and bubble. How dare they rob me of my only means of happiness? Rip me of my dignity, steal my trust, and then stamp all over it! We’d been so happy! I was content to share what was mine with them. But no, their greed—Kate’s and Dan’s especially—pushed away any possibility of communal happiness. Not only had they dissed me, dismissed me, they were planning to kill me!
This sick tale was unraveling like a dirty bandage, festering with old dried blood and germs. Lee had reneged on the deal she made with Juan, and that’s why he suddenly married me. When Cliffside became half mine, she no longer had a stake in it. Legally, after the triplets turned eighteen, Lee wasn’t able to claim them as dependents anymore—Juan was free and clear of any responsibility. I imagined him serving the divorce papers the second he was able to, and how under California law, even if she didn’t finalize them with a signature, the courts would grant a default divorce, unless, of course, she had contested.
“Cup of tea, darling?” Pippa asked, cutting into my thoughts.
Pippa’s offer jolted me back to when I was fourteen, in the hospital, after my riding accident. The first thing the nurse had asked me, after I came to was, “Cuppa tea, love?” As if tea was the perfect remedy for a concussion. As if tea could help me now.
I nodded. “By the way, did Lee contest the divorce?”
“Her signature was on the papers,” Pippa said, a little smirk playing on her lips.
“You’re saying Juan forged her signature?”
Tit for tat.
“I’m not saying anything. Earl Grey or PG Tips?”
“Earl Grey.” I shifted Beanie off my lap and stood up. I was still in Pippa’s niece’s flowery pajamas and animal slippers. Apart from a new toothbrush she’d given me, I had nothing. No clothes. No car. She had helped me cancel all my credit cards, so the triplets couldn’t go AWOL, but I hadn’t dared to go out shopping with my new ones yet. I needed to lie low.
If Dan and Kate were capable of murdering me, they’d be capable of anything, even killing their own parents. If Lee was the monster Pippa described her to be, the second they turned eighteen they would’ve wanted their nasty mother out of the picture and inherit Cliffside after her death.
As for Lee herself? She never did have cancer, I bet. That little story was one big fat lie. Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich, my foot! A ruse by the triplets to get me to feel sorry for them, to open up my house, my heart to them… these poor, poor, homeless orphans. Now it all made sense. Thinking they would inherit Cliffside, they had murdered Lee. Had perhaps done the same to her as to me… playing nursie with her prescription until she got hooked. Maybe even locking her up in the laundry room. Then, expecting the house to fall into their laps, they got the shock of a lifetime when Juan showed up as owner. Their plan stymied, not to mention the double shock of finding out they had a flesh and blood father who had evaded them all their lives, robbing them of their inheritance, favoring his new wife over them. So they killed him out of revenge.
And that’s why Juan and Lee had disappeared around the same time. The question was, how did the triplets pull it off?
Forty-Nine
As Pippa made tea, minutiae of conversations clamored in my head, each detail screaming for attention. I rewound the one where Dan, Kate, and Jen were accusing me, in so many words, of murder. This was their ploy, their twisted technique: everything they were guilty of they boomeranged at me. I replayed Jen’s words: “Maybe it was, like, parked—it was a vintage Mustang, right?—maybe the handbrake was off, maybe it just rolled over the edge of the cliff.”
I’d reflected on that, the fact that Juan had driven to the airport in his prized 1969 Mustang convertible. He did like to take it for a spin in warm weather, but still, it seemed uncharacteristic. He hated parking it in public places, so why would he have risked it at the airport parking lot? I had a doctor’s appointment that fateful day, wasn’t home when he set off so never got the chance to ask. That night, I remember feeling hurt that he hadn’t returned my calls, and I couldn’t sleep, but after fretting till dawn I found his phone in the bathroom, under