offered to cut my hair not long after we’d moved into this large old house on the edge of town. She said she’d cut all her friends’ hair where she used to live. My father liked my hair long and insisted my mother do nothing more than trim it. I was ready for a change and I’m sure I was partly angry with him for marrying so soon after my mother’s death, so I agreed.” Charlie let out a laugh. “I also wanted Lindy to like me. I wanted to bond. I trusted her.”
Shep nodded, seeing where this was headed.
“When Lindy finished and handed me the mirror, I saw the look of triumph on her face and I knew she’d done something awful to me.” She grimaced in memory. “She’d butchered my hair. It took months to grow out. I got grounded because my father blamed me for letting her cut my hair. I just remember the snide smile Lindy gave me when I got grounded and she didn’t. Her mother did little more than tell her she was disappointed in her.”
“I’m guessing that wasn’t all she did to you.”
Charlie shook her head. “She put awful things into my food when I wasn’t looking, she ruined some of my clothing, always my favorites, she started rumors about me at school.”
“Didn’t you tell your father what was going on?”
She nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “He pleaded with me to try to get along with Lindy and not make trouble. He said she was having a rough time of it because she was having more trouble after moving to another town, another school and leaving behind her friends than I was.”
“It must have been just as hard on you. And you were hurting as well. Your mother had died.”
Charlie stared down into her wine. “He always took Lindy’s side, something else she rubbed in my face. The rest of the time he was enjoying his new wife. He thought that Lindy and I were old enough to work things out for ourselves.”
Shep snorted. “He didn’t want to upset his wife by stepping in, you mean.”
“I think he was still hurting from losing my mom and Kat was a distraction.”
He let that go, knowing how much Charlie had loved her parents.
“Whenever I fought back, Lindy had a way of turning things around so it looked like I was the problem.”
“It must have been hell for you.”
Charlie let out a bitter laugh. “That’s putting it mildly. I thought about running away. I even thought about killing myself—not seriously. I knew that if I could stick it out, Lindy would be leaving, going away to college and I would be free of her. As it was, she’d been held back a year and I’d been advanced a year at school so we were in a lot of the same classes.”
She sipped her wine. “There was this senior at school that I liked. Lindy often went through my things since we had to share a room and she found a note from a friend about the boy, Andy Walden. The day Lindy died, she came home from school to tell me that he’d asked her out. I thought I couldn’t hate her more than at that moment. She said he told her he thought I was a freak. I couldn’t understand why she tormented me so. We argued.”
“Where were your parents?”
“They’d gone out, as usual, and weren’t expected back until late. They’d joined the country club and had gone to a party there.” She took a breath and let it out slowly. He could see that she was working herself up to tell him the rest. “For the first time, Lindy told me that she hated me. That I wasn’t the sister she wanted and that she would torment me for the rest of my life.”
“Charlie—” He started to reach out to her, to touch her, but pulled back his hand when he saw the anguished look on her face as if she only wanted to get though this. He feared if he tried to comfort her, it would only make it harder.
“That day, Lindy pushed me too far. She didn’t even like Andy, she said, but she wasn’t about to let me have him. She was berating me, saying he said I was ugly and childish and...” She swallowed. “Something snapped inside me. I opened the front door as if I was going to leave, but instead grabbed her and pushed her out. It