Chapter 47

FORTY-SEVEN

Saturday August 15, 2010

I need to write this down before I forget, because what I overheard on the phone was too twisted to be believed.

Amy asked where they were going, and Lyle said they would meet their mutual friend, Dalton. That didn’t make sense. The only Dalton I know is Lyle’s former colleague, who recommended Three Fates. He came for dinner a few times, but that was past the girls’ bedtime.

Lyle explained that Dalton was Mr. Delta. And he had a job for her that required twins. My brows pinched as I tried to pick through his ramblings over the sound of Amy’s crying. She said a jumble of words, mostly about not wanting to return to Three Fates, but I managed to piece together that the summer she spent there was terrible and involved getting hurt.

I wanted to hang up and call Lyle, but something compelled me to stay on the line. I slid out of bed and rushed to call him on the landline. It rang and rang, finally switching to voicemail. I left it and listened to the rest of their conversation.

Lyle chuckled, telling her that Charlotte would explain it all to her at Three Fates. Amy gasped. My jaw dropped. Then Lyle gloated that he had hired Charlotte to help extract her and Dolly from the family and assassinate the baby.

I went numb with shock, unable to process the betrayal until Lyle boasted about including allergens in my meals, trying to make me miscarry. When that didn’t work, Charlotte upped the dose. She and Lyle faked her death and he let her smother the baby.

I slid down the wall, my mind going blank, not quite believing my devoted husband would arrange something so horrific.

Amy kept asking what he meant, and Lyle explained in gleeful detail how he had set me up to look like a lunatic, estranging me from my daughters. He needed to extract Dolly and Amy with my consent, and his plan worked.

My girl begged to go home. She didn’t like Delta. She didn’t want to do those terrible things. I listened, my eyes widening, my mind whirring. Had I just handed over my daughter to a sex trafficker?

Lyle said it wasn’t personal. That he needed something in return for throwing away his entire life for a woman who turned out to be a cheating cunt. Amy didn’t know what he was talking about—how could she?

He raised his voice, screaming that he knew I was listening. He called me a deluded bitch for thinking that a man with a nil sperm count could suddenly father a son.

I dropped the phone, my fingers shaking, so I missed what he said next. By the time I picked it up again to catch the tail end of his rant, all I heard were some chilling words about his plan to kill Dr. Forster.

Somehow, Lyle worked out that Dr. Forster was the one who helped with our fertility problems.

Alarm kicked me into gear. I hung up on the landline and called 911, but froze when Amy yelled that it was his fault her baby brother was dead. Then chaos erupted from the other end of the line. Glass broke. Tires screeched. Metal crunched. In between was a cacophony of screams and horns. And then there were sirens, confirming a car accident.

In a panic, I dropped everything, jumped in the SUV, and took to the streets. Three Fates was somewhere in Carmel, New Jersey, and there was only one highway linking it to our suburb. Driving like a madwoman, I tore through red lights and stop signs until I reached the scene of a pileup.

The crowd was too dense to break through, but I caught glimpses of paramedics pulling Amy out of the wreckage and loading her onto a stretcher. At the same time, police officers were extracting Lyle from the driver’s seat. Something was poking out from his neck. At first, I thought it was a piece of debris from the accident, but someone in the crowd shouted that it was a pair of scissors.

I don’t want to think about how they got there.