Sisters (28 page)

‘What did you do?’ Alex asked.

‘I hurried her out of there. Back upstairs. I cleaned her up and we left the building. Didn’t come back till late.’

‘And you let Dory take the blame,’ said Alex.

‘I was only thinking about Therese. I didn’t know that Dory was going to be arrested,’ said Joy. ‘Don’t bother trying to make me feel worse than I already do.’

Suddenly Alex realized what Joy had been doing at the stove. She smelled gas. ‘Joy, for God’s sake. Turn the gas off.’

Joy shook her head. ‘I have to do this. To protect Therese. Everything has just spun out of control. I have got to put a stop to it. You have to be prevented from spreading this story around about my affair with Lauren. Sooner or later, someone will believe it and it will lead them, inevitably, to Therese. She doesn’t deserve that. This was all my fault anyway. I was playing with fire. I just kept thinking I wouldn’t get caught and I never did, until it was too late.’

‘Doesn’t Chris know?’

‘No, actually, he doesn’t. He was always an innocent. I have to protect him too. He still thinks I was on a yoga retreat all those years ago. Of course, he assumed I was involved with an instructor or something. But when I came to my senses and left Lauren, he took me back without any question.’

The smell of the gas was beginning to seep into the corners of the room and make Alex’s stomach churn. It would not be long before the slightest spark would cause an explosion. Just then, Joy took a lighter from her pocket and held it up. She placed it in the palm of her hand and stared at it.

‘You’ll be killed too if you strike that thing!’ Alex cried.

‘That’s the idea,’ said Joy flatly.

Alex’s stomach swooped down. ‘You’re going to kill us both?’

‘It will end all the questions, for once and for all. I owe Therese that much. I left a note, confessing to Lauren’s murder. No one will be able to blame Therese.’

‘Why do I have to die for your crimes?’ Alex protested.

‘Because it’s your fault all of this came out in the first place. If you had minded your own business and not come barging into our lives, none of this would have happened. Dory would probably still be in prison . . . But no, you had to find your sister. And then you had to start digging up the past. Therese is not going to pay the price for your idle curiosity. You know what they say – curiosity killed the cat,’ said Joy.

Alex felt her heart thud again. There was no reasoning with someone who thought this way. But she had to try. ‘You know, you’re not doing Therese any favors. She’ll always have to live with the guilt of what she did,’ she said.

‘Sometimes I think she doesn’t even remember what she did. But, no matter what, she won’t have to rot in prison for it,’ said Joy. ‘At least she’ll have a shot at a good life. And look on the bright side. They’ll know that Dory didn’t hurt you. And she will be free.’

Just then there was a knock at the front door.

Joy froze. ‘Who is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alex said truthfully.

‘They’ll go away.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Alex. ‘They can see my car in the driveway.’

Joy sighed. ‘All right. I’ll get rid of them.’ She reached into the kitchen drawer of dishtowels and pulled out a clean dishrag. ‘Open up,’ she said.

Alex tried to keep her mouth clamped shut.

‘I said, open up!’ Joy cried, whacking Alex on the side of the head with the bottom of the skillet.

Alex’s mouth opened in a cry and Joy stuffed the wadded dishrag inside. Then she ran down the hall to the front door. Alex could hear her open the door.

‘Ms Woods,’ said a low, rumbling voice. ‘Alex Woods.’

‘I’m Alex Woods,’ said Joy.

There was a moment’s silence. Then the man said, ‘No, you ain’t.’

Joy murmured something but the man persisted. ‘’Less there’s two of you.’

Joy faked an airy laugh. It came out sounding tragic. ‘I’m kidding. We’re cousins,’ she said.

‘I smell gas,’ he said.

THIRTY-TWO

‘I
don’t smell anything,’ Joy said.

Yes, it’s gas. Help. Alex tried to cry out through the gag in her mouth. All that emerged were grunting noises. She tried to dislodge the dishrag with her tongue to no avail.

‘It sure smells like gas to me,’ the man at the door said.

‘Well, I can’t help that,’ Joy said impatiently. ‘Is that all, officer?’

Officer? Alex thought. Was it Detective Langford, she wondered, her heart leaping up in hope. The man’s voice sounded as if he might be black.

‘Don’t go closing that door on me,’ said the man. ‘Answer my question, please. Where is Alex Woods? This is her house, isn’t it?’

‘She’s not here,’ said Joy. ‘Look, I really have to go.’

‘Ma’am, that is gas that I smell. You better get out of this house. I can call the gas company for you from out here.’

‘No, don’t!’ Joy cried. ‘Just go away. It’s fine.’

‘Fine? The house could blow up.’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing. Maybe the flame went out on one of the burners. I’ll go have a look.’

‘And Ms Woods?’ the man said stubbornly.

‘Do you have her number?’ Joy asked.

‘Yeah, I do.’

‘You should call her.’

‘I need to talk to her face-to-face,’ the man insisted.

‘Can’t help you with that,’ said Joy. ‘Now, if you don’t mind . . .’

Alex could not hear what the man said in reply. She heard the murmur of his deep voice and then silence. She was praying that he would insist on coming in. That he would not acquiesce. After a minute, she heard Joy mutter, ‘Finally.’ The front door slammed shut.

Alex’s heart sank. Between the smell of the gas and the rag in her mouth, she felt like she was on the verge of suffocation. And now the man at the door had given up and departed. He may have been unconvinced, but he probably wasn’t about to force his way into a house where the lone occupant appeared to be a young woman. She didn’t blame him. That was lawsuit territory. It could be the end of his career. But she felt as if she had lost her only hope for escape.

Maybe he’ll call the gas company, she thought. And then she felt a renewed sense of futility. The gas company never responded promptly. Everybody knew that. Joy will have set off the explosion by then. At that moment Joy walked back into the kitchen.

Alex looked up at her balefully.

‘That was close,’ Joy said. ‘For a minute I thought he was going to insist on coming in here. He doesn’t realize how lucky he is. One flick of this lighter . . .’ She had taken it from her pocket and was looking down at it as if mesmerized.

Alex’s stomach churned. Was it coming now? No, she thought. Shit. I don’t want to die. I’m not ready.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Joy, picking up the tranquilizer gun from the counter and tucking it into her waistband. ‘I’ll knock you out before I set it off. You won’t even feel it.’

Joy’s phone rang, and she pulled it from another pocket.

The desperate look in her eyes softened. ‘It’s Therese,’ she said. ‘I have to take this.’ She walked out of the kitchen, and, from the next room, Alex could hear the sound of her voice rising and falling. She must be saying her goodbyes, Alex thought. How nice for her. What about my goodbyes? She thought of Seth, arriving tomorrow. A day late. She thought of the life she would never have with him, and it made her heart ache. Tears seeped out from under her closed eyelids.

All of this had happened because she had decided to search for her sister. Her mother could never have imagined that her letter, revealing Alex’s long-lost sister, would lead to this. You couldn’t have known, Alex thought, addressing her mother in her heart.

Suddenly Alex heard a faint tapping sound. Her eyes widened. She turned her head and looked in the direction of the porch door. Darkness had fallen over the yard outside and darkness was all she could see. That, and the reflection on the glass panes in the door of the lights from the house. And then, with a start, and a cry muffled by her gag, she realized that she was looking into a pair of eyes in the darkness. They were frowning at her. Peering past the reflections in the glass, she made out the contours of a face.

It was a black man, looking in. He was wearing something dark, and was rendered almost invisible in the night. But his electric gaze was sweeping the room. He looked straight into Alex’s eyes again and pressed a finger to his lips.

Alex stared back at him. She looked in the direction of the dining room. She could still hear Joy talking on the phone, her voice strained and anxious.

The man frowned and reached down for the doorknob. He turned it, but it didn’t open. Joy had locked it. And thanks to the recent visit from the locksmith, the lock was not about to disengage easily.

Alex looked at him helplessly. From his place out on the porch, he was studying the kitchen, searching for something. Alex glanced back toward the murmuring voice in the other room.

The man outside the door fastened his gaze on a waist-high, rolling wooden cart beside Alex. Alex followed his gaze. The open cart had always served as a makeshift bar for her parents. There were several bottles of alcohol on it, the liquid inside them at varying heights. There was also a pair of shot glasses, some wine glasses and two brandy snifters.

The man at the door gestured to Alex. She did not understand what he was trying to convey. She shook her head. He pointed to the glass pane in the door nearest the doorknob. Then he pantomimed breaking the glass and reaching inside. At last, Alex understood what he was saying. He was going to break the pane, reach through and unlock the door from the inside. She watched him, hope and fear mixed in her gaze.

Then he pointed to Alex and from her, to the whiskey cart beside her. He jerked his body as if to show her what to do. It took her a minute to read his signals. He wanted her to knock into the cart. For a moment she couldn’t comprehend why he would want her to do this. She looked at him helplessly, shaking her head. The man stood still for a moment, thinking. Then he pretended to lift a glass to his lips. He used his large fingers in a dainty fashion to indicate that it was a glass with a stem. A wine glass. She frowned as he pretended to hurl the glass to the ground. As Alex watched him closely, he pointed from his invisible broken glass to the top of the rolling bar cart. Then it came to her. There were glasses on the cart. He wanted her to knock the glasses off the cart so they would break on the tiled floor. Why? she wondered. She felt confused, the oppressive smell of the gas making it difficult to think.

The man seemed to sense her confusion. He patiently pointed to glasses on the cart and then to himself, pantomiming once again, the act of breaking the glass pane in the door. Suddenly Alex got it. Aha! she thought. She understood. When the glasses fell, their breaking would cover the sound of the door pane breaking. Alex sagged with relief that she finally knew what he meant. When Joy heard the glass break, she would rush into the kitchen. If her attention weren’t diverted, Joy would instantly see Alex’s rescuer opening the door. This diversion of breaking the glasses on the bar cart might give the man a short but necessary window of time to enter the house.

Alex got it. She nodded and shifted her chair slightly. Alex didn’t dare scrape it too far along the floor. If Joy heard that she would be in here in a flash, her lighter at the ready. She just moved a few inches closer to the cart so that she would be in position to knock the glasses off it.

The man raised three fingers. Alex understood. On the count of three. She nodded again. The man grimly mimed a fist bump. Then he raised one finger. Two. Three. On three, Alex used her shoulder, her side and even the back of the chair to crash into the cart.

There was the sound of smashing glass.

Joy came running in, still holding the phone in her hand. ‘What was that?’

Alex looked sheepishly at the broken snifters on the floor.

‘What did you do that for?’ Joy asked.

Alex looked down at the broken glass.

‘You think you’re going to cut yourself loose? Use them as a weapon maybe? Forget it, Alex. You can’t stop me. This is the end for us. Use your time to say your prayers.’ Joy turned her back on Alex and put the phone back to her ear.

‘All right, sweetie,’ Joy said. ‘I have to go now. But I want you to remember how much I love you. Don’t ever forget.’

The man on the porch reached through the door pane and unlocked the door. Alex made as loud a gargling sound as possible in her throat to cover the click of the lock.

The next moments seemed to pass in slow motion. The man pushed the door open as Joy turned and suddenly realized what was happening. Alex saw, as if from underwater, the door banging open. The man, who was wearing a midnight-blue uniform, lunged across the room and tackled Joy before she could react. Her phone skittered across the tiles, landing near Alex.

‘No,’ Joy wailed. ‘Let me go. I have to do this.’

But Mr S. Robinson, for Alex recognized him at last, was huge and strong, and in no mood to be blown sky-high. ‘Sorry, lady. Not gonna happen today.’ He pressed Joy’s face to the floor, straddled her and, with one hand, took his handcuffs off his belt and fastened them around her wrists. Then he stood up, dragging Joy to her feet, and hauled her out onto the porch where he shoved her roughly into a chair. She began to weep, crying out in frustration.

He came back inside, rushed to the stove and turned off the gas. He ran to the windows and threw them open. Finally he picked up Alex, chair and all, and half-dragged, half-carried her out onto the porch, leaving the door wide open. He removed her gag.

Alex gasped and drank in the air. Her lungs ached, but her heart rose up like a balloon. ‘Thank you,’ she gasped.

Joy slid from the chair to the floor, on her knees, wailing.

‘She has a tranquilizer gun. And a lighter,’ Alex said.

Robinson crouched down and patted Joy’s pockets. He tucked the gun into his own waistband and pulled out the lighter. He slipped it into his own pocket. ‘Not anymore she don’t,’ he said.

‘I was so afraid you were going to leave,’ Alex said.

The man shook his head as he untied her. ‘No. But I could tell that, for some reason, she didn’t care if she ended up in an explosion. I had to be careful.’