The Sisters Page 3

  “Where’s my sister?”

  The rain started in small spatters, and the sheriff looked up for a moment, as if he might read the answer in the clouds. “Looks like she’s run off,” he said. He reached in his pocket and held out a bit of crumpled paper to Bertie. “There’s a couple of empty whiskey bottles up in the loft. Neighbors said Butcher was a drinker?” He looked at her for confirmation he obviously didn’t need. “Found this right near him,” he said, nodding toward the note. “I figure he had it in his hand when he swung off, and then dropped it when…”

  Bertie took the paper from the sheriff and smoothed it open on her knee. Just four words, not addressed to anybody. It was Mabel’s writing. Gone away with Wallace. An M for her name, the way she signed all her notes.

  TWO

  Departure

  June 1927

  Juniper, Kentucky

  MABEL

  “WAIT!” MABEL PULLED HARD ON Wallace’s hand.

  “We’ll miss the train!”

  Already the whistle for the approaching 4:18 had sounded, and from behind the line of juniper trees, Mabel could see a few people gathered in front of the station. By now, Bertie would be sitting in the church with her diploma in her lap, waiting for the principal to finish his address on the importance of discipline and initiative so she could shove through the crowd of other people’s relatives to look for Mabel and Wallace. What would be the expression on Bertie’s face as it dawned on her she’d been left alone? Confusion or fear? Betrayal? Despair? Mabel pushed the image away. She couldn’t look at it. She wouldn’t.

  “Mabel, we have to go now,” Wallace said. “Now—or we have to go back.” His chambray shirt stuck in dark damp patches to his chest, and his hair, soaked with sweat from their run, was the color of soiled straw. A few hayseeds clung to his neck, the reason she had stopped him. Mabel picked them off and held them out for him to see before shaking them from her fingers. Without a word, she took his hand again and they turned toward the station.

  Mabel kept her eyes down while Wallace paid for the tickets, but still she could feel the stares from people already on the train and from the four or five others standing around, all of them, she supposed, wondering about this rumpled and dirty pair without any luggage between them. She wanted to look up, to see if anyone they knew might be watching them, but she didn’t dare. And then Wallace’s arm was around her shoulders, and he was guiding her into the car, past the cluster of passengers at the front, settling her by a window near the back, sitting beside her, drawing her head to his chest.

  “It was the only way,” Mabel said. “Wasn’t it?” With another blow of the whistle, the train lurched away. When they got to Louisville, they would disappear in the crowd, get their tickets for Chicago, and leave another for Bertie.

  Wallace’s voice creaked like an old spring. “Was it?”

  Not once before had he hinted at doubt. Mabel lifted her head and looked at him. If he’d noticed her movement, he gave no sign of it. His eyes were fixed on something she couldn’t see, a scene playing out silently in his own mind. This is how it would be. She and Wallace would travel through the night and into another day, locked separately inside their questions. This is how it would be for the next two days, until the three of them were together again, safely in Chicago, when she could tell Bertie everything.

  But how could she? How could Mabel tell Bertie even as much as she had told Wallace, which wasn’t all? Could her sister bear it? Just five days ago, she and Wallace had been so certain. So short a time ago as last Monday, they had agreed there was nothing else to be done. Now for every decision that had seemed inevitable, Mabel could think of three or four more she might have made. She might have found a way—made up some excuse—to send Bertie on ahead of them. But what would Jim Butcher have believed? What could Mabel have said that wouldn’t have set off questions, that wouldn’t have pricked his rage? Or she and Wallace might have hurried to meet Bertie at the graduation party, and they all could have left together, on the late train. But, no, it would have been too risky to delay, too dangerous for Bertie to travel with them. Or she might just have waited—waited to see if there was any other answer. But what then? What would another month, another week, another day have cost her sister?

  It was the way Butcher had looked at Bertie. Even from the back, as Mabel stepped into the hallway to tell him his breakfast was ready, she could see it in how he was leaning into the room, the way his head tilted, the way his hand pulsed on the knob.

  There was no decision then, only instinct. A light touch on his arm. A smile. A question about supper. Enough to break the spell, but for how long?

  Years ago, when Butcher had looked at her like that, Mabel had been alone, no one to interpret for her, too innocent, like Bertie was now, to know what it meant. Just like Bertie, she’d been standing before the mirror in a pretty dress, one from Mama’s trousseau, altered to fit—rich green shantung for her first Christmas dance. When Butcher’s eyes narrowed to a dark stare, Mabel hurried to explain it was Mama’s dress, one packed away the day she got the telegram saying her soldier husband had died of influenza. Still Butcher stared, and, heart banging, Mabel asked him if he minded her wearing Mama’s dress. He shook his head. “It’s right you should have her things. Suits you,” he said, smiling, so she believed him. And when she came home that night, out of the dark cold after the dance, Bertie already in bed, he’d been so kind to her.

  He’d built a fire and had made a pot of tea, leaving it on the hearth to keep it hot. She didn’t need to tell him how she liked it, with just half a spoon of sugar. Her hands were icy from the walk home, and when he passed her the cup, she was grateful for its warmth.

  “Was your mother showed me how to make a pot of tea right,” he said. “Used to boil it like coffee till it was so bitter you had to stir in a whole sugar bowl.”

  “It’s good,” Mabel said. “Just like Mama’s.” That wasn’t true. It was thick with tea leaves and he had let it steep too long by the fire, but the gesture had been thoughtful.

  He asked her about the dance then, supposed she had been the prettiest girl there, pretty as he’d heard tell her mother was at that age. Two girls, young widowhood, having to hire out to scrub anything other people wanted scrubbing—all these had taken Mama’s looks before Jim Butcher showed up to court her, persuading her he could turn her little patch of ground into a working farm. Now, poking at the fire, he said he missed her, felt bad for not having treated her more gently. In the quick rise of golden light, his eyes were sadness as he spoke her mother’s name, “Imogene.” At that moment, for the first time since he’d come into their house, Mabel felt a little tenderness toward him. Maybe he wasn’t the schemer she’d been sure he was, but really just a clumsy, well-meaning man who drank too much, uncertain of himself, uncertain of the world, after the war. “Terrible things he saw over there,” her mother had said. “Things nobody should ever see. Having to do things nobody should ever have to do.” There were so many men like that.

  It was past midnight when Butcher stood up, his cheeks flushed, and held out his hand to her. “Want to show you something.” He led her into his room, turned up the lamp on the bedside table. On the bed lay Mama’s stereopticon, the clamp full with cards. “Sit down,” he said, motioning to the bed. “I know how you like looking through this thing. Some pictures here you’ve never seen before.” He sat beside her and handed her the viewer. Mabel pressed it to her forehead, gasping at what she saw. The card was tinted, dozens of colors deepening the scene, and the lovely women, pinked with life, seemed so close she could touch them.

  There were five women, three standing on richly carpeted steps, one leaning against what looked like a marble column, and the other sitting on the tile beside a large square bath, all of them draped in lush silks—rose, teal, saffron, emerald, bronze. On their heads they wore matching turbans, some of them decorated with peacock feathers. Behind the women were long windows with tops like upside-down tulips, and through th
e windows, blue, like blossoms of sky. Palm fronds peeked out from the edges of the scene, and a large gold urn and flat bowl sat beside the bath.

  “Wonderful,” Mabel said. “Is it in Turkey? Bertie will love this.” She looked at her stepfather. “May I show her tomorrow?”

  “There’s no hurry,” he said. “Look again.” He’d removed the first picture. Two of the women on the steps had opened the silk draping at the top, exposing their breasts. The tints of their flesh, the detail of their nipples, the depth of the optical trick made those round breasts as real as Mabel’s own. Before she could speak, Butcher pulled aside that picture, and now the first three women had completely removed their top draperies. One was reaching forward to untie another’s skirt. The woman beside the column had moved to join the one beside the bath. They had both disrobed entirely and now sat gazing intently at each other’s nakedness. One extended her hand as if to caress her companion’s breast.

  A flick of Butcher’s hand, and now all the women were naked, their silks lying in shimmering heaps. Some had gotten in the bath, though they stood to show off their bodies. One pair sat on the floor, facing each other, their legs entwined.

  Mabel threw the viewer aside and sprang up, but Butcher caught her by her waist and pulled her down onto the bed. “Prettiest girl,” he said, and pressed his mouth hard against hers. His throat swallowed her scream and his hard chest absorbed her struggles. He held her down with the weight of his body, and when he released the kiss, he clamped one hand across her mouth and the other across her throat. “Not a sound, now.” He pressed her throat harder. “Not a sound. This stays between us. Wouldn’t take a bit of trouble to kill that sister of yours.”

  Both terror and ignorance had kept her from screaming again. Mabel knew little then of what happened between men and women, and so when she lay there while he tugged her party dress off her shoulders and over her hips, unlaced her corset and rolled down her stockings, she thought he was just going to look at her, perhaps beat her. Anything else was beyond her conceiving, so, when he turned her over on the bed and jammed her face into the wool blanket, she couldn’t comprehend what he was doing, imagining he must have sprouted claws to dig within her and tear out her insides. She’d seen him disembowel a deer once and thought now he must be disemboweling her.

  He’d been less cruel to the deer. He’d killed it first.

  In the dawn light, she was astonished to wake up, to find herself alive. In his bed. In his arms. Her hip bones felt as if they’d been torn from the rest of her body, perhaps broken, and there was such a burning inside her, she thought he must have driven in a lighted candle to sear her with the melted wax. But she was strangely clean, too. The soft scent of lavender rose from her skin, and she was wearing one of her mother’s linen nightdresses.

  Though it was agony, she rolled to her side, trying to slip out of the bed without waking Butcher, but his arms tightened around her. His breath on her neck, he nuzzled against her. “Little wife,” he said. “In this room, you’re my little wife.”

  “Oh, no, no.” Hot tears flowed down Mabel’s cheeks. Again she tried to pull herself free.

  “In this room, I said.” Butcher clasped his fingers like a vise around her jaw and forced her to look at him. “Everyplace else, you’re my little girl.” Nothing, not even coal, was blacker than his eyes. “Say it. Say ‘Yes, Daddy.’” Mabel twisted away, but he jerked her back, holding even tighter now. “Say it!”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Like you mean it.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to swallow, tried to recall her father’s face. What came to her was Bertie’s face—little Bertie, still sleeping, she prayed, two rooms away—Bertie’s face and Butcher’s words from last night. Two long breaths. Another swallow. A whisper. “Yes. Daddy.”

  Against the train windows, rain clattered like giant handfuls of thrown gravel. Beside her, Wallace sat with his head back, hands shuttering his eyes. Mabel looked across the aisle, out the opposite windows. North, beyond the river, shafts of lightning pierced the black clouds.

  When they got to Chicago, Wallace would go out to find a place for them to stay while Mabel waited in the station for Bertie’s train. Bertie was sure to be tired, upset, confused—angry and afraid—and the first days would be hard, harder even than the days after Mama died, but once Bertie was with them, when they could hold her hands and touch her cheek while they explained all, Bertie would understand, and she would forgive them.

  The rocking of the train slowed as it approached a station, small, in need of painting—so like Juniper’s. A few seats away, a couple and two children stood up, collecting bags and cardboard cases.

  Wallace took his hands from his eyes. “Louisville?”

  “No,” Mabel said. “One of the little towns. I don’t know which.” There were three or four such stops—she didn’t remember. She’d been on the train to Louisville only once—a special treat, Butcher had insisted, for her sixteenth birthday. That day he took her first to Stewart’s, made her parade and twist before him in each of the half-dozen dresses the saleswoman had selected before he chose one made all of white lace. After that, they lunched in the tearoom, where the waiters gathered to share their best wishes, setting before her a small cake decorated with fresh rosebuds.

  Outside the store, Mabel turned back the way they had come, toward the train station, but Butcher linked her arm in his and led her down Fourth Street, around the corner, blocks and blocks away from the bright stores, onto a street with signless, smoky brick buildings. He knocked at a shabby green door, immediately answered by a whiskered man in his shirtsleeves who pointed to a corner half-covered by a thin curtain and said, “Put her back there. I’m all set up.”

  His courtly manner gone now, Butcher shoved the Stewart’s box into Mabel’s arms. “Change into this. Everything.”

  She pressed as far back into the corner as she could and set the box on the floor. Beneath the dress lay silk underclothes, white silk stockings, and white slippers embroidered with ivory and silver thread. Glancing from behind the curtain, she saw the men with their backs to her, leaning over a table, talking, so she slipped out of her dress and tossed it over the curtain rod to give her more cover. Shivering against the cold sting of the silk, she stepped into the lace dress.

  “Mabel! Hurry it up.”

  When she came out from behind the curtain, Butcher snatched her hand and pulled her to him. “Told you she was a beauty,” he said, and kissed her hard, his tongue wedging her lips open, then he lifted her in his arms and carried her into another room where there was a swing placed before a backdrop painted to suggest a summer garden. Butcher set her on the swing and gestured toward the other man, now standing behind a camera. “Do everything just as he tells you.”

  Five days ago, seeing the way Butcher had looked at Bertie in her graduation dress, Mabel had gone to Wallace and told him how her stepfather, since the Christmas before she turned fifteen, had come sometimes once, sometimes nearly every night in a week to force her from the bed she shared with her sister and into his. She told how his whispered threats about Bertie had taught her to keep silent, had schooled her in concealment. But she hadn’t told Wallace about the pictures.

  They were stereo portraits, a series in the tradition of the Turkish women, twelve views in all, which for years to come Butcher would make her look at while he slid his hands under her nightgown, rough fingers pressing every curve of her body.

  There were two copies of the first photograph—one given to Bertie to support the story Mabel was instructed to tell of her splendid birthday visit to the city. In that one, she sat demurely on the swing, her shining hair spread across her shoulders. View by view, her clothes fell away, first the dress, then the chemise, the tap pants, the corselet, the stockings. For the last six, she was entirely naked, ordered to lie on the swing, to arch her back, to spread her legs.

  “Ready for the last,” the whiskered man said, then told Mabel to kneel on the seat.

&
nbsp; She would get through it, she told herself. She would. Just one more. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, tried to separate herself from her body. The swing creaked.

  Butcher, naked, a black mask over his eyes, sat beside her.

  “Lean over, girl,” said the man behind the camera.

  Butcher wrapped his hand around the back of her neck to push her head down, letting go only when her face was inches from his thighs, her long dark hair pooling in his lap.

  She jerked upright at the screaming of the whistle, echoed by the conductor’s final warning of departure: “Tucker’s Creek to Louisville. All aboard!”

  Mabel sprang to her feet. “We have to go back!”

  Wallace caught her hand. “Mabel, the train’s moving.”

  She stumbled across his legs and fell headfirst into the aisle. Righting herself, she crawled a few feet forward. “Stop!” she cried, her face wild.

  With the help of another man, Wallace lifted her up and got her back to their seat. All through the car, passengers stared and pointed, murmuring their concern and irritation.

  Wallace held her tightly, but still Mabel trembled. “Next stop,” she said. “We have to turn back at the next stop.”

  “We can’t.” Wallace rocked her, his voice a singsong. “We can’t.”

  “We can wait for Bertie at the station. We’ll all go on the late train.”

  “Sweetheart,” Wallace said. “We can’t. You know we can’t.”

  “In Louisville, then. We’ll meet her train in Louisville.”

  “Mabel…”

  “Please, Wallace.”

  Though he touched his fingers to her lips to urge her to stay quiet, Mabel couldn’t stop the tears. “She mustn’t … She can’t go back to the house. What if she goes back to the house?”

  “But you told her not to,” Wallace said. “In your note. Didn’t you?”