VICTORIA PUT A FINGER to her lips, slipped silently to the door, closed and locked it, her fingers trembling, her eyes wide and full of fear. “Where’s your phone?” she whispered.
“Bag. Front door,” I mouthed back with a shiver. “Yours?”
“Kitchen counter. What are we going to do? What are we going to do?”
“Victoria? Where are you?” Hugh’s voice was closer now, his footsteps traveling down the hallway, bouncing off the walls. The door handle rattled, making us both gasp. “Are you in there?” he said “Victoria? What’s going on?”
She grabbed hold of me, her entire body trembling, and I knew, finally understood how much she feared this man, a person she was supposed to trust with her life. For years she’d pretended to everyone, and herself, that their marriage was perfect, knowing people envied her, envied them, but it had all been a lie, and now I was the one who had to protect her.
“Open the door,” Hugh called out, banging again. “Victoria? Open up.”
“Go away,” I said, taking a step closer. “Go away now.”
“Eleanor?” Hugh said. “What the hell? Open the door.”
“No.”
“Where’s my wife?” He pounded on the door again. “What have you done—”
“She’s gone. I’m collecting some of her things.”
“What do you mean she’s gone? Gone where? I don’t believe you. Open the door. Now.” The pounding resumed, harder and louder. “Victoria? Victoria? Talk to me.”
“Help me,” Victoria whispered. “I don’t know what he’ll do if he finds me here. He won’t let me go. He’s said it a thousand times. He’ll never let me go.”
“I won’t let him hurt you,” I said, crossing over to the bed and grabbing the gun, closing my shaking fingers over it, the cool steel heavy in my hand.
“It’s not loaded,” she said. “It’s useless.”
“Not if I can make him think it is.”
“Eleanor,” Hugh yelled and Victoria let out a scream. “Open the door, now or I’ll kick it in, I swear to God.”
“I have Victoria’s SIG,” I said, planting my feet on the floor, hips wide. “Leave, or—”
With an almighty crack, the door flew back on its hinges, coming off one of them and lodging itself, lopsided, into the wall. Hugh stood in the doorway, his right foot raised, his face barely recognizable. He looked like a beast, ugly and twisted, and that was when I knew Victoria’s life wasn’t the only one in danger.
His eyes darted from me to Victoria, who had slid to the floor and cowered, her hands over her face, shoulders shaking. She let out another scream as he lunged for me, and my immediate self-preservation reflex was to pull the trigger.
Another crack, from the gun this time. Hugh lurched, his head snapping back before our eyes met again. A look of bewilderment appeared on his face as he put one hand to his chest, his fingers touching the patch of deep crimson that had already appeared. His knees buckled and he went down on the carpet with a dull thud, wavering for a full three seconds as if he were about to say a silent prayer. Another one, two beats, and he crashed to the floor without putting out his hands to stop the fall or making another sound.
“Oh, my God,” I shouted. “Jesus Christ. No! No! It was loaded. The gun was loaded.”
As I turned to Victoria, all I saw was a flash of something coming at me, something turquoise and made of glass. It hit me on the side of the face. Pain erupted through my skull in the same way it had when I’d been attacked in the street, except this time, I knew my assailant. Unable to speak or cry out, I went down, too, falling a few feet away from Hugh, whose eyes were open, unblinking, already glazed over.
Victoria grabbed hold of my shirt and rolled me onto my back. She yanked on my hands, curling my limp fingers before scraping them across her face and chest, leaving angry, deep red gouges in her buttery skin. I pulled my hands away, but she tugged down my sleeves, digging her nails into my flesh, so I tried to roll over and push myself up. I let out a cry as she hit me again with what I now knew was the paperweight from her bedside table, and shoved me onto my front, this time pulling my hands behind me, tying them together with what felt like a scarf. I could barely move, barely think, and as I tried to pull my hands away again, she twisted my thumbs back so far, I thought I heard them snap.
“V-Victoria...stop. Please. L-let...m-me...go,” I stammered.
She didn’t answer, didn’t utter a word. Instead, she got to work on my feet, tying them together, too, immobilizing me completely. Once done, she stood over me, looking down with a satisfied grin on her face.
I didn’t understand. Wanted to ask why she was doing this, why she was hurting me, but my eyes rolled into the back of my head. The entire room faded to black, pulling me toward unconsciousness as everything began to soften around the edges. Everything except the grip of her fingers as she knelt down and tugged on my hair, and the sound of her ice-cold voice as she put her mouth to my ear.
“Be still now,” she whispered. “There’s a good sister dear.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH time passed until I came to, but when I opened my eyes, slowly, painfully, I managed to lift my head and turn it to one side. From my vantage point—flat on my stomach, my hands still bound behind me, my feet tied at the ankles—I made out two police officers. They stood in the doorway of Victoria and Hugh’s bedroom, their bulky silhouettes obstructing the last slivers of light fading behind them like wispy ghosts.
My eyes landed on the crumpled body lying six feet away. I didn’t want to see it again. Didn’t need to. I knew Hugh had drawn his final breaths, his once strong, healthy heart had stilled forever. Although I turned away, I could smell the rusty scent of his blood—a dark, sticky pool seeping deep into the carpet as it inched its way toward the bed.
“It was self-defense,” I croaked, making the officers turn. “He attacked—”
“You’re lying,” Victoria shouted, pushing past the policemen and silencing me as a sob escaped her lips. “Stop lying. You threatened me. You shot him. You killed him.”
“No.” I looked up at the three of them staring down at me with varying expressions of judgment and disgust. “I didn’t mean to—”
“He came home and she murdered him,” Victoria said before collapsing against one of the officers—the taller man with hair darker than coal, caramel skin and big brown eyes, not the pallid potbellied one with the acne-scarred face, despite the latter standing two feet closer. As the officer’s thick, muscular arms went around her tiny waist, she turned to me, her voice hoarse.
“How could you do this?” she said. “You said we were best friends.”
I felt my mouth fall open, my words—protests—wrapping themselves around my throat, squeezing tighter and tighter until I thought I’d pass out again. My head throbbed, and I attempted to convince myself I’d somehow landed in the middle of a nightmare. None of it was real. I’d wake up soon. Oh, how I wanted to wake up soon.
“Hugh warned me.” Victoria spoke to the officers now and let out another sob she tried to stifle by covering her mouth with a hand. “He warned me this morning. Said she’d stolen from us. He wanted to fire her but I told him not to because I didn’t believe him. Then she kept calling and calling, and came over, so I asked Hugh to come home. And now my husband’s dead. Oh, my God. He’s dead. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”
I tried to fathom for how long she’d rehearsed those looks of pretend panic, the sounds of disbelief and despair. Minutes, days or weeks, it didn’t matter. It had been long enough to distill them to pure perfection. She pressed herself against the officer’s chest and tilted her head so only I could see the small, sly smile gently pulling her lips upward, emphasizing the cold, dark pools her eyes had become.
It was the moment I knew nothing I said would make a difference.
Nothing I did would get t
hem to change their minds.
They already believed her.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CLEAR-CUT, THOSE WERE THE words my lawyer, Ms. Allerton, said when we met, after she offered to take on my high-profile case pro bono, explaining it would raise the notoriety of her firm when I asked why. At first I’d argued and fought, insisted and wept, before accepting I’d been unequivocally fucked by my half sister. I watched Ms. Allerton’s ruby-red lips as she talked, but didn’t hear her words. Instead I let my mind wander off in different directions. I pondered how she got her lipstick to stay on for so long, if it smudged when she ate, ending up on her brilliant white teeth. It’s understandable—I was in shock.
“The evidence against you is compelling.” Ms. Allerton tap-tapped her notepad with the cap of her fountain pen. “It doesn’t look good, but it’s by no means over.”
She didn’t need to lay everything out, but she did, anyway. There was the fact I’d lied to Victoria and Hugh about who I was, right from the beginning. There were my clandestine visits to Stan, which he and his assistant, Steven Marshall, were all too happy to confirm. The photographs they’d found—many, many photographs—on my old Nikon, ones of Stan and Madeleine, and Victoria, all of them taken when they’d had no idea I was there. A few of them were leaked to the press, who labeled me a stalker, especially when somebody told them I’d contacted Victoria via LinkedIn for the website job without sharing my true identity.
And then there were all Victoria’s things. Her engagement ring they’d found hidden away in my bedside table, her red shirts and the earring she’d “lost” at the spa, which had turned up in my bathroom. The jewelry I insisted she’d given me, but which, as it turned out, Hugh had custom-made for her as Christmas presents—they even had the receipt and store footage to prove it, in which you could hear Hugh say how excited he was to have found the perfect gift for his perfect wife. Zirconia, my ass. They found a silver rabbit ornament tucked away in the back of my bedroom drawer, too, my fingerprints all over it, and the undated check Victoria had written out with my pen. She’d even changed her handwriting so it looked like a forgery.
As if all that wasn’t enough, there were the dozens of frantic phone calls I’d made to Victoria the day Hugh died, the neighbor who confirmed I’d slipped past her to get into the building and the other who’d shared how I’d banged on Victoria’s door so hard, he thought it might break. And, of course, the coup de grâce: my prints on her SIG, and the gunshot residue on my hands. Mine, not hers, because she hadn’t fired the gun.
“Hugh and Genie were having an affair,” I insisted. “He was going to kill Victoria. He increased her life insurance. He killed his first wife, Natalie. Look into it. It’s all true.”
Ms. Allerton shook her head. The nude photos in Hugh’s office weren’t of Genie, they were of Victoria. She and Hugh often engaged in role-play, apparently. Victoria still had the blond wig and the photographs on Hugh’s camera to prove it. As for the tattoo—upon closer inspection similar but not identical to Genie’s—it had been one of a few temporary ones, all part of Victoria’s persona, part of the excitement and mystique she liked to build. My eyes had seen what they’d wanted to see—what she’d wanted me to see. And the life insurance? They’d both increased their policy amounts, and had the beneficiaries changed.
Victoria was in for a hell of a payday, and I’d been played harder than Go Fish.
But none of those things were as hard to come to terms with as hearing how Lewis had told the police I’d shared the details about Victoria and me being half sisters with him right from the start. My refusal to tell her, he’d said, was because I’d wanted to get to know her, which immediately got spun as “infiltrate her life.” I was branded crazy, jealous, the half sister from hell, a madwoman.
I didn’t blame Lewis for his testimony. All he’d done was tell the truth, but the prosecution reveled in arguing I’d latched onto Victoria because Dad had died, and I didn’t have a relationship with my mother or my sister, Amy. The last one wasn’t hard to prove. Neither of them showed up when I was arrested, and I doubted they would ever visit me in prison. A clear albeit mostly false picture of me emerged. Manipulative, deceitful, blinded by envy...almost ironic how at one point that had all been true.
Facedown and tied up on the bedroom floor, next to the man I’d killed, I’d known I was in trouble. What I hadn’t bargained for were the lengths Victoria had gone to, the strategic planning and patience it must have taken. Under any other circumstance, I’d have been in awe.
“This is a good deal,” Ms. Allerton had said when she’d come back with an offer, laying out the consequences if I accepted the lesser charge of manslaughter.
“Lesser charge?” I whispered. “It’s eighteen years. Eighteen.”
“Yes,” she’d said, crossing her slender legs and rearranging the long string of blue beads hanging around her neck. “But if this goes to trial, you have to understand you could be convicted of murder. Life in prison. Are you sure it’s a risk you’re willing to take?”
I wasn’t. And so, a few months after shooting Hugh, I stood in front of a judge, bowed my head and answered, “Guilty,” when asked how I wanted to plead.
Victoria’s victim impact statement was the final, crushing blow, and a manipulation masterclass. “She’s pregnant,” she said quietly, looking drawn and skinny, continuing to play the part of the beautiful, grieving widow to perfection. “But I want to show mercy, Your Honor, and I hope you will, too. The only reason I agreed to the manslaughter plea is because she’s having a child...and whatever she did, the fact is, she’s still my half sister. She’s my family by blood. And...I have to keep believing that counts for something.”
The judge had dabbed at the corner of his eye, setting off an entire row of people at the front while I sat there, according to the news reports, stone-faced and unrepentant.
The news of the murder went national, Victoria’s face splashed across the front pages of the papers, and everywhere online. Even in prison, I couldn’t escape her.
“I thought we were friends,” she said during one of her many interviews. “She even told me we were best friends. I can’t believe how naive I was, how stupid.”
“Why do you think she killed your husband?” the reporter said, her voice soft, coaxing.
Victoria sighed and bent her head before looking up from underneath those goddamn eyelashes, the ones she’d used to enchant everyone with, witch powers I now knew for sure she had. “I’ve asked myself that question a million times,” she said, her voice silky smooth, everyone in the room gulping it down like hot chocolate. “How could she hate us so much? What did we do to deserve what she did? Other than her being jealous, I just don’t know.”
“And do you think you’ll ever find any kind of peace?”
“Peace?” She shook her head. “I think peace is still a long way out of reach.”
Victoria was a far better actor than Amy, and as I listened to her words, watched her swipe at her tears with a crumpled tissue in her hand and a pained expression on her face, I wondered how I’d got everything so wrong.
So utterly and completely wrong.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Ten months later
I GAVE BIRTH TO YOU on a Wednesday, Gemma, four days after my sentencing, to all glorious seven pounds, nine ounces of you. I sweated and screamed, panted and writhed—not because I wanted to force you out of me, even though I’d become so big I could barely sit. No, if it had been up to me, I’d have carried you ten times as long, and longer still. Because I knew once you’d left my body, they’d take you from me. For the next eighteen years, I couldn’t be your mom, not properly, no matter how much I wanted to.
The nurse let me hold you for an hour, gave me tablets to stop my milk from coming, and then they took you, and I thought I might die from the pain of losing you. Not long after I signed the custody papers for your fat
her, each pen stroke a cut to my shattered heart. Although it’s better this way, I know it is, and he promised he’d come once a month, on a Wednesday, so I can see how much you’ve grown. He’s a good man, your father. A wonderful man and I have to stop myself from thinking how different everything might have been if I’d listened to him.
My heart soars as I’m summoned to the visiting room, despite its clinical look and its hard white tables and seats bolted to the linoleum floor. It soars because it’s Wednesday, and today you’re exactly six months old. I’ve made you a little card on the pink paper one of the officers gave me. I drew a picture of me holding you, which my cellmate said was “nice,” and I know that means it’s awesome, because she never compliments anyone on anything.
I walk into the visiting room and look around, my heart beating fast, my smile growing as I try to find your beaming face among the tables. You have teeth now, two of them at least, and I can’t wait to see. But you’re not there, and neither is your daddy. Instead I see the devil herself, her smooth mahogany hair tied back in a ponytail, her long legs crossed in front of her, disappearing underneath an emerald dress that matches her eyes.
She’s chosen the table the farthest away from everyone, including the guards, undoubtedly so no one can hear us. I’m certain she’s here for me, so I walk over, lower myself into the chair, unable to take my eyes off her. Why has she come? Where are you, my sweet little Gemma? It’s already been a month and I need to see you, smell the top of your head and take in your scent. Without it, I’ll surely wither away to nothing.
I haven’t seen her—I can’t bring myself to think her name—in person since the sentencing, and yet here she sits, a ghost of my past still haunting my present, and smiles.
“Hello, sis,” she says. I don’t reply. “It’s good to see you, too. Wow, you’re slim.”
She means it. I’m thinner than ever before, all muscle and sinew. Working out has had that effect, the group therapy sessions, too. At least that’s what I let people believe. But I know my bingeing became a thing of the past when the void inside me filled with a million mountains of rage. It took locking me up to rid myself of some inner demons, only to see them replaced by other, darker ones. Ironically I miss the comfort of my curves. It’s something else she’s taken. I won’t tell her this, of course.
Sister Dear Page 29
