Page 89 of The Dysfunctional Family's Guide to Murder
Dylan shuffles away from Sasha, and he’d better not be going for that knife rack because Dylan is tall but Sasha could bend him around his arm like a warm pretzel. Why didn’tDylan’s stupid dad ever tell him the stats on weapons being used against him?
“The police will be interested in hearing that you pretended to be GG’s neighbor,” I say. “They already know Rob’s hit-and-run wasn’t an accident.”
“It’s not a crime to give someone the wrong home address. If I had tried to kill your mate—Ross, was it?—thatwouldbe a crime. Why would you say that I had?” His voice is casual, but I’m starting to recognize his expressions, and I’m pretty sure that Sasha is scared. If I hadn’t been sure before that he’d tried to kill Rob (and, real talk, I wasn’t), I am now.
Dylan takes another side step, and I want to tell him with my eyes not to be a hopeless show-off and to stay away from those knives, but I don’t want Sasha to see what he’s up to and get any ideas. So I talk.
“Rob was GG’s son. His real name is Martin, but he was calling himself by his middle name, Robert, when we met him. I don’t think it was a coincidence that he befriended Shippy, of all people. I think he knew his mum lived here and wanted to see her. Maybe he was nervous about the kind of reception he’d get. Maybe he wanted to surprise her. Maybe he even wanted to pay her back for ghosting him for so long.” I try not to think about how awful it must have been for Rob to turn up and learn of his mum’s death through casual conversation with strangers. I try even harder not to think about how close GG came to getting to see her son again before she died. There’s a tiny tragedy in there, among all the rest of it.
Sasha just shakes his head. “You’re a creative kid.”
He’s not wrong. The list of things Ithinkcould be true is a lot longer than the list of things Iknowto be true. But Sasha doesn’t need to know that, and I just need to keep him talking long enough for the others to get home, so he doesn’t have a chance to get away with GG’s phone.
“You must have been shocked when Rob walked into this room that day.” I try to think back to the awkwardness of the moment, which I’d put down to Rob’s lack of clothes. “He knew who you were, and you knew who he was: You’d been in prison together. You were the one who saw that letter from GG and took an interest in this guy with the rich mum. That day, when he said he wanted to check out your truck—what did he say to you? Did he know you’d been taking money from his mum already? Did he want it back? Did you arrange to meet up at the beach then or did you just swap numbers so you could text him later?”
“That’s a lot of questions and not a lot of answers,” Sasha says lazily, but he’s not convincing.
“You got out of prison first and came here to track down his mum.” I keep going. “GG believed you when you presented yourself as a friend of her son, and she believed you when you said you’d give the money to him. That thing she says in the video about you passing on her cards and how she’s ‘sorry it’s not more.’ That doesn’t make sense unless the cards had money in them. Money for prison, maybe. Or money for when he got out. Laura at the library said GG had been taking out big sums of money from the bank. How much was it?”
Sasha doesn’t answer.
“Did Robknow,or were you just scared that he was going to figure it out? Maybe you thought there was a way you could get your hands on more of her money. Rob, Martin, whatever you want to call him, must have told you she was rich. How disappointing to learn that her idea of an inheritance was an ancient typewriter and a bag of baby teeth.” Sasha looks genuinely confused at that last bit and I realize that he probably didn’t have time to look in the box very carefully before stashing it. I don’t bother to fill him in. “Whydidyou hide the box, anyway? Did you hear something and panic?” I’m spitballing wildly, but there’s a moment where Sasha almost looks like he wants to answer. He doesn’t, of course, so I keep talking.
“I should have known it was you when you turned up with that story about GG being scared of her son. Is a terminally ill woman seriously going to be scared of being confronted by her estranged son? It never made sense.”
“You’ve got no proof for any of this,” Sasha says as Dylan takes another big step away from him. Bloody Dylan—he never quite thinks things through. There’s a noise from outside, but maybe it’s all in my head because nobody else reacts and I can’t look away from Sasha. I have to keep his attention off Dylan. “Are you going to give me the phone or do I have to take it? Because this is getting boring.”
“You made a mistake, though, when you hit Rob with your car.” I reach into my pocket, and Sasha, misinterpreting my move even though hejust asked for GG’s phone,pulls his own hand free from his jacket to reveal, oh crap, an actual gun. It’s not a farmer’s shotgun but the kind of shiny small gun I’veonly ever seen in the movies. The scale of my miscalculation swamps me: an act of pure recklessness and arrogance that’s going to take the body count to three or four (Rob/Martin’s life also still being very much in the balance at this stage) and leave this mystery unsolved.
“Wait!” I yelp. “It’s the phones! They’re in my pocket.”
“They?”
“There’s two of them.”
“Get ’em out.”
I take out the two phones and lay them on the table. “The other one is Rob’s,” I explain.
There’s movement outside the living room window, but I’m the only one facing that way, so, again, I seem to be the only one who notices. It makes me brave.
“You must have thought you killed him when you hit him with your car. You stopped just long enough to take his phone and, I assume, destroy it. Except you destroyedmyphone, which is actually such a pain in the arse. Rob and I had the same phone. We even both had photos of Yallingup Beach as our lock screen. Rob probably wasn’t looking closely when he grabbed mine the day he went to meet you. I didn’t realize why my phone was missing until I found his. But I do now. And this phone has proof—the message you sent Rob to tell him where to meet you that day.”
This is me bluffing. Can you tell? I can no more open Rob’s phone to read his messages than I could find a phone signal in this ridiculous house. But the only time Rob and Sasha were ever alone, so far as I know, was a minute or two outside ourhouse, which doesn’t seem long enough to arrange a rendezvous. So much easier to swap numbers.
“There’s nothing incriminating about sending a text message.”
“There is if you arrange to meet someone and a car turns up to run them down.”
“Give me the phone,” Sasha says, almost conversationally. “Or I’ll shoot you and your boyfriend here.” He swings his arm so the gun is pointing at Dylan, still meters from the knives, which is something. At least he’s not going to accidentally behead himself with a bread knife.
“He’s not my boyfriend. Until recently we thought we were related.”
“Ruth,”Dylan says.
“Probably not the time.”
“Both phones now, please.”
