The Good Sister (3 page)

Now the old phone is offering zero gratification.

Which doesn’t make sense, because a landline should work even with the power out. A blown fuse wouldn’t have impacted the telephone line inside the house, and it’s not as if there’s a storm raging outside, toppling trees and taking down wires.

Perplexed, Sandra stands holding the receiver, wondering how it stopped functioning.

Then she sees it, out of the corner of her eye: the slightest movement in the shadowy corner of the kitchen, where two steps lead down to a small, windowed mudroom and back door.

Her instinct is to cry out, to turn and stare at the spot, or to bolt from the room.

She doesn’t do any of those things.

Instead, just in case someone really is there, watching her, she pushes back the panic rushing up from her gut, forcing herself to stand absolutely still.

Her mind races through possibilities.

One, she’s imagining things . . .

Two, it’s a ghost . . .

Three, it’s a human prowler.

Seeing another flicker of movement, she rules out the first option and decides that the second is much more appealing than the third.

More appealing, but perhaps less likely, especially when she considers the abrupt power outage.

Someone could have cut the telephone and electric lines, instantly isolating her in the dark.

The house is locked, of course, with the fancy new dead bolts Bob Witkowski installed for her after she moved in. A hell of a lot of good they do now, with all the windows open.

Sandra’s own words about the broken screen, spoken so glibly just this morning, come back to haunt her now.

Anyone could push through it and hop in.

But it’s such a safe neighborhood . . .

That doesn’t matter. Someone—some, some
night predator
—could have easily found his way here.

Someone could have been watching from the shrub border as she walked from her car to the back door a little while ago. He could have climbed in the window while she was upstairs changing her clothes, lying in wait down here the whole time . . .

Oh dear God.

What do I do?

He’s positioned between Sandra and the back door. If she goes in the opposite direction and makes a run for the front door, he’ll surely catch her before she reaches it.

There’s a drawer full of knives a few feet away, but she can’t remember which one it is.

All right. All right. Neither flight nor fight is a reliable option.

She can scream for help, but chances are no one will hear her above the hum of air-conditioning or window fans.

What do I do?

What do I do?

In the still, dark room, she can feel the predator poised, getting ready to pounce.

She has to take a chance.

With a silent prayer—
Please, God, please, God
—Sandra bursts into motion, running with all her might toward the front of the house, certain she’s going to hear footsteps chasing her, and yet . . .

Yet there’s nothing, not a hint of movement behind her.

But he’s there; I know he’s there, and he’s coming.

I have to get out.

Cursing the fact that she doesn’t keep the dead bolt key inside the lock, she frantically reaches for the strip of molding above the door, knowing now that the extra second it takes to grab it could very well cost her her life.

Her straining fingertips settle at the center of the door frame, where she always places the key after locking herself in.

It isn’t there.

She fumbles along the shallow ledge a couple of inches to the right, and then to the left.

No key.

Biting her trembling lip to keep from crying out in frustration, she swipes her hand across the ledge again, trying to control her movement so that she doesn’t knock the key off and have to dive for it. The ledge is empty.

How can that be?

Her mind races. She rarely uses the front door. But whenever she opens it, she puts the key back where it belongs.

So what happened? Where is it?

It doesn’t matter. She’s trapped.

Any second now, he’s going to grab her from behind . . .

She spins around.

He isn’t there.

Was her mind playing tricks on her after all?

Of course. It makes sense.

Who doesn’t start imagining scary things when the lights go out?

Relieved, Sandra presses a hand against her pounding heart.

Okay. Okay. I’m okay. It was a false alarm.

But . . .

What about the missing key?

And why
did
the lights go out?

And how did the living room windows wind up closed and locked?

Even as the questions flit into her mind, even as her pulse slows to a slightly less frantic rhythm, she hears it . . .

The unmistakable sound of a floorboard creaking in the kitchen.

Someone is there.

Someone is coming.

Steady footfalls approach.

Sandra looks around wildly for something to throw through the window.

Before she can make a move, a voice—eerily calm, jarringly familiar—says from the shadows, “Don’t, Sandra.”

It’s
him
.

What is
he
doing here?

“I have a gun, and I’ll use it.”

A whimper escapes her as she shrinks back against the locked door like a cowering doe helplessly waiting for the hunter’s kill.

Entry from the marble notebook

Wednesday, September 4, 1985

He came to my room again last night.

I wasn’t feeling good so I had gone to bed early, but he woke me up. As usual, after he left I was so upset that I got no sleep, and I was exhausted today for the first day of school.

I’m a sophomore now. At Mass on Sunday, I prayed that this year will be better than last, and that I might find a friend. But so far, it’s the same as last year. The other girls either look right through me like I’m not even there, or they stare at me like they feel sorry for me, or worse, like they hate me.

I don’t know how I’m going to get through another whole year of this, let alone two more after that. If I complain, Mother will threaten to homeschool me again—that’s what she’s going to do with Adrian, poor baby.

I would never survive that. Never. School might be miserable, but it’s my only escape. But I don’t think she’d really go through with it for me. She doesn’t want me at home all day, every day, where he could get to me while she’s out working. It’s not that she’s trying to protect me from him, because God knows she doesn’t do that. When I was little and it first started happening, I used to go crying to her, begging her to make him stop. I would get beaten and locked in my room, and I learned to keep my mouth shut. So she doesn’t try to keep me from him for my own sake. It’s for hers. I think that in some weird, warped way, she’s jealous. She’d be thrilled if I walked out the door one day and never came back. I would, too, if it weren’t for Adrian. I would never leave him here alone with them, ever.

If I stay in school I can get a good job someday and then I’ll take him to live with me. We’ll move away and make a fresh start someplace—in a big city where no one will know us, or on a peaceful ocean beach—someplace where we can be safe and sound and far away from the two of them, and we’ll never look back. That’s the only thing that keeps me going.

Chapter 3

F
ebruary might be the shortest month of the year, but it feels exactly the opposite, Carley Archer decides as she strips off her wet parka on a dark winter Monday morning.

February seems to drag on endlessly here in Buffalo, where regardless of what the calendar and the groundhog say, there are still at least two more months of depressing weather ahead—usually more.

Carley drapes the hood over a hook in her locker, crams the rest of the puffy nylon coat into the narrow space, and slams the door, knowing that when she opens it later, it’s going to smell like mildew again. That’s what happens, she’s discovered this winter, when you hang a wet coat in a closed-in, dark place all day, every day. There are no open cloakroom hooks here at Sacred Sisters High School like there were at the parochial school where Carley spent the first nine years of her education.

She takes a deep breath, air that smells of pencil sharpener shavings, old books, and, still lingering faintly, the fish casserole the cafeteria served for lunch on Friday. Time to get through another week.

Backpack over her shoulder, she heads down the hall toward homeroom, keeping an eye out for Johnny, the part-time janitor.

The first time she saw him, not long after she started school here last fall, he was outside at the edge of the parking lot, leaning on the rusty bike rack no one ever uses, simultaneously reading a book and peeling an apple. He was using a pocket knife and peeling carefully so that the skin dangled in a continuous red coil.

He wasn’t great-looking—tall and wiry with black hair cut stubbly short—but there was something appealing about him. Carley assumed he must be someone’s boyfriend from Cardinal Ruffini, the neighboring all-boys Catholic school.

He saw her looking at him and instead of glancing away, said hello.

“Hi,” she said, expecting him to go back to his book, but he was still looking at her, as though he expected her to say something else.

So she gestured at the apple. “How do you do that without even looking at it?”

“Practice.”

“Really? Aren’t you afraid you’re going to cut your fingers?”

He shrugged. “Nah. I’ve peeled a million apples and I’ve never cut my fingers once.”

“Still . . . that must be a really good book,” she said. “What is it?”

He held up the cover, and she recognized the Ray Bradbury novel she’d been assigned to read for freshman English.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“I love it.”

“Really?” Carley, who loves so many books, didn’t like that one at all. Too shy to tell him that, much less find out what he thought made the book so great, she hurried away.

She occasionally spotted him out there after that, always with a book and an apple and a perfectly unfurled peel. As the weather grew more frequently inclement, she started to notice him inside the school, too. She can’t quite remember how she found out his name, or that he’s not someone’s boyfriend after all—rather, part of the custodial staff—but she does recall feeling an odd little spark of pleasure at the news.

Not that she has a particular affinity for janitors, but . . . well, at least he’s not dating one of the other girls. Not that
she
wants to date him, because he’s too old for her and they have nothing in common but Ray Bradbury and finding themselves in the same little corner of the world at the same time, and he’s probably not interested anyway, but . . .

She just happens to like the fact that he was obviously reading the Bradbury book because he wanted to. Not because he had to for an assignment.

She began not just to notice him, but to look for him. She figured out, for example, that on the first Monday of every month, he can always be found outside by the big signboard in front of the school. It’s his job to change the listing of events using the big black letters he carries with him in a plastic case. She liked how in December, he wrote “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!” using plenty of exclamation marks.

When she worked up the courage to compliment him on that one day, he told her that he would have used more, “But that was all they had in the box.”

On the last day before Christmas break, he saw her in the hall and called, “Merry Christmas! I hope you can tell I said that with lots of exclamation!”

She laughed longer and harder than she should have.

Today, there’s no sign of Johnny in the hallway. Just the usual crowd of uniformed girls making their way to classrooms, and the occasional habited nun hustling them along or waiting in doorways to greet them.

“Hi, Carley!”

She turns, surprised to have been greeted—by name!—by a pair of passing girls from her social studies class.

“Oh . . . hi.”

She rounds a corner and another girl spots her and waves. “Carley, what’s up?”

“Not much.” Carley waves back and walks on, feeling a smile playing at her lips. Maybe, at long last, she’s starting to fit in here. Mom promised that it would take some time but would eventually happen. “You’ll see, Carley, before you know it, you’ll feel as much at home at Sacred Sisters as you did at Saint Paul’s.”

She doubted that. After all, Saint Paul’s was within walking distance of her house in Woodsbridge, not way up here in the city. And she was enrolled there from kindergarten through eighth grade, year after year, in the same building with the same kids and the same teachers who weren’t all nuns like they are at Sisters—well,
almost
all of them, anyway. And at Saint Paul’s, the nuns didn’t wear habits as they do here, where they’re part of a more conservative religious order.

Plus . . .

Nicki was at Saint Paul’s.

Carley’s smile fades. She doesn’t want to think about Nicki right now. Not on a day that’s started out so well, despite the stormy weather outside.

In homeroom, she greets Sister Thomas Katherine, who’s standing at the chalkboard writing something.

“Good morning, Carley!” Sister Thomas Katherine is cheerful, as always, and Carley’s mood lifts another notch as she heads down the row to her seat.

“Hi, Carley.” The girl in front of her, a pretty blonde named Renee, turns around. “How was your weekend?”

“Oh—it was pretty good, thanks.”

“That’s good.” Renee faces forward again before Carley remembers that she should have asked, in turn, how Renee’s weekend was.

“The best way to make new friends,” Mom coached her at the beginning of the year, “is to ask people about themselves.”

So far, that’s been easier said than done. You can’t just walk up to someone who doesn’t know you exist and ask if she has any hobbies.

Mom can’t relate to that particular problem, though. She’s the kind of person people notice—and like—right away. Dad calls her a social butterfly. Carley’s younger sister, Emma, is the same way: never at a loss for words and completely at ease wherever she goes, even surrounded by strangers.

It must be nice to have that kind of confidence. Carley would trade places with Emma or Mom any day.

But now, for the first time since she started high school, she wonders if her loneliness might be temporary after all, like her mother said. Weird the way it seems to have happened overnight, though. Or maybe friendliness is contagious: several other classmates say hello to her before it’s time to stand for the Pledge and morning prayer, read over the loudspeaker by a pair of seniors.

Listening absently to the morning announcements, Carley decides February isn’t so bad after all.

It’s definitely looking better than the fall months, when she was so new here she couldn’t find her way from her locker to homeroom without consulting her photocopied map.

And it’s better than December and January, too, by far. Nicki’s absence in her life made the holidays—always Carley’s favorite time of year—seem oddly depressing this year. The lake-effect snow hurtled across the frigid waters of Erie and Ontario seemed even crueler than usual without her best friend around to coax her into sledding or brownie baking when blizzards canceled school.

“And last but not least,” the girl on the PA system is saying, and her voice makes Carley picture her as petite, ponytailed, and bubbly, “this morning, the Spring Fling elections will be held in homeroom. Winners will be announced on Friday.”

The other senior joins her to deliver the usual signoff in unison: “Have a blessed day!”

The intercom clicks off, and an excited buzz goes up in the room.

Carley first heard about Spring Fling from her mother, who also attended Sacred Sisters, along with Carley’s four aunts. The dance, a longtime tradition, is a collaborative affair between Sisters and Cardinal Ruffini, held annually on a March weekend in the gym of one school or the other. There’s a royal court, consisting of one princess and one prince chosen from each grade, along with a senior queen and king.

Naturally, Mom was voted princess her sophomore year.

“Why not freshman year?” Emma wanted to know, the night Mom shared that memory at the dinner table.

“I was a late bloomer. Freshman year, the prettiest girl in the class got elected.”

“You mean she wasn’t you?” Dad shook his head. “I don’t buy that for a second.”

Mom laughed. “I know it’s hard to believe, but not everyone fell in love with me at first sight. Just you.”

At that, Emma rolled her eyes at Carley, who—the older she gets—finds it more sweet than disgusting when her parents get flirty. Maybe someday, she’ll be grown up and sitting at the dinner table with her own kids and a husband who fell in love with her at first sight. Maybe she’s a late bloomer, too.

“Listen up, ladies,” Sister Thomas Katherine calls from the front of the room, brushing chalk dust from her black habit. “Before we each write down the name of the girl we’d like to represent the class at Spring Fling, we’re going to go over some of these points I’ve written on the board. This is
not
a beauty contest or a popularity contest.”

Sure it is, Carley thinks. It’s a beauty contest
and
a popularity contest, because (a) those two things go hand in hand, and (b) who wants an ugly nobody as Spring Fling princess?

For weeks now, her fellow freshmen have been talking about the obvious choice: Melissa Kovacs, the prettiest girl in the class.

Also the meanest.

Carley figured that out on the first day of school, when she heard Melissa mocking an elderly cafeteria lady’s speech impediment within earshot of the poor woman.

“Let’s go over the qualities we want to see in our princess,” Sister Thomas Katherine is saying.

Chin in hand, Carley scans the list on the board:
good citizenship, solid morals, impeccable manners, intelligence, a charitable heart . . .

Melissa Kovacs possesses none of the above. She might win, but it won’t be a unanimous vote, Carley decides, as Sister Thomas Katherine walks up and down the aisle, handing out ballots.

T
he sky beyond the windowpane is dismal as ever this morning, pulsing blue-black clouds pushed by a gusting west wind that tosses icy pellets against the glass like slingshot gravel. But nothing, not even western New York weather, can put a damper on this glorious day.

Yet another phase of the plan has been set into motion. At last, it’s all coming together.

Nineteen months.

It’s been nineteen months since the black marble notebook, with its papery brown shards of pressed flower petals, surfaced in the old house on Lilac Street.

Nineteen months since the terrible truth was revealed.

Nineteen months since Sandra Lutz became the first to pay for the sins of the past—though not her own sins. No, she merely got in the way. Said too much, knew too much . . .

But the others—the original trio of sinners—are about to discover what it means to truly suffer.

The bell rings, signifying the end of homeroom period. In exactly four minutes, another bell will announce the start of first period. A minute after that, a distant whistle will blow, bells will clang, and a freight train will burst onto the grade-level track a few blocks from the school, rattling along its route to Cleveland and on to Detroit, maybe, or Chicago. Ten, fifteen minutes later, a brown UPS truck will pull into the big parking lot alongside the yellow brick building and the driver will climb out with the day’s packages. In the big industrial kitchen adjacent to the cafeteria, plain-faced women in hairnets chop tomatoes and shred lettuce. Monday is always taco day.

You get to know the rhythm of a place after a while. Week after week, month after month, the same routine, marred only by winter storms that warrant school closings or the occasional fire drill, though not in a while, and not today for sure. No one wants to stand around the parking lot, coatless, on a morning like this.

Today will be unremarkable, with one exception.

But I’m the only one who knows about that.

With a scraping of chairs and excited female chatter, the girls of Sacred Sisters leave their homerooms to fill the drably tiled hallways of the old school, oblivious to the tragedy that started to unfold here almost three decades ago this very day—or to their own unwitting roles in the new one about to begin.