Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 163802 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 819(@200wpm)___ 655(@250wpm)___ 546(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 163802 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 819(@200wpm)___ 655(@250wpm)___ 546(@300wpm)
Her expression was terrible. Straight snarling like a wild animal, Sue took one jerky step back, then another.
“Better.” Standing up, I cleared my throat. “Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, I’d gotten to the part where the real winged specter of death swooped down and murdered the sweet woman who was like a second mother to us, but I really should back up to how you faked your death.”
Sue bared her teeth at me. “Sure, go ahead, but you should know, Officer,” she called, raising her voice, “that everything this psycho says is a lie. If I really died, why did she steal my identity and pretend to be her dead twin? What kind of Appa-fucking nutcase does that?”
I clenched my jaw, refusing to rise to her bait. “The car accident was faked,” I gritted out. “It all seemed real to me, but in actuality, it was just another performance.
“The deer wasn’t real,” I dropped. “Or I should say, it was real, but it wasn’t alive. It was a stuffed deer mounted on a rigged pulley hooked up to fishing line. When I came flying around that corner, Reynard pulled and sent that oversized horned doll flying into the street. I crashed, conked my head on the dash, and was out.
“That gave you and your boytoy plenty of time to put some torn-up deer limbs and blood on the road, and replace my sister with your body double, Tracy Williams.”
“Tracy Williams?” she snorted. “The girl who was just at the post office signing strangers’ wills? Now she’s in the car with you pretending to be me? Honestly, you’ve got to stop watching all those murder shows, they’re messing with your brain.”
I went on like she hadn’t spoken. “I’ve seen photos of Tracy Williams all over the news. She was approximately our same height and body type. It was crazy how well that worked out for you. You didn’t have to go and kill another innocent person to pass off as yourself. You just had to dye Tracy’s hair, put her in your clothes, and smash her face enough that all I could identify was her eyes. Our eyes,” I stressed. “I saw a body next to me with purple eyes and believed it was you, because of course I did. Humans take shortcuts in their understanding. The simplest explanation is their favorite.
“What came next you couldn’t be sure of, but that’s why you spent the whole car ride going on and on about how perfect your life was, while digging at how shitty mine was,” I said. “You were needling and manipulating me into concluding that my life would be better if I took over yours... so I did.
“I cleaned up your crime scene and threw Tracy Williams’s body off a cliff, and that’s how she washed up on Bonsai Beach shortly after.” My voice shook. “Because of me.”
She hummed again. “Wow. You’re confessing to a lot of serious felonies, little sis, but I’m still not hearing any proof that I was involved. Who in the hell told you I was working with Reynard? I barely ever spoke to him.”
“You more than spoke to him. You’re the reason why he dumped a shiny career in the trash,” I said. “He didn’t start charging all those fake charges to the estate because he woke up one day and suddenly decided to become a monster. He did it because he was waking up every day in bed with a monster.” I smiled. “You.
“You started sleeping with him and got into his head. Who knows what you said to convince him to start stealing from the estate for you. It was probably some boohoo sob story about the husbands who canceled your credit cards and blocked you from the joint accounts. Or maybe it was the tale of the mean mommy and lawyer who had an iron grip on your inheritance. Either way, it worked.
“And when you realized all you needed to get half a billion dollars was for Omma to die, you convinced Reynard to start shortchanging her care, denying her the meds she needed to be well—all around trying to drain the life out of her even faster, so she’d just finally fucking die,” I cried. “But too bad for you, our mother was a tough old broad. Six months she was on hospice—six months!
“She just kept hanging on with no funeral in sight, and you couldn’t fucking stand it. But,” I stressed, “you were going to struggle on to the end until Omma did the one thing that sealed her fate. She cut you out of the will, giving everything to me, and she told you so in a loud, screaming match that the whole manor heard.” I whistled. “I don’t know what set her off, but it had to be bad for her to say she wished she bashed your head in with the rolling pin and threw you off a cliff.”