Sibs F Paul Wilson Read online

  "She was a nurse, for God's sake!" Kara said. "She worked at St. Vincent's! Whenever she'd visit the farm she'd tell me horror stories about all the drug addicts and the VD and AIDS. She saw all that stuff first hand! I can't believe she'd become a… a swinger!" The very word left such a foul taste in her mouth that she wanted to spit. "Tell me there's a chance you're wrong, Rob."

  His expression was pained.

  "I wish I could, Kara, I really do. But there's too much corroboration. The Plaza people knew her. According to them, she was fast becoming a legend in the Oak Bar."

  "A legend," she said acidly. "My sister the legend. That's just great."

  Gradually, her shock and disbelief ebbed away, and Kara became aware of a growing anger at her twin. Kelly hadn't been a completely innocent victim of one of New York's myriad acts of violence. She had been an enabler. She had put herself in a situation that simply begged for trouble.

  Kara was furious. It was this city, this rotten lousy city that had done it to Kelly. She hadn't come here a swinger and a coke head, but she'd ended up one.

  This damn city… Kara had to get out of it all over again. And right now. If she had to spend much longer here, she'd start to scream.

  She glanced at her watch.

  "I've got to be going. Thanks for the coffee and for your help and your time."

  "No trouble. Where's your car?"

  "I took the train. I didn't trust myself to drive."

  "Good thinking. But even so, maybe you should stay over a night."

  She gave him a sidelong stare. Was he thinking…?

  "I don't mean anything like that," he said. "I just mean you don't look so hot. You're welcome to my place."

  "You still rooming with Tony?"

  "No. He's married. The rent got too high so I'm over on the East Side now. But seriously, I'll sleep on the couch. No problem."

  "Thanks, but I don't know when my mother's coming in and I left Jill with a neighbor so—"

  "Who's Jill?"

  Good God, why had she mentioned Jill? She'd never intended to. But somehow it had slipped out. Damn. Well, she couldn't take it back now. She had to tell him something.

  "My daughter."

  ▼

  Rob hoped he didn't look as shocked as he felt. "A daughter? You have a child?"

  Automatically, he reached for a cigarette, then remembered she'd asked him not to smoke. He really needed one now.

  "Yes. Jill Marie. A real little beauty."

  Kara's mood had lightened visibly with the change in subject. Her eyes were alight with love.

  Why should he be so stunned? He and Kara had had no contact in ten years. He had never married. Was that why some part of him assumed that Kara too had remained single?

  "Wait a sec. You signed in at the morgue as Kara Wade. That's your maiden name."

  "It's my married name, too."

  "You married a guy with the same last name?"

  "No, Rob," she said with exaggerated patience. "I simply kept my name when I got married. There's no law that says I've got to take my husband's name."

  "Oh." He remembered how Kara had been into women's lib. Apparently that hadn't changed. "How old's your little girl?"

  "Hmmm?" Kara seemed to come back from faraway. "Jill? Oh, she's eight."

  Eight?

  "You didn't waste much time, did you!" he blurted, then wanted to kick himself. "Sorry."

  "That's okay." Kara smiled. "No, I guess I didn't. He was an old high school beau who'd been carrying the torch for me all the time I was away."

  "Imagine that."

  Rob remembered carrying the torch for Kara a long while himself, hoping she'd come back, or at least call. Hoping…

  "It's true," she said. "We just sort of picked up where we left off."

  Rob tried but couldn't keep the edge off his voice. "He's not a cop, I take it."

  "No. He was a safe, sane, staid insurance salesman."

  "Was?"

  "He was killed a year after we were married. His car got caught between a granite cliff and a jack-knifing tractor trailer on a snowy night on the Penn Turnpike out near Pittsburgh."

  "Jeez, I'm sorry."

  She was looking at him, a hint of wonder seeping into her expression.

  "You really are, aren't you?"

  "Of course. I mean, that's awful. How could I be anything else?"

  Her mouth worked. For a moment he thought she was going to cry, but she blinked her glistening eyes, swallowed, and seemed to get herself under control again.

  She said, "That was a perfect opening for a cheap shot. And you owe me one of those."

  Rob understood. One of her reasons for leaving him had been her fear of being a young widow.

  "Maybe," he said, "but a dead husband and father should be off limits, don't you think?"

  Kara nodded, swallowed again, and looked out the window, saying nothing.

  In the silence, Rob's thoughts tripped back to the time they had spent together here in the city a decade ago. Had it been that long since he was a rookie and Kara was a Kelly Girl? After a two-year drift through CCNY, he'd finally settled on a field that really interested him. Despite all his mother's pleas to find something else, he'd decided to go into the family business—police work. And when the Wade twins came to town, he found a woman he could really care for—Kara.

  Kara and Kelly, identical in appearance, but so opposite in attitude. Kelly, the free spirit, open to everything, she took to Manhattan like she'd been made for it, as if all her life she'd been waiting to be set free in The City That Never Sleeps. Kara, the thinker, the muller, did fine until her run-in with the necklace snatcher in Central Park. After that she began to see danger lurking in every corner. She started calling Rob's police career a death wish. Their last months became an endless argument, one long tug of war with a fraying rope. She wanted him to quit, go back to school, get a degree of some sort, and move out to the suburbs—Jersey, Connecticut, Upstate, anyplace but here.

  He couldn't go. Rob the rookie loved the job, the excitement, the challenge, and loved the city. It was his city. He'd grown up here. He couldn't see what was so frightening about it.

  Finally there was nowhere to go but apart. The immovable object stayed in New York. The irresistible force moved back to rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, saying she didn't want to be a widow at twenty-five.

  Somewhere a dark god might be laughing at the irony of it all, but Rob found himself unable to squeeze out even a tiny drop of satisfaction.

  Even now, after all these years, he found he still cared.

  What a jerk he could be where she was concerned.

  "I'll drive you to the station," he said.

  ▼

  Rob drove her crosstown at a leisurely pace on Thirty-fourth, staying in lane instead of doing his customary bob and weave through the traffic. All around him on the street the cabs were playing their usual game of chicken with each other, while on the sidewalks the three-card monte players were set up and waiting for their daily quota of lunch-hour suckers. Rob badly wanted a cigarette.

  "What are you doing with yourself these days?" he said to break the silence as they crawled past Macy's.

  "Writing."

  "Really? Novels?"

  "Non-fiction. I do reviews, articles, criticism, that sort of thing."

  "Would I have seen any of it?"

  He couldn't remember seeing the Kara Wade byline anywhere.

  "Not unless you're a regular reader of some of the feminist publications."

  "Feminist? You write feminist stuff? I thought you said you wrote non-fiction?"

  "Ooookaaaay," she said with a small, rueful smile. "I should have seen that one coming."

  "So you're still into that stuff, though?"

  "It's not something you're 'into' and 'out of,' Rob" she said, and he realized by her tone this was one serious subject for her. "If you really believe in something, you stay with it."

  "Like being a cop?" he said.

/>   There was something different in the way she looked at him, something new in her eyes.

  "Yes. I guess so. I've never looked at being a cop as something a person could believe in, but I guess you can. But anyway, writing's what I do. I went to Franklin and Marshall when I got back home, went mostly at night, got a degree in Woman's Studies—"

  Rob bit back a remark. Woman's Studies! Christ!

  "—and began writing."

  "You can make a living writing feminist articles?"

  "No way. But the articles gave me enough credibility to land a contract for a book. And that's what I've been working on lately. In the meantime, I do clerical work at the local hospital—it's decent pay with an excellent benefits package, and it's mentally unchallenging enough to allow me to compose what I'll write when I get home at night. I still live on the farm. Jill and I get by just fine."

  He had a feeling she was holding something back but didn't press. This wasn't the time or the place.

  "And your mother…?"

  Rob remembered that Kara's father had died a few years before she came to New York; he had met Mrs. Wade once. A big, jovial woman who didn't look at all like her twins.

  "Mom got remarried shortly after Jill was born. She and Bert live in Florida now. I'm in the process of buying the farm from her. I'm paying her off a little at a time. Mom and Bert are flying up this afternoon for the…"

  She didn't finish the sentence. Suddenly her eyes were filling with tears. Rob didn't know what to do. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her, but at the moment he was driving a car. Penn Station was dead ahead. He swung around its south side, then turned into a restricted area under its belly. He pulled the car into the curb and turned toward her. He stroked her shoulder, wondering what to say.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not made for this kind of thing."

  "Who is? Nobody's made for losing a sister. A twin, no less."

  "I wish I could be stronger. I should be stronger."

  "You're pretty damn strong," Rob told her. "It took a lot of guts to come in here and go to the morgue alone to see her. A hell of a lot of guts."

  Suddenly her head was up and she was staring at him. Her face was blotchy, and streaked with tears, but her eyes were fierce, her teeth were clenched.

  "Find those bastards, Rob!"

  "I will, Kara." He had never seen her like this. "Take it easy, take it easy."

  "And when you find them, I want you to call me. Because I want to see them. I want to see what kind of scum did that to my sister!"

  "As soon as I know, you'll know. And we'll get them. Kelly's case won't get dropped. I've got a personal stake in this, too, you know. I promise we'll get them."

  "Okay," she said. "That's good enough for me. Can I have your number so I can call?"

  As he fished out a card for her, Rob didn't attempt to explain that finding the two men who'd been in the room with Kelly was a long way from convicting them of tossing her out the window, especially since the Forensics boys were saying there was no sign of a struggle. They were pushing to call it a suicide, and Kara would not want to hear that.

  He said, "If I can get away, I'd like to come to the funeral."

  "No! I mean, that might not be such a good idea. I'd feel better if I knew you were here working on her case."

  Rob had figured she'd say something like that. Kara seemed intent on keeping him at arm's length. So what else was new?

  "I'll walk you to the Amtrak platform."

  "That's okay. I can make it." She started to get out of the car, then stopped. "And thank you, Rob. When they unzipped the bag at the morgue, you turned away. I appreciate that."

  He was baffled.

  "Why?"

  "It gave me an inch more of privacy than I would have had otherwise. That was very considerate. I'm glad to see that you haven't become like everyone else in this city."

  And then she closed the door and walked away toward the station doors.

  Considerate, hell! he thought. He hadn't been able to look at Kelly again because she looked so much like Kara. And he hadn't been able to bring himself to watch Kara view her sister's battered corpse, couldn't watch her pain, her naked grief. So he'd turned away. That was all.

  He lit a cigarette and watched the station doors for a while after she had gone inside. Kara had changed. She'd always been a strong person, with lots of drive and intensity, but the intervening years seemed to have brought everything into sharp focus for her. There was fire in her voice, and a steely determination in her eyes. Although legally she'd been an adult when they'd had their affair, she'd still been a girl inside. She was a woman now, inside and out.

  And somehow he knew it would not be another ten years before he saw her again. He found himself looking forward to that.

  Punished me again.

  Still recovering from it. At least he didn't find the letters. Doesn't know about my scribblings. Be furious if he did. They tell too much about him, about our whole mad relationship. He'd punish me again, worse than ever.

  But I can't stop writing. Only this bit of pencil and these scraps of paper allow me to retain the most tenuous grip on the last remnant of my sanity. My only link to reality, whatever that means. My reality—one continuous nightmare interspersed with all too brief periods of wakefulness. Have to keep a record of these awake times, to reassure myself they exist. That I exist! They are worth any punishment.

  Oh, the punishment. He metes it out so casually these days. Simply for belittling him because he lost the blonde. Laughed at him because she escaped him. Resented my taunts, so the swine punished me.

  But no matter. I survived. And in that poor nurse's death I've found hope. Proves he's not omnipotent. Not quite the Ubermensch he believes himself to be—that I believed him to be.

  She escaped him.

  Perhaps there's still hope for me.

  February 7

  5:32 P.M.

  "YOU COMING DOWN SOON, MOM?"

  Kara turned at the sound of Jill's voice. In the dim twilight leaching through the bedroom window she saw her daughter standing uncertainly in the doorway. Jill was still dressed in the dark green plaid dress and white tights she had worn to the funeral. Her dark brown hair had somehow held onto the French braid Kara had worked it into this morning.

  "In a few minutes, Jill. I just want to sit here a while longer."

  Jill walked over to where Kara sat by the window and put a hand on her arm.

  "Are you okay, Mom?"

  Kara put an arm around Jill's thin little shoulders and hugged her close. Someday I'll be okay, she thought, but not yet. Not for a long time.

  "I'm fine," she told Jill. "Just sad."

  It was over. Finally. Kelly had been laid to rest in a tearful ceremony late this morning. Six nurses had come all the way from Manhattan to say good-bye. Kara had been touched by that. They had accompanied the family back to the house and were downstairs now with her mother, Bert, Aunt Ellen, and a few neighbors who remembered Kelly.

  Kara knew she should be downstairs playing hostess, but she couldn't manage that right now. She didn't want anybody else here in her house tonight. Except Jill. And maybe Mom.

  Kara wanted them all to go home now and leave her alone with her grief. She wanted to hold onto that grief, use it to keep Kelly alive, use it to retrieve the memories of the past they had shared so intimately.

  Go away! All of you!

  She'd heard it was good to share your grief; that was what wakes and funerals were for—not for the dead, but for the living. To Kara, it was morbid, all of it.

  "Aunt Kelly's with God, right?"

  For the hundredth time, Kara reassured her little girl that her Aunt was indeed up in heaven with God.

  "And she's happy, right?"

  So important to Jill that her Aunt was happy. It seemed to make Kelly's death easier for Jill to accept. But it didn't work for Kara.

  "Very happy. She's up in Heaven's ICU taking care of all those scorched souls they shi
p in from Purgatory every day. She's happy and very, very busy."

  On the last word, Kara felt her voice start to crack. She hugged Jill more tightly against her.

  If I start crying now, I'll never stop.

  She got control and pushed Jill to arm's length, glad she hadn't turned on the lights.

  "You go downstairs and play hostess with the mostess for a little while, then I'll come down and take over, okay?"

  Jill brightened. She loved to be put in charge.

  "Okay!"

  They hugged again. Kara could never get enough hugs from Jill, or give her enough. She loved her like life itself, and strove every day to give her child two parents' worth of affection.

  "Love you, bug," she said.

  Jill kissed Kara on the cheek and ran downstairs.

  Kara leaned back in her rocker and rocked, much as she had in this same chair, in this same room, when she'd been nursing Jill. That had given her such warm, pleasant feeling. Now she looked out at the bleak, frozen landscape and thought how well it matched her present mood.

  The farm. Her farm. Forty acres with a house and a barn. True, the barn was falling apart and there was no livestock. Kara had no desire to be a farmer, but she was growing something: Christmas trees. That was for tax purposes, mainly. An accountant had told her that her tax rate for the property would go down if a certain percentage of the acreage was planted. Scotch pines were a perfect solution. Once she'd planted the seedlings, they needed no care beside an occasional spraying which she did herself. And someday she'd be able to sell them as Christmas trees.

  She rocked and listened: Through the floor she could hear her mother moving about downstairs, clanking the pots, still so much at home in the kitchen that had been hers for thirty years but now belonged to Kara. Mom looked like she'd aged ten years since Christmas. She wasn't saying much; especially noticeable was the lack of bickering with her sister, Aunt Ellen. Hanging between Mom and Ellen no doubt was the memory that it had been Ellen who first had urged the twins to come to New York and live there as she did. Bert's voice floated up occasionally. Kara's usually jovial stepfather had been subdued this trip, muttering only an occasional phrase. He seemed to take Kelly's death as hard as a man who had lost his own flesh and blood. Kara loved him for that. And piping above it all was Jill's voice, high-pitched, incessant. Good old Jill. No such thing as a pregnant pause when she was around.