Chapter 18

"You did that on purpose," I say to Nicole a few seconds after the door closes behind Declan.

"Did what?" she asks with a snort.

"You weren't really in the shower."

She waggles her brows. "You want to take off my robe and check?"

"No. You're the type of person who'd lean into a ruse. I'll bet you really did take a shower."

She grins before whipping off the robe, revealing an acid yellow tank top and cut-off jeans. For someone who's supposedly a private investigator, she sure doesn't seem to mind attracting attention. "But thank you for the props. I normally would have gone for the full effect, but I was working with a small window of time."

I shake my head. "You're truly demented. Why do you care so much about throwing me at Declan? I told you. There's no way he hurt Dick. He liked Dick."

"I hope he doesn't like dick. That would really get in the way of my plan to get you laid."

Sighing, I say, "I guess I walked into that one. But, seriously, why do you want me to sleep with him if you think he's a potential murderer?"

"It's like I said. I think you'd have fun with the whole Mata Hari thing," she says, her eyes sparkling. "It would do a lot for your personality."

When I glower at her, she lifts both hands, palms facing out. "Okay, okay. I'm pretty sure he didn't kill our father. And I want to help because I'm a good wing woman." She shrugs, tugging off the towel around her dry hair. "Besides, I can tell you like him. You've got this whole moony thing going on whenever he's around, and it's obvious to me you need help…both of you, actually. Damien told me about the whole cookie thing—what a missed opportunity. I asked him to lock you out of the house that night so you and the hot neighbor could finish what you'd started, but he has principles sometimes."

"How inconvenient of him," I say, rolling my eyes.

"It just means I think more of your coping abilities than he does. But he did steal some of hot guy's mail so you'd have to deliver it."

"You guys are unhinged."

She shrugs. "Let's go get drunk. It's been a long few days."

"Are you going to tell me what you were doing while you were gone?"

She lifts her eyebrows. "What do you think?"

I sigh and toe off my shoes. I suddenly need that drink—maybe two of them—but that's the effect of being around my half-sister for more than two minutes. The last several days have been comparatively peaceful.

Boring, a voice in my head whispers.

I follow her into Dick's kitchen and sit at the table, watching as she pours each of us some of the bourbon I threw at her last weekend.

"You missed me, didn't you?" she asks as she sits down across from me, shoving one of the drinks in my direction. When I don't answer, she clinks the glasses together. I hold back a smile, because I might not want to admit it, but I kind of did miss her.

"Are we going to start going through Dick's stuff?" I ask.

She nods, then throws back the contents of her glass, and I remember again that this is different for her. Dick wasn't just a mysterious figure with a house full of weird stuff; he was her father. "What was he like when you were a kid?" I ask before I can stop myself.

"A shit," she says, banging the glass back down on the table. "There was nothing he liked more than fucking people over…and fucking people who weren't my mother." A side of her mouth lifts. "But, sure, he could be funny sometimes. I'm not convinced that makes up for giving me a lifetime's worth of trust issues."

"You have trust issues?" I ask, surprised. She comes off as invincible. Fearless. As a person who'd be a terrible boss rather than work for one. I'd love to have even a sliver of that boss bitch energy—that willful insistence on being herself—but it appears to have skipped my side of the bloodline. Or maybe it came from her mother.

She snorts. "Why do you think I wanted to become a private investigator? I always have a copy of Damien's phone."

"Seriously?" I ask, cocking my head. "He's so devoted to you."

"He is. Tell that to my issues, though. Damien gets it. It's become a kind of game with us. He tries to lead me down rabbit holes, and I do the same with him. It's foreplay."

"You guys are…."

"Not normal, you've said. Neither are you, you know. The way you volunteered to be that Rosings woman's bitch…" She grins and shakes her head. "It was like you were going for the last slice of cake at a birthday party."

I shrug and take sip of the drink. "I like to keep busy, and I'm used to worse."

She raps a palm against the table. "Well, that's a ringing endorsement. She's used to worse, ladies and gentlemen. Isn't there anything you'd like to do? Any dreams you have? Or do you pin all of your hopes on other people?"

I think of the bakery that lives only in my head—the red-and-white-striped awning, the built-in shelves, the glass bake case filled with my as-yet-to-be-renamed Bronuts. "No dreams," I say thickly. Because I'm not going to hand-deliver my dreams to her as if she won't crush them.

"You're lying," she says. "But that's okay. I would have lied too." She's still watching me, though, her gaze hawk-like. "What happened with Agnes Lewis?"

"You know everything," I say, suddenly tired. Desperately tired. "Surely you already know."

"I want to hear it from you."

I don't know what possesses me, but I find myself telling her about Doug's grudge. The fizzy drinks. And Agnes word-vomiting and then vomit-vomiting.

"And you're the one who got blamed?" she asks, her tone harsh.

"I was always the one who got blamed," I say, surprised by the bitterness in my voice. A the time, I'd told myself it was okay—that it was part of paying my dues and everyone paid their dues. Even Agnes had paid her dues, back in the day. Or so the story went. Her father was a famous film director, so when you got right down to it, she was a nepo baby.

"People only walk all over you if you pretend you're a carpet," she says, lifting her eyebrows. "If Dick Ricci taught me anything, it's that people take advantage of people pleasers like my mother."

I rub my chest. It occurs to me that I should have learned that lesson from my own parents—from watching my mother cheat on and use my father, again and again. He still loves her. If she called him tomorrow to say that she realized the Tribe of Light was a racket, he'd probably buy her a plane ticket and pick her up from the airport. I love him, and he's strong in his own way, but I don't want to be like that.

I find myself thinking about the burn book. About the photocopy tucked into the suitcase that will probably never be found. That's the one thing I didn't tell Nicole about, although for all I know she and Damien are the type of couple who tell each other everything.

Nicole's still looking at me, waiting for some kind of response, so I say, "You're not wrong. My parents had that kind of dynamic too, but the opposite."

"So why don't you grow a pair?" Nicole asks. "You can."

"My high school anatomy teacher disagrees with you."

She shakes her head, smiling ruefully, like she can't even with me. "Let's get started. But I'd suggest you drink more of that first. Mom tells me that Dick used to have a truly extensive porn collection."

"Why are there DVDs?"I say with a groan. "Why couldn't he keep everything on his hard drive like a normal pervert?"

"He didn't have the internet, and knowing him, he didn't trust digital files," Nicole says, snickering at the title of the DVD—Little Titty Women, Big Time. "At least he had diverse taste." She points to another DVD case—DD Titties.

"Where's the trash bag?"

She shakes her head. "Nope. They're hilarious, and we're keeping them. You get half of them."

"I hereby bequeath my half to you."

"But you already gave me all of the weed shit. I mean, I understand that you can get more from your boyfriend, but I feel you're being overly generous."

I throw a copy of Tony's Titty Club at her, thankful that she had black latex gloves. Also wondering why she had a big box of black latex gloves.

We've gone through half of the contents of Dick's closet now. There's weed paraphernalia but no weed, about thirty losing scratch-offs he kept for unspecified reasons, a Sam's Club treasure trove of condoms, and a lot of old clothes. One of the T-shirts—This is How Eye Roll—made Nicole's face pucker up for half a second before she shoved it into the donate pile—ten times larger than the keep pile—with a wry comment. I made a mental note to myself to put it aside later. Because something tells me she bought it for him and he kept it. She might not want it now, but it obviously means something to her.

She starts taking more DVDs out of the box—most of them porn, along with Free Willy and a box set of Leave it to Beaver.

"I get it," Nicole comments after I express my confusion about his organizational system. "They're porn DVDs and DVDs that sound like porn."

She finds a tiny key at the bottom of the box and glances at me with shining eyes. "The motherload."

"You think it's important?" I ask, unimpressed. "It could go to anything."

"He hid it in his porn and movies that sound like porn box. It's important, although we'll have to go around fitting it into locks, like we're a porn version of Cinderella."

Sighing, I add the keep pile to a half empty box containing other "keep" items. Even though I didn't know this man had existed until he no longer existed, it's emotionally draining to go through his things. I'm reminded again of all the things that have outlasted him—ridiculous porn DVDs and the condom wrapper that fell out of one of his pairs of pants.

I pull another box over and open it, gasping at the sight of the framed photo on top. Dick Ricci with a woman who resembles Nicole and a small child. He doesn't look like a cheating asshole. Then again, my mother doesn't at first glance look like an occultist.

"You have blond hair," I say.

"Bite your tongue." She grab the photo from me and sets it face down on the floor. "It was only blond for a few years before it turned pink."

"Mhm," I say.

"With a short stop at brown."

I remove a photo album next, and Nicole opens it with a huff before setting aside and grabbing the one beneath it. I'm prepared for her to set that one aside too, but after opening it, she shoves it toward me. "This one's yours.

"Mine?" I ask, my heart beating faster.

"You've got this people pleaser expression that really hasn't changed with age," she says with a half-smile. "I would have recognized you anywhere."

That and she's probably seen childhood photos of me in the deep dive she inevitably did after learning about me.

Heart thumping, I open the album. It's full of photos of me at different ages. A newborn. First time walking. First food. First day of school…

I stop turning the pages and look up at her. "It doesn't mean anything," I say, closing the book. "It's just…my mother must have sent them to him, but it doesn't mean he cared. Anyone can keep photos. Hell. I still have a frame with the photo of the model inside. It doesn't mean I care about him."

"Fuck Richard Ricci," Nicole agrees, lifting an imaginary drink to me. She glances at her empty hand. "And fuck this. I'm getting the bourbon."

She gets up, pausing to touch my shoulder for a second before she leaves the room, and for a second, I'm glad for it.

I don't want to care.

I don't want to think about him, thinking about me. Or to wonder if he's ever regretted his decision to leave Nicole's life and to not be in my life at all. I don't want to think about him at all, other than to be annoyed that his last gesture was to give us a homework assignment—and to die in a manner that's open for interpretation, and inviting of mistrust.

I definitely don't want to feel heat behind my eyes as I open the album again and turn the pages. As I see my life through someone else's eyes.

It seems so small…

By the time Nicole comes back with the bourbon, the tears are falling silently down my cheeks.

"No," she snaps, grabbing the album from me and slamming it shut. "Not happening." She stacks my album on top of hers. "We're burning them."

"What?" I ask, caught off-guard.

"You heard me, don't play dumb. We're going to burn them, and it's going to feel therapeutic and shit. You need to remember he's not your father, Claire, and I didn't have a father. I had a kickass mother, and she was more than enough."

"I didn't," I say with a half-hearted smile. "But I'm guessing you know all about that."

"Who knows, maybe that wrinkled little man really is the reincarnation of god," she says, her lips twitching. "But if so, she should have black-bagged you and brought you to California. I'd kidnap you if I found the key to salvation. No way would I leave my only sister behind to burn."

"Thanks, I think." I feel something dangerous—a softening toward my sister. A warmth. She shoves the bottle of bourbon at me, and I glance at it, thinking about my father's aversion to germs. Then again, I risked drinking from Mrs. Rosings's flask when I thought the end was upon me, and it feels like a different kind of end is upon me now. I take a swig and hand it back. "Are we really going to burn them? Don't you think we might want them at some point? Like that T-shirt you put in the discard pile?"

She snorts. "Why the fuck would I want that? I used my allowance to buy it for him for Father's Day, and he left me and my mom five days later. Fuck that shit. I'm glad he kept it, but only because I hope he sadly wept into it. But no, Claire, I don't need to feel bad about him or the shit he left behind for us to clean up, and neither do you. If we owe him anything, it's to figure out what happened to him so we can collect that damn money, and his ephemeral spirit can fade away happy, knowing he did exactly one thing for his children."

I look at her in amazement. And I acknowledge, for the first time, that my sister, for all her flaws, is a badass. "Okay," I say slowly, getting to my feet. "Let's do it."