ORRINGTON — Wendy Bullard stood in her kitchen one recent afternoon and gazed at the brown box addressed to her sister.

She knew she had to open it. There was no one else to do it. She summoned her courage and slowly cut away the brown tape that bound the box together.

When she saw the contents, she began to weep.

The six peony roots inside were a painful reminder of the relationship she had with her sister, Lynn Willette. It was a relationship built on a love that had been tested through 40 years, and finally had blossomed into a friendship unique to sisters.

Wendy’s knees grew weak and she sobbed as she recalled that only five months earlier she had sat on her mother’s couch while her sister flipped through a seed catalog.

“What’s your favorite flower in the whole world?” Lynn asked her older sister.

Wendy told her that she loved peonies. Any color. She loved them all.

On May 21, unbeknownst to Wendy, Lynn had placed an order to the seed company. The flowers would be delivered when it was time to plant them.

That day arrived a few weeks ago, but Lynn was not there to receive them.

Four days after she placed the order, Lynn disappeared. She has not been seen or heard from since.

The disappearance of the 40-year-old Orrington woman is shrouded in suspicion. Only a week earlier she had moved out of a Brewer apartment she shared with James Hicks who 12 years ago was convicted for the murder of his first wife, Jennie Hicks. Jennie Hicks disappeared from the couple’s Carmel trailer in 1977, though her husband was not charged with her murder until 1983. Her body was never found, and in 1984 James Hicks became the first person in Maine to be convicted of murder in a case with no evidence of a corpse, no weapon and no bloodstains.

Hicks also has been heavily investigated for a possible connection to the mysterious disappearance in 1982 of Jerilyn Towers of Newport. The pair last were seen leaving the Gateway Lounge together. She was never seen again.

Such occurrences cast a grave shadow over the disappearance of Lynn Willette, whose last known whereabouts was at the South Main Street apartment she had once shared with Hicks.

Lynn knew of Hicks’ past, but it was a secret she failed to share with her family until the night before she disappeared.

Wendy claims Hicks was unhappy about her sister’s decision to move out of the apartment. Similarly, Jennie Hicks was preparing to move out of the Carmel trailer she shared with her husband when she suddenly disappeared.

During the week after Lynn’s disappearance, police, family and friends scoured gravel pits, woods and back roads for signs of her or her 1988 light blue Toyota Tercel. When she disappeared she was carrying a small brown purse with a green heart-shaped pin attached to it.

The car was found one week later at Dysart’s Restaurant in Hermon. Police examined it for clues that could lead them to Lynn.

They found none.

Hicks, who works at Twin City Motel in Brewer, refused to be interviewed for this story. He says he believes Lynn simply took off and will come home someday.

Police have no new leads. The case is stagnant.

Miracle sisters

Last week, just shy of the four-month anniversary of Lynn’s disappearance, Wendy Bullard sat on the couch in the middle of her Orrington home, sifting through a handful of pictures of herself and her sister.

The black-and-white photos are wrinkled with age. They show Wendy, a 5-year-old with tousled hair, posed carefully on the couch cradling her newborn sister. In another, the two girls, Wendy, age 10 and nearly a foot taller than her 5-year-old sister, stand bundled up on a frozen pond near their home.

They were their mother’s miracle girls. Injured in an automobile accident in her teens, Jane Hincks had been told she could never have children.

The births of her two daughters in 1950 and 1955 were unexpected blessings.

The two sisters grew close through their childhood. With both parents working, they were often each other’s only company in the family’s small ranch home on the Johnson Mill Road.

Wendy quickly adopted the role of her sister’s protector, a role Lynn grew to cherish and depend on, yet at times resent.

“I was always protective of her,” Wendy said recently while curled up in a comfortable chair in her living room. “As we grew, I remained protective of her, but I learned that there were times when I had to mind my own business.”

Lynn, quiet and shy, had one close friend in school and spent much of her time in her bedroom drawing cartoon characters. Her knack for drawing landed her acceptance into Disney’s Cartoon School in Florida.

She chose not to attend the school and instead got married soon after graduating from Brewer High School. The marriage lasted only a short time.

With an uncertain future, Lynn joined the U.S. Army and was based in Oklahoma where she was a heavy-equipment operator.

Returning to her roots

Somewhere in her early 20s, the shy, quiet cartoonist had developed into a fiercely independent woman who could wire a house, fix a broken sink and install carpeting. She also had a passion for gardening.

Before receiving an honorable discharge from the Army, she remarried. But she soon left the marriage and the Midwest behind to return to in Orrington.

“Lynn was always getting involved with men who wanted to protect her. She hated that. Her marriages always ended on good terms. She was always the one who left. She had a strong need to be her own person,” Wendy said.

Lynn’s life during her early 30s led her to California, where she became a licensed paramedic, then to North Carolina and back to Maine. She had two more failed marriages.

Her wayward lifestyle troubled her older and more settled sister who finally spoke up one day as Lynn announced plans to leave Maine again, this time for North Carolina.

Lynn clearly resented the intrusion and the sisters didn’t speak for months.

Lynn realized quickly that her move to North Carolina was a mistake and returned to Maine. It was then that she and her dog moved into the small apartment on South Main Street in Brewer.

A reuniting tragedy

It was the dog that Wendy had helped her pick out in North Carolina that finally would put an end to the tiff that had separated the sisters for months.

Wendy got a call one afternoon from her sobbing mother. Lynn’s dog had been struck by a car and killed in front of Lynn’s apartment. Lynn had seen the accident and was sitting on the side of the road with the dog in her lap.

Passers-by had stopped to help, but Lynn wouldn’t move. Never having had children of her own, her dog was her baby. With Lynn having been protected all of her life by her sister, the dog was hers to protect and she had just seen the animal killed.

Wendy found her sister slumped and sobbing on the side of the road. She was covered in dust from head to toe, the dead dog lying across her lap. Her cheeks were stained with dirt and tears, and a stethoscope dangled from her neck.

“I heard her heart stop beating,” she sobbed to her sister, “and there was nothing I could do.”

Wendy placed her sister’s face between her hands, focusing Lynn’s eyes with her own and convinced her to help get the dog into the truck.

“She went and got the dog’s favorite blanket from the apartment and together we placed her in the truck and took her to the vet to be cremated. The vet came out to the car, but Lynn wouldn’t let him touch the dog. She carried that 90-pound dog into the office herself,” Wendy said.

Lynn’s tragedy reunited the sisters.

Lynn’s relationship with her family continued to deepen as she seemed finally to become comfortable with herself. She worked as a painter and spent most weekends at the family’s home in Orrington helping her mother and also helping Wendy’s family build their home next door.

A new relationship

In 1994, Lynn met James Hicks who hired her to work in the maintenance department at Twin City Motel. The two went on a couple of dates before Hicks told her that he was being forced from his trailer and needed a place to stay.

“I remember that when he moved in he sold everything he owned. Lynn didn’t like that. She kept telling him not to sell his things. She knew then that the relationship was not permanent,” Wendy said.

Hicks quickly interjected himself into Lynn’s entire life, Wendy claims, accompanying her each weekend to the family’s home and helping her do household projects for her mother.

The pair also helped Wendy and her husband with their new home that was being built next door to her mother’s house.

In February 1996, the family knew that Lynn wanted to move out of her Brewer apartment. Wendy claims that Lynn felt as though Hicks was smothering her. They worked together and lived together, and she needed more space.

Slowly Lynn began preparing her mother’s guest room. Painting it, installing a new carpet, even buying a new bed.

The family knew that Lynn was preparing to move into the room, though they knew not to say anything to Hicks.

Before she moved in, Lynn got a new black Labrador puppy. She decided not to move into her mother’s home until they could put up a dog fence. Lynn and her mother agreed to split the cost of the fence, and Lynn was waiting to receive her tax return check so she could pay her share and install the fence.

Her check never came. When she called to find out why, the IRS informed her that the check had been mailed. It apparently had been taken out of her mailbox. She later learned it had never been cashed.

Her mother agreed to pay for the fence herself with the agreement that Lynn would repay her as soon as her replacement check arrived. Meanwhile, Lynn slowly began moving things from the Brewer apartment to her mother’s home.

on Saturday, May 18, Lynn told Hicks that she was moving out. He was angry, Wendy said, but helped her load her things into his red Blazer and take them to her mother’s.

After things were unloaded, he tore out of the driveway. He called Lynn eight times that night with the last call coming at 4:30 a.m., Wendy said.

During the next week, Hicks showed up at the Orrington home almost every night after work.

On Friday, May 24, Wendy asked her sister to go shopping. The women also planned to stop for a drink at a Brewer bar.

By this time, the sisters’ relationship had been rekindled. With her children grown, Wendy had more time to spend with her sister, and Lynn had settled into a comfortable life.

It was perhaps because of this renewed bond that Lynn decided on that Friday night to share the sinister secret about Hicks’ past that she had kept hidden from her family.

Wendy was shocked as she drove into Brewer, her sister sitting beside her telling the tale of a man who served seven years in prison for the death of his wife. Lynn made Wendy promise not to tell anyone else in the family.

Lynn said that Hicks swore he did not kill his wife, that he said he had been “railroaded.”

Meanwhile, Hicks had found out that the two women were out together with plans to go to the Brewer bar.

At the bar, the two women met up with a single man who was a friend of Wendy’s. After having one drink, the threesome left the bar and took a ride in the friend’s convertible. They returned in half an hour and the women went home.

On the way home, Lynn told her sister that Hicks had written her an eight-page letter and wanted her to come by his apartment to read it.

“I asked her if she was going to go and she said she probably would. She was trying to keep things friendly with him, but it was obvious she wanted to end the relationship. She told me that night that they had not been intimate for a year,” Wendy recalled, “and she questioned why he was so intent on maintaining the relationship.”

Lynn normally did not work on Saturdays, but had altered her schedule so that she could be with her family on Sunday for a Memorial Day cookout and to go to the coast with her sister on Monday.

She left for work at about 8 a.m. Saturday, telling her mother that she would return home at about 1 p.m.

It was the last time her family saw her.

A missing sister

She did work that day, painting the motel pool in preparation for its opening after Memorial Day.

She punched out at noon.

When Lynn failed to come home that afternoon, Wendy tried to convince herself that her sister had simply gone shopping.

When she wasn’t home at 7:30 p.m., Wendy drove by the South Main Street apartment and saw her sister’s car in the driveway. Hicks’ Blazer was gone.

“I thought `good, maybe she went there and perhaps something happened at the motel and they both returned to work,”‘ Wendy said.

By 11:30 p.m. Wendy, armed with Lynn’s secret about Hicks’ past, drove back to Brewer. This time Hicks’ truck was in the yard, but Lynn’s car was gone.

“I thought `phew, she’s on her way home. I must have just missed her,”‘ Wendy said.

But when she got back to Orrington, Lynn still wasn’t home and Wendy was a bundle of nerves.

She still had said nothing to her family about what her sister had told her the night before. Wendy paced the floor until out of pure exhaustion she fell asleep at 4:30 a.m.

When Lynn still had not come home the next day, Wendy became frantic.

She told her daughter about Hicks’ past at about the same time that Hicks pulled into the driveway. He had been invited to the family’s cookout and arrived at 10 a.m.

He asked where Lynn was and then asked to speak to Wendy alone.

“He said, `I know Lynn told you about my past. Why has she gone and taken off like this? She knows how this is going to look.’ I knew then that Lynn had told him on Saturday that she had told me about his past,” Wendy said.

Hicks also asked Wendy about the single man that the two sisters had met for a drink Friday night. Wendy is still unsure how Hicks knew they had met the man for drinks.

The cookout was planned for 1 p.m. and when Lynn still had not come home, Wendy decided to call the police. Hicks, who had remained at the house, actually made the first call to the Brewer Police Department.

“Lynn was the family organizer. She was the one who planned all of the family gatherings,” Wendy said. “She had planned this cookout. I knew when she didn’t show up that something was terribly wrong. People have got to realize that Lynn would never have taken off. She came right home every night after work. When she was living at the Brewer apartment, she either came out to see my mother every night or called her as soon as she got home from work. We’re a very close family. She would never have done this.”

As police issued all-points bulletins across the country, Wendy and her family were frantically searching for Lynn.

From dusk to dawn, they tromped through the woods, drove along back roads and combed miles of fields.

Wendy’s daughter recalled her mother calling her at 11:30 one night and insisting they go out looking for Lynn.

“It was simply craziness going on. We were at the end of our ropes. I would be out in the middle of the night searching for her,” Wendy said.

It wasn’t until a few days later when the police were going to hold a press conference about Lynn’s disappearance that Wendy finally told her mother about Hicks’ past.

She sat down with her 73-year-old mother and told her the frightening story that Lynn had related just a few nights before. By this time, Wendy had learned about Jerilyn Towers.

Her mother sat in the living room where she had raised her daughters and cried. When she could speak, she looked at her oldest daughter and said, “She was my baby, you know. She’s gone. I’m her mother and I can feel it.”

These days Wendy’s emotional state seesaws between anger and sadness. Her voice quivers as she thinks of what this has done to her and her family, especially her mother.

“My mother is 73 years old. She needs to know what happened to her daughter.”

Unfinished business

Lynn left behind $150 in cash in her bedroom. Her final check from the motel was never cashed. Her bank account has never been touched.

Her dog, Nicky, remains at the family’s Orrington home bounding around in the pen Lynn put up.

Her bedroom at her mother’s house is as she left it. A yellow rose bush she planted in her mother’s yard is blooming.

Lynn’s mother carefully clips each blossom and carries it into the house, doing what she can to preserve the delicate petals.

Wendy’s husband recently planted the tiny peony roots along the picket fence Lynn had built in front of their home.

Just last week, a neighbor came by carrying slips cut from a variety of bushes in her yard. Months earlier Lynn had asked if she could have pieces of the bushes to transplant in her mother’s yard.

“Lynn had wanted these,” the neighbor said, handing them over to Wendy.

The bushes lean against the house waiting to be planted. Wendy knows that her sister isn’t going to be coming home to plant them, and she knows that she won’t be home in the spring to see the peony stems poke their green heads through the dirt.

She knows that if her sister were OK, she would be home. For the family, it’s now a matter of waiting to see if someday they may find out what happened to her.