Page 26 of The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie
Brant cocks his head to the side. “Are you okay, Alice?”
“Yes,” I sputter. “Of course. I just… In that suit, you look so much like…”
His brow crinkles. “Oh… is it making you uncomfortable? Would you like me to change?”
“No…” I manage a smile. I’m being silly. “That’s okay. It’s fine.”
He comes around the side of the couch and sits beside me. He has a boyish smile on his face that reminds me of a child on Christmas Day. He picks up the gift-wrapped box and holds it out to me. “Now it’s present time.”
I beam at him, pushing aside any remaining anxiety about the suit he’s wearing. “Thank you. You are so thoughtful, Brant.”
I take the box from him. I shake it, hoping to hear candy rattling around inside. But no. It feels more like something soft. I’m so excited to find out what he got for me. I hope it’s a new scarf. And not a warm scarf, but one of those useless silky ones.
I rip through the green wrapping paper and discover a square white box inside. I pause, smiling up at Brant. He winks at me.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Open it.”
Slowly, I lift the cover off the box. And when I see what’s inside, my heart does a backspring followed by a split leap and then transitioning into a handspring on vault.
No. No, it couldn’t be.
It’s a blue-and-black dress.
26
“Do you like it, Alice?”
I raise my eyes to look up at the man sitting beside me in the Armani suit, with the dark-blond hair and blue eyes and the tiny mole near his right ear. He looks exactly the same as he did a moment earlier, but something in his voice has changed.
“What is this?” I whisper.
“It’s a dress, silly,” he says. “And I got it in your favorite colors. Blue and black.” He cocks his head to the side. “You do like blue and black, don’t you, Alice? Or would you have preferred something in white and gold?”
Fear grips my chest like a vise. “Who are you?”
“Or perhaps yellow and purple, if we’re talking about ridiculous combinations,” he goes on. “Or why not green and light green? Anything goes!”
“Grant?” I manage.
He arches one of his light-brown eyebrows. “How could I be Grant? Grant is dead, isn’t he? You killed him, didn’t you?”
I let out an anguished cry, cowering on the sofa. “What’s going on? What are you talking about, Brant?”
The man sitting beside me licks the tip of his index finger. Then he rubs against the side of his face until that tiny mole vanishes. Now that he is wearing that expensive suit, with the telltale mole apparently gone, there is no longer any doubt in my mind.
The man in front of me is Grant Lockwood.
“My twin brother was a good-for-nothing leech,” he spits. “Always has been, always will be. He came to me a few weeks ago, trying to get me to give him some money for his ridiculously large family. If you can’t support eight children, then don’t have eight children! What a loser.”
I don’t know what to say. The words have flown out of my head, and all that remains is paralyzing fear.
“So I said to Brant that I couldn’t give him any money,” he continues, “but I told him I would give him my Mercedes. It was worth a lot of money, I told him, and he knew he could sell it. He was thrilled. Of course, I had already seen you messing around under my car. I knew the brakes would fail.” A smile touches his lips. “After years of being a thorn in my side, my brother finally went down in a blaze of glory.”
I scramble off the sofa, even though I’m not sure my legs will support me. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. The man that I identified in the morgue wasBrant, not Grant. I had noticed he was wearing different clothing from what Grant usually wears, but his shirt and pants were covered in blood, so I hadn’t put much thought into it at the time.
“Did you really think you could get rid of me, Alice?” He grabs the blue-and-black dress that I left behind in the box. “Did you really think you could kill me and get away with it?”
Yes. Obviously, I did. But I can only mutely shake my head.
