reassure him.
With a quick kiss to my cheek, he turns and races down the hall to the front door. He gives me one last questioning look over his shoulder before he walks out the door.
“Go, I’ll be okay,” I tell him.
As soon as the door closes behind him, I turn and run as fast as I can back down the stairs into the basement.
“You really are an evil genius,” Mavra says with a laugh, pulling me from my memories. “I can’t believe you were able throw a bunch of heavy stones into the hole to keep her weighted down, drag a hose over to it and fill it with enough water to cover the body.”
Turning my head to the right and looking into the kitchen, I smile when I see the old, faded newspaper article held up with a yellow smiley face magnet.
“Brave eighteen-year-old woman endures nightmare and lives to tell the tale,” I say aloud.
My eyesight doesn’t let me see much farther than a few feet in front of me, but I don’t need to see the title of the article to repeat it.
“Now you know why I kept the article all these years,” I tell her, looking away from the fridge and back at my daughter. “It’s not like I could go around telling people I’m an evil genius, so I wanted to make sure I’d always have a reminder.”
I’m treated to another eye-roll from Mavra.
“Even though I’ve read that article so many times over the years, now that I know what really happened, I am completely amazed. You were able to explain away everything so the police wouldn’t convict you of murder, and you gave Nolan something he could believe and something he would understand,” she states. “They all believed you really did have a twin sister and her name was Ravenna, allowing you to move forward using your real name of Tatiana. They even believed she died when you were both five years old from drowning in the lake. And on top of that, with Nolan’s statement confirming your parents’ strange behavior toward you in recent weeks, they even believed that your parents were so distraught over the death of their daughter Ravenna that they spent the next thirteen years trying to turn you into her, pretending like it never happened. Complete with electric shock therapy to make you forget you had a twin.”
I smile, happy that my daughter acknowledges just how much trouble it was to come up with all of that, while at the same time trying to hide my sister’s dead body so it would never be found.
“Don’t forget, Tanner supposedly found out two weeks before my accident in the woods that the twins his wife gave birth to eighteen years prior weren’t really his, but the product of an affair she had with his brother, who was locked in a cell in his own prison, right under his nose,” I add, reciting more of the article.
“That’s right,” Mavra replies. “A perfect explanation and one that Nolan could once again confirm for the police, to explain why you started acting so differently two weeks before the night in the woods and why your father suddenly behaved as if he hated you.”
“And then of course we have the night in the woods, when Nolan found me bleeding from the head, on the ground during a thunderstorm,” I continue. “Tanner, already a little off kilter after years of trying to make one daughter take the place of a dead one, lost his mind when his wife admitted the truth and chased me out into the woods. The police wanted to know why he did it, but I just cried and cried. I couldn’t tell them why. I didn’t know if he meant to kill me or just hurt me because he was so angry. And I’d never know since he was dead. Oh God help me, my whole family is dead. I never meant to kill him; you have to believe me, Officers! He was just angry, and he wouldn’t stop coming at me, and I knew if I didn’t do something, he’d push me right down into that water-filled hole!”
I wail, wiping fake tears from my cheeks as Mavra slowly claps her hands together.
“Bravo, Mother, bravo,” she commends me.
She grows quiet again, and I watch the smile fall from her face.
“Just ask, Mavra. Whatever you’re thinking, just ask,” I remind her.
She blows out a breath, her loose lips making the sound of someone blowing