The Winter Sister(68)

He chuckled then. “I mean, Jesus,” he went on. “Just look at your eyes. It’s like you’re already half dead.”

Ben moved forward in his chair. “Are you threatening her, Dent?”

“Hey, man,” Tommy said, holding up his hands. “It’s not me she has to worry about. I’m not the one whose girlfriend ended up dead.”

Ben stood up, the movement so sudden that it made me jump, distracting me from the chill threading through my veins.

“I think we should go, Sylvie,” he said.

“Go?” My voice sounded hollow as I looked up at him. “But we haven’t even . . . he hasn’t even told us anything yet.”

“Yeah, Ben,” Tommy chimed in, “I haven’t even told you anything yet.”

Ben’s fingers contracted into a fist, but he kept his eyes on me. “Come on,” he urged. “I was wrong, okay? We’re not going to get any answers from him. He’s spewing nonsense. He just wants to mess with us.”

He tried to pull me up, but when his hand circled my arm, I jerked away from him. “No,” I said. “I’m not—I can’t go yet. He has to tell—” I leaned forward, searching Tommy’s face for some weakness, some fragility, something that would let me speak to him on a level we could both understand. “You have to tell me what you know.”

The corners of Tommy’s lips curled up. “What about your mother?” he asked. “Did she tell you what she knows?”

I straightened up, my spine like an elastic snapping into place. “What are you talking about?”

Talk to the mother—that’s what Tommy had told the detectives—and now, here he was, making the same ridiculous insinuation that Mom knew something about what happened to Persephone.

“It’s really not my place to say,” Tommy answered, his grin nothing but teeth, a film of saliva glazing his lower lip.

“Then why bring it up at all?” Ben challenged. “See, Sylvie? It’s nonsense.”

Tommy looked up at Ben, who towered above him. “Let’s just say,” he started, “that Annie lied to the police. I was the one who told them to talk to her. I was the one who knew they should. But she didn’t exactly tell them the truth.”

“How would you even know that?” I asked. “How would you know what she did or did not tell them, and how would you know if what she told them was the truth?”

Tommy shrugged. “I have my ways,” he said. “A person on the inside.”

“You have a person on the inside,” I scoffed. “On the inside of what—the police?”

He didn’t answer, but a low, reverberating chuckle emanated from his throat.

“You’re lying,” I said. “You don’t know a thing about my mother.”

“Oh, I don’t? I guess I just imagined it, then—all those long, intimate chats we had.”

He chewed on the word intimate as if it were a delicious bite of food.

“I guess I don’t know anything about what kind of pills she prefers, huh?” he continued. “Or how long it takes for her to just—”

“Stop!” Anger ballooned inside me, squeezing out the fear and hesitation. I leaned forward as far as I could, the package on my lap thudding to the floor as I stared him in the eyes.

“Don’t say another word about my mother,” I said. “I know what you’re doing. I know you’re just trying to distract me from figuring out what you did and what you know.”

“Is that so?” Tommy said.

“Yep.”

“Well—please, Sylvie—tell me what else I’m doing. This is so informative.”

He leaned forward, too, his face coming so close to mine that I could see the web of veins pulsing through his eyelids.

“Dent . . .” Ben warned, taking a step closer to Tommy.

“For one thing,” I said, “you’re lying about Persephone’s stuff. You didn’t sell it to anyone, that’s ridiculous—no one in their right mind would want it. So it’s here, isn’t it? I know it is. And I’m going to give you one more chance to come clean about everything.”

Tommy smiled as he inched even closer to me, the excitement on his face dripping with vulgarity. “Or what?” he asked.

I saw pockmarks on his cheeks—ghosts of old acne and the scrawny teenage boy he’d once been. I saw strands of gray in the wiry hair of his goatee.

“Or this.”

I stood up, marched through the kitchen, and entered the hallway beyond it. It was dim back there, and it took a second for my eyes to adjust enough to make out the bathroom to my left, the shaded bedroom to my right.

“Sylvie,” Ben said, and I could feel him following just behind me.

“Not now,” I snapped. I walked into Tommy’s room, flicking on the light switch by the door, which illuminated a space as tidy and spare as his living room had been. There was a twin bed, its comforter pulled taut toward the headboard, a dresser with a watch and a comb on it, and a couple of plastic bins stacked in the corner.

“What is she doing?” Tommy asked as I rushed toward the bins. His laughter bubbled up in pitch.

“Sylvie, come on.” I felt Ben’s hand on my arm, but I pulled away and tore off the lid on the highest bin in the stack.