The Match (Wilde, #2)(98)

“You should have let me kill her first, Wilde.”

Wilde did not reply. He looked out the window too. Rola stood with Jenn by the chain-link gate to the construction site. She had two other people readied and in position, but Wilde hadn’t needed them.

“What gave me away?” Vicky asked.

“What always gives people away? The lies.”

“Specifically?”

Wilde still stared out the window. “For one thing, you lied about your relationship with Peter. You’re not his sister. You’re his mother.”

She nodded slowly. “How did you find out?”

“The same way Peter did. From a DNA database.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said in a small voice.

“That part? No, Vicky, that part wasn’t your fault.”

“He raped me, you know.”

Wilde nodded. “Your family lived outside of Memphis.”

“Yes.”

“You were the oldest,” Wilde said. “I didn’t think about that at the time. But you told me your younger sister Kelly was upset about your moving because she’d miss a friend’s eleventh birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.”

“That was true.”

“I don’t doubt it. But that got me thinking. Kelly was eleven. You were older. How much older?”

Vicky swallowed. “Three years.”

Wilde nodded slowly. “You were only fourteen.”

“Yes.”

“I’m really sorry that happened to you,” Wilde said.

“He started raping me when I was twelve.”

“Pastor Paul?”

She nodded. “I didn’t tell my parents. I mean not then. He was God to them. Then I tried, but they wouldn’t listen. When I told them I was pregnant, they called me a whore. My own mother and father. They demanded to know what boy I had screwed around with. Can you believe that, Wilde? I told them the truth. I told them what Pastor Paul had done. My mom hit me. Slapped me across the face. She said I was a liar.”

She stopped then, closed her eyes.

“So what happened next?” Wilde asked.

“Can’t you guess?”

“You moved away.”

“Something like that. My parents decided the only way to save the family name was for me and Mom to say we were going on a religious pilgrimage once I started showing. Mom would tell everyone she was pregnant. And when we came back to our community, we would just raise the baby as if it were hers.”

“And you’d pretend to be the baby’s sister.”

“Yes.”

“So how did you end up in Pennsylvania? I checked. Your father did work at Penn State. Your family did move to the area.”

“They changed their minds. My parents.”

“They believed you?”

“They never admitted it,” she said. “But yes.”

“Why?”

A tear came to her eye now. “Kelly.”

“Your sister?”

“Pastor Paul started showing interest in her.” She closed her eyes for a long moment. “That woke my parents up. They weren’t bad people, my parents. They’d both been raised in brainwashing religions. They didn’t know any better. The idea that the man they literally worshipped would defile their own daughters…” She took a deep breath. “I guess you found Pastor Paul through Peter’s DNA.”

“Yes.”

“How did you know I was Peter’s mother?”

“The same way Peter did. The match with Silas. Silas kept talking about sharing a quarter of his DNA with Peter as meaning you’re a half sibling. He jumped to that conclusion. But that couldn’t be anymore. Half siblings can only share one parent. Could Pastor Paul be both their fathers with two different, totally unrelated mothers? That seemed highly unlikely, especially since Silas found other matches on your father’s side too. The key is, if you have a twenty-three percent DNA share, it doesn’t just mean you could be a half sibling. The DNAYourStory website said as much. You could be a grandparent. Or, as in this case, an uncle. It was the only thing that made sense. You’re Peter’s mother, making Silas his uncle.”

Vicky nodded. “Do you want to hear something odd?”

Wilde waited.

“Having Peter was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. After all the horror and abuse and cruelty, at the end for me, there was this perfect little baby boy—a golden child too good for this world. Nothing I told you about him was a lie. Peter was special.”

Wilde pushed ahead. “Did Peter reach out to Boomerang, or was that you?”

“We both did. Peter still thought I was his sister back then. And he was devastated by what happened with Marnie and Jenn and the whole Love Is a Battlefield world. He was obsessed with proving his innocence. So when he saw that DogLufegnev account claiming he had more pics, worse ones, he wanted to know more. I pushed him to let Boomerang help us. Then one day, maybe a month later, someone from Boomerang emails me that our case had been rejected. I wrote back as Peter, saying how devastated I was and how we still needed their help. Eventually the person from Boomerang told me her name was Katherine Frole. She started going on about how big a Battler she was, how she loved Peter’s season, all that. She said she still wanted to help.”