You Don't Want To Know - By Lisa Jackson Page 0,111

this awful thing? Who hated her so much as to go to so much trouble to cruelly torment her? She bit her lip to keep from crying.

“Ever seen this before?” Dern asked.

Ava shook her head. “No.” She had to force her voice to work. “But . . . but the clothes. They belong to my son.”

Dern stared at the effigy.

“The sweatshirt,” she whispered. “I recognize it.”

“Dude, this is so fucked up!” Jacob stumbled even farther backward, as if he were afraid the rag doll might spring to life.

For once Ava agreed with her cousin.

“You think someone dressed a doll like your boy, then buried it here,” Dern said carefully.

“Yes. Absolutely. It’s a girl doll, at least it was originally, and then someone cut the hair to make it look like a boy, like my son.” Ava felt a chill in the deepest part of her soul. “Then they left the key for the casket where I could find it, to toy with me and taunt me, testing me to see how long it would take me to figure out where the lock was.” Slowly, her despair was giving way to anger. Who would do such a thing? Who? “Someone hates me so much they want me to suffer the worst kind of pain a mother can endure.”

“But you might never have found this box, never figured out that you had to dig it up.” Rain was coming down harder now, and Dern wiped the drops from his face with his sleeve.

“They would make sure I’d find it. I’m sure if I hadn’t wondered about it tonight, whoever buried this casket,” she said, kicking at the metal box, “would just leave me more and more clues, getting off on my frustration, thinking I was stupid and all the while luring me in the right direction.”

“Who?” Jacob asked on a gulp.

Anyone in my family. Again her stomach roiled as she considered the long list of her relatives. A lot of them might resent her, even talk behind her back or feel some sort of satisfaction that she was mentally unstable, that she was no longer the take-charge, my-way-or-the-highway woman she’d once been. But this intense vitriolic loathing . . . this was something else altogether.

Turning, trying to get hold of her nerves, Ava looked back at the huge house looming above them on the hill. Dark for the most part, her gaze was drawn to the windows where lights were blazing, glowing squares of illumination. The kitchen and dining area were visible, and on the second floor, an eerie bluish light trembled in Jewel-Anne’s suite of rooms where she was watching television or staring at a computer monitor in the dark.

The curtain over Jewel-Anne’s window moved slightly.

As if someone were watching and had ducked backward, like a turtle’s head retreating into its shell. “Jewel-Anne,” Ava whispered, because in that split second, her suspect list was quickly honed to one, twisted individual, the woman who refused to grow up, who was determined to ever play the victim, the cousin who blamed her for Kelvin’s death and her own injuries. “Bitch,” Ava muttered under her breath as, with new conviction, she hauled the horrid doll out of its box and started marching up the hill.

“Where’re you going?” Dern demanded.

“The house,” she snapped, and increased her pace. Jewel-Anne. It has to be Jewel-Anne with her damned dolls. Who else? Racing through the rain, her fingers tight around the doll’s soft shoulder, Ava ran to the house. The altered rag doll was the size of a six-month-old baby, not a toddler, and the clothes it was dressed in were too large, but the point had been made. It was a twisted representation of Noah.

By Jewel-Anne!

Behind her, Dern was closing fast, his footsteps slapping the soft ground, but she didn’t slow, didn’t so much as glance over her shoulder. Now she was of singular purpose. Up the porch steps she flew and through the kitchen, her shoes resounding on the tile floor, Virginia’s black cat, Mr. T, frantically scrambling out of the way.

At the main staircase, Dern was right on her heels. “You don’t know that Jewel-Anne is behind this.”

“Like hell!” Fury burned through her as she hurried up the runner. She knew who the culprit was but didn’t understand why her cousin would resort to such emotional cruelty. “Let me handle this!” she said as she made her way along the upper gallery to the wing of Jewel-Anne’s suite. Ava didn’t bother knocking, just burst through