Page 74 of Bad Blood
“Mason was standing there,” Kane said. “He was just…standing there. And then he turned, and he looked at me, and he said, ‘Tell Darren—I won’t tell.’”
I could hear Malcolm Lowell stating that he didn’t think his grandson had been the one to torture and kill the animals he’d found.
I think he watched.
“That was when your father built the chapel?” Agent Sterling asked. I translated the question—the cell underneath the chapel. The shackles on the walls. Not for sheep in his flock who’d gone astray—for his own monstrous son.
I tried to imagine being Kane, knowing that my father had locked my own twin away. Had Kane visited Darren? Had he seen the toll captivity was taking on him? Had he just left his own brother down there, day after day and year after year?
As if he could hear those silent questions, Kane closed his eyes, pain etched into his features. “You could catch Darren standing over a dying puppy and he’d tell you to your face that he didn’t do it. He swore, up and down, that he’d had nothing to do with the attack on the Kyles.” Kane swallowed. “My father didn’t believe him.”
You didn’t believe him, either. You let your father lock him up. For years.
I understood now why Kane had never been able to leave town. No matter how disgusted he’d become with his father’s manipulations, no matter how broken his family was, he couldn’t leave his brother.
“He was my twin. If he was a monster, I was, too.”
“Years later, you met my mother,” I commented, my mind racing. “And things were going so well….” My voice caught in my throat as I remembered Kane dancing with my mother on the front porch, Kane lifting me onto his shoulders.
“How does Sarah Simon tie in to all of this?” Agent Sterling redirected the conversation. “By all accounts, she joined Serenity more than two decades after the death of the Kyle family.”
“I’d left Serenity by that point,” Kane said, his voice hoarse enough to tell me that I wasn’t the only one who’d been caught up in memories of my mother. “But from what I understand, Sarah spent a lot of time in the chapel.”
I could hear the horror in the way Kane saidchapel.
“Sarah found out about Darren,” I said, my mind on the cell where Holland Darby had kept his son.
“She discovered the room. She snuck down to see him, probably more than once, and when he tired of playing with her, he killed her.” Kane’s voice was like a dull-edged knife. “He wrapped his hands around her neck, just like you said. Power. Domination. Personal. And then, he got out and came after me.”
Not you, I corrected silently.Power. Domination. Personal.
“He went after the person you loved.” I wondered how Darren had known about my mother, if he’d followed Kane to our house, but those questions died under the force of a memory that hit me with a tsunami’s force.
Nighttime. There’s a thump downstairs.
I put myself in my mother’s position.Did you think he was Kane at first? Did he try to hurt you? Did he wrap his fingers around your throat?
You fought back.
I thought of my mother smiling, hours later, dancing with me on the side of the road.You killed him.
Kane’s eyes were closed now, like he couldn’t bear looking at me, couldn’t bear remembering, but couldn’t stop. “By the time I got to Lorelai’s house, she was gone. You were gone, Cassie. And Darren’s body was at the bottom of the stairs.”
I saw the entire scene through his eyes: the brother he’d hated and feared and loved, dead. The woman he’d fallen for, responsible.It was your fault he came after her. Your fault he hurt her.
Your fault he was dead.
“Lorelai killed Darren in self-defense,” Agent Sterling surmised. “Unless you’d told her about him, she probably thought that she’d killed you.”
I tried to reconcile that with the mother I remembered, the mother I knew.
“You cleaned up the crime scene,” Agent Sterling continued, offering Kane no respite. “You brought your twin’s body home.”
“I never told.” Kane sounded like a boy, like the child who’d been forced to keep his family’s secret, to carry his brother’s burden.
“Your family locked Darren away, under the chapel,” Sterling said softly. “He was dead, and they still put him in shackles. And Sarah Simon—you left her body down there. You let her family think she’d left town.”
Kane had no response. Something had snapped inside of him. Something had broken. And when he finally did speak again, it wasn’t to confirm Agent Sterling’s statements.
