“It wasn’t your dad,” she said.
I forced my eyes to open, despite the pain, and thought I was seeing things at first. I was sitting on a bed, but the floor was covered in straw. And I could see Alice sitting in an old leather recliner across the way, but there were silver bars between us. I tried to look around, but moving my head made me feel like I would vomit.
“Just keep your eyes closed, Mori. You’ll recover faster if you keep them closed.”
“Where am I? What is this?”
“You’re safe,” she said. “You’re at the farm.”
I sighed and squinted my eyes open again to gain some sense of where I was. The room I was in looked like it had been converted from a horse stall. And there was a door to my right that was open just enough for me to see a small bathroom beyond. But instead of a door to get out of the stall, there was an opening with silver bars.
“You have a jail cell on your farm?”
I closed my eyes again, but I couldn’t ignore the pain in my shoulder and brought a hand up to hold it.
“I have someone on the way to treat those. Was that caused by that woman in the house?”
I nodded. “What is this?”
I heard rustling, and when I opened my eyes, Alice was standing at the bars holding a white card between them. “This should explain things.”
“Not really in the mood for show-and-tell.” It took me a while, but I lay back down gingerly, shifting until my back stopped stinging. “Just tell me what I have to do to get out of here.”
I heard the card flop onto the straw somewhere close to my cot. “You’ll want to see this. It’s your third sin.”
That got my attention, but sitting up took me much longer than it should have.
“What drug did you give me?”
Alice smiled. “Several. You had a long trip to take.”
I grabbed the card and stared at the silver embossed THANK YOU on the front for a few seconds. “You sent the cards,” I said. “That’s why they didn’t have stamps.”
“Clever girl. Just asking that question now, though? I almost ran them through the post just to make it perfect, but I needed them to come to you at set times. And who can trust the post office?”
“But Mrs. Greeves . . . ,” I knew what had happened as soon as I’d said her name. “She sent the collage threat. It had a postmark.”
Alice sneered a little and rolled her eyes. “She sent twelve of those stinky envelopes. I had to intercept them, which was a trial with all of you home from school.”
My second sin smelled like the model glue because Alice had probably held them together, not because they were both from Greeves. I’d been stupid to think that meant something.
My stomach rolled and I squeezed my eyes shut against the nausea. “Why?”
Alice didn’t answer, and when I looked up, she was back in her recliner, staring at the rafters of the barn. She was clearly not ready to answer my questions, leaving me just the one avenue of information.
I opened the card. This time the frame was a plain oval, and there was just a rough sketch of the head of the man that usually peeked in, but inside the frame was another frame—this one a window. In front of the window stood a woman who was clearly meant to be Mrs. Greeves. Just like she’d said, she stood outside our kitchen window and watched me hold a knife to my father’s neck.
“That Greeves woman saw you.” Alice spoke up to the rafters.
“I know.”
“She heard from Constance Ross that you’d thrown the sword into the lake, then she saw you holding a knife to your father’s neck and decided that meant you were the guilty one.”
“I said I know. She told me herself. She’s probably telling the police right now.”
Alice stood and walked to the bars again. “She’s not. You can thank me for that.”
She had all my attention then, which seemed to be just what Alice wanted. “What do you mean?”
“She’s dead.” Alice watched me closely then, looking for my reaction when she added, “I did it for you.”
“You killed her.” I didn’t know how she’d expected me to react, but I’d obviously disappointed her.
“I did it for you. She’s been after you from the beginning. Haven’t you put it together yet? She came there that night to kill you.”
“But she didn’t. She was dying on the floor, you didn’t have—”
“And what if she survived?” Alice looked out through the doorway behind her. “I can’t believe it took me this long to figure out who she was.” She turned back to me. “As soon as you said what’d happened, I remembered that I’d seen her with Constance Ross at the police station. When I was arguing with Mallory about keeping you in custody, I saw her.” Alice pointed at the white card that was still in my hands. “That Greeves woman was yelling at the officer who was trying to control Constance. So when you told me she’d attacked you, that’s when I knew I had to get you away from London.”
Alice was Y.