Page 58 of The Dysfunctional Family's Guide to Murder
“Can I see the letter?” Dylan asks, ignored by everyone.
“Debatable,” Dad says. “If this isn’t a motive for murder, then I’ve never seen an episode ofColumbo.”
“What’s in the letter?” Dylan asks.
“What’sColumbo?” Shippy asks.
“This can’t have been Bec’s idea,” Aunty Vinka says, mostly to herself, turning the letter over just in case there’s an explanation for all of this on the back. (There isn’t.)
“Where did you find it?” Dad asks me.
“In Aunty Bec’s shoe, but they took it from GG’s wardrobe.”
“Cansomeonetell mewhat’s in the letter!” Dylan sounds ready to explode.
“It’s the results of a DNA test,” Dad says, possibly because he, like me, fears that Dylan is at risk of winding up splattered around the walls in tiny pieces.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that Shippy and Bec—sorry, Dylan, your mum—are liars.”
“What?”
“Bec isnotour half sister. She wasnotDad’s secret love child, and she is definitelynotentitled to a share of Dad’s—or Gertie’s—fortune.”
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If I could, I’d skipover the whole next scene and just give you the bullet points. It’s not that what happens isn’t important. (It is.) It’s not that it doesn’t contain clues to the truth about why GG died. (It does.) It’s just that, while this family-drama stuff might read on the page like a helpful information dump, when you live through it and then have toreliveit, it’s kind of a bummer.
We gather in the kitchen because there’s too many of us to fit comfortably in Bec (hold the Aunty) and Shippy’s bedroom. Nobody seems sure how to act. Is this a confrontation? An intervention? A seriously awkward extended-family get together, not entirely dissimilar to that Christmas lunch when Aunty Vinka’s then-boyfriend got drunk and passed out in the bathroom? Aunty Vinka is (massive surprise) making tea from some of her stinky herbal concoctions, while Dad keeps staring at the letter as though the numbers and letters might rearrange themselves to reveal something new.
Dylan won’t meet my eyes, but that might be because I’m not trying too hard. Still, every time I sneak a look, he’s staring straight at the kitchen cupboards, and they can’t possibly be that interesting. It’s hard to say whether he’s (a)furious with me for ratting out his mum and her shifty boyfriend (likely) or (b)furious at them for, well, being the worst (also likely) or (c)a combination of the two (ding, ding, ding) with a sprinkling of justifiable rage that I didn’t say anything earlier. Now is not the moment to ask the only question I really want to ask him:Did you know?
“So,” Dad says, taking charge because of a lack of reasonable alternative candidates. He’s put his chair so close to mine he keeps accidentally banging my ribs with his elbow, but I don’t mind. “Which of you wants to tell us what’s been going on before we call the cops?”
“There’s no—”
“I will go to the paddock!”
“Okay, okay.”
Aunty Vinka puts a mug of something unidentifiable in front of me, and although it does smell disturbingly like my schoolbag on a Friday afternoon, I take it gratefully because pretending to drink it gives me something to do.
“I’m sorry,” Bec says, but it’s clearly the kind of sorry-not-sorry apology celebrities make after posting something racist/sexist/transphobic on Instagram, because the next words out of her mouth are “but this is ridiculous.”
“What do you expect, Bec? You’ve been pretending to be mysister.That’s something a soap-opera character or a crazyperson does. Since you’re not on a soap opera, I can only imagine that you’re a crazy person.” I can tell Dad is the kind of furious he usually only gets around election time by the fact that he’s using the wordcrazyas an insult—something he always tells me off for doing. The one time I said “this is mental” about an economics assignment, he gave me a ten-minute lecture on mental-health stigma that made me late for tennis practice.
“This isn’t about you, Andy.”
“Of course it is.”
“What do you want from me? I’ve already said sorry.”
“How about you start with why you did it, and we’ll decide whether to call the cops.”
There’s a long pause, during which Bec presumably weighs her options and finds bugger all in the way of graceful exit strategies.
“What do you want to know?”
