I came down to the cellar to search for a bottle. The door slammed and, shortly after, a scuffling sound like furniture being dragged over the floor came from above.
How long was it between the slam and the scuffling? Not long, maybe a second or two. Faith had to have been quick because I was at the door, pounding within seconds.
Or was I? I had freaked out and at first thought that it was an accident, so I didn’t run over, though I was quick.
But still, Faith would have wanted to trap me under something heavy.
What would she have used?
No. A better question was—what was nearby?
Okay, let’s start with the sitting area. The couches are too far away and too heavy for Faith to have dragged them over quickly.
The dining room table, the place where we had sat Friday night is also too far away for her to have managed to drag it over within a few seconds.
The ottoman in the living room is a big bulky thing, as wide as two coffee tables—so not an option.
The end tables are also big with glass tops. To move one, Faith would have first have had to remove a lamp. That would eat away time, so she wouldn’t have chosen one of them, either.
Ha ha, Faith, two of us can play detective.
It’s just like it used to be, me and her in a battle of wills and smarts. Who will solve the mystery first?
So Faith can’t have used a couch, a big table, an ottoman, or an end table. That only leaves the chairs as a possibility for what is standing between me and getting out of the cellar.
But I had pounded on the door. I had pushed and shoved. Maybe Faith was leaning on it. I never heard her drag something else on top, so it is possible that the same chair is still sitting above me.
Faith knows me too well—or at least she thinks she does. Brittany is too nice to push and shove her way from the depths of hell.
Well that was the old Brittany, the one before I became Court. This Brittany will fight with every clawlike fingernail that I have to survive.
Going back, Faith wouldn’t have used one of the chairs sitting under the breakfast bar to place atop the door. They’re too long and not heavy enough. It makes more sense for her to go for one of those under the dining room table. They are sturdy and big. They’re heavy for sure, but all anything needs is time and pressure set against it and it will fall.
Here is where I excel.
Not only do I spin, but I also weight train. My arms are toned, and my legs are steel. I am a housewife, and if there’s one thing that housewives have, it’s the luxury of time to go to the gym and be in shape.
Faith has not counted on that. With her rounded little doughy body, she hasn’t count on my strength.
I ease myself under the door, and instead of pushing with my hands, this time I flatten my back against the prone surface. I bend my legs under me so that I can use my thighs to shove my body upward.
When my back is braced, I begin to push. My spine protests, growling in pain, but I grunt through it. I’ve lived with back pain for the past twenty years. I can do this.
At first it seems like nothing is happening, that maybe I’m wrong about what’s pinning the door down.
But maybe what the object needs is a good shove in the right direction. I exhale hard and silently count one, two, three.
I push with all my might, forcing my legs to put out more pounds per pressure than I think possible. At first nothing happens, but then I hear something scrape.
It’s quiet, not loud enough to distract Faith, or at least I hope not. But the door begins to open. The crack between the slats widens.
If I give it one more good shove, I might can dislodge the chair. But I have to be fast and I must work hard.
My legs quiver. They shake, but I ignore it. One more good thrust and I’ll be out.
I grunt and bear down, pushing with all I have. The chair atop the door begins to slide, and I get my arms under me and shove the door up all the way.
Then I’m gulping warm, smoky air. My body vomits out of the cellar and splays onto the wood floor. My arms are sprawled out in front of me, and I fall flat onto the cool surface.
I hear Faith’s voice. “Glad you could join us, Court. I think Blanche has something that she would like to say.”
My legs quake as I push myself onto my feet. My shoulder aches. My spine screams in pain, but I shuffle to the fireplace.
There, sitting strapped to the recliner, is Blanche. Standing beside her is Faith, holding a knife over our friend.
Chapter 47
“Come on over,” Faith chirps happily, almost gleefully, “and hear what Blanche has to tell us.”
The fire crackles. A new log has been set on it so at least Faith isn’t so crazy that she would freeze us to death. But she was crazy enough to lock me up and tie Blanche to a recliner.
Blanche is strapped from head to foot with twine. I can’t imagine where Faith discovered the tool for her torture, but she must have picked through the cabin from top to bottom in order to procure it.
Blanche’s eyes plead with me to free her. Her hair is sprawled around her like the legs of a starfish, knotted and teased out as if she’s about to trick-or-treat.
“Court,” Blanche pleads.
“Say it.” Faith places a hand on Blanche’s head and presses her into the cushion. “Tell us that you did it.”
Tears pour from Blanche’s eyes.
“Faith,” I say quietly, “let her go.”
“No,” Faith snaps. “We’ve been through this. She must confess. I’m not going to be investigated.” She glares down at her captive. “I know you did it. Court knows you did it. We all know, Blanche. Go ahead and admit that you killed Paige. Do it or so help me God—”
She lifts the knife in a threat. I reach for her. “Faith, stop! No!”
“I’m not going to kill her, just cut her a little, until she spills the beans. Spill her blood for beans, Court!”
Anger geysers in my gut, pouring into my veins. I remember that I hate Faith. That I hate her because of how she ruined my life. She ruined Paige’s life, too, and now she’s trying to ruin Blanche’s life.
How had I not ever noticed the madness in her? Easy—she’s one of my best friends. She kept her kleptomania a secret. Maybe that’s where she hid her insanity all these years. But with that exposed, the nastiness inside of her has been flushed out.
For so long I’ve worked to keep my secrets. So long. They have been my comfort when the world was a big ball of hate that surrounded me.
But now it’s time to reveal one more.
“Faith, put down the knife. There’s something you should know.”
She squints at me. “What?”
“Please, Court,” Blanche says.
I smile at my friend. “I’m not Court. I’m Brittany.”
A look of shock ripples through Blanche like I’ve slapped her with a book. At first there’s confusion, then denial, and finally, ever so slowly, there is acceptance.
“I already know that,” Faith snaps.
I nod. “Yes, you do. But you haven’t figured out the one big secret that goes with it.”
She quirks a brow and looks very annoyed that she doesn’t have all the answers. It is annoyance, but she’s also uncomfortable. Faith is smart enough to know that I’m about to pull a huge fucking rug out from under her feet.
“What are you talking about?” she says stiffly.
I steel my back, lift my chin, and say, “Blanche didn’t kill Paige.”
“How do you know that?”
I lick my lips and realize how very, very dry my mouth is. “I know that because I did. I killed Paige, and I’ll tell you how.”
Chapter 48
You see it all started with the blackmail letter, that nasty little slip of paper that I received in my mailbox only a week ago.
The letter, though I haven’t shared it at this point, was really quite revealing—at least I thought it was at the time. I thought, upon reading it, tha
t the person who had penned it truly knew every single one of my secrets—or at least they had known the big one.
This is what was written on that creamy white page:
Dear Court,
I know what you’ve done. You can’t escape your past, even though you’ve tried. Unless you pay me ten thousand dollars, in US dollars, converted to Bitcoins, I will go to the police with this information.
That was the best part of it. The rest of the letter explained how to send the Bitcoins, giving me details of things that I never thought I would ever, in all the world, have to bother myself with, much less actually do.
Now, that in itself was certainly enough to make my heart flutter, but it was what was included with the letter that made my heart tighten to a stone—a high school yearbook picture of me, of Brittany.
That’s when I knew that whoever had sent the letter knew exactly what I had done. They knew the truth of the matter, that I had spent the last ten-plus years impersonating my sister.
At least, that’s what I thought.
So you can see that with the possibility of my true identity being uncovered, I was wrecked. For years I had impersonated another. I had committed fraud that in the eyes of the law is unacceptable. DHR would be called. My child, or children, would be taken. Or maybe not even that would happen. Tal would get to keep the children because by law he was Jonas’s adopted father.
But I would go to jail, to prison. For how long? I don’t know, but I had made a promise to Court, one that I was bound and determined to keep.
You can imagine that I had no idea who had sent this letter. I didn’t, and not once did I consider that it was anyone I knew.
For days my focus was on trying to stay alive, to remain where I was in life, even while I realized that whoever had blackmailed me would probably only do so again and again and again. I couldn’t afford more ten grand payments.
But there was something about the letter, something that bothered me, tickled in the back of my mind. I was still working it out, still a fractured mess the day I went to my mother’s house.
If you recall, that morning I went to Tim’s pharmacy, the second pharmacy that my mother had owned and then sold. He handed me her new prescription and mentioned that he’d had to pull out his old typewriter to print the label.
That was what did it—the typewriter. That was when I started connecting dots. My mind worked like a blizzard, ideas like flurries darting down. I recalled the night of Paige’s party when Tal and I had been talking to Derek. He had an antique typewriter, and he mentioned that it was perfect—except for the o’s. That the very bottom of the little o was broken off.
I tore out of Tim’s. I remember how hard my hands shook as I peeled the letter from my purse and devoured it once more, staring at the o’s to make sure that my memory wasn’t clouded.
It wasn’t. They were broken, just at the very bottom. The world fell away. That had only happened one other time in my life—when my sister died. I felt the same experience that very moment as I stared at the words typed out.
I fell back onto my seat. My head lifted to the ceiling and I cried.
It was obvious that it hadn’t been Derek who had done this. There was no reason for him to have blackmailed me. But Paige, why would she have done such a thing? Why would she choose to do this? To know my secret?
I admit that I did not know, and I racked and racked my brain trying to figure it out. It made no sense—she was my friend, but as I read the letter again and again, I heard her voice punching through the quiet of my mind. I could hear her telling me that I couldn’t escape my past.
I started to trace back how we’d met—through Faith—and how Paige had wormed her way quite seamlessly into our lives. This had all been planned, I realized. She was looking at us, ferreting out our pasts, but I still didn’t know why. Paige was my friend, but I didn’t really know her, didn’t share a deep history with her.
Paige was more myth than person, and once I pinned my attention on her, it made sense.
She was always so warm, but what really lay beneath the veneer of kindness? I didn’t know. Her past was never discussed, never touched on in any deep manner. She was a shell, and from that shell she had been watching and learning.
But what I did know was that confronting her about it would do nothing more than send me to prison faster.
I made my way to my mother’s house, barely able to keep myself together. Everything about me was a wreck—I could barely concentrate, could hardly speak. It was easiest to throw myself into cutting her vegetables. I could still turn over in my head why Paige had done it.
We were friends, and friends didn’t do that to one another.
Then my mother asked me what someone knew about me, and I buckled, sobbing.
I never told her the truth, never said one word about exactly what had happened.
But she knew; I saw it in her eyes. My mother must have always known who I was. I’ve thought about this a lot. Even twins a mother can tell apart. Cut your hair, bleach your teeth, act like the other and have her attitude, but still a mother’s eyes and mind can pierce that persona like a spear, finding the brittle place where the veneer cracks in two and falls away like a sheet of ice.
I said, “Sorry?”
And Mama spoke very slowly, deliberately giving emphasis to each word. “They know, don’t they?”
Not another word needed to be spoken. She had said it all, right there in that moment.
I didn’t say anything—couldn’t say anything. My throat was a shriveled mess. Not one squeak, not one peep crept from the depths of my throat.
She spoke again. “You must protect yourself.”
She nodded slowly and took the box, the one full of patches that she would never use, and she pushed them toward me. The box scraped across the wooden counter as it slid before stopping.
I stared at the name, Duragesic. Duragesic is the brand name for fentanyl. Fentanyl is one of the strongest pain killers known to man—at least right now it is. Police often raid drug dealers and find scores of the illegal stuff.
It will take down an elephant.
In its patch form, it's not as deadly as pure powder. But for someone who doesn’t take narcotics, it will kill them—especially if alcohol is involved.
Someone like Paige.
At first I didn’t want to admit what my mother was suggesting, but her nod at the box convinced me. Then she turned her back and looked away so that I could tuck it into the pocket of my cardigan, out of sight.
She never saw me take it, so she could never say that I had stolen it from her.
Even though Mama had wanted me to do just that.
After I left, my mind started whirling. The weekend at Paige’s was coming up. I couldn’t simply slap a patch on her leg while she slept and then have her wake up dead.
An autopsy would occur in that situation. A beautiful, rich white woman in the prime of her life goes dead? Oh, people would want to know why.
They would wonder where the drugs came from.
So I crafted a simple plan.
Having grown up in pharmacies, there is a lot that I know about them—like that pharmacists take phone calls from doctor’s nurses all the time. I knew who Paige’s doctor was. All I had to do was call and find out the nurse’s name. That was simple enough. I called and told the receptionist that I had just been at the office and the nurse was so nice that I wanted to send her a thank-you note, and what was her name again?
See? Easy.
Luckily I also knew some dosing. Working in a pharmacy will teach you that, too.
I called Tim’s pharmacy, pretending to be the nurse, and left a prescription on the voice mail for a new patient, Paige Varnell.
“Xanax 1 mg. Take one or two by mouth at bedtime. Number, 60. No refills.”
I even left a fake social security number to make it complete.
Then the next day I showed up and told Tim, who loved me and had known me for years, that I was picking up my
friend Paige’s prescription. Tim didn’t even bat an eyelash because he had every bit of info that he needed for Paige. Tim would never think that I would lie about a prescription. No, I was a good customer. I was Court Lane, which meant that I was trustworthy.
Of course the first thing I did when I got home (and my biggest mistake) was to flush the pills down the toilet. I never thought about that stupid powder, that clue that Faith had latched on to like a tick on a dog.
The rest of my plan was easy.
Friday night, after I was certain that Paige had fallen asleep, I took two patches from the box and, as quietly as I could, made my way to her room and applied them to her leg.
That she didn’t wake up was a miracle. At one point I thought she would. She moaned a little and shuffled, but I got them on.
They would work fairly quickly, especially with how much wine she had consumed. I checked on her an hour later and her breathing was slower, so I applied the last three patches, emptying the box. She was so sedated that she didn’t even move. It was clear that by morning she would be dead.
It sounds so clinical, doesn’t it, the way I’m telling you? As if I never cared for Paige, as if all of this was simply so easy to do.
It wasn’t.
I spent days coming to terms with the fact that I had to end the life of one of my best friends so that I could go on living.
After all, won’t we do anything to protect our families? Won’t we do whatever we can to keep them safe?
I would and I will.
I half expected that Paige would bring up the letters Friday night, or that she would pull me aside and tell me what she knew. It still wouldn’t have changed anything. The patches would have been applied just the same.
The next morning—early, before anyone was up, I sneaked back into her room and checked.
Paige was dead.
I slipped the empty bottle onto her table along with a bottle of water that I wiped down.
I let Paige hold it to put her prints on it, of course.
Then I carefully removed the patches and wiped off any glue residue.
It was done.
Don't Trust Her Page 24