EPILOGUE

Lauren felt sick. A sense of dread, of worry, crawled through her bones like some tainted arachnid, leaving its mark on every ounce of her being. Not since that dreaded night, when flames ravaged the house she once called home, when her parents, the people she loved most in the world, were reduced to screams, ashes, and memories, had she felt this sickening sense of dread.

“Are you okay?” A reassuring hand on her shoulder, a kind glance into her eyes.

Lauren took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She fought against the flashbacks, the images of her husband on the kitchen floor, her sister standing above her. She repeatedly told herself that it was going to be okay. It wasn’t going to be like it was the other night; this was different.

Her physical injuries had cleared up—a night in the hospital, a visit to the dentist, a week of high-strength painkillers—but the mental impact would no doubt linger for the rest of her life. She had never come to terms with her parents’ death, but there were times when the weight of burden had lifted, times when she told herself that her sister had made a mistake. She had acted without complete control. A regrettable moment of madness.

This was different—cold, callous, unforgivable. But despite that, she felt like she had to do what she was about to do. She wasn’t going to run away; she was going to face her, stare into her eyes, and tell her how much she hated her.

“Are you ready?”

Lauren nodded and Steven placed his hand gently on her back, leading her down the corridor, their footsteps slow and staggered, as if they wanted to take every opportunity they could to delay the inevitable.

Doctors, nurses, patients—everyone whizzed by them at a frantic pace, a cacophony of noise, an endless march of activity, but they both continued their slow trudge. They followed the signs hanging from the ceilings and plastered on the walls and before long they were walking down a quiet corridor, darker and more subdued than the rest.

They came to a door at the end of the corridor. A deputy sat to one side of it, a paperback novel in his hand. He looked up as they arrived. “The sister and the boyfriend, right?”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Steven corrected, turning to Lauren. “And—”

“Former sister,” she finished.

“Go inside,” the deputy said, leaving them with a smile as he returned his attention to his book. “She’s waiting for you.”

Lauren entered the room first, with Steven close behind.

She had expected to feel fear, a climax of the dread that she had felt all day and one that caused her to collapse in panic or turn and flee. But when she saw her sister, her former sister, all that dread disappeared, and the only thing left was a feeling of relief.

Martha was still breathing, but only with the help of a machine. There were tubes connected to her mouth and nose; patches stuck to her exposed shoulders and arms. A multitude of machines sounded a series of beeps and pings—radar searching for threats and finding none.

“Is she dead?” Steven’s words made Lauren jump, lost as she was in the repetitive noise and the image of her sister, who seemed to be enjoying some undeserved peace and tranquility.

“More or less.” Lauren’s attention had been so fixed on her sister and on the machines that kept her alive that she hadn’t seen the other two people in the room. One of them, a male doctor, wearing an obligatory white coat and carrying a clipboard, was the first to speak. “She’s comatose. Vegetative state. We’re keeping her alive.” He returned the clipboard to its holder at the bottom of the bed and approached Lauren. “Lauren, right?”

Lauren nodded and shook his proffered hand.

“We spoke on the phone. My name is Doctor Fraser. As I said, you’re the closest thing we have to a next of kin, but—” He shrugged and glanced toward the other person in the room, a middle-aged woman wearing a pinstripe suit. “First, I believe Detective Robinson here wants to have a word. I’ll be back shortly. Please, excuse me.” The doctor smiled warmly, nodded a friendly greeting to Steven, and then left, his footsteps hurried as he exited the room and made his way toward the buzzing hive of activity.

The detective greeted Lauren and Steven in turn and then told them to take a seat on the other side of the bed. There was only one chair and Steven offered it to Lauren, but she politely declined, choosing to stand and to keep her distance from her sleeping sister in the process.

Steven sat down with a sigh, holding his heavily bandaged chest and wincing audibly. The detective watched them both, waited until they were comfortable, and then spoke to Lauren. “You’re here today to decide if your sister lives or dies. I figured it was only fair that I tell you what I know.”

“If it’s that my sister was an absolute sociopathic shithead, I already know.”

The detective shook her head. “I’m afraid you don’t know the half of it.”

Lauren and Steven exchanged a concerned glance before turning their attentions to Martha, as if to ensure she was still comatose.

The detective inhaled deeply and exhaled quickly and audibly. “Your sister—”

“Let’s just call her Martha,” Lauren interjected.

“Or the psycho bitch,” Steven offered.

“Martha,” the Detective said with a nod, “had been on our radar for some time. She was released from psychiatric care when she was in her mid-twenties. Given a new identity, a new address. She served her time, so the system gave her a fresh start and only her social support team knew her real identity. Within the year, they began reporting some … let’s call them oddities—”

“She believed she was my grandmother. Bit more than an oddity.”

Detective Robinson nodded. “Agreed, but we hadn’t quite reached that point at that time, and it wasn’t a concern until much later. You see, I didn’t find out about this until I was called out to the murder of an elderly couple. They were in their eighties, married for nigh-on sixty years, never a burden to anyone. The wife was bedridden, riddled with cancer; the husband was her caregiver. For some reason,” she said with a shrug, “someone took an exception to them being alive and murdered them.”

She paused, shuffled on the hard-backed chair, and continued.

“They were your sister’s next-door neighbors. At first, we thought it was a robbery gone wrong. Then we did some digging. By chance, we discovered your sister’s real identity. At first, it didn’t seem that big of a deal. She was a quiet, timid girl. Yes, she’d killed in her youth, but under different circumstances and … there wasn’t much to go on.”

“A murderer lived next to a crime scene, and you didn’t connect the dots?” Lauren asked.

“You’d be surprised how many people have horrible things in their past and go on to live perfectly normal lives.”

“Why would she kill them? Did she have something to gain?”

“Probably not. But as we know, she didn’t always need a reason. There were some rumors about the old man. Despite his age, he had a tendency to get a little handsy with the local ladies. Maybe she took exception to that. Maybe they were on to her. Maybe she just got angry and they got in her way… . We don’t know.”

“So why didn’t you take her in? Why didn’t you charge her? You could have prevented all of this.”

“We had to give your sister the benefit of the doubt. Initially, at least.”

“Why initially?”

The detective sighed and glanced at Martha. “We discovered that her social workers, the ones who knew about her identity, had also died in suspicious circumstances. Both deaths had been ruled accidental, but only because they could never be certain that a third party was involved. One of them, a man named Victor Dunne, apparently jumped from his balcony.”

“And?” Steven said.

“His coffee table was filled with drugs. He’d just bought enough beer for a two-day bender, and he’d arranged for the … services of an escort for a couple of hours after he died. Sometimes people kill themselves in the spur of the moment, and he had so many intoxicants in his system he could have also done it accidentally, but his death came three days after the other social work fell from a cliff while hiking and broke her neck.”

“Jesus.”

Martha had only been living here for a year at the time. Not close enough to be recognized by people from her youth, but always within touching distance. She rented a house by paying a year in advance, and the next thing we know, the neighbors show up dead.”

“She rented?” Steven asked. “She told me her grandmother owned the house.”

Lauren laughed, short and sharp. The detective shook her head. “Her family had never lived there. She had rented for a year before, well, this—” She gestured to the hospital bed. “But she wanted everyone to believe that she’d spent a lifetime there. I suppose it was all part of her game. That way she could hide who she really was, where she came from.”

“Jesus,” Steven repeated.

“Her grandmother, your grandmother.” She gestured to Lauren. “Lived a mile down the road, but she died when Abi was in the psychiatric hospital. That obviously affected her.”

“Martha adored her,” Lauren cut in. “Even after it happened. She forgave her. She was the only one who went to see her. We didn’t have much of an extended family, and the ones we did have basically rejected her. And me. My grandmother was probably the only communication she had with the family when she was in there. I certainly didn’t want to contact her.” She released a long, drawn-out sigh, focused her attention on the detective. “Gran died a few years after the fire. Heart attack. Her friends said it was because of the trauma of losing her child and daughter-in-law and then watching her beloved granddaughter suffer. But she drank like a fish and partied like a twenty-year-old, so that probably had more to do with it.” Lauren allowed herself a smile. “What I don’t understand, is if you knew this, why didn’t you arrest her there and then?”

“We didn’t have any proof. She covered her tracks.”

“So, you left her to kill?” Steven asked. “That poor old lady, the young girl, Robert, her—”

“Robert was undercover.” The detective was visibly uncomfortable. “Tasked with keeping an eye on her, getting as much information as he could.” She shrugged. “He was adamant that she was up to something, but he couldn’t catch her in the act.”

“Shit,” Steven said, the color draining from his face. “I—I—didn’t know. I mean, she killed him, I wasn’t involved, but I thought he was the killer, I thought he was up to something, I may have pushed her into—”

Detective Robinson held up her hand. “It’s okay, there was nothing you could have done. You weren’t to know. Everyone was fooled. Even when the body count began to rise, we never truly suspected she was behind it. She seemed to live a quiet life. Spent most of her time inside—rarely left the house, never interacted with the neighbors.”

“What about the old lady across the road?”

“I think Robert began to suspect her at that point. He contacted us, told us how she had complained about late nights, about her sneaking out in the morning hours. He asked for night-vision cameras, surveillance equipment to monitor her in the early morning hours, but before he had a chance to set them up …” She allowed her voice to trail off.

A silence descended over the room, with only the sound of Martha’s aspirated breathing and the rhythmic bleating of the machines. Lauren thought she noticed a tear forming in the comer of the detective’s eye, but she quickly turned her head, rubbed her face, and hid whatever had been affecting her.

“So, what happens now?” Steven asked.

“Now?” The detective stood. “Now you thank your lucky stars that you survived this crazy bitch, you pray for the ones who didn’t, and you sell your story to the highest bidder.” She cracked a smile, but it quickly faded when she heard the encroaching footsteps of the doctor. Detective Robinson turned to the windows and watched as Doctor Fraser approached.

“Just one thing,” she said to Lauren. “The doctor is going to come in here and ask for your final decision on whether you want to pull the plug or not. When he does, remember that this piece of shit is not your sister, she’s not his girlfriend, she’s not anyone’s friend. She’s the one who killed your husband, tried to kill you, murdered an officer of the law, and took the lives of several others.”

The doctor entered just as the detective finished her statement. Lauren closed her eyes as she heard the door shut behind her, picturing the chaos that her sister had caused, the destruction she had brought to her family and several others. When she opened her eyes, Doctor Fraser was standing in front of her, a practiced look of compassion on his face.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, standing, feeling more assured and more confident than she had since the incident. “I’ve made my decision.”