Page 134 of Wicked Little Secret

“Who’s this?” I ask, tossing the photo at her. “Brooklyn and Josalyn?”

The photo floats in the air ’til it touches down in front of her.

“You know who that is. That’s my sister, Nyssa.”

“Josalyn?”

Her mouth puckers like she’s bit into a lemon. “That’s right. Why are you asking? Why now?”

“Because I want to know why you’ve never told me my aunt was killed by Valentine?” I ask. “Why have you never told me she graduated from Castlebury too? And… and if you graduated undergrad this year like you’ve always said, where areyourrobes?”

“Nyssa…”

“Mom, if I look up Castlebury’s year one law students for 2004-2005, would I find your name?” I snap. “Or would I find this… Josalyn Webber?”

“Enough. Fix your tone.” She half rises out of her chair, doing her best to be the stern motherly figure she has been so many times in the past.

The difference is, this time it falls flat. I press on.

“None of what you said checks out, Mom. Everything you’ve told me suddenly seems like it makes no sense,” I say. “The only Edward Oliver I could find is some White guy who majored in economics and who graduated before Valentine was even a thing. You said my father was killed the summer after school let out. But how is that possible when all news reports say Josalyn was the final victim and that was in June 2005?”

She closes her eyes. “Nyssa, you’re speaking on things you don’t understand!”

“Then tell me! Tell me why you lied about when my father was killed by Valentine! Why is Josalyn Webber holding me in this photo and not you? Why is Josalyn Webber in the graduation robes and not you? Why does her writing…”

…match the writing in the letter Theron had?

I stop myself at the last second, the cotton in my throat too drying. I’m fuming, shaking on the spot, as hot tears mist my eyes.

Mom sighs as if it pains her. She finally looks me in the face, the heaviness on hers telling me all I need to know.

“Because,” she says, “I’m not your mother.”

27

THERON

BROKEN MAN - ST. VINCENT

“Well,Adler? What do you have to say for yourself?”

Officer Brewster rests his folded arms on his pot belly that he’s grown after years of a diet of beer and chicken wings. He sits opposite me in the sparsely lit dungeon the Castlebury Police Department call an interrogation room.

I’m not in handcuffs. I’m not eventechnicallyunder arrest.

Once the police pulled up on me late at night in the pouring rain, they informed me they had received an anonymous tip. Someone claimed to have seen me fighting with Samson Wicker and then spotted me hauling a large piece of luggage to my car moments later.

This so-calledanonymoustipster told the police I was driving deep into the forest.

Brewster and his colleagues damn near blinded me shining their flashlights in my face, sweeping it up and down my soaked, mucked up clothes. They hovered on the muddy shovel in my grasp and then asked me what I was doing out in the middle of nowhere.

“Why don’t you come with us?” asked the officer with athick mustache that was silver in the moonlight. “Make things easier on yourself.”

I had cooperated, but not without one last glance at the wall of pine trees nearby. My eyes had long ago adjusted to the darkness. They sought out the different shapes, looking for her.

Nyssa.

She’d shown up seemingly out of nowhere only to disappear just as seamlessly.

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