Now that I was starting to sober up, I could feel the regret. Why on earth did I open up to Candace? God only knew what she thought of me after discovering that my husband had cheated on me, so I had stalked him, and now he was conveniently dead. I might as well have confessed to murder.
It was too late to take it all back or plead drunken rambling. Note to self: Never drink a whole bottle of wine alone. In my defense, the alcohol had done most of the talking, and some of the conversational details were a little vague. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about what I had said or left unsaid, but as snippets of the conversation pieced together in my head, the big picture was concerning. I had said too much.
I checked the time. Candace was down for her afternoon nap, and Lane was working at the hospital until dinnertime. I still had a couple hours before the kids were due home from school, so I grabbed my keys and headed to the car. I couldn’t stand another minute in this house. I stood beside the car, aiming my key fob at the moving target as the world tilted back and forth. Damn, maybe I wasn’t as sober as I thought. My first attempt at unlocking the car failed as I hit the lock button on my fob, then the alarm.
“Come. On!”
As the alarm blasted throughout the neighborhood, I punched every button on the fob until it shut off. In the haze of slippery thoughts I knew this was a bad decision. A terrible decision to drive. Don’t drink and drive. I’d heard the slogan repeatedly since I was a teenager. But right now, in this moment, I didn’t care about anything, because chances were high I was going to be arrested soon anyway. Might as well go out with a bang.
It took four tries for me to properly insert the key into the ignition. Then two tries to successfully back out of the driveway. It took so much focus I strained my eyes, igniting a headache. The stretch of street before me was wobbly and blurred, so I leaned forward in my seat, nearly pressing my face to the windshield. As I turned onto the main street, a police cruiser pulled up behind me at the stoplight.
“Crap!” I shouted to the dead air. How long had he been following me?
Concentrate, I reminded myself. Just drive normally. Except that the street was swimming and swaying and making it hard to drive normally. Turn right. Blinker on. Green light. Slowly hit the gas. It was like being sixteen, learning how to drive for the first time, with my mother screaming directions at me from the passenger seat: Put your blinker on! Accelerate slowly! Red light half a mile ahead! Slow down before you kill us! Every instruction an exclamation point.
I prayed over the next mile as the cop car followed me, mumbling, “Pleasedon’tswerve pleasedon’tswerve pleasedon’tswerve.” Several glances in the rearview mirror later and he was still there, still following me. Two turns, always behind me. Was he tailing me on purpose? Had Detective Meltzer told him to keep tabs on me?
A burst of blue and red lights sent my heart into overdrive. The siren cut through my concentration. He was pulling me over. My first DUI. I slowed to a crawl, aiming the car toward the berm, and prayed he wouldn’t give me a Breathalyzer test. If I could talk my way out of it, I still had a slim shot of not getting caught. I hadn’t broken any driving laws . . . that I knew of, at least. As I mentally prepared my defense—I thought I was going the speed limit, Officer. I used my signal for every turn, sir—the cruiser shot out from behind me, flying into the open lane beside me, careening ahead with siren blaring and lights flashing.
It hadn’t been for me after all. Thank God for bigger criminals than me. Heart attack averted!
At last I reached the turn-in to my mother’s subdivision. Exhaling a breath of relief—had I held my breath the entire drive here?—I passed my mom’s house twice before crookedly pulling into the driveway.
I stumbled my way out of the car, up the walkway, and onto the porch stoop and dizzily knocked. Mom answered in a huff.
“Harper.” Ouch. Her shrill voice hurt my ears. “What are you doing here?”
“I . . . I need you, Mommy. I need your help.”
“Oh my God. Are you drunk?”
So I wasn’t hiding it as well as I thought.
“Nooo,” I blurted out, then tripped over my own foot while just standing there. “Okay, maybe a little tipsy.”
She exhaled an annoyed sigh and dragged me inside by my arm. “Get in here. I’ll make you a coffee. You can’t possibly drive home like this. You’re lucky you made it here alive.”
The fragrance of lilac assaulted my migraine-sensitive nose.
“Sit,” she ordered.
Wobbling my way into the living room, I fell into the first armchair I came to. From the kitchen I heard her tinkering with coffee mugs and the coffeemaker.
“You hungry?” she asked. “You should probably eat something to help soak up the alcohol.”
Silly Mom. I was already two sheets to the wind. No amount of food was going to soak up the wine flowing through my veins. But I was craving something salty, so I shouted, “Got any chips?”
“Lord help me,” she mumbled. “What is wrong with you?”
“I heard that!” I yelled. “Are you mad at me?”
A clatter of ceramic later, Mom entered carrying two mugs of coffee and took a seat on the sofa across from me. While I sobered up on black coffee, Mom topped hers off with cream and sugar.
“No, I’m not mad at you. Disappointed, though, yes.”
“Don’t pull that motherly disappointment on me. I wrote the book on it.” I often used that same line on Elise when she disobeyed. I wonder where I learned it from.
“So what’s going on that has you drunk as a skunk in the middle of the afternoon?” she asked, resting her hand on her bare collarbone.
“Where’s your necklace?” I asked.
“Oh, I must have forgotten to put it on today. I still need to fix that clasp before I lose it. So . . . ? Don’t deflect, Harper. Spill it. What’s going on?”
“Everything’s gone to shit, Mom.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Language, Harper. You know better than to talk like that.”
“Apparently I don’t know better. I told Candace about Ben.”
“What about Ben?”
“That he had been cheating on me. That I saw him at the hotel with the other woman. I don’t think—now I could be wrong, because the details are fuzzy—but I don’t think I told her that Lane and I tampered with the scene that night. But God knows what all I said. The whole conversation is a blur.”
“Oh, Harper.” She plunged back in her seat, shaking her head. Coffee sloshed onto her pants. “That is bad. Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“I wish I was.”
“Certainly you didn’t tell her everything?”
“No, I don’t think so.” I wasn’t sure at all, to be honest. “But more than I should have. I can’t imagine what’s going through her head right now.” I groaned. As Julia Roberts so aptly said in Pretty Woman, “Big mistake. Big. Huge.”
Sipping the black coffee, I winced at its bitterness. “At least I didn’t tell her about Medea Kent.”
“Medea Kent? Who’s that?”
That’s right, I hadn’t told Mom about that fun little discovery. “Oh, the other beneficiary on Ben’s life insurance policy. The name of his mistress.”
“He named his mistress on his life insurance policy? You can’t be serious.”
“Yup, I have officially hit an all-time low.”
I set my coffee on the white-painted table between us. A lilac-scented candle flickered like a jagged talon, its spear point hot and alluring. I stared at the flame, my vision glazing over as a disk of wax pooled at the base of the wick. While my mother’s voice wah wah wah’d in the background, my thoughts drifted back to Jackson in his bedroom, setting the pictures aflame. I wondered what it felt like to be engulfed by fire, to watch everything burn, and for the first time I understood my little pyromaniac.
“Harper!” Mom’s stridence shook the daydream loose. “Where’d you go off to inside your head?”
“Sorry, my brain keeps wandering.”
“As I was saying, there’s nothing you can do except to regain the upper hand. And you can only do that by gaining Candace’s trust, restoring family order.”
I grinned. Candace. So Mom did know her preferred name.
“Ha! Family order? What order do we even have? I’m probably a suspect in my cheating husband’s murder, Lane married a pathological liar, my son is now an arsonist, my daughter has become a horror enthusiast, you’re being questioned about Michelle’s murder, and Ben’s mistress is taking half my money. If you have any idea how to restore family order, I’m all ears, Mom. Because I’m feeling clueless right now.”
“Stop your wallowing and do something about it!” Mom was missing the part of the heart that doled out empathy. “First things first, we need to get Candace out of the way. She’s no good for your brother. Then we need to sell your house and take care of your family. Use that money to start over. Help each other heal. Then, when you’re emotionally ready, you can move forward again. But like I said, Candace has got to go. By any means necessary. Do whatever it takes.”
“Mom, you’re sounding an awful lot like you did when you talked about wanting Ben gone. And now he’s dead.”
I eyed her warily, the dark overture sobering me more than the coffee ever could. She stared into her cup. Avoidance. What wasn’t she telling me?
“I just want you to get back to normal, and you can’t do that with a manipulative liar in your midst.”
I shook my head. “I can’t afford to piss her off. Lane blindly loves her, for better or for worse, and if I get on her bad side I’m afraid I’ll lose him. Plus, Candace knows too much. And I already told you I’m not selling my house. Not yet. Maybe not ever. What is your obsession with me selling it?”
“I haven’t been totally honest with you.” Mom raised her hands, as if surrendering the truth. “I’ve found myself in somewhat of a . . . financial predicament. I was hoping you would be willing to sell the house so that you could loan me a little money to pay off some bills.”
“I would if I could, Mom, you know that. But it’s too risky for me to try to sell the house anyway. What if they seize my assets on top of everything else? Then I would be left with nothing. Literally. They haven’t unfrozen my bank accounts yet. And it might be months before I get my insurance payout. Have you asked Lane?”
“He’s already given me so much. I hate to even admit this, but things with my real estate work have been slow. And as you found out during my interrogation, Ben scammed me out of every dime of my retirement money.”
“I still can’t believe Ben would take his own family’s money.” Incoherent words tore through my throat. “Detective Meltzer told me he had a secret bank account set up in another name. I’m assuming it was for Medea. How did I not see this side of Ben?”
“As sure as he’s dead, the man was pure evil. The lies he spilled came so naturally too. He offered me this great business opportunity to double my investment return. Why wouldn’t I trust my own son-in-law? So, of course, I invested. I lost everything, Harp. Every. Last. Penny. For the past six months I’ve been working two jobs, fourteen-hour days, and I still can’t make ends meet. No one wants to hire an elderly real estate agent when all these fresh faces around here offer the moon and the stars.”
She took a shaky breath, wiping the wet corners of her eyes.
“This is embarrassing for me, but I’m burned out, honey. I need a break. I really thought your insurance money would come through, or at least that you’d have access to your bank accounts by now.”
“I’m so sorry, Mom. I had no idea you were struggling for that long. Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“Oh, honey, I didn’t want to start trouble with you and Ben after he screwed me over. The lies . . . That man ruined me. And to be honest, I wanted him dead. But I couldn’t go saying that to you, now, could I? And since then it’s all been pretense, my dear. I didn’t want to worry you and Lane, but I can’t hide it anymore. I’m looking at foreclosure if I don’t catch up on my payments.”
“I know Lane’s got extra money. And I’ll be employed soon and can help out. We’ll be happy to help get your bills caught up.” I couldn’t speak for Candace on the matter . . . well, I actually could. I knew she’d put her foot down, but I hoped Lane still had enough of his balls intact to stand up to her for the sake of our mother, who had sacrificed so much for us when we were growing up. “And as soon as I have access to my bank account again, I’ll pay him back and get you on your feet.”
“No, I can’t ask your brother again. I already mentioned it to him, and Candace shut it down. She said they need the money for the doctor bills and baby stuff. I’m not going to push it. I’ll figure something out.”
“I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry.”
And I would. Even if I had to drag Candace down kicking and screaming, I was not going to let my mother suffer any longer. Hadn’t she suffered enough? I just hoped she hadn’t done something to deserve it. Our sins did have a way of coming back to bite us.
“Mom, I have to ask you something. And I need you to be honest with me.”
Her brown eyes flicked upward, earnest but guilty. The look lasted so long it rattled me, forcing me to glance away.
“Did you kill Ben because you found out he lost all of your money?” I searched her face for any sign of truth.
Her gaze hardened. “Did you kill Ben because you found out he was cheating on you?”
Though we both swore our innocence, every cell in my body lit on fire with a knowing that my mother was capable of a lot more than she would ever admit to. Like mother, like daughter, after all.