The Winter Sister(51)

I set the box on the coffee table and crossed my arms. “Good,” I said coolly. “Now—back to Tommy. I know you’re lying.”

“What? No, I’m not. I gave it all to him.”

I shook my head. “Not about that. About him mowing the lawn and cleaning the house. I know for a fact that Jill paid a landscaping service and cleaned the house herself. So what was the real deal? What did you get in exchange for your dead daughter’s possessions?”

She shrank into her chair, pulling her book toward her chest as if to defend herself.

“If you must know,” she said, her voice creaky and low, “he gave me pills.”

I hesitated. “Pills? What kind of pills?”

“Oh, I don’t know the fancy names,” she said, sounding annoyed. “They were painkillers mostly. The good stuff.”

Even though it probably shouldn’t have, this actually surprised me.

“You used pills?” I asked. “Did—did Jill know?”

Mom lowered her book onto her lap, her finger still pressed like a dried flower between its pages. “Not at first,” she said. “But later, after Tom stopped coming around, she . . . found me. Withdrawals were a bitch.”

The living room clock counted the seconds of my silence. “I can’t believe she never told me,” I said, more to myself than to Mom.

“I asked her not to.”

And we O’Leary women—we keep our promises to our sisters.

Something hot flickered in my chest. “This is so . . .” I started—but then I stopped. I didn’t know what this was. I could barely keep up with all the things I’d learned so far that day, let alone find the words to define them.

Talk to the mother. I heard it again, that absurd suggestion that Mom knew something about Persephone’s murder. Was this why he’d urged the detectives to talk to her? Because he’d been talking to her himself, dropping pills like coins into her palm each week? Did she say something to him once, the drugs just beginning to blunt her edges, that made him think she was worth investigating?

No. I shook the thought from my head. Mom said Tommy didn’t start coming around until a couple years after Persephone died. There was no reason, then, for him to have thought of her when talking to the police.

“You know it was all bullshit, right?” I said. “Everything Tommy said? For one thing, he and Persephone weren’t friends. He barely even knew her. He just left all these creepy notes in her locker. He—”

“That’s not true,” Mom said. “They were good friends. He told me they used to hang out all the time after school. I just never knew about it because I was always working.”

“They never hung out,” I insisted. “That last year? When we were all in the same school? She came home with me on the bus and then she’d do her homework or watch TV until—”

Until Ben came to pick her up, I was going to say, but Mom, as if sensing the dark, choppy waves I was wading into, quickly cut me off.

“And why would Tom lie?” she asked. “Why would he want mementos of her if he hardly knew her?” Mom reached for a bookmark on the end table, slid it between the pages she’d been marking with her finger, and snapped the book shut. “That doesn’t make any sense. You’re just mad I gave those things to him and not you.”

“Damn right I’m mad,” I agreed. “I’m mad you gave him her stuff, and I’m mad you gave him her stuff for pills. God, did you really have no—” I stopped, another thought overlapping the others. “Also, even if they were friends, why would you give her stuff to him, and not to me?”

Mom shrugged and rested her head against the back of the chair. Closing her eyes, she said, “I didn’t think you wanted it. You were out of here the first chance you got, weren’t you? You never asked for any of it.”

“I didn’t think you’d just give it away!”

Her arms hung limply at her sides, her palms turned toward the ceiling. She was clearly exhausted. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from charging forward.

“He was a suspect, Mom. In Persephone’s murder.”

She opened one eye and looked at me before closing it again.

“That’s insane,” she said. “I would have heard about that if it were true.”

“When?” I demanded. “When you were locked in your bedroom? When you were passed out drunk? When you were on drugs?”

“Sylvie,” Mom said, touching her forehead, “you’re being very loud. And I wasn’t on drugs. I was just taking painkillers.”

“He raped a girl,” I told her, remembering the details I’d collected during my research the night before. “Twelve years ago. He was at a party and he found some girl passed out in one of the bedrooms, and he raped her.”

Mom shook her head, her eyes still closed.

“That doesn’t sound like Tom,” she said.

“No? That doesn’t sound like your drug-dealing friend, Tom?” I couldn’t keep the condescension out of my voice. It dripped over every word, thick and sticky. “He spent the next eleven years in prison, so clearly he did it. He—”

My pulse seemed to pause. Turning back to look at the box on the coffee table, I read the address again.