The Better Sister Read online

  I remembered Ethan coming into the living room and showing us the Post article about his bringing a gun to Casden. “A gun?” Nicky had said. “You never told me about this.”

  Her comment seemed strange at the time. I never told her anything about Ethan, because we hardly ever spoke. But the comment hadn’t been directed at me. It was for Ethan. Whatever information he was sharing with her, he hadn’t told her everything.

  “He talked to you about us?” I asked, sitting next to her on the bed.

  “Not initially. Honestly, I don’t think he knew at first what to say to me, but I could tell he wanted a connection. So I’d just talk about my life instead. The jewelry I make. The tomatoes I was trying to grow, even though it was obvious I was never going to make it work. I told him funny memories of you growing up. Old Tessa next door became a bit of a character in the stories—the way I’d always find her going through neighborhood trash, searching for hidden treasure.” My parents’ neighbor Tessa had been the local crazy old lady even when I was little. She had probably only been my age at the time. “Over time, he opened up. It was clear he was having problems with Adam.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me.”

  “And I didn’t understand why you weren’t telling me. We’re obviously in a different place now. I figured Ethan was almost an adult and could start making his own choices about what role I’d play in his life. He slowly started sharing more about what was going on—Adam struggling for power, trying to control everyone and everything. It brought back all those old memories. He said ever since Adam found out about the pot, he’d been spot-checking Ethan’s room. Treating him like a criminal. I believe him about not selling, by the way, but he was smoking—a lot. Too much. It sounded so much like me before I got sober. He swore he wasn’t addicted, but said it made him feel better. And then Adam would try to tell Ethan that he’d done all these bad things when he was high.”

  “What do you mean, ‘bad things’?”

  “So I guess if he smokes too much, he crashes. Like a sleep you can’t wake up from.” I thought of all the times Ethan had come up and fallen into a coma on the sofa. I didn’t even realize he was high. “Adam would go yell at him and try to wake him up, and Ethan would be out cold. And then Adam would tell him later that Ethan had screamed at him for coming into his room. And then he told him that he had nearly hurt Panda, throwing him off his bed.”

  “Adam never told me any of this.”

  “Exactly. It was always when you weren’t home, apparently. After the thing with Panda, Ethan started wondering if Adam was just making it all up.”

  “But why?”

  “To make him feel bad. To control him. That’s what abusers do, Chloe. They gaslight their victims. Adam was telling Ethan that he was starting to go crazy like his mother—just like in that video. And that was why Ethan had the webcam set up in his room—he wanted to know if those things were true. He didn’t think so, but he didn’t understand why Adam would lie to him.”

  “And what were you doing in response to all this?”

  “Just listening to him. He needed someone to talk to.”

  I started to say that he should have come to me, but obviously he didn’t think he could. If I couldn’t stand up for myself, how was I going to protect him?

  “Did he tell you what Adam was doing to me?” I still couldn’t bring myself to say the words. I would never think of myself that way.

  “Yes. And it was killing me to know that he was hurting you. I thought so many times about calling you, but I didn’t want to betray Ethan’s trust. And I was scared it would backfire on me if you guys knew I was talking to him. And then one day—sometime in April, I think—he suddenly throws it out there that Adam could have lied about what happened at the pool when Ethan was little. I mean, I don’t remember anything from that night. I just assumed Adam was telling the truth. I was horrified. I was certain there was no way I was actually trying to hurt Ethan, but I took the basic facts as a given. But the reality is: Adam could have just pushed me into the water and dragged me back out. I never would have known.”

  I finally pulled the documents from the mailing envelope on my lap. “The blood tests at the hospital put you at a point-one-eight BAC, mixed with flu-ox-e-tine—” I sounded out the syllables.

  “Prozac,” she said. “It does a body good, but not with all the booze in the house.”

  “Plus zolpidem.”

  “Ambien.”

  “That much, Adam told me. But the records also show that you had contusions on your arms. Adam said it must have happened when he was pulling you from the water. When you came to, he said you started resisting him, trying to go back in.” Adam was one of the most admired young prosecutors at the county DA’s office. No one would have questioned his version of events. He was the heroic dad who had saved his baby from a disturbed wife.

  “Maybe. Like I said, I don’t remember anything. Or maybe it happened because he threw me in while I was passed out. Honestly, I want to believe that’s what occurred, but I can’t know for sure. But Ethan was really starting to question whether Adam lied about what went down that night. He accused him during an argument, and that’s when Adam started talking about sending him to military school.”

  “Except I think maybe there is a way to know, Nicky.” I handed her a page of the police report from the night Adam rescued Ethan from the swimming pool. I had already highlighted the paragraph I wanted her to read.

  Macintosh says wife appeared to be unconscious. As he tried to pull her out of the water, she began to resist him. She kept saying “I’ll be an angel over Wallace Lake.” Per Macintosh, it’s a memory from wife’s childhood. He explained it’s a reference to family version of the prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” He took it to be an expression of his wife’s desire to end her life.

  “You never saw this before?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. I never told him about that. And that’s not even the right line. It was ‘I’ll wait for you at Shadow Lake.’ We were talking about that right when the trial started, remember?”

  And then she made the connection. She remembered the actual phrase, but I hadn’t. I had changed it in my head over the years. And during one of those phone calls Adam made to tell me how worried he was about Nicky, I had told him what a good big sister she used to be to me when I was little. I told him how I used to get scared when saying my prayers, and she made up a version about us being angels together. And then I told him my altered version, including the name of the wrong lake.

  “He was lying, Nicky. You weren’t trying to kill yourself.”

  “Which means I wasn’t trying to hurt Ethan.”

  “You didn’t hurt Ethan. He couldn’t even talk then. He was breathing perfectly fine by the time paramedics arrived. Adam made the whole thing up—so he could leave you and take Ethan.”

  “When did you get these?” she asked.

  “Yesterday. Ethan ordered them back in April. It must have taken this long for the clerk to get around to the archive search.”

  She reached over and took the rest of the documents from me and began flipping through them.

  “Is that why you killed Adam?” I finally asked. “Because he stole Ethan? You wanted custody again?”

  She shook her head. I’d spent my whole life thinking she was a liar, and this time, I really wanted to believe her denial.

  But she wasn’t denying it, at least not the part about killing Adam. “It was because Adam was starting to hurt you, and I could see how it was destroying Ethan. He was breaking that sweet little boy. Sending him away? Throwing him out like that? Take a look at the newspapers, filled with headlines about monstrous men who were once boys unloved by their fathers.”

  Just as I had asked: What if we had been boys?

  “It’s not what I wanted, Chloe, but Ethan called me Thursday night—it was after you won that First Amendment prize. He said he spent the whol
e time scared shitless that Adam wouldn’t show up and that it was going to set him off if you got upset about it. I guess it all worked out that night, but I could tell Ethan felt like he was living in a tinderbox. He said you were heading to East Hampton for the weekend, and he was going to spend the night with his friend so he wouldn’t have to deal with Adam. So I jumped in the car first thing the next morning and was, like, fuck it, I’m going to call Adam out on this myself if I have to. Then I got to your house and had no idea what to do next. I actually saw you leave for your party. You looked so pretty.”

  I let her keep talking. There was nothing for me to say.

  “Then I just waited, and Adam came home. I finally got up the nerve to knock on the door. He let me in.” That had to have been when the alarm was turned off. “I told him Ethan saw through him better than I ever could, and that I wasn’t going to let him do to him what he’d done to me. I wasn’t going to let him break our son. And then that dark side came out, and I felt so powerless again. I have worked so hard to improve myself. To be a different person. And in a matter of minutes, it was all gone. I felt small. Meek. And then, I wasn’t.”

  “Were you defending yourself? Did he try to hurt you?”

  She shook her head. “I could say that, but it wouldn’t be true. I remember his face when he realized what I had done. He was so shocked. And he looked at me, like, Oh, you are going to regret this. But then I pulled the knife out and did it again.” I knew she had stabbed him a total of five times. “I’m so sorry, Chloe. I know you loved him.”

  “Your cell phone. You knew to leave it in Cleveland. And the knife. We weren’t missing one.”

  “I still carry Dad’s old Buck knife everywhere I go—or at least I did until that night.” He had loved that thing. I had tried buying him fancier ones over the years, but he remained loyal to that twenty-five-dollar blade. “And I left my phone at home because I was terrified that he was going to haul me into court for showing up at the house unannounced. I figured I’d just lie and deny, deny, deny, and then produce my phone records showing I was getting a signal in good ol’ Cleveland all weekend.”

  She had been planning to gaslight the gaslighter, but had ended up killing him instead.

  “You’re going to turn me in, aren’t you? At this point, I don’t even care what happens to me anymore. I wanted Ethan to be okay, and I know he’s going to be all right with you—now that Adam is gone.”

  I wasn’t going to turn her in. It would destroy my son—our son.

  “Do you still have the knife?”

  She said she had it hidden at the house in Cleveland.

  “Well, I think it’s about time you moved some more of your things to New York.”

  40

  Bill welcomed me at his front door with one of those big, warm bear hugs I used to savor. His bright blue eyes twinkled as he stepped back and flashed a contented smile. “I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to see you again, Miss Chloe.”

  We had exchanged a few phone calls, but I hadn’t seen him in person since the week before Ethan’s trial had started. Now it was the day after Christmas, and he was spending the week at his house in Amagansett. It was only fifteen minutes away from our place in East Hampton.

  I handed him a gift box from Thomas Pink, tied with a black silk ribbon. “Spoiler alert. I meant to wrap it in proper paper, but I’m afraid all my usual standards have gone out the window this year.”

  “Well, that’s a very polite way of saving an eighty-one-year-old man from embarrassing himself in a battle with wrapping paper.” He led the way to his living room, where a fire was roaring. “I’m having a hot toddy. I think you need one, too.”

  He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a glass mug, complete with a cinnamon stick, to match the one waiting on the coffee table, and a bright blue gift box tied with a white ribbon. “Merry Christmas, my dear. We do know each other’s favorite stores.”

  A navy cashmere scarf for him. A lead crystal and sterling silver martini shaker for me. “Oh, I will be putting this to excellent use,” I said.

  “If I’d gone through the year you’ve had, I’d be drunk until the next presidential election.”

  I exchanged the empty shaker for my current toddy and took a sip of the warm, honey-touched whiskey. “I’m not the only one who’s had a few surprises thrown my way,” I said, arching a brow in his direction. “I had no idea that Adam was talking to the FBI. You know that, don’t you?”

  He waved away my apology. “If he had just come to me, I could have explained he had nothing to be concerned about. Adam was new to M&A, and probably jumped in too fast. He was used to being on the other side of the aisle and didn’t understand how deals get done, let alone the big international ones.”

  “But the FBI is investigating Gentry. And the agent who testified at Ethan’s trial made it sound like they were looking at your firm, too.”

  “The feds are always trying to drag lawyers into their clients’ scandals. It’s a scare tactic—to keep us from doing our jobs. The long and the short of it is, they don’t believe in the Sixth Amendment.”

  “But why would Adam have been trying to work out a cooperation agreement if there was nothing to worry about?”

  “That husband of yours—with all due respect—was always a bit too sanctimonious for the private sector. He thought he was above the work, but your loyalty is always to the client. End of story. You know what I mean by that, certainly.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not a lawyer.”

  “No, but you just survived a monthlong trial where the government was accusing Ethan of murder. And I saw how you went to bat for him. You never believed Jake was a killer, did you?”

  He was staring at me with those charming blue eyes so intensely. I looked away. “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice softening. “That must have been hard for you. My point is that you did what you needed to do to help Ethan. I will never breathe a word of this to anyone else, mind you, but I don’t believe for one moment that you told Jake that Adam had raised his hands to you. If you had, the police would have found Adam very much alive, but with two black eyes and a broken nose he’d have to explain. You said what you had to say to protect your son.”

  I took another sip of my drink.

  “I know, I know,” he said, waving his free hand. “Don’t say anything, one way or another. I’m just an old man running my trap. But I do want to say one more thing: even Jake understands the situation you were in. He loves you, you know.”

  I looked down. This was going to be even harder than I had thought. “That’s not possible,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  “I can see it. He’s different now. The light I saw in him—I realize now it was because of what he had with you. And it’s gone now. He misses you. You should call him, down the road, when the time is right.”

  I reminded myself he was only pretending to care about Jake’s happiness. Just like I had allowed a jury to wonder if Jake was a killer, Bill had allowed Olivia and the press to suggest that Jake was the one responsible for the wrongdoing at the Gentry Group. I knew otherwise.

  “That might be a little awkward if Jake ends up getting arrested for whatever Adam was reporting to the government. I don’t need a white-collar criminal in my life right now.”

  Bill smiled, and his gaze drifted into the distance.

  “I’m not kidding, Bill. Ethan’s defense lawyer said the FBI made it sound like arrests were imminent and that they’re definitely targeting your firm. What if it’s not just Jake? What if they come after you, too?”

  “I have absolutely no plans to go to prison.”

  “Of course not. I’m just saying, you should be prepared. Maybe you should go ahead and get your own lawyer, in case it happens.”

  “I’m eighty-one years old, my dear. Any kind of federal sentence would be a death sentence. Hypothetically, if I thought that was going to happen, it would be lights out. I’ve had a good run.” This clearly
wasn’t the first time he had pondered the question, and his answer did not sound hypothetical. “Now, enough with all this paranoid talk about court cases and overzealous FBI agents. Tell me everything you’re doing now that Ethan’s back home.”

  For nearly an hour we talked about Nicky and Ethan and the draft of my memoir and even a call from a film agent who was interested in our story. It almost felt like old times with my favorite octogenarian boyfriend.

  After our second round of toddies, he headed to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine, but I held up a hand to stop him. “If I go down that road, I won’t be able to drive home. But thank you so much for having me over. You’ve been so wonderful through all of this. I won’t forget it.”

  I stood to leave, tucking my fancy martini shaker into my handbag. As he walked to the front closet for my coat, I patted his arm. “You know, I think I need the little girl’s room before I hit the road. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not. You know your way around.”

  I opted for the en suite bathroom in the guest room. It seemed like a natural enough choice. I had stayed in this room for two nights a couple of years before, when we lost power over New Year’s at our place.

  As I ran the water to wash my hands, I pulled the latex glove from my purse and snapped it on. I slid the middle gray wicker bin from the lower shelf of the vanity, the one filled with fresh hand towels. I unwrapped a white, waffle-textured dishcloth from around my father’s Buck knife. I tried not to look at the brick-brown stains at the base of the blade. I placed it at the bottom of the bin and restacked the guest towels on top of it.

  I pulled off the glove, stuffed it in my bag, and gave my hands a quick rinse.

  When I returned to the foyer, Bill was waiting with my coat, wearing his new cashmere scarf. “What do you think?” he said, tossing one end across his shoulder.

  “You’ve still got it, my friend,” I said, stepping into my coat. “That’s what the girls at work call a smoke show.”