All the Way Home (50 page)

Tears are stinging Rory’s eyes now. She takes a tentative step, and then another, toward the skeletal remains on the floor, pushing past the detectives crouched beside them, knowing what she’ll see even before she spots it.

There.

It’s clearly visible around the neck of one corpse.

A locket, identical to her own.

Her father’s voice echoes in her ears.

Never take them off. They will remind you that you’re sisters, a part of each other forever. Someday you’ll be best friends. You’re lucky to have each other.

One of the officers puts a hand on her arm, pulls her back, murmurs something about not disturbing the bodies.

Tears stream down her cheeks, enormous sobs wracking her body as she absorbs the terrible, undeniable truth. The loss is crippling; somehow sudden, yet long delayed.

And now she knows.

After so many years of wondering, and praying, and hoping.

Now she knows.

Carleen is dead.

You’re sisters, a part, of each other forever . . 
.

“Rory?”

She turns at the sound of her name.

Molly’s standing there, freed from her shackles, looking pale and unnerved . . . and small. And alone.

“Rory?” Her voice is quaking. “I’m so sorry I made you come here. She made me—”

“I know, Molly. God, I know.” She opens her arms, and her little sister steps into them, and then they’re both sobbing, and clinging to each other, and Molly is thanking her, over and over.

“Let’s get out of here,” Molly says at last, pulling back and looking around with a shudder.

“Okay,” Rory agrees, squeezing her hand. “Let’s go home.”

E
PILOGUE

“M
olly? Are you almost ready?”

“God, Rory, cut me a break! I’ll be right down, okay?”

Rory’s eyes meet Barrett’s, and they both smile.

“Thirteen-year-old sisters,” she informs him, “can be a real pain in the—”

“Relax, Rory. She’s making herself beautiful. Can you blame her? We’re going to the fanciest restaurant in town.”

“I still think we should have chosen someplace less . . .”

“Expensive,” Barrett asks, reading her mind. “I know you do. After all, you’re a real starving artist now,” he adds, with a glance at the easel Rory set up in the living room, her unofficial “studio.” “But I told you, Rory, it’ll be my treat.”

“And money is no object for you. Do you have to rub it in?” Rory asks with a grin. “Must be nice to be filthy rich.”

“Oh, believe me, it is.” Barrett raises an eyebrow at her. “Maybe someday you’ll find out.”

Her stomach flutters at the suggestive look on his face, even though she knows it’s too soon . . . much too soon to be thinking about settling down with him.

Then again, she’s already made the decision to stay here in Lake Charlotte . . . at least for a while.

And so has Barrett, having spent the rest of the summer and all of September staying in a house he rented in town, working on his book.

It’s October now.

Out on Hayes Street, the leaves are dazzling reds and pinks and oranges and golds, and there’s a perpetual hint of wood smoke in the crisp air. Mrs. Shilling has temporarily closed down her bed and breakfast and gone to visit her son Bucky down in Austin. Cheryl Wasner’s chrysanthemums are in full bloom, and there’s an artful display of pumpkins and cornstalks on their porch. And out on the sidewalk in front of the Randalls’ house, every night after supper, Ozzie has been learning to ride his new red tricycle with his father’s help, as Michelle and his baby sister, Joy, look on from the front steps.

“Rory? Does this look all right?”

She looks up to see her mother walking slowly down the stairs.

“Mom! You changed your mind! You’re coming with us?”

“If it’s not too late to invite myself along,” Maura says, clinging tightly to the bannister as she descends. “And if you think I look presentable.”

Her mother’s hair is neatly combed, and there’s even a touch of lipstick and mascara to enhance her striking features. She’s wearing the simply cut navy wool dress and matching pumps that Rory bought her on a recent, memorable shopping trip, with a disapproving Sister Theodosia in tow.

“You look beautiful, Mom,” Rory says truthfully. “Did you remember to take your medication?”

Maura nods.

She usually does remember, lately—no longer needing to hide in the fog of her mental illness. She still has bad days, though they’re fewer and farther between as time goes on: days when she forgets, for a while, that Rory lives here now, and Kevin has moved into a place of his own in Saratoga, and Carleen . . .

Carleen is never coming home.

Rory spared her mother the vile details of Carleen’s imprisonment and death, not wanting her to be tortured by knowing how her beloved firstborn had suffered. Rory still can’t quite grasp that Carleen had been so close to home the whole time—left to die a slow, agonizing death, abandoned by Russell Anghardt in the dungeon beneath the house next door.

Carleen was laid to rest at last after the medical examiner released her remains to the family in July. Her grave is in the cemetery behind Holy Father Church, beside the simple stone marker where Patrick Connolly is buried.

And somehow, seeing her father and sister united in death, Rory had felt the sense of closure that enabled her long-delayed healing process to begin.

Visiting David Anghardt again had helped, too. This time, she had brought him some chocolate-covered raisins, and she had spent the entire day with him. She’d helped him string big wooden beads and sung songs, and had talked to him, rewarded when he smiled at the end of the day and tried to say her name. Choked up, she had promised him she’d be back soon. She hadn’t mentioned his sister; Lydia McGovern had said that she’d decided it would be better if she didn’t.

“He’s really going to miss seeing her,” the director had said sadly. “It’s hard to believe that someone who loved her brother as much as she did could have been capable of such heinous crimes.”

“She was her father’s first victim,” Rory pointed out. “It doesn’t make what she did any more tolerable, but I can understand how she got lost in her own tragic world.”

After so many years of living under horrific circumstances—first in her father’s house, then on the streets—Emily must have just snapped. When she went to confront her father, she flew into a rage and killed him. Then, aghast at what she had done, she had gone over the edge into madness.

“But why on earth was she wearing her father’s clothes, thinking she was him?” she’d wondered aloud to Barrett, bewildered, knowing she’d never shake the haunting memory of Emily’s creepy portrayal of Russell Anghardt.

“It was her response to the overwhelming realization that she’d killed him. An escape, maybe, or a way of keeping him alive. Didn’t you ever see
Psycho,
with kooky Norman Bates impersonating his dead mother?” Barrett had asked, and Rory had shuddered.

Now Emily is in a federal prison on kidnapping charges, and her lawyers are trying to prove her mentally unfit to stand trial. Either way, she’ll never be free again.

And Rory has vowed to keep visiting David Anghardt.

“Are Kevin and Katherine meeting us there?” Barrett asks, checking his watch.

Rory nods. “They’re probably waiting already. Come on, Molly, move it!”

“All right, already. I’m coming!”

A door bangs open upstairs, and, moments later, Molly appears at the head of the stairs. She’s wearing a red dress that shows off curves Rory didn’t realize she has, and teetering in a pair of too-high heels.

“Careful,” Rory and her mother say simultaneously, then look at each other and smile.

Molly rolls her eyes.

Barrett says, “Are you ready? Because Kevin and Katherine are waiting. And Travis will be there, too, by now.”

“I’m ready,” Molly says, walking down the stairs on wobbly feet, clinging to the railing.

Rory wants to tell her to go change into a pair of flats, but she holds her tongue. She knows how she would have reacted if Carleen had said something like that, in that annoying, superior, big-sister tone of hers.

She waits for Molly to descend the stairs as Barrett and her mother start out to the car.

“Are you nervous?” she asks her sister in a low voice when Molly reaches the bottom step.

Tonight’s meeting with Travis is all Molly’s talked about for days. She’s finally ready to meet her father—the man who has spent the last thirteen years living in Boston, wondering about her, so concerned that he’d hired a private detective to keep tabs on her, to make sure she was all right.

It had taken a while for Molly to agree to see him.

After all, it hadn’t been easy for her, for any of them, to accept that he had been much older than Carleen, and married, when they became involved. Travis was an instructor at a nearby college, and, as he’d told Rory, his marriage was already in trouble when he met Carleen, who passed herself off as twenty-one with no problem. It wasn’t until she came to him and told him she was pregnant that he’d discovered the truth.

Stunned and horrified, he’d asked her if she was sure the baby was his—and she’d flown off the handle. Stormed away, refusing to speak to him, though he tried to get in touch with her afterward, wanting to own up to his responsibility.

The next thing he knew, she’d moved to California with her family, and his marriage was falling apart. So he’d gone to Boston to make a fresh start, and managed to pull his life together over the years. He’s teaching at Harvard, he told Rory, and is getting married again over the holidays.

“But I want to be a part of Molly’s life,” he’d said earnestly. “If she’ll let me.”

For a while, Rory hadn’t thought Molly would.

With a stubborn streak that would have done her mother proud, Molly had refused to see him when he turned up in town the day of her rescue—but then, she was still shell-shocked from the trauma of what she’d been through.

Gradually, though, as summer turned to fall, Molly had shown a growing interest in the letters and gifts Travis had been sending to her.

And now, finally, she’s agreed to let him come back to Lake Charlotte on Columbus Day weekend. In just a short while, she’ll meet him face to face.

“Am I nervous?” she echoes Rory’s question. “No! God, why would I be—Whoops!”

Molly’s ankle turns on the step and she starts to fall forward.

Rory reaches out and catches her, holding her steady.

“You okay?”

“Yeah . . . thanks,” Molly adds, looking sheepish. “You saved me.”

Rory shrugs. “What are sisters for?”

And together, they walk out into the night.

And now a sneak peek at

THE GOOD SISTER,

the first in Wendy Corsi Staub’s

chilling new series

Coming October 2013

from HarperCollins Publishers

T
hat it had all been a lie shouldn’t come as any surprise, really.

And yet, the truth—a terrible, indisputable truth that unfolds line by blue ballpoint line, filling the pages of the black marble notebook—is somehow astonishing.

How did you never suspect it back then?

Or, at least, in the years since?

Looking back at the childhood decade spent in this house—an ornate, faded Second Empire Victorian mansion in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city—it’s so easy to see how it might have happened this way.

How it
did
happen this way.

There is no mistaking the evidence. No mistaking the distinct handwriting: a cramped, backhand scrawl so drastically different from the loopy, oversized penmanship so typical of other girls that age.

Different . . .

Of course it was different.

She
was different from the other girls; tragically, dangerously different.

I remember so well.

I remember her, remember so many things about her: both how she lived and how she—

Footsteps approach, tapping up the wooden stairway to this cupola perched high above the third story mansard roofline, topped by wrought-iron cresting that prongs the sky like a king’s squared-off crown.

“
Hellooo-oo
. Are you still up there?” calls Sandra Lutz, the Realtor.

“Yes.”
Where else would I be? Do you think I jumped out the window while you were gone?

Sandra had excused herself ten minutes ago, finally answering her cell phone. It had buzzed incessantly with incoming calls and texts as their footsteps echoed in one empty room after another on this final walk-through before the listing goes up tomorrow.