The Sister Read online

  Also by R.J. Ellory

  Ghostheart

  A Quiet Vendetta

  City of Lies

  A Quiet Belief in Angels

  A Simple Act of Violence

  The Anniversary Man

  Saints of New York

  Bad Signs

  Copyright

  This electronic edition first published in the United States in 2013 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the address above.

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Orion Books

  Copyright © 2012 R.J. Ellory Publications Limited

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-0651-4

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by R.J. Ellory

  Chapter 1

  About the Author

  In the real world—though what defines real these days, I am not so sure—a minute is no time at all.

  I am seated in a dark room ahead of a wide window. There are curtains on the other side, and they are drawn tight. It is like a movie theater, a small one, but still a movie theater. The seats are banked so the folks in front don’t block the view of the folks behind. They want to make sure that a good view is had by all, I guess. It’s pretty dark, but I think the walls are papered in some kind of dark maroon color. And there’s a smell. Hard to identify. The smell of men, but not unpleasant, like shaving soap and cologne and starched shirts. I guess they don’t see many girls in here. I wonder whether I am the first.

  To my right is a man I have never met before. His name is Patrick and he wears bay rum. He has a kind voice, and my right hand rests upon his left forearm, and he has told me that if I become too scared, too horrified by what is about to happen, then I should say nothing at all, that I should just squeeze his arm and he will take me out of the room to safety.

  So there it is.

  One minute.

  Sixty seconds.

  I can peel an apple in one minute, or pet a cat, or tie shoes, perhaps catch the attention of a barkeep and order a Manhattan.

  In the real world.

  But in your own world, your own internal world, a minute holds some infinite capacity for all things. Memories of events that unfolded throughout a year can be re-experienced in five seconds, perhaps less. Like a dream. A dream of a decade is lived in a heartbeat.

  So there it is.

  A minute begins now, and within that minute I will hear whether someone will live, or someone will die, and if they are going to die, I will see it play out in front of me like a picture show.

  Unless I squeeze Patrick’s arm.

  Which I won’t, of course.

  Because I want to see someone die, you see?

  I want to see them die so much it hurts.

  And whether or not that someone will die in the next minute has something to do with Mr. Kennedy, for Mr. Kennedy might be our new President, and Mr. Kennedy has a more liberal attitude toward things. He says that rehabilitation is the solution, not the death penalty. Our Governor follows Mr. Kennedy’s politics, and he might wish to demonstrate his support for this idea by commuting death sentences to life-terms, and oh God, how I hope he doesn’t . . .

  I look at the clock, up there above the window and a little to the left. It is the size of a dinner plate, and it has a black surround and a cream-colored face, and the hour and minute hands are black also, but the second hand is red, and even though it is silent, it still seems like I can hear each second ticking by. It is a precise sound—tick—tick—tick—and, as I concentrate on it, it seems to grow ever louder.

  The minute hand comes up past 11, and we are there.

  Sixty seconds.

  I remember something then, something I heard, or perhaps I read it in a magazine. It was about bad things. When something bad happens you have three choices: let it define you, let it destroy you, let it strengthen you.

  Not true.

  When something bad happens, something really bad, you are invariably defined, most definitely destroyed, but rarely ever strengthened.

  So here I am, and I am not strong, not strong at all. I am weak. Weak in my mind, my heart, my knees, my hands.

  I have also heard that it takes a full turn of the calendar—every birthday, every memorable day, every public holiday, Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas—to get over losing someone special.

  Once again, not true.

  I could tell you now about the crying jags, the burden of conscience, the sheer weight of human guilt; the certainty that had I said one thing, had I done one thing differently, then she might not have been where she was, that she might not have met him, that she would still be alive today; that somehow, some way, it was my fault, my fault alone, and that I should have been the one to die in her place, because if it had been me then she would be alive, and if she was alive then I would not feel this way. I could detail the late nights and early mornings, the sense of confusion and sheer hopelessness. I could tell you about the first year, the second, the third, how each of them was haunted throughout by their own ghost of this terrible thing, and how each ghost was different—neither better nor worse than the last—but still burdensome and exhausting.

  I could tell you of all these things, but I will not, not today, because today is set aside for something else.

  Fifty-eight seconds.

  I can remember this morning so clearly. I can even see myself standing in the hallway, looking into the mirror above the umbrella stand. Twice now I have applied lipstick, and twice it has smudged. My mascara has run, and I have wiped it away and started again. However, I will persist, because I believe I should put on a brave face.

  I am Carole’s only living relative, her sister, and soon I will be on my way to see her killer executed.

  My name is Maryanne Shaw, I am thirty-six years old, and there is no context within which to place my feelings.

  I will be ready soon—my coat, my gloves, my hat, my scarf. I will take the bus from the corner of Washington and Everhardt. I will ride the eight blocks to the end of Wintergreen, and there I will alight. I will walk half a block to the County Jail, I will give them my name, show them my driver’s license, and they will allow me to enter the closed observation room. There I will sit and wait patiently amongst the journalists and the police.

  Just as I have waited these past four and a half years.

  Four years, five months, fifteen days and twenty-two hours. More or less.

  Right from the moment I was told she’d died, just after noon on Tuesday the 22nd of May, 1956, to the moment her killer will breathe his last breath.

  I don’t want to see him die, but I have to. He needs to die for what he did, and I need to see it happen.

  Fifty-five.

  Even now, after all this time, I can remember the name and the face of the police officer that came to the door. He was handsome, a little older than me for sure, but handsome in a predictable and strangely comforting way. Perhaps he appeared this way to everyone, and thus he was always assigned this bleak and desperate task. He had his hat in his hand and so I knew it was bad. He had d
ark hair and an awkwardness about him. He was tall, perhaps three or four inches over six feet, and once he’d told me the news, once he’d come inside and sat in the kitchen and told me that my sister was dead, I stopped listening to his voice altogether. I just watched him. I watched the way he nervously fingered the brim of his hat, and I saw him as a child, his body language a collection of confusing signs, as if physical movement was something new to him and he was still furiously working to get a grip of what was going on. Forever agitated, all elbows and knees and mumbled apologies. I concluded that there was little he could not break or spill or damage. I imagined an abundance of glue in his house, his father—patient as a fisherman—forever following in his wake with a sharp eye and a steady hand for delicate repair work.

  And so, as soon as the news was delivered—Your sister was murdered last night . . . somewhere around nine o’clock . . . I am sorry, but it has taken us this long to find you—he went on his way. I was alone then. The house seemed as empty as a fairground balloon.

  Some seek solace in noise and commotion, others in solitude. Some have no choice, and thus find no comfort at all. Comfort is not found in routine, for routine is nothing but a reminder. Nor is comfort found in the new and unfamiliar, for already you are dealing with an abundance of the new and unfamiliar, albeit internal, emotional.

  I am usually alone. I have few friends. Acquaintances yes, but not friends. I have not been in Chicago long, and Chicago is still a stranger to me. I come from a small city called Belvidere in Boone County, Illinois, just eighty miles from the city street where my sister was killed.

  And now—right now—if I climbed to the top of my apartment building and looked west I would be able to see where her body was taken, where the autopsy was performed, where the documents were signed. Eastward just a block or two is the police precinct where her killer was interrogated, charged, confined, and from where he was dispatched to the Cook County Jail. It was there that he discussed his case with the assigned Public Defender, where he refused to allow his PD to file a plea with the District Attorney for manslaughter, and then again for second-degree murder, because he was honest enough to see what he had done, and he wished to accept the full consequences of his actions.

  This is what I was told by the prosecuting attorney. This is not what Carole’s killer said while he looked at me in court. He said nothing to me directly, not a single, solitary word. He simply stared at me, not as if I wasn’t there, but as if he wasn’t there.

  Three and a half months before the trial even began, I had traveled with Carole’s body back to Belvidere. That’s where she’d been born, and that’s where I wanted her buried. That’s what Carole would have wanted. It was a brief service, presided over by a man who knew neither Carole nor I, but he was mannered and respectful, and he had the face of someone who cared. Our parents had been dead some time already, and had they not been, then Carole’s death would have been sufficient a shock to kill them too. Thus, in that small church, there was only myself, the priest, the organist, and a handful of those who remembered us from before we left. And there was Carole, of course. A garland of lilies came from Carole’s place of employment in Chicago, but none of her colleagues made the trip. Ironic, but Belvidere was first settled in 1835 by a man called Mr. Whitney. The settlement was divided by the Kishwaukee River, and he called it Elysian Fields. That name came from the old Greek myth of Elysium, the place of burial for the righteous and the heroic, a place where they would remain after death and would enjoy a blessed and happy existence, engaged in whatever employment they had undertaken in life. Carole was a schoolteacher in Belvidere, and then she was a schoolteacher in Chicago. She taught kindergarten. I liked to think of her there in Elysium, teaching times-tables to all the little ones who’d lost their lives to mishaps and calamities. The righteous and heroic. The few and the fallen. The lost but never forgotten.

  I glance at the clock above the window. Fifty-two seconds.

  And so, my younger sister is dead, all of twenty-nine years old, and while the newspaper headlines ask who will be the new president, the handsome but perhaps inexperienced Mr. Kennedy, or the older but less charismatic Mr. Nixon, my sister’s name can be found nowhere, except on a small white marble headstone in the Forest Lawns Cemetery in Belvidere, Illinois. That headstone cost me a month’s salary, and all I could afford was her name, her dates of birth and death, and a three-word epitaph: In God’s care. I wanted to say so much more, but it was $2.50 a letter.

  Carole died on a Monday evening between 8:30 and 10. She was strangled because she did not want to have sex with a man she had known for less than a day. He was drunk and mad, and he put his hands around her throat, and he choked her until she stopped breathing, and then he sat with her body for an hour, and then he went to his own apartment and drank half a bottle of cheap whiskey, and then he took a late Greyhound to Milwaukee. When he arrived in Milwaukee he ate two hot dogs from a roadside stand, and then he walked the city for an hour, and then he tried to sleep on a bench in the bus station but the cleaning crew threw him out because they thought he was a bum. Four hours later he took a bus back to Chicago. He arrived at around 6:45 in the morning. He wandered the streets for a while, went back to his apartment to sleep, then he shaved and changed his clothes, and then he turned himself in to the desk sergeant at the 14th Precinct at 9:40 pm on Tuesday the 22nd of May, 1956.

  A stranger knew my sister was dead fifteen hours before I did.

  I should have known. I should have perceived something. I often wondered, had we been twins, whether I would have sensed her departure, whether a little of me would have died too.

  Forty-nine seconds.

  Carole was murdered in the Chicago 9th Precinct’s jurisdiction, but the detective investigating her case did not know that her killer had turned himself in at the 14th on Wednesday the 23rd. That detective went on looking for Carole’s killer for half a day after the killer had confessed. Once the detective knew, he transferred Carole’s killer back to the 9th, and there, in the presence of a court-assigned Public Defender, a full statement was transcribed and signed. The killer was charged with Carole’s murder that same evening.

  I would not know these things unless I had sat through the trial. And I did sit through it. The trial ran from Monday the 24th of September until Friday the 26th of October, 1956. After closing statements from both prosecution and defense, the jury was permitted leave for the weekend. They began their deliberations on the morning of Monday the 28th. They returned with a verdict just before lunch on Tuesday. Why it took them more than a day to find him guilty I do not know. Maybe because the psychiatric evaluation threw them a curveball out of left field and they had the sun in their eyes. Maybe because Carole’s killer pled ‘No contest’ to the charge, and his public defender seemed intent on convincing the court that he was actually deranged, incapable of any real responsibility for his actions, a man who acted without thought for consequence in the heat of the moment, angered by rejection, fueled up on cheap liquor. Maybe because the defendant seemed like he was elsewhere during the entire trial. Even when he was questioned he seemed distracted, looking at me constantly, fingering the cuffs of his jacket as if removing shreds of lint only he could see.

  I remember when he stood, the way his cuffed hands were out in front of him, the way he gripped the rail. Those were the hands that killed Carole. That’s what I thought. He had long fingers like a piano player, a painter perhaps, and they seemed too delicate and white to be capable of choking someone to death. But choke her he did. He said he had his hands around her neck for more than three minutes. He said he wanted to make sure.

  “Make sure of what?” the prosecutor asked.

  “That she was dead.”

  “So you wanted to make sure she was dead?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “So, if you wanted to make sure she was dead, then surely you were aware that you intended to kill her?”

  The defense counsel leapt to his feet. “Objection. L
eading the witness.”

  The judge looked down at the defendant, at the PD, at the prosecutor, and said, “I’ll allow it,’ ” at which point the prosecutor smiled like he had played his hand and taken the full pot.

  “I’ll repeat the question,” the prosecutor said. “So you were aware enough of what you were doing to understand that you were killing her?”

  “Objection!” the PD shouted, and once again he was on his feet. “Prosecution has changed the question, your Honor.”

  The judge, a squat man with a red face and hands like bunches of strange fruit, nodded sagely, and said, “Prosecution take note. Please ask the original question, not some variation thereof.”

  The prosecuting attorney believed he was smiling to himself alone, but I saw that crooked expression. He knew he’d still won the pot, whichever way it played out. He knew that the jury had heard the question, and regardless of the number of times the judge might say, “Jury will disregard the last statement . . .” he knew that they could not possibly disregard what they already heard with their own ears. Only if they had some memory-wiping device could they disregard such things, and if there was ever such a thing I would be first in line. I would have these terrible thoughts of Carole’s last moments deleted forever.

  The prosecutor repeated the question—“So, if you wanted to make sure she was dead, then surely you were aware that you intended to kill her?”—which surprised me, because I had forgotten the original question by then, and my sister’s killer looked at the attorney, then at the judge, and then at me, and he said, “I don’t know what I intended to do.”

  “But you said that you held your hands around the victim’s neck for three minutes.”

  “About three minutes, yes.”

  “And you did this to ensure that she was dead.”

  “I didn’t know if she was dead.”

  “I understand that, but you intended to kill her, correct?”

  “Objection,” the PD said again. “Defendant has pled no contest to the charge, and we are arguing a case of diminished responsibility and mitigating circumstances, and thus the prosecution cannot challenge the defendant as to his mental state when his mental state has not been the subject of a ruling.”