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Chapter 33
33
Once Audrey has made her exit, Dan leaves his sister’s house, Lisa hurrying to follow. He gets into his wife’s car and slams the door. She climbs in beside him. He backs the car out of the driveway with a squeal and takes off down the street.
“Slow down,” Lisa cries.
He eases his foot off the gas, but his hands clench the steering wheel angrily. “They think I did it, Lisa, my own sisters,” he says grimly. He negotiates a corner, going too fast. “And that bitch, Audrey—her and her big mouth.” He thinks of what she knows about him, what she might tell. The expected words of comfort from his wife don’t come. He glances at her. Her face is blank.
• • •lisa is reeling with shock. She sits in the passenger seat, one hand against the dashboard, as Dan drives wildly. Dan is speaking to her, but she’s not listening. She’s still trying to come to grips with what just happened. Catherine and Jenna think Dan murdered their parents. That much is clear. The question is, what does she think?
She has begun to have doubts.
At first, she didn’t believe Dan had anything to do with it. She knows what clothes he went out in that night. There was no blood on them. So she didn’t mind lying for him to the police.
And then the detectives found the package of disposable coveralls. She’d stood at the opening to the garage, her mind stuttering. If he’d worn the suit and booties, he wouldn’t have been covered with blood at all. He could have come home in clean clothes.
And Catherine—how could she find the bodies and say nothing? It’s disturbing. That’s not like Catherine at all. Surely she wouldn’t do that unless she was trying to protect her brother, give him time to get rid of evidence. That’s the problem—she believes Catherine over her own husband. Her blood runs cold. He was gone a long time that night.
She believes his sisters want to protect him, even though Dan doesn’t see it that way. If they can live with it, maybe she can too. Dan is about to inherit a fortune. Unless he’s convicted.
But Catherine and Jenna don’t have to actually live with him.
And Audrey—why are they all clearly so afraid of her?
• • •ted watches Dan and Lisa drive away and closes the door behind them. Slowly, he returns to the living room. Ted sits down heavily beside his wife and leans back against the sofa. He’s exhausted by all of this. He’s grateful that his childhood was relatively simple, as an only child. Catherine’s family is a fucking train wreck.
Jenna stands up. “I’ll be going, then. Let me know if anything happens.”
“I’m going too,” Irena says.
They almost seem to have forgotten about Irena, sitting in her corner, Ted thinks. He wonders if she feels mostly irrelevant to them now.
Catherine walks them to the door.
Ted closes his eyes. Soon he hears his wife come back into the living room, feels her sit down on the sofa beside him.
He’s thinking about what Dan said. He was lashing out—Dan was against the ropes and he knew it. Catherine and Jenna are trying to help him. Ted has decided he’s staying out of it; he’ll let the chips fall where they may.
But it’s niggling at him, what Dan said. Accusing Catherine, accusing Jenna. Because the truth is, Catherine was there that night. And Ted hasn’t come to terms with the fact that Catherine was able to come home and pretend that everything was fine. He’s not sure how well he really knows her anymore. “Why did he say that, about the disposable suits?” Ted asks, turning his head to look at her.
“What?”
“That you knew where they were. How would you know?”
She shakes her head dismissively. “Jenna and I were over there one day for lunch when he was working on the attic, that’s all. We laughed at how he looked in his hazmat suit. I think you were golfing that day.”
Ted averts his eyes. “And what was Audrey talking about?”
Catherine huffs. “Ignore her. She’s just angry that she didn’t get the money. She’s harmless.”
But Ted can tell she’s worried. And it makes him worry too.
• • •jenna drives home, heading north from her sister’s comfortable suburb. She’s soon on the outskirts of town, and then onto the dirt roads of the countryside. As she drives, she thinks about how much she hates her aunt Audrey. Audrey has always seemed to like her least. She’s not sure why. You would think her ranking of favorites would align with her parents’: Catherine first, then Jenna, then Dan. But Audrey seems to have her own preferences, ranking Jenna in last place. It’s not like Jenna’s ever done anything to her.
It’s clear that Audrey is threatening them all. She would never have dared to do that when their father was alive. But she’s obviously feeling vindictive and reckless. She thinks she’s been robbed of a fortune, and that it’s their fault.
Audrey is privy to the family secrets, most of them anyway. She knows things about them, things that might prejudice the police, and the public, against them. Audrey knows, for instance, about Jenna’s early violent streak.
When Jenna was six years old, furious at Dan for teasing her, she’d pushed him right off the top of the slide in their backyard. He’d fallen backward with a scream and landed hard on the ground. It could have been much worse—he’d only broken his arm, not his neck. Catherine had seen it happen and gone crying to their parents.
“What kind of child pushes another one off the top of the slide?” Audrey gasped, horrified, making more of it than she should have. Unfortunately, she happened to be there that day. Then she’d stayed behind with their father while their mother took Dan to the hospital to have his arm put in a cast. Jenna sat under the kitchen table playing with her Barbies and listened to Audrey and her father talk about her. “You’d better keep that temper in check, young lady,” Audrey had said as she left. Jenna has disliked her ever since.
Following that, she’d given Catherine a concussion, and Audrey knew about that, too, because their father told his sister everything about the kids, the worse the better. Jenna had picked up a plastic bat and struck Catherine, who had fallen and banged her head on the pavement, when they were having an argument. Catherine had been rushed to the hospital. Their parents told people that Catherine had fallen while playing.
Jenna had been properly punished for that one.
• • •at home that night, Audrey watches the eleven o’clock news in her pajamas, sipping a chamomile tea. There’s nothing new about the Merton case. She sits in bed, seething at the television set, thinking unhappily about her lost inheritance, which she had so hoped to be able to enjoy. She’d imagined a house of her own in Brecken Hill, fine clothes, and trips to Europe and the Bahamas. There’s brief footage of them searching Dan’s house earlier that day, but she has no idea if they found anything incriminating. They’re not saying. She remembers how frightened she was when Dan came toward her car window, the rage in his fist as it hit her car.
Now that she’s had time to think about it, she can hardly believe she crashed the family gathering at Catherine’s afterward. Where had she found the courage?
She decides to pay a visit to the detectives in the morning.
