“I would, but I’d rather have hot pokers stuck through my eyes than have to listen to our vapid cousin talk about the latest advances in plastic surgery.”
“Sick burn,” Ellen said sarcastically.
Lanie gave me an annoyed look that I supposed was intended to reprimand me for choosing Ellen over her yet again. I looked away. Ellen had been the one there for me when things had really gotten bad, the one who had held my hand while I wept for my family; Lanie hadn’t been around.
So as my sister walked down the front porch, I followed Ellen into the kitchen. She retrieved a bottle of fizzy Moscato from the refrigerator and poured the sweet wine into a pair of stemmed glasses.
“Do tell,” she said. “What was everyone’s least favorite podcast host doing here?”
“Just what she said. Trying to get Lanie and me to talk. She claims to have some sort of bombshell for the next episode, and said she would only tell us what it was if we promised to comment.”
“She’s fishing,” Ellen said dismissively. “Everything she’s put out thus far has been nothing more than rehashed gossip.”
I swirled the wine in my glass. “Did you listen to the third episode? She actually made a really solid case for Melanie Cave being the one to kill Dad, not Warren. Especially after that scene at the funeral home.”
“Is that what you think? That Melanie Cave let her son go to prison for something she did?”
“If she’s a murderer, why shouldn’t I believe that she’d let someone else take the rap?”
“The rap?” Ellen repeated with an amused smirk. “When did you become a television cop?”
“It makes sense, Ellen,” I insisted. “She had motive. She had opportunity. And there was this voicemail . . . The only thing that doesn’t fit is Lanie saying she saw Warren.” I sagged against the counter. “I can’t believe I’m letting this get in my head so much. It has to be Warren Cave. If Warren didn’t kill Dad, then why would Lanie say he did?”
“Don’t hate me for saying this,” Ellen said carefully, pouring more wine into our glasses, “but have you ever considered that maybe your sister lied?”
“But why? Why would she lie to protect Melanie Cave?”
Ellen held my eyes, uncharacteristically at a loss for words. She lifted the wineglass to her mouth, and into the globe, said, “Maybe that’s not who she was protecting.”
My blood froze in my veins. “What are you saying?”
After her morning at the salon, Ellen’s face was impressively blank. “Have you ever wondered if Lanie killed your father?”
My extremities went numb; the wineglass slipped from my hand and shattered on the kitchen floor.
“No,” I said emphatically. “Jesus, Ellen, no. He was our father.”
“You’re right,” Ellen said, her voice sounding far from convinced. “Forget I said anything.”
Such an accusation was, of course, impossible to forget.
Ellen knelt down to collect the shards of glass, deftly changing the subject to harmless gossip overheard at the salon. I nodded numbly and laughed at the appropriate intervals, drinking wine from the sturdy mug Ellen had handed me in lieu of another glass, but I wasn’t listening. Ellen’s words throbbed obtrusively in my head, calling to mind images of my sister smothering our mother, upending all the furniture in our room in an apoplectic frenzy, using a lit cigarette to burn her own face from a family photo. I shivered.
“Afternoon, ladies,” Caleb said, descending the back staircase, interrupting my dark thoughts and whatever gleeful story Ellen was telling.
“How’s the work going?” I asked, eager for the distraction.
“Eh, it’s going,” he said with a mild shrug. He yelped suddenly, and looked accusingly at the ground. He bent down and produced a chunk of glass, which he held up in confusion. “What’s this?”
“Josie broke a wineglass,” Ellen said.
Caleb frowned slightly, glancing from Ellen to me to the bottle on the counter. He flickered on a lopsided grin and said, “Little early in the day to be shit-faced, huh, gals?”
“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” I offered.
“Not on this continent.”
“That’s my cue,” Ellen announced, giggling into her hand as she swept out of the room.
Caleb stood and squinted after my cousin. “Does Ellen look a little odd to you this afternoon?”
“She says it’ll settle.”
“Did something happen down here? I heard some people come over.”
Ellen’s egregious accusation raced around my brain, but I couldn’t bring myself to give voice to it. The very idea was insane. Lanie might be a lot of things, but a killer wasn’t one of them.
“Poppy Parnell came by,” I finally said.
Caleb looked disgusted. “Bloody piranha.”
“Yeah.” I nodded, wracking my brain for an alternate topic. I didn’t want to talk about Poppy’s big bombshell, didn’t want to have to consider what it might be, didn’t want to have to worry that Ellen might be right. “Hey, do you have a minute to look at flights?”
Caleb nodded. “Are you sure you’re ready to go home? You don’t think you need to stick around for your aunt? Help her probate the estate and all that?”
“My mother spent the last decade living on a commune where they shared chickens and sexual partners. All of her belongings are sitting in the living room in a UPS box. She doesn’t have any estate to probate.”
“Ah,” Caleb said, flashing a quick, humorless smile. “Of course. Let me grab a snack, and then we’ll get right to it, okay?”
I nodded. “I’ll go upstairs and get my laptop.”
But as I passed through the living room, I saw the stack of Mom’s pictures, and I grabbed them without thinking. Sitting on my bed, I pored over them, blinking through tears at the smiling faces of Mom, Lanie, and myself. Looking at Lanie’s cheery smile—a genuine smile I hadn’t seen in years—Ellen’s accusations seemed even more insane. Lanie had loved our father. I flipped through the stack, looking for evidence of that, but couldn’t seem to find any pictures of him. A feeling of disquiet washed over me. I flipped through the stack again, more quickly this time. Perhaps she kept the photos of Dad somewhere else? Maybe they were still in the box?
Dropping the photos on my bed, I moved to the framed picture I had shown Caleb, the one that I had since propped up beside the bed. There, our father had one of his big hands resting on Lanie’s shoulder, and she was grinning, cheeks flushed with excitement, leaning into him adoringly. Ellen was insane. There was no way my sister killed our father.
The following morning, I sat cross-legged on my bed, emailing my boss to inform her I was returning to New York the next evening and could be back at work on Wednesday. As I waited for a response, I navigated to Facebook and scrolled idly through my feed. My stomach flipped when I saw an acquaintance—a girl who had lived on my floor during my one semester at college, and whom I had never thought about again until that instant—had shared a link to the Reconsidered website. New episode!!! she had written. Nobody bug me for the next 6o minutes!