One of Us Is Next(17)
What’s going to happen now?
CHAPTER SIX
Knox
Saturday, February 22
I’m about to kill my sister.
“Sorry, Kiersten, but you’re in my way.” With a flick of my thumb on the controller, Kiersten’s Bounty Wars avatar crumples to the ground, blood gushing from her neck. My sister blinks, fruitlessly presses a few buttons, and turns to me with an incredulous scowl.
“Did you just slit my throat?” She glares at the television screen as Dax Reaper steps over her lifeless body. “I thought we were working together!” Our geriatric golden retriever, Fritz, who’d been half-asleep at Kiersten’s feet, lifts his head and lets out a wheezy snort.
“We were,” I say, taking one hand off my controller to scratch between Fritz’s ears. “But you outlived your usefulness.”
Dax agrees with me on-screen. “It’s a good day for someone to die,” he growls, sheathing his knife and flexing his muscles. “Just not me.”
Kiersten makes a face. “This game is vile. And I’m starving.” She’s sitting next to me on our basement sofa and shifts closer to nudge my knee with hers. Kiersten lives an hour away and doesn’t usually spend her Saturdays with us, but her girlfriend is teaching in Japan for six weeks and she’s at loose ends. “Come on, pause your ridiculously buff alter ego and get some lunch with me.”
“You mean my doppelg?nger,” I say. “The resemblance is uncanny.” I put down my controller and flex one arm, then instantly wish I hadn’t. What’s the opposite of ridiculously buff? Pathetically spindly? Kiersten and I look the most alike of any of our siblings, down to our spiky short hair, but she has much better muscle tone from rowing crew on the weekends. Usually, I try not to call attention to that fact.
Kiersten ignores my sorry excuse for a joke. “What are you in the mood to eat?” She holds up her hand before I can speak. “Please don’t say fast food. I’m ancient, remember? I need a glass of wine and some vegetables.” Kiersten is thirty, the oldest of my four sisters. They were all born one right after the other, and then my parents thought they were done until I showed up a decade later. My sisters treated me like a living doll for years, carrying me around so much that I didn’t bother learning to walk until I was almost two.
“Wing Zone,” I say instantly. It’s a Bayview institution, famous for its extra-hot wings and a giant inflatable chicken on the roof. Now that Bayview’s getting trendy, new people are starting to grumble that the chicken is tacky and “doesn’t fit the town aesthetic.” Direct quote from a letter to the editor in last week’s Bayview Blade. So the Wing Zone owners are doubling down; on Valentine’s Day, they strung a garland of blinking red neon hearts around its neck that still hasn’t come off. That’s some professional-level petty, and I’m all for it.
“Wing Zone?” Kiersten frowns as we head for the basement stairs, Fritz padding behind us. “Didn’t I just specifically request vegetables?”
“They have celery sticks.”
“Those don’t count. They’re ninety-nine percent water.”
“And coleslaw.”
“One hundred percent mayonnaise.”
“The lemon-pepper wings have…citrus?”
“Here’s a life lesson for you, Knox. Fake fruit flavoring is not, and never will be, a vegetable.” Kiersten looks back at me as she opens the basement door, and I give her the kind of hopeful, ingratiating smile that works on absolutely nobody except my sisters. “Ugh, fine,” she groans. “But you owe me.”
“Sure,” I say. She’s never going to collect, though. That’s the upside of having sisters who think they’re your mom.
Our basement opens into the kitchen, and when we get upstairs my dad’s sitting at the table, hunched over some paperwork. He looks a lot more like Dax Reaper than I do. Now that he owns his own company Dad doesn’t necessarily have to do hands-on construction work, but he still does, which makes him the most in-shape guy in his fifties I know. He glances up, and his eyes flick past me—the boring kid who still lives at home—and twinkle at Kiersten.
“Didn’t know you were still here,” he says. Fritz, who’s always liked my alpha male father better than anybody, leans adoringly against his chair.
She sighs. “Knox roped me into video game hell.”
Dad frowns, because he thinks video games are a waste of time. As opposed to actual sportsball games, which he’d love for me to play. But he just waves the folder he’s holding at me and says, “I’ll leave this for you to take to work on Monday.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“Letter of intent. We’re gonna hire a couple of the D’Agostino exonerees,” he says. “I got a packet in the mail the other day from Until Proven.”
Great, except he didn’t get it in the mail. I brought it home and put it on his desk. With a note. Which, I guess, he never even noticed.
Kiersten beams. “Fantastic, Dad! Way to set an example for local businesses.”
My father and Kiersten are a strangely amicable pair. He’s this conservative, macho, old-school guy who somehow gets along better with my bleeding-heart lesbian sister than he does with anyone else. Maybe because they’re both athletic, take-charge, self-starter types. “Well, it’s worked out well so far,” Dad says, pushing the folder to one corner of the table. “Nate’s a good worker. And you know, he got A’s in both the classes we covered last semester. Kid’s a lot brighter than he gets credit for.”