The Sister-in-Law, Pamela Crane [have you read this book txt] 📗

under his chin with Marlon Brando flair. I laughed, because after all these years he still didn’t know it was Al Pacino who said the line in The Godfather, and there was no chin-flicking flair when he said it.

‘You are going to misquote that line until you die, aren’t you?’

‘Yep,’ he said with a wink.

As I headed out the door, my phone rang with my mom’s Glamour Shots-esque image flashing across my cracked screen.

‘Hey, Mom.’

‘Hi, Harper.’ A din of background voices nearly drowned her out. ‘I’m down at the police station again.’

‘I thought they already talked to you about Ben?’

A short pause filled with noise. ‘It’s not about Ben. I’m being questioned about the murder of Michelle Hudson, and I need your help.’

Chapter 27

Harper

Some days I went hours before I remembered that I was a widow. Then it would come in a flash, Ben is dead, but there was his nose on Elise, there were his lips on Jackson. Other days, like today, it was the first thought that awakened me and the last thought that followed me into my dreams.

The moon smiled down on me, its crescent wide like the Cheshire cat’s. I wasn’t smiling back tonight. I had just spent the last three hours at the police station while Detective Meltzer pelted my mother with questions about her whereabouts the night of Ben’s death, the day of Michelle’s murder, what her relationship with Ben was like. I watched her fumble over her lies, saying that she had been watching her grandkids all evening. The kids had been given a tour of the police station and a cruiser by a friendly officer who felt bad for them when he saw them slumped in the corner of the waiting room amid two prostitutes arguing over which street corner belonged to whom. For the first hour, Elise and Jackson whined about going home. For the next two hours, they followed the young officer, oohing and ahhing, asking a bajillion questions until Elise decidedly told me she wanted to be a cop someday. A touch of irony, since her mother was a criminal.

I had graciously thanked that officer for entertaining my kids as I herded them out the door. At least they hadn’t been in the interrogation room to deny my mother’s statement.

That’s when the big news came out – during the interrogation – and that’s when I saw just how corrupt my husband had been. Losing his mother-in-law’s life savings in a bad investment. Then taking a large chunk of Lane’s savings too. Ruining his own family! No wonder my mother had hated him. It was a wonder Lane didn’t. Now my conversation with Lane made sense; I didn’t know Ben at all, a man capable of stealing from the people who loved him, from the people he was supposed to love back.

As the details were explained to me, Ben sold it as a promissory note investment, where Mom and Lane – and a handful of others whose names weren’t disclosed to me – could buy back some of the debt to save Ben’s investment company. Except it wasn’t Ben’s company per se; sure, he had helped start it with the CEO, Randolph Whitman, but he had no control over it or ownership. He simply didn’t want to have to start over, so he figured saving a sinking ship might work. It didn’t. Especially not when Randy ran off with all the money. Ben died the same night that Randy fled, gone in the wind. And now I was more confused than ever.

After dropping the kids off at home and putting them to bed, I needed to clear my head. So many worries rattled around up there in my skull. Only one place really gave me clarity – beneath the weeping willow tree in my former backyard.

In one hand I held the keys to my Hendricks Way house. In the other hand I held the leather diary containing my daughter’s darkness. What I had read disturbed me greatly. What eleven-year-old wrote such graphic depictions of blood and death? Enfolded between pages of friend drama and school pressures I discovered a horrifying account of a little boy named Frankie – I assumed he was named after the doll that they had made such a fuss about – murdered by his reflection. The reflection kept luring the little boy with gifts, but with every gift the boy accepted, he lost a bit of himself. First it was not eating, then it was seeing things. It sounded awfully reminiscent of Jackson. Finally, at the end of the story, the little boy disappeared into the mirror and became the reflection, stuck behind glass with no escape.

Elise had titled it The Boy in the Mirror, as if it were just a story, an Aesop’s fable, except evil and unhinged, like R.L. Stine on steroids. I had read the story again and again, hoping to uncover some deeper meaning within the images of darkness folding over each other. All I found was a child in great need of hugs and therapy. Just like Jackson.

I stood in the backyard of the house I had called home for years, now a vault holding memories and secrets. The air was unseasonably crisp for a late May evening, which felt good after the day’s pitiless heat. My skin yearned for the cold to clear my head, to sharpen my focus. I needed single-mindedness now more than ever as the police were beginning to ask questions I couldn’t answer. Well, perhaps couldn’t isn’t the right word. Shouldn’t.

Michelle Hudson, the only witness in my husband’s murder case, was dead. Did I know anything about that?

Of course not, I’d insisted. How tragic! She was such a nice old lady.

Unfortunately – yet fortunately for me – she hadn’t gotten a good look at the two – yes, two! – intruders who had broken into my house the night of Ben’s death. But the police now had a lead – and it most