“Fuck you! I could gargle with diarrhea and my breath would still be minty-fresh compared to yours.”
I gasped, clapping my hand over the “O” of my mouth. “Goodness, Sue, don’t tell me you’re hawking Diarrhea Mouthwash next for ShitNaturals. What is with you and excrement? It’s getting weird now.”
Sue snatched an oily frying pan off the stove and flung it at my head.
I ducked, dropping to the floor and whipping out my second phone as she charged me. “Back off!” I belted. “Everything I’ve said is being recorded as a voice note headed straight for Officer Davis. Come near me and I hit send.”
Her expression was terrible. Straight snarling like a wild animal, Sue took one jerky step back, then another.
“Better.” Standing up, I cleared my throat. “Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, I’d gotten to the part where the real winged specter of death swooped down and murdered the sweet woman who was like a second mother to us, but I really should back up to how you faked your death.”
Sue bared her teeth at me. “Sure, go ahead, but you should know, Officer,” she called, raising her voice, “that everything this psycho says is a lie. If I really died, why did she steal my identity and pretend to be her dead twin? What kind of Appa-fucking nutcase does that?”
I clenched my jaw, refusing to rise to her bait. “The car accident was faked,” I gritted out. “It all seemed real to me, but in actuality, it was just another performance.
“The deer wasn’t real,” I dropped. “Or I should say, it was real, but it wasn’t alive. It was a stuffed deer mounted on a rigged pulley hooked up to fishing line. When I came flying around that corner, Reynard pulled and sent that oversized horned doll flying into the street. I crashed, conked my head on the dash, and was out.
“That gave you and your boytoy plenty of time to put some torn-up deer limbs and blood on the road, and replace my sister with your body double, Tracy Williams.”
“Tracy Williams?” she snorted. “The girl who was just at the post office signing strangers’ wills? Now she’s in the car with you pretending to be me? Honestly, you’ve got to stop watching all those murder shows, they’re messing with your brain.”
I went on like she hadn’t spoken. “I’ve seen photos of Tracy Williams all over the news. She was approximately our same height and body type. It was crazy how well that worked out for you. You didn’t have to go and killanotherinnocent person to pass off as yourself. You just had to dye Tracy’s hair, put her in your clothes, and smash her face enough that all I could identify was her eyes.Our eyes,” I stressed. “I saw a body next to me with purple eyes and believed it was you, because of course I did. Humans take shortcuts in their understanding. The simplest explanation is their favorite.
“What came next you couldn’t be sure of, but that’s why you spent the whole car ride going on and on about how perfect your life was, while digging at how shitty mine was,” I said. “You were needling and manipulating me into concluding that my life would be better if I took over yours... so I did.
“I cleaned up your crime scene and threw Tracy Williams’s body off a cliff, and that’s how she washed up on Bonsai Beach shortly after.” My voice shook. “Because of me.”
She hummed again. “Wow. You’re confessing to a lot of serious felonies, little sis, but I’m still not hearing any proof that I was involved. Who in the hell told you I was working with Reynard? I barely ever spoke to him.”
“You more than spoke to him. You’re the reason why he dumped a shiny career in the trash,” I said. “He didn’t start charging all those fake charges to the estate because he woke up one day and suddenly decided to become a monster. He did it because he was waking up every day in bed with a monster.” I smiled. “You.
“You started sleeping with him and got into his head. Who knows what you said to convince him to start stealing from the estate for you. It was probably some boohoo sob story about the husbands who canceled your credit cards and blocked you from the joint accounts. Or maybe it was the tale of the mean mommy and lawyer who had an iron grip on your inheritance. Either way, it worked.
“And when you realized all you needed to get half a billion dollars was for Omma to die, you convinced Reynard to start shortchanging her care, denying her the meds she needed to be well—all around trying to drain the life out of her even faster, so she’d just finally fucking die,” I cried. “But too bad for you, our mother was a tough old broad. Six months she was on hospice—six months!
“She just kept hanging on with no funeral in sight, and you couldn’t fucking stand it. But,” I stressed, “you were going to struggle on to the end until Omma did the one thing that sealed her fate. She cut you out of the will, giving everything to me, and she told you so in a loud, screaming match that the whole manor heard.” I whistled. “I don’t know what set her off, but it had to be bad for her to say she wished she bashed your head in with the rolling pin and threw you off a cliff.”
I snapped my fingers. “Maybe she found out you were using her nurse to steal from her while you counted the days until she died.” I shook my head, tsking. “I know parents are supposed to forgive their kids anything, but even Hera, the goddess of motherhood, would throw her kid off a mountain for that.
“Either way, you werenotgoing to sit by and watch everything go to me, so you put your plan into motion,” I continued while Sue rolled her eyes. She was really going to stand there and play it like I was spinning fairytales. “I always thought it was a little weird how everyone kept mentioning the fight, and how vicious it was. It happened just before I arrived, but the Omma I walked in on was weak, dreamy, and asleep twenty hours out of the day. How was it possible that only a couple weeks before, she had enough energy to crush your spirit to dust, but now all of a sudden she was too weak to lift her eyelids?” I held out my hands. “But then I read those invoices... and saw the bulk order of sleeping pills, morphine, and a mess of other hallucinogenic drugs that keep a person out of it, and pliable.
“Reynard was doping her,” I announced. “Carefully keeping her sailing on a river of happy drugs so she wouldn’t know which way was up, and it was all because Omma made the mistake of showing you the newest copy of her willbeforeshe turned it over to the estate lawyer. He had no idea you’d been disinherited—confirmed by the fact that he believes he’s been talking to Soo Min over the last couple weeks, and he’s told me all the details of Soo Min’s coming inheritance, when in actuality, Sue doesn’t get shit.
“With the doping going off without a hitch, the next thing to do was pluck your nature-made replica out of Willingsworth and put me in place in time for the party. Because it wasallabout the party.”
Sue groaned. “Is there an off-ramp from Delusion Highway to the real world? And if there is, can I get off there now?”
“Oh my gods, can you shut the fuck up for five minutes,” I screeched. “I swear, if you ever stopped running your mouth, you’d die!”
“This from the boring bitch who’s been blathering on about nothing for the last ten minutes!”
“It’s not boring. I’ll give you that much, Sue, your plot to kill your own mother wasn’t lazy or boring in the least. You thought of everything,” I threw back. “You commissioned the dress and rented the jewels knowing it’d come with a million bodyguards. You neededSoo Minto have a rock-solid alibi with witnesses and a dozen video cameras on her at the same timeSoo Minmurdered her mother. Everyone else would be a suspect... except you.
“You stole the guys’ credit cards and paid for that over-the-top, eye-wateringly expensive party because even though you told them you were done with them and wanted out, you needed them to stick around long enough to attend the party and then collect the refundable deposits,” I said. “Theywere in financial straits. They couldn’t walk away from sixteen million dollars, and if they were staying until after the anniversary party, they had to attend the party—not doing so would’ve looked too strange to all of their families, friends, and clients.
“You left nothing to chance,” I hissed. “Everything from it being a white party to Reynard securing a photographed alibi was planned out. That night, after Reynard left and we were all partying, you slipped out of his locked bedroom out of sight of every guard, killed Omma, and then shot under the bed when you heard the footsteps.
“Alex came into the room searching for the drive, and you witnessed it all. That’s why the clothes and the drive disappeared from under the step. You watched him duck into the servants’ entrance, and then you took it with you, because you couldn’t risk the police finding his hiding place.
