“Desirable?” I stared at her for the longest moment as a revelation washed over me. “It was attracted to you because of what was already inside you. Darkness... Evil...” I paused. “You let it in, didn’t you? Your dark caller. It didn’t have to cajole or seduce or barter. You wanted that thing inside you.”
Impatience flared as her head came up. “Don’t you understand anything? It chose me. Not Rose, not Mott, not any of the others. Me.” She put a foot on the bottom step and I caught a strong whiff of cloves. The scent was overpoweringly sweet, but the spice couldn’t disguise the putrid essence of the malcontent inside her. I rose and retreated to the porch.
She laughed. “Oh, are you afraid of me now? Imagine that. Someone so young and vibrant threatened by the likes of me.”
“You enjoy that, don’t you? Creating fear and chaos. You thrive on negative emotions. Is that why you wanted all those colonists dead?”
“What do you think, Amelia?”
My heart lurched at the sound of my name coming from her odious lips. I took another step back from her. “I think there was another reason. You said the idea was yours. You wanted them dead before the entity possessed you. Why?”
“Why does it matter?” she returned.
“You were little more than a child at the time. What could have motivated you to do such a thing?”
“Very well, if you must know.” She stirred restlessly as if bored by all my questions. Later I would realize that her apathy was only an act. My distress and curiosity must have been highly entertaining while she killed time waiting for her conspirator. “Ezra wanted to take Rose away from us. He wanted to leave the Colony and go somewhere new, make a fresh start. I couldn’t allow that to happen. Rose was the only mother Mott and I knew. She was our protector. What do you think would have happened to us if she’d left? Louvenia would have undoubtedly placed us in a home or a hospital, where we would have been poked and prodded and stared at like some carnival sideshow attraction.”
She climbed to the next step and paused in a beam of sunlight. I could see the entity clearly in her eyes now and in that rictus smile.
“Why kill all the colonists? Why not just Ezra?”
“Because it wanted me to. And because poison was so much easier for us to manage. A simple matter to take the container from the barn and sprinkle it into the food. Mott and I went to the Colony so often that no one paid us any mind that day.”
“But Ezra wasn’t there. He’d gone to see Rose.”
“His absence made things more difficult, but not insurmountable, as you know.”
“And Mott? Did she want him dead, too?”
Nelda sighed as a shadow flicked across her features. “My sweet little twin, always facing backward. Always at my mercy. Always wanting to see the best in people. She knew nothing until it was all over.”
“But she must have known about Ezra. She was right there. Even if you managed to fool her about the poison, she would have heard the gunshot. She would have felt the recoil in her body.”
Nelda nodded. “There was no help for that, I’m afraid. She was horribly upset, as you can imagine, but I convinced her to remain silent or we’d be put away. Still, it tormented her. She couldn’t eat or sleep and I knew it was only a matter of time before she cracked, so she had to be gotten rid of, too.”
“How?”
The eyes gleamed. “I drowned her like an unwanted puppy.”
A shudder ran through me at the image. Poor Mott, trapped by the confines of her body and bound for eternity to the twin that had become a monster.
“You used cloves to cover the smell, but not from the decay of Mott’s body. From the stench of the entity inside you.”
“So you’ve finally figured it out. You’ve solved Rose’s puzzle.”
Despite her taunt, my mind was still working frantically to put it all together. To connect all the dots. “Rose knew about you, didn’t she? She could see it inside you. So you blinded her. And then you killed her.”
“She’d been slowly losing her sight for years. That’s why she’d learned braille, in anticipation of her coming darkness. Given her gifts, perhaps she saw it as a blessing.”
“Is that what you told yourself when you put out her eyes with that key?” I asked angrily.
Her eyes darkened. “You should have heeded the warning. At least Louvenia was smart enough to stop asking questions. But you. You had to keep digging. You had to keep poking.” She started up the steps, using the cane for support. I backed away, keeping my distance, still certain that I could outrun her. Still certain I was in no immediate danger.
Suddenly, the door to the guest cottage flew open and the sound caught me by surprise. As I whirled toward the newcomer, Nelda whipped the cane across my shins and I went down hard on the porch.
Then she struck me across the back. Still I tried to rise. I even managed to get to my knees before a blow to the head flattened me.
“I’m surprised that one didn’t kill her,” Owen Dowling said as he came to kneel beside me.
I tried to lift a hand to the explosion of pain at my temple, but I couldn’t muster the strength. I lay there paralyzed as the world spun around me.