I jerked awake to a thundering heart and the piercing knowledge that the dream wasn’t right. “I wasn’t home that day.” The day Paige had jumped.
My tongue too thick in a dry mouth, my head pounding. No, that was my pulse.
Wiping the back of my hand over my mouth, I got myself up into a seated position, then reached for the bottle of water I kept on my bedside table. It was gone. Shit, I’d emptied it yesterday. Forcing myself out of bed, I was tempted to just hop over to the bathroom, but I had no intention of screwing up my leg all over again.
I grabbed the crutches, then made my way to the cool black tile.
Cupping my hands under the basin tap, I drank before throwing the water onto my face. It was like ice, a shock to the system. I stared at myself in the mirror as droplets fell onto my chest. Stared at the head that held a malfunctioning brain.
I’d had a fucking conversation with Paige. I’d hallucinated her with perfect clarity.
On the other hand, what if what I’d now “remembered” was the delusion?
Skin cold, I wiped off my face, and made my way to the computer. The clock in the bottom right of the screen showed that it was only eight-thirty. I’d had about two-and-a-half hours of sleep. Blinking gritty eyes, I forced myself to bring up the browser and type in her name: Paige Jani Moses.
Her stunning face filled the right side of the screen, all sharp bones and perfect lighting. One of those bio sections about famous people the search engine automatically generated. But the other top hits were news headlines.
CATWALK MODEL PAIGE JANI CRITICALLY INJURED IN FALL
DID PAIGE JANI JUMP?
EXCLUSIVE: PAIGE JANI MAY HAVE BEEN DRINKING!
“Bullshit,” I muttered under my breath. The police had told me that she hadn’t been intoxicated or under the influence of drugs when she’d decided to climb up over our lower balcony wall and jump. If she’d jumped from the top balcony, the one outside the master bedroom, she’d have fallen to the lower balcony. No easy fall, but survivable.
But that wasn’t what she’d done.
My eye went to the top headline:
PAIGE JANI FAREWELLED FROM HER CHILDHOOD CHURCH
Paige had crashed onto a parked car far, far, far below our apartment. That she’d survived at all was a miracle—but her survival had been a cruel mirage. Three hours later and she was gone.
There was vodka downstairs, endless bottles of it.
Whiskey, too.
Rum.
Any poison I wanted.
Mouth dry and hand shaking, I picked up my phone and called Dr. Jitrnicka’s office. “Can he fit me in?”
Turned out he could even though he was only working a half-day. “Just had a patient call to reschedule because their babysitter canceled on them,” the receptionist told me. “I’ll put your name in their ten o’clock slot.”
I made my way methodically through an entire family-size slab of chocolate in the interim. I had to make sure I thanked Shanti for ensuring the drawer stayed stocked. Had to be her. No one else knew my specific sugar addictions.
It was just after nine-thirty when I walked out to the car. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I knew I had to talk to someone. Maybe the therapist could help fill the Swiss-cheese holes in my brain, in my memories.
Paige was dead. Paige was DEAD!
I hit the steering wheel once before I reversed out of the drive and turned to head out, but didn’t press the accelerator.
Police vehicles sat outside Alice and Cora’s home. Trixi and Lexi, dressed in venomous lime-green and burn-your-eyes pink, stood craning their necks on the other side of the cordon. They weren’t the only ones. The Dixons, Margaret in head-to-toe black leather and Paul with his bowler hat, were walking over to join them now.
Their faces were tight . . . and oddly voracious.
It struck me then that I’d never once considered them as being involved with my mother’s murder simply because of their age. But they were physically fit now, had been even fitter then—and they obviously had no problem attracting younger women. My mother had also liked them.
“Mags and Paulie are wild, Ari. The kind of wild I want to be when I’m a wicked white-haired budiya.”
Wild people often hungered for new highs, for constant new doses of adrenaline. It had been drug-fueled orgies in their youth. Had it become murder in their senior years?