The Sisters Read Online Free Page B

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.

T WO
    Departure
     
    June 1927
    Juniper, Kentucky
     
    MABEL
     
    “W AIT! ” 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