Page 75 of The Sister's Curse
Fred Jasper had been honorably discharged after two tours of duty in Iraq. He got a degree in criminology on the GI Bill, then applied to the Bayern County Sheriff’s Office. He’d passed abackground check. At that time, maybe the office just ran a criminal records check and a credit check. Maybe nobody connected him with Dana Carson. And even if somebody did, that wouldn’t exclude him as a candidate to be a sheriff’s deputy. It would truly have been nothing—if anyone had even noticed.
But now…now Jasper was working this case. There was a clear conflict of interest there. Why hadn’t he said anything? Yes, there was literally no one else to do the work, but we could have called someone in from a neighboring county. Although it would have been days, at least, before they could get over to us.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I reached for the phone, but then my hand stilled.
I had been in his shoes. I wasn’t using my real name. And I’d worked a case I had no business working. My intentions hadn’t been pure, exactly, but I’d been pursuing a killer. What if Fred was doing the same thing?
I exhaled. I wasn’t going to act now. I would gather information, and talk to Jasper. There was no advantage in going off half-cocked and calling hellfire down on an innocent man. Especially one I trusted.
I could detect a killer if I looked him in the eye, right?
Right?
I wasn’t so sure.
—
For all her flaws, Cassandra loved her girls, and the loss of her daughter had driven her to madness. Her love for them was palpable. Pride shone in her face, even this many years later. I couldn’t imagine the depths of her despair, or the depths of that love.
I felt a pang of jealousy at that. My mother had never felt thatway about me. Intellectually, I knew her feelings were tangled in her hatred of my father. I was his child, and I looked at her through his eyes. And so she rejected me, had my memory swept away, and went on to live her own life.
Maybe she was the only one of us to truly move on, to be released from this curse.
I wasn’t far from Carlisle, the town where my mother was living her new life over the state line. On impulse, I drove south, down the freeway, and then coasted through small-town streets. In anticipation of the Fourth of July, red, white, and blue bunting hung from streetlights. I passed a corner store, a library with windows covered in construction-paper drawings, and a school closed for summer.
I turned right on my mother’s street. I parked a half block away, staring at the brick ranch house where my mother lived. Pastel balloons were tied to a sign staked to the front lawn.Raina’s Baby Showerwas lettered in calligraphy.
My jaw clenched so hard that it ached. Raina was my mother’s daughter with her new family. I watched as the screen door opened, admitting visitors carrying packages tied with green and yellow ribbons.
I spied activity in the backyard. I slowly tooled down the street, turned left, and observed the backyard from the next block over. The yard was bounded by a chain-link fence, and picnic tables were set up in the shade of a large maple tree. The tables were covered with yellow plastic tablecloths, and flowers in vases. A young brunette woman sat in a lawn chair, cradling her pregnant belly. A balding man manned a grill. He looked like my mother’s husband. He was tan and round, totally unlike the stringy sharp angles of my father. People milled around a table heaped highwith presents—diaper towers, a car seat, and a hundred plastic baubles that I didn’t know the purposes of. I scanned the guests, observing a man and woman, who might be the honoree’s siblings, playing croquet on the grass with barefoot young children who rolled the wooden balls through wire hoops.
My lungs felt hollow. This was what my mother had replaced me with, this perfect slice of American pie, this sunshine party over the shadowed forest my father and I inhabited.
I could never do this. I could never live a conventional life. I could never bring myself to have children. What if I passed my dark legacy on to a child? I couldn’t forgive myself. I was not…I was an observer in life. I stood back, recorded, watched. I was not a participant. I remained on the other side of the glass, then and now.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. I didn’t see my face—I saw my mother’s when she was younger and stalking along the river, as she had been in my dreams. I blinked, and saw myself once more, with my sun freckles and uneven mascara.
I rubbed my eyes. I was…imagining things. And I didn’t like that.
I put my sunglasses on and turned my attention to the yard, trying to focus on what was real. I searched for my mother. She called herself Rebecca now. She had a smile that seemed to reach her eyes as she cut slices of pink cake for the guests. I watched her. Was she playing the doting grandmother-to-be? Or was she really capable of that kind of emotion?
I wasn’t sure. She’d never displayed that kind of emotion to me, as far as I remembered, except in my dreams. That didn’t necessarily mean that she wasn’t capable of it. Maybe she was faking. It was possible, I supposed. She had the same genetic marker myfather and I did, the rare Lyssa variant, that was associated with psychopathy.
My gut lurched at the thought of our bloodline continuing. It was highly unlikely that my mother could’ve passed the fully expressed Lyssa variant on to the children she had with her new husband. That would require that her husband also carry the fully expressed Lyssa gene. It was so improbable that it was nearly impossible.
I watched her kiss her daughter on the head and hand her a plate. Maybe she really did feel things. I knew I felt things: love, compassion, admiration. Maybe she did, too.
Her gaze drifted across the yard to land on my car. I was wearing sunglasses in an unmarked car. It was unlikely that she would think anything of me. I remained still, but I felt the weight of her gaze on me.
A challenge, maybe. Recognition? I’d come to her house a year ago, working a case. Would she remember me from that investigation? Would she finally remember who I really was—her lost daughter?
She kissed her real daughter again and moved into the house.
I started the ignition and put the car into gear. I went back around the block, saw my mother standing on the front porch step, smoking a cigarette.
She walked down the steps, toward my car.
