The Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

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