the sound of my big sister’s voice or comforted by the knowledge of her presence in the nearby bed. In fact, sharing a room with Katie that year had been a punishment. The nightmares that had plagued her when we’d first come to live with Aunt Lucy and Gran—the screaming awakenings that had wrenched both of us from our sleep—had returned that year.
Hormones and stress, Aunt Lucy had diagnosed. Katie was just having a difficult time growing up. Be patient, she said when I complained. It will pass. And at bedtime she began dosing my sister—and me, for good measure—with steaming mugs of chamomile tea sweetened with wildflower honey. A treat for Katie, who liked the concoction. A torture for me, who didn’t. And one more reason for us to bicker. As if teenage sisters needed a reason.
That summer, Katie began taking long, solitary drives in the beaten-up old car she’d bought for two hundred dollars. Back then, I’d figured she had a boyfriend—someone Gran and Aunt Lucy wouldn’t have approved of. I still remembered the curious mix of jealousy, envy and anger I’d felt each time I’d watched her drive off and how I’d speculated about who she might have been meeting. Maybe she was seeing that gangly Baker boy who had dropped out of school and was bagging groceries at a store in Paducah. Or the Rosses’ youngest son who, that summer, had taken to hanging out with his friends late at night at the little park just up the street from the Cherokee Rose.
I sat with my foot pressed down on the accelerator and the air-conditioning blasting away inside my SUV, wondering with nine years of hindsight if I’d gotten it wrong. Wondering now if the reason Katie had so hotly denied having a boyfriend—the reason no boy had ever surfaced that summer or, in fact, any of the summers after that—was that there had never been a boyfriend. Something else, I now feared, had stolen Katie’s attention away from me. Had reawakened memories of our past.
And there was something else that was racheting up the painful, twisting anxiety I began feeling deep in the pit of my stomach from the moment I’d first wrapped my fingers around the inhaler.
Right after Missy’s murder, Gran and Aunt Lucy had moved Katie into an isolated facility in the hills of Montana where she’d stayed for almost two years. After that, she’d traveled to France. To Paris, where she’d learned to cook and bake. She’d worked for a while at a hotel resort in Colorado, and then for a trendy restaurant in Miami. Finally, she’d returned to Maryville and the Cherokee Rose. Because she missed us and she loved us and she was lonely for her family and her home.
Gran, Aunt Lucy and Katie—especially Katie—seemed to have put the past behind them. Katie had been given a second chance, Gran told me. Just like the women we moved along the Underground.
A second chance. That’s what covering up Missy’s murder had bought my sister. A chance that I owed her. Because she was my sister and my protector. I had willingly paid the personal costs. But now…
I hit a pothole a little faster than I should have. The seat belt tightened across my lap and tugged at my shoulder, jolting my attention back to the winding road in front of me.
For a few minutes, I concentrated on the road and on managing a little more detachment. I dug through my glove compartment, popped a couple of the antacid tablets I stored there, and washed them down with a swig of lukewarm coffee from my Thermos cup. Then I ticked off the facts—only the facts—in my head.
I’d found an inhaler near a female murder victim’s remains.
Katie used an inhaler.
The remains were found within an easy drive from Maryville.
Within the time frame that the murder had occurred, Katie had had a car and had often been absent from town without explanation.
The remains were near Camp Cadiz.
Eight years earlier, my sister had committed cold-blooded murder at Camp Cadiz.
It was beyond circumstantial, I told myself. Just random coincidence and paranoid, guilt-driven supposition, all arbitrarily knotted together into an unlikely pattern. There were other explanations. Better explanations.
No matter that, at the moment, I couldn’t think of any.
Despite my best efforts, my instincts—or maybe simply my fear—presented a horrific scenario that I couldn’t reason away. No matter how reasonable I tried to be.
What if Missy Porter hadn’t been my sister’s first victim? I asked myself.