My Sister's Keeper

Chapter 2

2

IN THE SOLITUDE OF MARTHA'S HOSPITAL ROOM, my mind drifted back to that summer day when a sixteen-year-old neighborhood bully named Jimmy Lassiter pulled a switchblade and tried to rob us. I was fourteen at the time and Martha was ten. Without hesitation, she snatched up a broken chunk of brick and hurled it, permanently blinding him in his right eye, and scarring me internally for the rest of my life. Coward!

Why couldn't I be more like my sister?

As I watched over her and prayed for her life, I promised God that night that if he'd let Martha live, no matter how badly she was injured, I'd take care of her for the rest of her life if needed. I hadn't kept many promises I'd made to God, but that was one promise I did intend to keep.

When Martha finally did emerge from her coma and I realized how much rehabilitation she was going to need, I went back to New York City, packed up my Tribeca photography studio, and hauled it down to Wilmington so I could help with her recovery.

After four months in the hospital, she moved back home with Mom and Dad and things got easier. In addition to helping with Martha, I set up a studio downtown and got involved in the local theatre. That was three years ago.

The events of that night at the warehouse cost Martha a kidney and left her paralyzed from the waist down. She's gotten used to the pain, the limitations, and the prognosis of a future alone, but I don't think she'll ever get over not being able to have children.

Although the police had a solid set of fingerprints and even some DNA evidence, the case still had yet to be solved three years later. Two more girls had turned up floating in the river and another two disappeared without a trace. The police feared they had a serial killer on their hands and—although confined to a wheelchair—finding the owners of those fingerprints had become the focus of Martha's life.

And mine, too.

I wanted her to go with me. I told her we'd go anywhere she wanted, but until this thing was resolved, she wouldn't leave—and neither could I. I was her legs.

When the police exhausted their leads, Martha talked Sam Jones into giving her detailed copies of the three sets of fingerprints they'd found in the warehouse. She ordered a fingerprint kit along with computer hardware and software on the Internet, and read every book she could find on how to collect, store, and interpret them. She became an expert.

I pushed her around town and took her places she couldn't go on her own so she could secretly lift drinking glasses, forks, and knives from seedy bars and restaurants from which to get fingerprints to scan at home.

Her scrapbook grew to contain more than seven hundred prints catalogued with notes identifying where they came from, when, and to whom they belonged—or most likely belonged. She even took to getting possible suspects to help her with her wheelchair just so she could get their prints off the handles.

That's all she had to go on. That and the name "Jack." But that's all she needed. She'd never give up, and had started to make some people very nervous.

Then she found something.

I had stopped by to pick her up for another outing and leaned in her bedroom door. "How'd we do, Babe?" I asked.

She was comparing two images of fingerprints on her computer screen. Her shoulder-length hair was pulled back in a short ponytail exposing her freckled forehead and thick Brooke Shields eyebrows. Through frameless eyeglasses resting on the end of her nose, she squinted at the screen. "I think we can finally rule out Jackie...Wilkes," she said. The lisp in her speech was now gone and the hesitations were waning. I stepped in and kissed the top of her head.