in my ears. “I don’t know how I got so sick. How I hurt my ankle.”
“Alcohol poisoning,” Kate told me, her tone very matter-of-fact. “You were out of control, no wonder you hurt yourself. We were so worried about you.”
“What? From one silly bottle of white wine? Not even a whole bottle! And you’d got it from your hotel, Jen, you said it was a fancy label, that people had been raving about what great quality it was. And the champagne, that was just a ‘hair of the dog,’ a needed pick-me-up to help with recovery, not the cause itself!”
Jen widened her pretty green eyes. “Don’t you remember anything?”
Kate said, “You downed a half bottle of vodka, too, and then one whole bottle of champagne straight after. Not counting the one by your bed.”
“No. No. I never—almost never—not since my student days—mix my drinks. Vodka? No, where would I have got vodka from?”
“In the freezer. It was right there. Right there, in the freezer. You don’t remember? We all played Scrabble that evening, and you won with the word OWL. Dan made a fire and we sat by the wood burner. And then we tried to play charades, but by this point you were so drunk you blacked out, so Dan carried you to bed.”
“No. No. It’s not true!”
“And we were super worried and wanted to call a doctor, but knew one might not come because of all the rain—the highway’s real dangerous right now—so we called your friend Pippa, and she told us that this is typical behavior, that you often go on binges and then black out and can’t remember stuff the next day, that you even get reckless and violent sometimes—for us to watch out—and we shouldn’t worry and that you’d be fine. So we just let you sleep and checked on you every so often to make sure you didn’t choke on your own vomit or anything.”
I sat up. My head spun with the sudden movement. They were lying about Pippa saying that. Unless… “Pippa was here, wasn’t she?”
“No,” Kate said.
“But I heard her voice, her car.”
“Nope, you’re imagining it,” Dan snapped.
“No,” I whispered. “No!” Were they right, had I been imagining things? Had I been violent? My head hammered on with my own white noise, the buzz of paranoia about what I had or hadn’t done and everything that could go wrong. Everything that was already wrong.
“And then there’ve been these weird anonymous calls,” Kate added. “Someone who’s hung up every time one of us answered the landline. And now the landline’s down ’cause of the weather.” I remembered the dead phone in the laundry room.
“Can someone give me my cell phone, please?” I hauled myself out of bed but tumbled straight back. I was one big, aching mass of bruised flesh and bone.
Nobody spoke. Jen glided out of the room, and Dan followed. Kate remained sitting on my bed. “Speaking of phones, maybe you can explain the anonymous calls,” she said. “Someone breathing and then hanging up when they hear it isn’t your voice. Anyway, they won’t be calling again. Last night’s lightning strikes have made us totally incommunicado.”
The triplets’ whispery conversation popped up in my mind like a vicious Punch & Judy show. Punch, punching me. Judy kicking. We can deal with her. We’ll take control. This weekend? When we all have the day off? We’ll go down there and see—
“Where’s my cell phone?” I yelled again. “You’ve taken my phone away from me? Look, you three need to get OUT of my house! This has gone far enough!”
Kate raised her eyebrows in a “Tut tut, you’re such a fool” way. She pointed a varnished black nail at me and said, “Now you know that’s never gonna happen. Calm down, little lady.”
“How DARE you!” But the words chafed in my raw throat. I ran the options through my head. It was true; there was no way they’d leave this house without a fight. They might be no more than teenagers, but there were three of them against one skinny, weak, frazzled me. I could barely even walk. And Dan was buffed up. “Look, I’ll sort out a really nice apartment for you. I’ll pay for six months’ rent up front.”
Kate laughed again and held my clammy hand. “Why would we want to live in some strange apartment when we can be here with you, in our own home? Our tax returns get sent to this address, we’re registered to vote at this address,