All the Way Home
Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
All the Way Home
WENDY CORSI STAUB
For my boys,
Brody and Morgan—
and my guy, Mark.
C
ONTENTS
An Excerpt from
The Good Sister
C
arleen Connolly is the third to disappear.
Rory realizes, after it has happened, that she has somehow, somewhere in the back of her mind, been expecting it all along—that perhaps she’s always understood that one day she would wake up to find her older sister gone forever.
The thing is, she had pretty much figured on Carleen—reckless, impulsive Carleen—getting into a terrible accident with the Chevy, which she has been sneaking out of the garage at night for years, long before she actually turned sixteen and got her license. Whenever Rory heard the ominous wail of ambulance sirens from her bed at night, she would brace herself for a ringing phone or a knock on the door—for the imminent news that her sister was dead, that she’d gone and wrapped the Chevy around a pole or missed a curve out on winding Lakeshore Road.
Or maybe she had believed Carleen would run off with one of the older boys she was always seeing—elope to Maryland the way Mrs. Shilling’s daughter, Diana, had a few years back.
Then again, Carleen might just leave home alone, on her own, headed for New York City a few hours south. How many times, after a screaming battle with their parents, had Carleen threatened to do just that? “I’m going to run away! You wait and see. I’m out of here!”
And Daddy would shout back, “You want to leave? Go ahead. See how far you get with no money and no high school diploma.”
And Rory, when she had been young enough to think her sister was serious about leaving, would cry and beg Carleen not to run away. Because, even though there always seemed to be some kind of trouble when Carleen was around, the thought of life without her was depressing.
Well, now Carleen is gone.
And Rory’s life isn’t just depressing; it has turned into a nightmare.
Because her sister hasn’t had an accident.
And she hasn’t eloped, or run away.
Carleen has simply disappeared.
Just like the two teenaged girls before her.
Nice, wholesome girls who grew up here in Lake Charlotte, New York, a sleepy village in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, where people chat with each other from front porches and keep an eye on each other’s children and leave their doors unlocked at night . . .
Until this summer.
Everything changed when the first girl vanished. Kirstin Stafford. Age thirteen. Never came home from an after-dinner bike ride around the lake on a hot June evening.
Then, a few weeks later, it was Allison Myers, a fifteen-year-old who disappeared from a Fourth of July picnic out at Point Cedar Park.
No trace of either girl was ever found.
Now there is Carleen Connolly, seventeen, whose mother found her canopy bed empty one morning in late July in the third-story bedroom of the big old house at 52 Hayes Street.
For years after, Rory Connolly will do a double take every time she sees a girl with long, straight black hair, or catches a whiff of Poison perfume, or hears a piercing, high-pitched whistle, the kind you make by sticking two fingers into your mouth.
Carleen had long, straight black hair.
Carleen wore Poison perfume.
Carleen used to whistle like that.
But Carleen is gone.
“She probably just ran away,” Rory’s next-door neighbor, Emily Anghardt, keeps saying reassuringly, her big brown eyes solemn and her voice, still retaining a hint of a southern accent, low and soothing. “You know how Carleen is.”
Yes, Rory knows how Carleen is. Everyone in Lake Charlotte knows how Carleen Connolly is.
How she seemed like such a nice girl until she became a teenager, when she started smoking and drinking and got caught shoplifting beer at the A&P. How she disrespectfully calls her parents by their first names behind their backs and sometimes even to their faces, and how she brags about stealing money from her mother’s purse, and how she curses and cuts classes and cheats her way through school.
What most people don’t remember, though, is that Carleen has another side—a vulnerable side.
Carleen once came sobbing out of the woods carrying a rabbit whose leg had been bloodied and broken in a hunter’s trap, and she insisted on paying for the veterinarian bill out of her allowance, then held the suffering animal in her lap while the vet put it out of its misery, stroking its matted fur as it heaved its last shuddering breath.
Carleen used to go over and play the piano for old Miss Prendergrast next door, and shovel her walk when it snowed, and of all the neighborhood children, only Carleen was allowed to pick the raspberries from the briars that grew along Mrs. Prendergrast’s back fence.
And sometimes—long after Carleen had outgrown the Barbie dolls she and Rory had always shared and she had taken to making fun of her little sister’s “babyish games” whenever anyone else was in earshot—she would pop into Rory’s bedroom and play Barbies with her, making her swear not to tell a soul.
Rory never had.
Rory knows something else about her big sister that she wouldn’t dare tell anyone, not even Emily, even though they’ve been best friends ever since Emily’s family moved into Mrs. Prendergrast’s house almost two years ago.
Rory must keep her sister’s deepest, darkest secret, even now that Carleen is gone. After all, she promised.
“Don’t worry, Rory,” Emily says daily. “Carleen’ll be back sooner or later.”
And Rory wants to scream at her to stop saying it, to just shut up, even though she knows Emily is only trying to make her feel better. After all, what else can one friend say to another under circumstances like these? Emily can hardly voice what’s on everyone’s mind as the grim, steamy August days drift by with no evidence, no leads, no word.
No, Emily can hardly say to Rory, “Carleen has obviously been kidnapped and probably murdered by some psycho child molester, and it’s only a matter of time before he strikes again.”
So Rory mutely lets Emily reassure her, and she constantly looks over her shoulder, and there never seems to be a moment during that endless, humid summer when she isn’t wondering about Carleen, and what has happened to her.
And when it happens again—when her best friend Emily Anghardt disappears just before Labor Day weekend—Rory realizes that no matter where her life takes her, no matter what happens to her from now until the day she dies, she will never feel safe again.
“S
o, Rory . . . thanks. For coming,” Kevin says gruffly, his eyes focused on the Departures screen above their heads, as if he’s looking for his commuter flight to JFK in New York, which he’s checked and double-checked countless times already.
Gate four, On Time, 4:35
P.M.
It’s only three-thirty now.
Rory watches the earnest expression on her younger brother’s face, wondering when he turned into a man. It’s as though she hasn’t looked at him,
really
looked, on the few occasions she’s seen him since she left home.
Last night, she hadn’t gotten in until late, and she was so exhausted from the long hours of driving that she hadn’t stayed up to socialize. Today there was a flurry of activity as she settled in and Kevin prepared to leave.
And then she was driving him to the airport, and here they are, and she’s noticing for the first time that there’s a shadow of a beard covering Kevin’s jaw and that his always lanky frame has picked up some bulk, filling out the thin cotton shirt and snug faded jeans he’s wearing. He’s grown up, and for the first time, he’s striking out on his own.
She realizes he’s talking to her, thanking her.
“You’re welcome,” she tells him, reaching up to brush a clump of sandy hair out of his eyes.
“Tell Mom . . .” He trails off, shrugging. “Never mind. I guess it doesn’t matter what you tell her. She won’t understand. She doesn’t understand anything, except that I’m leaving. She can’t figure out why, or that I’ll be back, even though I’ve told her . . .”
“She’ll be all right,” Rory assures him, noting the worry in his green eyes, trying to push back a wave of guilt that sweeps over her.
He’s old beyond his years, her kid brother.
Thanks to her.
He’s the one who was at home to pick up the pieces when Daddy dropped dead of a brain aneurysm a year and a half after that terrible summer.
That was what had done their mother in. Becoming a widow. No longer having a husband there to take care of her, the way Daddy had in the twenty years they were married.
Maura Connolly had always been fragile, always nervous, always unstable.
After Kevin’s birth, she had gone into a deep depression that lasted almost a year, Rory remembered. She locked herself away in her room, not even emerging to attend daily mass, as she always had, and Daddy hired a nanny to take care of the baby and Rory and Carleen, and he finally forced Mom to go see a doctor. Nobody ever said psychiatrist, but that must have been it, Rory later realized. The doctor had put her on some kind of medication, and eventually, she had come back to life. She was never quite the same, but at least she could function as a normal human being.