A cove of trees shielded the house from the road. As we turned the corner, we were met with a scene I couldn’t at first comprehend. Red flashing lights. An ambulance. A cop car. My mom sat on the steps of our front porch. She stared straight into the car’s headlights as if in a trance. Her arms hung loose at her sides. The front of her white nightgown was stained and clung to her. Blood? Was it blood? I blinked, sure I was seeing things.
“Cole, what is it? What’s happening?”
He leaned forward. “I don’t know.”
I turned to the ambulance. They were lifting a body covered in a sheet into the back. My dad, dressed in his cotton pajamas, was on his knees in the gravel. My gaze returned to the stretcher. A bit of blond hair hung over the side. “Beth.” I might have screamed, or it might not have come out at all.
Luke slammed on the brakes and turned off the car. He stumbled toward my mother, then seemed to think better of it and lumbered like a drunk man toward the ambulance.
Drew was out of the car and moving the bucket seat so that I could climb out. But no. I couldn’t move. Cole was out of the car by then. I hadn’t noticed him leaving my side. He reached in and lifted me out of the back seat. I clung to him, the two of us standing in the middle of the yard. Luke had run to the ambulance and tried to climb in, but the paramedics stopped him. He might have been screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything over the heartbeat that pounded between my ears.
My dad must have seen me then, because he got to his feet. Blood covered the front of his pajamas. Beth’s blood, I thought.
“Carlie. Carlie. It’s Beth. She’s gone.”
“How?”
“Someone stabbed her. They left her on the grass. In her own yard.” Dad spoke through his sobs. I’d never seen my father cry.
“No. We just saw her.” My lips and limbs went numb. Dots danced before my eyes. And that was it. Blackness.
I was told later that Cole caught me and carried me up to my bed. I have no recollection of that or anything else that happened over the next few days.
For thirty years I lived that way, not quite alive, part of me having died with my sister. It was only when we finally knew the answer to what happened on a night that smelled of summer that I returned to life.
1
Carlie
I found my sister’s journal hidden in the false bottom of a shelf. Beth had been dead for thirty years by then, the secrets to her past locked away in a bedroom frozen in time. I had no idea how the discovery of her secrets written down during the last months of her life would alter the rest of mine.
I’d come home to help my mother sell the home she’d lived in for almost fifty years. She’d accumulated too much junk, she’d said to me. “Come help me clean everything out and put the house up for sale.”
I’d decided in an instant to say yes. I couldn’t decide if she needed me or if she knew I needed her. I was adrift. My only child, Brooke, had just finished her second year of college. My cheating ex-husband was in the arms of his new wife. My university position as an English literature professor had become stale. More and more I dwelled in the past. Reliving all the moments of that summer of 1989 as if they would give me answers to the questions that haunted me. What had happened to my sister? Who was responsible for stabbing her seventeen times and leaving her on my parents’ lawn? I kept thinking, if I could just see the foreshadowing, the clues along the way that led to Beth’s murder, I would know the answer. But the clues and foreshadowing were not easily found as in the English novels I’d spent my career studying.
On the second day after my arrival, I waited until my mother left for her golf game before tackling the first of many purges to come. Beth’s room would be first. I wanted to get it over with. I had a cup of strong coffee while sitting in the shade of the oak in the backyard, followed by a bowl of corn flakes before traipsing upstairs. I wasn’t sure, but my mother might be the only person left in the world who still bought corn flakes. She used them for everything, including frying up the stinky fish we’d had last night for dinner.
I stood in the doorway of Beth’s room. Like my family, the room was stuck in the past. The same ruffled bedspread, rickety desk, and dresser that had witnessed my sister’s short life remained untouched. Like me, the vibrancy of the flower wallpaper had faded. Years and cheating husbands had a way of doing that to a surface.
The room smelled faintly of mildew and dried flowers. Any hint of my sister’s scent was long gone. She’d always carried the scent of baby powder and shampoo. I’d been jealous of her beautiful thick hair. Before bed sometimes she’d let me brush and braid it for her. I could still feel the silky strands in my fingers.
I went to the window and looked down to the yard. From this second-floor angle, my father’s once-impeccable lawn looked patchy and yellow. Roses still bloomed but were as unruly and gangly as awkward middle-school girls. I tugged on the window to let in some fresh air. Birds sang and chirped outside, with no idea of how heavy a human heart could be.
Memories of a thousand moments engulfed me as thick as the air before a thunderstorm. I sat on the empty bed, gathering myself. This was simply a chore
