I followed Lanie through the station’s narrow halls and out the front door. She walked briskly, with purpose, and I couldn’t blame her for wanting to make a quick escape. Outside, the sun was completing its final dip below the horizon, throwing long shadows across the nearly empty parking lot. I glanced around quickly, certain that Poppy Parnell and her new cameraman had been lying in wait to ambush us, but they were nowhere to be seen. I exhaled a sigh of relief, thankful for small mercies.
In Caleb’s rental car, I placed the key in the ignition but then hesitated. I turned to look at my sister, small and disheveled in the passenger seat. Lanie was staring straight ahead, her blood-streaked eyes desperate, her jaw tense.
“Are you okay?”
She laughed a short bark, a sound that was anything but amused. “I’ve never felt so fucked in my life. And that’s saying something.”
I swallowed. “But they didn’t arrest you, right?”
“Right. You can’t arrest a person for a crime someone else has been convicted of.” She paused to sniff disdainfully. “Or so I’m told.”
“They can’t think that you had anything to do with Dad’s murder. Especially not now, not after they got Mom’s note.”
“Thanks for bringing that. And for coming to get me.” She paused, gnawing on her chapped lower lip. “I imagine Adam’s not here because he’s mad at me?”
“Adam’s not here because I didn’t tell him I was coming,” I admitted. “I wasn’t thinking too clearly when I left the house. He was at your place, meeting with your lawyer.”
“I have a lawyer?”
“One of the best, according to Ellen.”
Lanie sighed and looked out the window. “I suppose I need one.”
“Maybe not. Adam called him before Poppy showed up with Mom’s note. That changes everything, right?”
She shrugged. “Maybe they no longer think I murdered my own father, which seemed to be their working theory for most of the day. But I think it will take more than that to convince them that I didn’t purposefully lie about Warren.”
It was my turn to shrug, and she looked at me sharply.
“You know I didn’t intentionally lie about that, right?”
“Right,” I said without conviction.
Lanie heard the uncertainty in my voice, and her mouth twisted, her expression hurt. “I can’t believe you think I would do that.”
Old resentment swelled inside me, a familiar acrimony born of my sister once again claiming victimhood based on my perfectly reasonable reaction to her pattern of bad behavior, and I snapped, “Come on, Lanie. Don’t act like it’s completely out of character for you to lie.”
“I don’t lie to you,” she said, her eyes going wide and shimmery. “I never lie to you.”
“But you don’t always tell me the truth, do you? All these years and you never told me that it was Mom?”
“Because I didn’t know!” she shouted, her sudden outburst seeming to startle both of us. She took a deep breath and looked at her hands, tugging at a broken nail. “I know that sounds crazy, Josie, but I swear it’s the truth. I saw her—I’m sure now that I saw her—but I couldn’t understand, couldn’t process it. Somehow I convinced myself that it had been Warren Cave.”
“I don’t know, Lanie.” I sighed. “I want to believe you. I do. But I just don’t see how that’s possible. You must have known, even if you didn’t want to accept it.”
“I didn’t,” she said resolutely. “I swear. Sometimes I would have these weird flashes about that night, times when I thought that it might not have been Warren, but honestly, Josie, I never thought they meant anything. I thought they were just nightmares. One shrink I saw thought it was PTSD, another thought it was anxiety. I’ve seen plenty of people and been put on plenty of medication, and no one—no one—ever suggested that my memory might be faulty.”
“Forget the doctors, though. What about you? You never thought you might be wrong? Never? Not even that summer you tried to smother Mom with a pillow? Can you really look me in the eye and say that had nothing to do with what you’re claiming not to know?”
Lanie shuddered and looked away. “I don’t know, okay? Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. I don’t really remember; I was tweaking pretty bad. Anything I thought that night is just as likely to have been drug-induced paranoia as it is to have been an actual memory.” She dug her dirty fingernails into the soft flesh of her palms and winced in pain. “Do you think that’s why she left? Because she thought I knew?”
“I don’t think so,” I said gently, seemingly biologically programmed to soften when faced with my sister’s anguish, no matter how skeptical of her I felt. “That’s not what it sounded like in the note, anyway. Did you ever raise it with her another time?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head fiercely. “I couldn’t have. I didn’t know! Besides, Josie, you remember what she was like then. Even if I had remembered something, do you honestly think I could have talked to her about it?”
An image of my mother’s blank face, her eyes pale and vacant, filled my mind, and my stomach tightened. Lanie might have been the twin unfortunate enough to witness the murder, but should I have known, too? Were there clues that I had missed, telling behavior on my mother’s part that I had overlooked? I thought back to that awful night in October, remembering the sound of the slamming door, the way color drained from Lanie’s face when she looked out the window, the urgency in how she had pulled me into the closet.
“Lanie,” I said suddenly. “Do you remember what you told me the night Dad died? When we were in the closet, in the dark? You said, ‘It’s my fault.’ What did you mean by that?”
Her eyes darkened. “I knew Dad was sleeping with Melanie.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I snuck a peek at Mom’s journal. She wrote about it.” Lanie dragged her nails up the inside of her arm, squirming. “But I didn’t understand the significance of any of it until it was too late. I should have said something, done something . . . If I had, then maybe things would have been different. We could have stopped it. I could have stopped it. And when I saw Warren—or who I thought was Warren—come through the back door, I knew it was because I hadn’t spoken up, hadn’t saved our families. And then I froze. I couldn’t stop it, even then. It was my fault.”
She clenched her jaw so tightly her teeth ground audibly, and I realized for the first time the true extent of the pain and guilt my sister had carried since the night our father was murdered. It went beyond witnessing his death, it even went beyond seeing our mother be the one to pull the trigger—it was the unrelenting torment of unconsciously believing she could have done something to stop it, that she was responsible for the loss of our parents. I reached across the center console for her hand. Understanding the depth of her misery didn’t excuse all that she had done over the years, but it did begin to explain it.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know that now,” she said, squeezing my hand so tightly the bones overlapped and throbbed with pain.
“A lot of things were your fault,” I couldn’t help but add, “but that wasn’t one of them.”
She smiled ruefully and loosened her grip on my hand. “Do you think we can ever start over?”
“You and me?”
“All of us. You, me, Adam, Aunt A, Ellen. My daughter. Warren Cave. Do you think we can just put this awful past behind us and start over?”