Bobby finally left. He looked like a puppy that got kicked when I told him I didn’t think we should ever see each other again. Then he got mad, grabbed a permanent marker off my counter and wrote his phone number on my mirrored dining room wall. I gaped at it, only distantly hearing the front door slam shut. After a few stunned seconds of silence, I angrily scrubbed the mirror with glass cleaner. But not before I remembered I had his number on my cell phone from when he called.
I felt bad about kicking Bobby out, but if I didn’t stop this thing right now, the next thing I knew I’d find myself doing something ridiculous like asking him to move in or something.
I’d never felt so alone in the world.
Every single blood relative I had was dead. Even though Christopher was a horrible person, he was my flesh and blood. When you were Italian-American, that meant something. He was also my last tie to my mother. Now that was gone, too.
The only thing I had left of my mother was that damn box. I stared at it on my computer desk. It had obviously been special to my mother. She had millions of dollars in jewelry sitting on her dressers in houses across the world and yet she found this box so precious, so valuable, that she was compelled to hide it.
The box was the key to her heart. It showed what really mattered to her. My father and Christopher and hopefully, if I dug around in it more, I’d find something that was proof of her love for me.
Maybe it was time to read the love letters. I needed to know it was possible to love someone and have them love you back just as much. Even if I never experienced that in my own life so far, I needed to believe that it existed. I wanted to cling to that belief. I poured a glass of cabernet sauvignon, my mother’s favorite, gulped most of it in one sip, took a big breath, and opened the lid of the hat box.
The letter I’d found on the floor of their house addressed to my mother was on top. I tore it open.
At first I couldn’t understand what I was reading, but when the implications of the letter became clear, I didn’t make it to the bathroom before I threw up.
It was a letter from the widow of the doctor who had performed my parents’ autopsies. The Geneva doctor had killed himself last month and left a note saying he had been paid off to lie on dozens of autopsy reports. Including my parents.
My parents did not die in an accidental fire. They were murdered.
The official report said they had burned to death in their lakeside Geneva home. The fire and subsequent deaths were ruled accidental, caused by an electrical short.
In reality, according to this letter, they both had bullets through their foreheads. As I read the letter, the horror of losing both my parents came back so hard I couldn’t breathe. It was bad enough believing they had died in an accident, but to have been deliberately killed? And by someone powerful — or at least rich — enough to cover it up.
Murdered.
My parents had been murdered.
And now my brother was dead.
As soon as these two pieces of information met, I knew what had been nagging at me the day before. It was how Christopher died. The way he died.
During Christopher’s long, rambling letters to me about Bridget, he had said several times that he blamed Bridget’s heroin addiction for ruining his life, and making him incapable of loving anyone ever again.
His hatred for the drug was so fierce, he said, he was considering spending his life going after the big dealers in the world and taking them out. He called heroin evil.
Bobby said Christopher died of a heroin overdose.
I knew that even if his madness made him turn to the one drug he blamed for ruining his life, he still would never have shot it up. Even if Christopher had wanted to die, if he had found some poetic justice in killing himself the way Bridget had, he wouldn’t have shot up. He would have snorted or smoked it.
He would never stick a needle in himself.
Ever since he was a little boy he’d had an unholy fear of needles.
To me, this all added up to one thing:
Christopher was murdered.
Somebody was methodically killing my family. They had disguised it with a fire.
Slumped on the floor near my mirrored dining room wall in a sick daze, I watched myself in the mirror as I dry heaved. My eyes were bloodshot with little pink blood bursts that had appeared around my eyelids from the violent motion.
Why would someone kill my parents? I had no idea. Christopher? Well there were a million reasons. But I was convinced all three deaths were related. But why? It wasn’t for our family’s money. If I died, the money would go to charity. My parents had stipulated that in their will. If Christopher and I died before we had children, any money at our deaths would go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
None of it made sense.
I sat staring at the wall with my hand pressed to my mouth for a good hour before I finally, wearily, dragged myself to bed where I stared at the ceiling for the rest of the night.