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 that must be done. I played with the ruffle on the peach-colored comforter that my sister had loved so much. Mom periodically washed the sheets and blankets and then made the bed back up as if someone would ever sleep in there again. When my daughter, Brooke, and I had come to visit when she was small, we’d always stayed together in my old bedroom.
Get on with it, I told myself. I had a task to do. I simply needed to shut off my mind and get it done.
I rose from the bed. I’d do the closet first. God only knew what was in there. I opened the closet door and peered inside. It was too dark to see, and my muscle memory clicked in as my fingers found the string that hung from the ceiling light. I tugged on what was essentially kitchen twine, so thin between my fingers I feared it would break off. To my surprise, it didn’t. How had the string not disintegrated after all these years? The bulb shed a ghostly light.
The closet was shaped in a triangle, one of the many quirks of a house built in the late seventies. Wooden rods where Beth’s clothes had hung were empty. Thank God for small favors. I’d already taken care of the clothes. That had been a hard day. Several years after her death, I’d taken all of Beth’s clothes to the Salvation Army. My father had asked me to do it one afternoon when Mom had gone to the hair salon. The first year, Mom had decided not to return to work as a first-grade teacher. She rarely left the house during those months. When I’d come home from school, I’d find her still in her pajamas curled up in bed. I’d learned to cook a few simple meals, and she’d come down for dinner and then return to her room. However, after the first anniversary, it was like something had clicked inside her. The will to live, perhaps? Maybe she needed that year to grieve fully, to let herself fall into the abyss.
Dad and I had a different method, which in hindsight might not have been as effective. We simply soldiered on. As I did after learning of my husband’s infidelities. I never gave myself the time to wallow. Brooke needed me. My students needed me.
And now here I was with another project. Help Mom sell the house.
I started with a shelf lined with books. Most were trade paperbacks with a few hardbacks of Beth’s favorites: Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables, The Swiss Family Robinson. Dozens of romance novels were hidden behind the hardbacks. We’d devoured those stories as if they were succulent bites of chocolate.
I held my breath as I opened Black Beauty. The inscription read: To Beth. We couldn’t get you a horse, so this book will have to do. Love, Mom and Dad. December, 1980.
A lump formed in the back of my throat the size of a baseball. I sat back against the wall and spread my legs out so that my feet were pressed against the opposite wall. What it lacked in shape, the closet made up for in size. Beth and I had spent many rainy afternoons in here as kids and even teenagers, reading together, one on each wall with our legs spread out long as I had them now. How naive I’d been to think we would always be that way, connected by limbs and hearts.
I sniffed the romance with a cover of a scantily dressed hero in the arms of a redheaded heroine, hoping for a hint of Beth. The pages smelled of old paperback. How could they smell of anything else having been in the closet without their owner for decades? Still, the heart hopes without understanding the truth about loss. Grief lasts forever.
I set the book aside and sat on the floor, pulling my knees to my chest. “Beth, I miss you so much,” I whispered. What was heaven like? Could she feel me or see me? Did she miss me up there or was all pain removed the moment you entered the pearly gates?
I shook off my sadness and began to pull the rest of the stuff from the shelves and into either a box or a trash bag. A bin of paper dolls went into the trash, but I put some of the books in the box of things I’d keep for myself. The only odd item I found was a butter knife from Mom’s silver placed in one of the romances like a bookmark. Curious of what she’d bookmarked, I opened the paperback. I laughed to see that it marked a steamy kissing scene. We were innocent enough that they’d made us blush, but we couldn’t get enough. The hero in this one was a hockey player who fell in love with the coach’s daughter. A favorite of ours. I hadn’t thought about this book or any of them for that matter since I’d read them with Beth over thirty years ago. We’d imagined ourselves as the heroine, swept away by the hero’s grand gesture. We’d both been such romantics, debating for hours which of the heroes we would choose if we could. How scandalous the stories had seemed to us. If I’d only known then of what was to come—Beth’s murder and then the ultimate betrayal by my husband. Murder. Blackmailed by a prostitute. Those were real scandals. True trials.
I put aside the knife. Mom would chuckle when I told her I’d found it up here. Beth had loved chunky peanut butter from the jar. After school, she’d use a knife to take a small amount. She never used spoons because she didn’t want too much. “Too easy to take a lot more with a spoon,” she’d said to me when I asked. “I have to fit into my cheerleader uniform.”
I closed my eyes for a moment as a wave of heartache enveloped me. Beth and her peanut butter obsession. Hopefully peanut butter had made it into heaven and she got to have a large amount on the biggest spoon ever.
Never mind all that, I told myself. Get back to it.
As I worked, I grew damp from exertion. The upstairs of this house had always been warm in the summer. Still, it didn’t take me but thirty minutes to finish the closet. Soon, everything had been emptied and put in either a box or the trash. Rickety and unstable, the shelving unit was something my dad must have put together. After forty years of neglect, who could blame it for giving in to decay? I felt this way some days. Too old and worn out to keep on going.
Last night my mother had asked if I would start dating again. It had been two years since my divorce from Max.
I’d dismissed the idea. Dating? At my age? Forty-six and faced with the prospect of showing my naked body to a man seemed impossible. When I’d married Max I would never have guessed that twenty years later I’d be out there again. Did I even want someone? After living with Max, picking up after him, cooking his meals, coddling his ego, I wasn’t sure I wanted a repeat.
I’d thought Max was a good man. Or at least an honest one with flaws. I could deal with flaws. The dishonesty, the deception—that’s what I couldn’t look past. The betrayal had sliced through me like a dull blade through my middle. When I’d lectured in front of my class, I’d wondered if they could see the hole he’d left.
Anyway, that was all in the past. Now I had the opportunity to reinvent myself. I had enough money to live for years without working. I might not go back to the university. Maybe I would stay here in Logan Bend and grow tomatoes. I could never get a darn tomato to ripen in Seattle’s cool climate. But here? Here I could have oodles and oodles of juicy red tomatoes.
These were my thoughts as I emptied the rest of the room. Beth’s desk had been emptied at some point, so there was nothing much to do. Under the bed was also clear. I went back in for one last look in the closet to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, kneeling once more in front of the shelves. That’s when I saw a crack in the bottom shelf. The shelving unit had a false bottom, covered by the decorative front. I looked more closely. Actually, it wasn’t a crack but a rectangular incision in the board. A secret hiding place? I needed something like a knife to lift it.
The butter knife. Had she actually kept it up here to open this hiding place? Not peanut butter after all? I grabbed the knife from where I’d set it on the bed, then used it to pry the part from the rest of the shelf.
I gasped at what I saw. Beth’s journal. The one with butterflies on the cover. She’d gotten it as a gift when we were in middle school from an elderly aunt. I’d never seen her write in it when we were small.
She’d hidden it, which meant she must have been writing in it when we were in high school and didn’t want me or Mom to find it. Our mother wasn’t above snooping. I lifted the journal from its coffin.
I opened to the first page. My heart beat fast as I looked at the date of the first entry, which was roughly six months before she was murdered.
I can’t let anyone see this. Not ever. But today we did it for the first time. I won’t say his name, not even in here. I’m in love. I feel really guilty about Luke, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I’m sick with love. And now I’ve done the thing I can’t even tell Carlie about. Sex. It wasn’t good, like I hoped, but he assures me it gets better with time. We’re planning to meet in our secret place again tomorrow.
I’m playing with fire. I know that. But he’s too irresistible. There’s no one like him. Luke seems like a child compared to him.
I stared at the page, unable to comprehend what I was reading. Beth had a boyfriend other than Luke. A boyfriend she couldn’t tell even me about? And she’d had sex with him. How could this be?
Shivers ran up my spine. This was a lead. After all these years, something to go on. Information the police hadn’t had at the time. There had been another boy in Beth’s life. She’d had a secret. One that she kept from even me. But why? Why not just break up with Luke and go out with whoever this was? Had she sensed he was dangerous? Had instincts told her to keep us in the dark so we wouldn’t see him for who he was and make her break it off with him? She’d always said I was scared of everything and that Dad was overprotective. I’d been right to be scared. My dad had been right too. Neither of us had the power to stop whoever it was that took Beth from us.
Would this journal hold answers? Was it possible that Mom and I could finally have closure? We were the only two left of what had been a happy family of four. The Websters. Two beautiful blonde daughters. A bank manager and a beloved teacher. Native sons and daughters of Logan Bend. The rivers and mountains of Idaho ran through our blood. We were Logan Bend. Until we were not.