions about what I’d actually been up to tonight.

“His mother must be an absolute wreck,” my mom said.

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, yes, of course she is, but she’s also able to do everyday things. She gave me a cookie. It was totally stale, but still. It’s not like she’s bawling all the time.”

“It’s just so sad,” my mom said. “Times like this make you realize that life is so precious, you know?”

I nodded into her shoulder. I did know. I thought. It was hard to tell when there was just so much strategizing around maintaining life. It wasn’t some gooey wonder zone. Life recently seemed to be just jockeying and positioning, vowing and lying.

“She asked me if I was ever suspicious of Brian,” I said.

My mom held me at arm’s length. “What did you tell her?”

“That he didn’t ever have much good to say about his brother. Everyone knows that. But there was something I didn’t show her. Something I found in Brian’s room.”

“What? Tell me anything you know. Immediately. Even the most minor detail can turn out to be very important, honey.”

“Okay, okay! I am.”

I pulled Brian’s sketches out of my bag and handed them to my mother. I hadn’t planned to do it. But I couldn’t hold it in. I wanted my mother to decide what to do.

She examined them right then and there. When the motion sensor light clicked off I waved at it so she could continue uninterrupted.

“They’re pretty vivid, huh?” I said. “He’s a really good artist.”

“Unfortunately for him,” Mom said. “If he weren’t, someone could argue that this guy in the picture wasn’t Jefferson. But this is definitely him.”

“Brian’s not
killing him
in any of them,” I protested weakly. “It’s just that Jefferson happens to be dying.”

“Honey,” Mom said, “you did the right thing to show these to me.” She sounded relieved, but there was something else there, an emotion I’d never detected in her before. The opposite of relief: a gearing up. Something like bloodlust. Not a motherly feeling. What had I done?

When we went inside my dad was pacing and waiting to lay into me but she took the heat, yelling back at him while I slinked upstairs with Cody. The yells soon subsided, and I could hear frantic whispering. She was telling him about the drawings. Then it was quiet as doom down there.

When my mom took me to school the next morning, she slowed down and we peered through the trees as we passed Brian’s mobile home complex.

A police cruiser was at the Andrewses’ door.

F
rom Brian’s place all the way to school, the traffic was terrible. My paranoid imagination attached the congestion to Brian’s arrest, somehow, that it was already on all the morning radio shows and people were so shocked that they lost control of their cars, that the astonishment of my betraying Brian had caused thousands of commuters to fall out of their normal patterns and trip over themselves and wonder
Who’s the bitch who betrayed that sweet, sweet kid?

After I said good-bye to my mom, I headed straight for my locker. I already had the books I needed, but I craved the solitary ritual of it, pretending that finals and APs were all I had to be worried about. I couldn’t help but see Brian’s locker as I passed. The lock was gone, replaced by a loop of tough plastic. That was always the sign that someone had gotten into major trouble.
Nate’s been expelled, they looped his locker. Marisa’s back in the hospital, they looped her locker. Brian’s in police custody because of Abby Goodwin, they looped his locker.

Where did kids who skipped classes but still wanted to stay in the school building hang out? It was weird that I didn’t know, but I’d never been friends with those sorts of kids. The auditorium was drama territory; the shed by the bus circle was for smokers. I couldn’t just join in with any of them. So I sat in the bathroom instead.

When the passing period bell rang, I waited near Cheyenne’s classroom. I followed her to her locker and put my hands over her eyes. It was our usual trick; normally she’d shriek my name, but today she shrieked terrified nonsense instead. “Abby? What the hell are you doing?” she said once she’d calmed down.

“What do you mean, ‘what am I doing?’”

“You scared me. You weren’t in psych, so I figured you weren’t coming in today.”

“Nope,” I said. I was going to apologize, but I bit my tongue. I didn’t really need a reason for my actions, did I? Not these days.

“I figured you were avoiding me,” she said, slamming a book into her locker, picking it back out, and slamming it back in.

“Oh no,” I said, figuring I was experiencing a wave of garden variety Cheyenne insecurity, “of course not.”

“I don’t think it’s an ‘of course not’ kind of situation.”

“What are you talking about?”

“‘Congrats on the Florida’s Scholars, Cheyenne; hey, good job, Cheyenne.
Gee, thanks, everybody, who’d you find out from?’”

“I didn’t tell anyone,” I lied. I’d find out some way to tell her the truth later, I promised myself.

“Someone did, because the word’s out. And I only told
you
.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” I’d never lied to Cheyenne before this week. Not about anything major, at least. But all
rules were off since Jefferson was killed. I’d make it up to her once things were back to normal.

“Everyone’s looking at me weird,” she said. “It’s real fun to be me these days, let me tell ya.”

“Tell me about it—I get it,” I said, relieved to say something unabashedly true to my best friend. “I’m sorry.”

“Come to calc with me, at least,” Cheyenne said.

I shook my head. “I haven’t done any homework for ages.”

She clutched my arm and adopted a mock parental tone. “You, missy, are coming with me.”

I let her lead me to the math wing. I was about to ask her if she’d heard any rumors about Brian when we passed someone who stopped me in my tracks. Rose Nelson.

Rose stopped Cheyenne in her tracks, too. And Cheyenne and I stopped Rose in her tracks. It was like some god somewhere had pressed Pause. Cheyenne finally broke the silence. “Hey, Rose.”

“Hey, Rose,” I parroted.

Rose Nelson stared back.

“Come on, let’s get going,” Cheyenne said.

“How’s your sister, Abby?” Rose asked. She was beaming like a fluorescent light, her books clasped tight and demure against her chest. It was warmth and chilliness at the same time.

“Screw you,” I said.

“No,” Rose said, “screw
you
,” and she hurled her books at me. I’d always thought that only boys really got violent, that girls lashed out by excluding one another, but times must
have changed. Most of her books missed. Unfortunately for me she was coming from calculus, though, and the honors book is college level and really fat and contains an extra two hundred pages on multivariable derivatives and is brand-new with sharp corners. She got me square on the shoulder, and it really hurt. I picked up the book and threw it back, ripping the cover off in the process. I got her elbow. Then Cheyenne joined in, picking the book back up and lobbing it at Rose. It missed and slapped loudly against the wall. By now everyone in the hallway was watching.

“Come on, Abby, let’s
go
,” Cheyenne said.

“It wasn’t
Brian Andrews
,” Rose said. “Please. We know exactly who killed Jefferson. And her name is Maya Goodwin.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Just because you couldn’t keep your man in your bed doesn’t mean my sister had anything to do with it.”

As far as comebacks go, it was pretty lame, but tears immediately stood in Rose’s eyes. “How could you say that to me? My boyfriend is
dead
.” Rose’s friends, and unfortunately there were always dozens of them around, started swarming over. They circled her and looked at me reproachfully. This was going nowhere fast. I let Cheyenne lead me away.

“Good one, Abby,” Cheyenne muttered as we sped to calc. “What is
wrong
with us?”

“I don’t know,” I said, sliding into my seat. I felt both sullen and energized.

There was a quiz, but I said I didn’t feel well and got out of it. I toyed with my phone under the desk instead. I’d gotten a message from Keith: call asap. business stuff. urgent. Maybe I would call him. But not anytime soon. What I didn’t need at all right now were even more complications.

What I
did
need, though, was to find out exactly what was happening with Brian. I dreaded finding out, even as I wanted it more than anything.

I excused myself to the bathroom and called the Andrewses’ home line from a stall. I had the number keyed in under Jefferson’s name; it felt unholy pressing Send. Brian’s dad answered. “Hello?”

“Mr. Andrews?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Abby. Abby Goodwin.”

“Brian can’t talk to you.”

“I’m sorry, I…I just want to know if he’s okay.”

“Did you hear me?” he asked, his voice rising. “I said he can’t talk to you. Don’t call here.”

“Does he not want to talk to me or
can’t
he? Has he been arrested, Mr. Andrews?”

The line went dead. I stared at my phone. I heard the sizzle of a dunked cigarette in the next stall, followed by a toilet flushing. Did Brian hate me? Or was he arrested? There was no way I’d find out, not for a while. I went back to math class in a stupor.

Maybe the lives of both the Andrews boys were over now.