You Don't Want To Know - By Lisa Jackson Page 0,159

to make me think I was going insane?” She was shaking now, her anger pulsing through her veins.

“It wasn’t much of a push!” Jewel-Anne cried.

“But there has to be a reason.”

Jewel-Anne actually winced.

“What is it? Tell me. I intend to show this little video to everyone here, so you may as well tell me now. What reason did you have for terrorizing me, for letting me think my little boy was haunting me, crying out for me. Do you have any idea how that tore me up inside?”

“Yes!” she nearly shouted. Her little-girl features twisted with a hatred so intense, Ava recoiled a bit. Hard eyes bored into hers. “I do know,” she snarled. There was a sudden gleam in her eye that suggested she would relish showing how she’d duped Ava, pulled one over on her successful cousin.

“You know, for a woman who’s supposed to be smart, with a near-genius IQ, you sure are dense,” she said.

Ava was shaking her head and feeling, again, as if she were standing in quicksand, slowly but surely being sucked under.

“I guess it’s time you knew the whole truth.” Jewel-Anne’s malicious smirk stretched wide, an ugly curve across her face. “You can’t even remember who the birth mother of your child is, can you?”

Ava felt like the room was receding, like she was at the end of a long corridor. She lifted a hand to ward off what was coming, but it was a useless gesture.

“That’s right, Ava. Wyatt’s story about . . . who? Charles Yates and Tracey Johnson?” She gave a brittle laugh. “News to me, too. That cock-and-bull story was made up just to confuse you.” She was nearly rabid now, her eyes glowing with the truth, her need to rub it in overpowering. Her voice rose, carrying into the hallway and reverberating in Ava’s brain. “I’m Noah’s mother, you stupid bitch! I was the one who carried him. I was the one who felt that he was ripping me up inside that night on the boat! Noah was my son, Ava, and you couldn’t even acknowledge that simple, but oh-too-important fact: Noah was my son. Not yours. Mine!”

“No . . .” She wouldn’t believe it. Couldn’t. But the truth was bared, no longer hidden in a web of lies. Was it possible her son, her beautiful son, was really Jewel’s?

Shaking her head and backing up, she had to deny it. “No!”

“The truth, Ava. Truth.”

Oh, God, she remembered. She remembered! Jewel-Anne had been pregnant, too, at the same time as Ava, never divulging the father of her child, acting as if she were some modern-day Madonna . . . Oh, Lord, this was all so, so twisted. So painful. So wrong. Her insides wrenched and she thought she might throw up as she remembered losing her child and, in her grief, willing to do anything to replace him.

“Noah was my baby!” Jewel-Anne crowed again loudly.

“Was?” Ava repeated, hearing the past tense for the first time. No, oh, no. Noah couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be. Like a zombie, Ava felt dead inside, denial rippling through her, and yet she advanced upon her cousin, towering over her. “What the hell did you do to my son?”

“I don’t know what happened to him.”

“You little faker!” Ava clasped her hands over her cousin’s shoulders and yanked her to her feet.

Jewel-Anne shrieked in horror. “Let go of me!”

“Tell me where he is!” Angrily, Ava shook her cousin. Jewel-Anne’s head bounced around like one of her eerie dolls.

“I don’t know!”

“Liar! You’ve been lying the whole time. For two damned years. Gaslighting me! Making me think that I saw my son, that I heard him crying for me!”

“Let go of me!”

For an answer, she dragged Jewel-Anne into the hallway. The smaller woman wriggled and writhed, flailed with her hands, her legs moving wildly, uncontrolled.

“Ava, what’re you doing? Don’t!” Jewel-Anne cried as Ava pulled her toward the stairs. “No! Oh, God!”

“Where is my son?”

“I don’t know,” Jewel-Anne insisted, her eyes round, panic showing as they reached the top of the staircase. “Really, Ava, I don’t! Stop this!” She was blubbering now.

Ava pushed her cousin against the rail, bending her back over it as Jewel-Anne clung to her. “Why did you set up the recording?” she demanded. “Why did you let me think Noah was here in the house? Why did you try to make me go insane?”

Fear rounded Jewel-Anne’s eyes. “Ava, please—”

“Why?”

“Because you got it all!” Jewel-Anne blurted, frantic. “The house, the estate, the looks, the athleticism.