stole a glance at him—we locked eyes for a nanosecond. What was he saying? Was that an allusion to the phantom rattlesnake, or some cryptic warning? My paranoia whooshed through me like a seventh wave. What did the triplets know? Had they been playing me all this time? I regretted trusting them. I should have followed my instincts and got rid of them. I hung my head, afraid I’d vomit again.
“I got poison ivy all over me once, as a child,” Dan explained. “Never had so much pain in my life. But then I thought about it. It’s December, there’s no poison ivy around right now.”
The penny dropped. He’d been spying on me all along. Poison ivy, my foot. It was a ruse. They’d fooled me too many times already, these canny triplets.
Just because you love certain people, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be axed out of your life. And that’s exactly what I was going to do. Axe them out.
Tomorrow. First thing in the morning. This time I meant business.
Twenty-Eight
“Man, she’s such a liar.” It was Dan’s voice I heard first.
“Yup, she twists the truth all right.” Kate.
The whispers again. Fading in. Fading out. Carried by the wind. I had taken to leaving the kitchen window and the sliding doors to my bedroom open, ever since I’d first heard them talking.
I lay in my bed, in a stupor. The migraine worse than before. Or was it flu? My weak ankle throbbed like crazy. Had I twisted it again? How? Sweat was spiking every part of my body. My ears clamored in my thrumming head. Jen had fetched me a hot chamomile tea, earlier, and a cool wet washcloth that she’d draped over my brow. I could barely breathe I felt so bad. My fingers groped for my migraine pills beside my bed and I downed a couple to numb the pain.
“There was no accident. There is no proof of an accident!” Dan again. His voice flew in on a breeze. It pained me to think we’d become so close. This perfect family situation—the family that had become mine, these three young adults who had felt like my very own children—would all soon become dust to me. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Tears pooled in my eyes.
My head hammered.
I groaned in my bed. Covered my eyes with the comforter. How could a hangover be this bad? There was a bottle of champagne by my bed, and a glass. Hair of the dog—I’d feel better soon. I managed to sit halfway up and pour myself some.
“She said he crashed near Ragged Point, and how she ‘lost’ him.”
More conversation.
“Yeah, true, now I think about it she’s never mentioned…” Kate’s voice, now, but someone’s cough blocking out the rest of the sentence.
I drained the glass. Maybe I could sleep this thing off? I cradled my two hundred pound head in my trembling hands. I felt as if it had been in a vice and my brains would explode any second.
Kate’s voice pattered on, “I bumped into Pippa the other day. Asked her about the details of the crash. She changed the subject, pronto. Don’t you think she would know, being a journalist, of all the nitty-gritty details? Not to mention the two women being old friends.”
“She’s a sociopath. A taker and a user. An alcoholic too.” Dan. His words falling on a gentle whisper yet stabbing me in the heart. “We have two choices,” he said.
“One choice, Dan,” Jen corrected, her voice fired with emotion. “It’s a choice, not ‘two choices.’ When you have a choice, you already have A CHOICE between two things.”
That’s right, Jen, you tell him. I smiled to myself, amused that my mother had passed her grammar pet peeves via me onto Jen and that Jen, in her way, was sticking up for me. New clustering thoughts swirled and simmered. I lost the next few patches of conversation. My body, as if out of itself, spun on a penny. I felt like a London taxi doing a U-turn. Surreal images popped into my head, mixing with the stark reality of what I was hearing.
“So what do we do? Call the cops?” Dan again. “Demand them to reopen the investigation, say we suspect something?”
The investigation? I felt another wave of nausea wash over my floppy doll body.
“Are you crazy?” Kate said. “That’s the dumbest idea ever, asshat! The last thing we want is to attract attention to ourselves, it could screw up everything. And it wouldn’t help us get