The Silent Sister Page 9

  “My God.” I felt my whole body sag with the weight of the news. “Who was it?” I asked again. “Who did she kill?”

  “His name was Steve Davis,” she said. “He was her violin teacher.”

  I gasped, remembering the tall, slender conductor in the tapes. Was that who Jeannie was talking about?

  “She was angry with him because he’d hurt her chance to get into Juilliard, but she never would have killed him over that,” Jeannie said. “She was such a quiet, gentle girl. She never would have intentionally killed anyone over anything. It was all so unbelievable.”

  It was unbelievable, and I had so many questions. I paged through the articles until I found one of them with a picture of Steve Davis. He was definitely the man from the tapes. I pressed my hand to my mouth as I began to read the article to myself, while Jeannie sat quietly on the bench, waiting for me to learn the truth.

  Lisa Beth MacPherson, the seventeen-year-old violinist awaiting trial in the murder of her former violin teacher Steven Davis, is missing and presumed dead. Ms. MacPherson’s yellow kayak was found in the frozen waters of the Potomac River near Fort Hunt Park in Alexandria Monday morning, and her white Honda Civic was parked at the side of the road south of the Belle Haven Marina. Her book bag and a wallet containing her driver’s license and more than thirty dollars in cash were in the vehicle. A blue jacket thought to be hers was found tangled in the icy reeds nearby.

  Her father, Frank MacPherson, contacted police around eight o’clock Monday morning after finding an apparent suicide note in her bedroom. The contents of the note have not been made public, but a police spokesperson stated that the note indicated MacPherson’s intention to kill herself, and her father identified the handwriting as hers. MacPherson’s mother and younger siblings were out of town Monday morning.

  Lisa MacPherson was out on bail in the October murder of Davis, who was forty-two at the time of his death. She was to be tried as an adult, and the trial was to begin this Wednesday. She was expected to testify that the shooting was accidental. MacPherson had planned to apply to the Juilliard School of Music for the fall 1990 semester, and Davis allegedly sent a derogatory letter about her to a colleague at the school, a fact prosecutors were expected to introduce as a possible motive. Davis had instructed MacPherson for most of her career, although at the time of the incident, she was studying with National Symphony violinist Caterina Thoreau.

  Acquaintances stated that MacPherson had been extremely depressed in the months since her arrest. Upon hearing of her student’s probable suicide this morning, Caterina Thoreau made this statement to the press: “This is tragic news. Lisa is the most gifted student I’ve ever had the pleasure to teach and her future was bright. I’ve always believed that the shooting was accidental, and given Lisa’s sensitive nature, I can imagine how difficult it was for her to live with what happened. She held (Davis) in high esteem.”

  Davis, who lived in McLean with his wife, Sondra Lynn Davis, was teaching at George Mason University at the time of his death. The couple had no children.

  The search for MacPherson’s body continues.

  I stared at the article, trying to comprehend it. “I always thought she killed herself because she was overwhelmed by how stressful her career had become and because she was worrying about getting into Juilliard, and…” My voice trailed off. I looked across the room at Jeannie, holding up the article I’d just read. “This is for real?”

  Jeannie nodded. “I’m afraid so. I knew her quite well, Riley, and she was such a nice girl—studious and always with an eye toward her future. Your mother homeschooled her, as I’m sure you know, but she had friends even though she wasn’t in a regular school. Other violin students, that sort of thing. She had a few rough patches…” She looked into the distance as if remembering some hardship of Lisa’s. “But what kid doesn’t?” she asked.

  “Do you think she killed him because of the letter to Juilliard?” I asked.

  “No, of course not! I believe that, for whatever reason, she got hold of your father’s gun. Maybe to show him? I don’t know. And she—”

  “To show him? That doesn’t make sense. Was it just lying around? It sounds like she was angry and intentionally shot him.” My exalted image of my sister was rapidly deteriorating. I felt as if I was losing her all over again.

  “Frank blamed himself,” Jeannie said. “He always has. His service revolver was locked up in the den, but Lisa knew where it was. This was up in your Virginia house. Maybe Lisa just threatened Steve with the gun. Maybe she had lost her mind a little bit over that letter and she was asking him to make it right. That’s what I’ve always pictured. She threatened him and maybe there was a scuffle and it went off. I don’t know. No one will ever know. All I know was that it was heartbreaking. Your mother never really recovered from all she went through.”

  “I’m in shock,” I said honestly. “Is this why Daddy retired early from the Marshals Service?”

  “Well, he was technically too young to retire, but it’s why he left, yes. He and your mother wanted to move someplace where they could start over completely fresh for you and Danny.”

  “But Danny would have been six years old when Lisa died. He would have had some idea of what was going on, wouldn’t he? He would have known why she really killed herself.”

  Jeannie looked old all of a sudden, her blue eyes tired. “You’re right,” she said slowly, “and I think they did your brother a huge disservice.” She rubbed her temples. “I hate to criticize them, because I know they were surviving the best they could and they probably weren’t thinking straight at the time. But they made up their minds that you and Danny should grow up not knowing about the murder, and so if Danny asked questions about things he’d heard, or things other kids said, your mother and father would tell him those kids didn’t know what they were talking about. And like I said, they moved down here right away and did a pretty good job of starting fresh. The shooting and Lisa’s suicide were national news, but somehow the kids down here didn’t get the message, and to the best of my knowledge they left Danny alone about it. So he ultimately bought into the whole ‘she killed herself because she was depressed’ idea, same as you.” She pressed her palms together in her lap. “And if he remembered things other children said, your parents would say he must be misremembering. I think that was a little cruel to him. It must have made him feel crazy sometimes. I think that’s what led to him being so … disturbed. He had a lot of problems when they moved here.”

  “He was always getting into trouble at school,” I said, remembering what my brother was like by the time he reached his teens. “He’d get into fights and wouldn’t do his homework. And he argued with Mom and Daddy nearly every night.” I remembered the fights. I’d cower in my room while my parents and Danny went at it, shouting and arguing about his grades and his foul language and the kids he hung out with. I’d been eleven years old, and I’d missed the big brother who’d doted on me and had always seemed like my protector. I’d put the pillow over my head to block out the noise.

  “His school recommended that he see a counselor,” Jeannie said, “but your parents wouldn’t hear of it. They were afraid he’d say something about … the shooting and that Lisa killed herself, and then it would get out in New Bern and defeat the purpose of moving.”

  That really got to me. “How terrible for him,” I said. “He needed help and they kept it from him.” The thought of my brother’s confusion tore me up. No wonder his feelings toward our parents were so bitter. I couldn’t blame him. As far as I knew, they never did get him help. How could they trust him to hold tight to the family lies?

  I wasn’t sure who in my family I hurt worse for. The brother I’d adored, being told one thing while knowing another. My father, whose guilt over the gun must have haunted him his entire life. Or my mother, who lost her oldest child. And then there was my sister, the ethereal creature I’d seen on the tapes, struggling to live with the guilt of having taken a life. I dropped my head a
gainst the back of the chair and shut my eyes. “I wish I didn’t know any of this,” I said.

  But now that I did know it, I had to know it all.

  * * *

  I sent Jeannie home, then sat up in bed reading every word of every article, including one that described the scene at our house when the police arrived: “Mr. Davis was found on the blood-soaked living room floor, MacPherson kneeling over him, a .357 Magnum in her hand. Davis had been shot in the temple and the eye and was pronounced dead at the scene.”

  That horrific description was going to give me nightmares.

  Most of the other articles were repetitive, but I still read them all. It was nearly midnight when I reached the most personal, most painful-to-read item in the box. It was a handwritten note on a sheet of lined white paper, clearly a Xeroxed copy.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  I’m so sorry for what I’ve put you through. I know what I’m about to do will make it even harder on you, at least for a while, but I’m sure a jury won’t believe me about it being an accident and I can’t go to prison. It terrifies me. I just can’t do it. This is better for everyone in the long run. I love you and Riley and Danny so much and I’m sorry for any shame I’ve brought on our family.

  Love, Lisa

  13.

  The forest was absolutely silent, the only sound the hush-hush of our footsteps as Danny and I walked over a carpet of long brown pine needles and tufts of neon-green weeds. I was in my brother’s world, though not at his invitation. I’d shown up with the box of articles that morning, feeling anxious, wondering how much he remembered of the shooting and Lisa’s suicide. How much he knew. But he didn’t speak. He sat at the table in his trailer, his face growing nearly as red as his T-shirt as he scanned two of the articles, then shoved the box aside. Grabbing his shotgun, he pushed out of the trailer and into the woods. I quickly followed, terrified that I may have made the worst mistake of my life by bringing the box to him.

  When I found him, though, he was walking slowly, as though he hoped I’d catch up to him. He didn’t look at me, but kept his eyes forward, his gun propped against his shoulder, and I fell into step next to him. We walked that way in complete silence for ten minutes or more, and although I’d been nervous at first, I began to relax. There was something about the quiet out here. About the thick carpet of needles beneath our feet. All around us, for as far as I could see, the arrow-straight trunks of the pines shot into the sky, where they exploded into puff balls of long green needles. I glanced over my shoulders to see the same view in every direction. We were not on a trail, and I knew that without Danny at my side, I would be lost.

  “How do you know where we are?” I whispered. It seemed wrong to break the spell of the woods with my voice.

  “I just do.” He pointed ahead of us. “That’s where I like to go.”

  I looked ahead of us, but the landscape of tree trunks looked no different in that direction than in any other. Yet within a few steps, I understood. An oval of grass opened up in front of us, circled by pines so tall, they created a cathedral-like space below them. “Oh,” I said. “I see why. It’s beautiful.”

  He walked over to one of the trees and sat down on the cushion of pine needles near its base, resting the shotgun on the ground at his side. I sat next to him, and when I looked at him, he was slowly shaking his head, his eyes closed. I waited, and two or three minutes passed before he finally opened his eyes.

  “You know how you think you remember things, but you’re not sure if maybe you dreamt them?” he asked, looking out into the trees. “Or maybe even … made them up?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Mom used to say I had a good imagination. I should be a writer, she said, because I made up such amazing stories.” He sounded bitter. “She’d laugh them off, my stories. When I’d ask her if she remembered the day she and I came home from the grocery store and we heard two gunshots as we got out of the car, she’d say, ‘Oh, what a creative mind you have!’ Or when I said something about remembering blood on the living room carpet, she’d say, ‘If you have to make up stories, can’t you make up nicer ones?’”

  “Oh, Danny.” I touched his arm, relieved when he didn’t try to brush my hand away.

  “I remember sirens,” he said. “I thought they were coming for you.”

  “For me?”

  He nodded. “You were bleeding. You had a cut on your head.”

  “I have a scar on my forehead,” I said, lifting my bangs to show him the small dent above my left eyebrow, but he didn’t turn to look at me. He seemed lost in his memory.

  “You were screaming,” he said.

  I let my bangs fall over my forehead again. “Mom always told me I hit my head on a coffee table when I was little, but I don’t remember it.”

  “I thought that was why the ambulance was coming, but that wasn’t it, was it?” He shook his head as though talking to himself. “It was for her teacher. That guy she killed.”

  “Accidentally,” I added. “You read the part about it being an accident, right?”

  “‘Shot through the eye,’” he said. “I knew that. I knew…” He ran his fingers through his hair. “How did I know that? Did I see it? Hear it?” He rubbed his temples hard in frustration, then looked at me. “I knew about all this, Riles,” he said. “I knew it, but I’d forgotten it.”

  “I think,” I said carefully, not wanting him to go off on his tirade about our parents again … and yet, maybe they deserved it? “I think Mom and Daddy did their best to make you forget it.”

  “I didn’t have to go to school then,” he said. “Mom homeschooled me for a while like she did with Lisa, though Lisa was gone.” He frowned as if trying to remember. “She was always going away on trips and things, but … I guess she was in jail then? She must have been. I didn’t connect the homeschooling with the sirens or anything. I thought I was being punished for something. They wouldn’t let me go out and play.” He was rambling, piecing things together in his mind. “I hardly knew her,” he said. “Lisa. Eleven years older and always gone. Her schedule ruled our lives. The whole world revolved around her.” He wrapped his hand around a fistful of pine needles. His face was still expressionless, but his voice was taut. Suddenly it softened. “I always liked you, though,” he added, glancing at me. “You were a cool little kid.”

  I couldn’t believe he was talking this way. Saying so much.

  “You were my best friend,” I said.

  He dropped the needles. Rubbed his hands over his denim-covered knees. “I have this nightmare that comes and goes,” he said. “It sucks. It’s the worst one.”

  “Do you want to tell—”

  “I thought it was about Iraq.” He interrupted me, lost in his own thoughts. “But now I don’t know, because Mom is in it. She’s always in it. Always screaming.”

  I watched the muscles around his jaw tighten and release as I waited for him to say more, but he was done talking about his dream.

  “Suicide is the coward’s way out.” He picked up a twig, playing with it between his fingers. “I mean, I feel for the vets who do it, and I get it. It becomes too much for them to carry around. Maybe they don’t have a place like this to escape to.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by “a place like this.” Then I realized he was talking about this small patch of pine forest. His haven. I was touched that he’d allowed me to be there with him.

  “So you don’t have to worry about me and suicide, all right?” He glanced at me. “I know you do.”

  I was afraid of breaking the spell of warmth that had fallen over us, yet maybe I could take advantage of his mood to delve deeper.

  “I do worry,” I admitted. “I know you’re depressed. If you’d stay on your medications, I think you’d be—”

  “I’m not depressed.”

  Like hell, I thought. “How would you define your feelings, then? What do you—”

  “I’m pissed off, is what I am!” He broke the twig in two between his fingers
. The sound it made was barely audible, yet it made me jump.

  “Who are you pissed off at?” I asked.

  “Who am I not pissed off at would be a shorter answer,” he said. “Our fucking government, for one. The shitty things they made me do over there. Made me…” He gave an angry shake of his head. “You don’t even see people as human beings after a while when you’re there, you know?” he said. “And I’m pissed at our parents. Our lying prick of a father and our ice queen of a mother. And our selfish bitch of a sister!” His face was red and damp with sweat, his breathing loud. “She took up all the air in our family. There was nothing left for anyone else.”

  “But,” I said carefully, “did you ever stop to think of what it was like for her, growing up?” I asked. “The pressure on her?”

  “Hell, no!” His anger shattered the sacred feel of the woods. “Nobody ever forced her to play the violin. Nobody told her to kill her fucking teacher. Everything was handed to her on a silver platter and she took it all for herself!”

  I ran my fingers through the pine needles. I could hear his hard, fast breathing and I made my voice as calm as I could to counter his rage. “I try to understand why people do what they—”

  “Shut up with the counselor voice, okay?” he said. “I hate when you do that!”

  I was stunned. “I’m only trying to—”

  “You turn into some automaton, like you’re programmed to say all this fake, warm, fuzzy shit that has nothing to do with reality.” He looked at me, his face flushed. “You went to school for what? Five years? Six years? And then you think you’re equipped to pick at people’s heads when you haven’t even lived in the real world yet? Maybe you can manage a thirteen-year-old. Fourteen-year-old. But you are way the hell out of your league when it comes to me, little sister.”