Chapter 3 - The Sister Who Knew Too Much
Kara stood in the middle of the living room, her coat soaked through from the sudden summer rain, holding a crumpled piece of paper in her hand. She saw the paternity test in mine, and her shoulders slumped like all the fight had gone out of her.
“You found it,” she said, not a question.
“When did you know?” I said, my voice sharper than I meant it to be. Michael stepped between us, his hand resting on my arm like he was scared I’d do something stupid.
“Six months ago,” she said, walking over to the couch and sitting down, staring at her shoes. “I was looking for Dad’s birth certificate to get a new passport, and I found the envelope in his desk drawer. I read it. Then I confronted him.”
“What did he say?” Michael said.
Kara let out a bitter laugh. “He said he was sorry. That he’d wanted to tell me when I was older, but he never found the right time. That Mom had a fling with an old boyfriend right before they got married, and when she found out she was pregnant, she didn’t know who the father was. He said he loved me like I was his own, that it didn’t change anything. But it changed everything, Emily. How was I supposed to look at him the same way? How was I supposed to know if any of it was real?”
“Is that why you did it?” I said, and the words came out before I could stop them. “Is that why you poisoned them? Because you were angry?”
Kara’s head snapped up, her eyes blazing. “How dare you? I would never hurt them. Never. Yeah, I was mad. I was furious. I didn’t talk to any of you for 2 weeks. But then… I thought about it. Dad taught me how to throw a baseball. He stayed up with me all night when I had appendicitis. He walked me down the aisle at my first wedding, for God’s sake. He’s my dad. Blood or not. I’d never hurt him. Or Mom.”
“Then where were you the day they were poisoned?” I said. “The police said you told them you were out of town with Tyler. But Tyler’s on the run. You could have been here.”
“I was at the spa in Columbus,” Kara said, shoving the crumpled paper in her hand at me. It was a receipt, dated the day of the poisoning, timestamped 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., signed by the esthetician who’d done her facial. “I needed to get away, clear my head. I paid with my card. The police already checked. I have 12 witnesses who saw me there. I was 90 miles away when it happened, Emily. I couldn’t have done it.”
I stared at the receipt, my face hot. I felt terrible for accusing her, but everything was so messed up — how was I supposed to know who to trust?
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
Kara waved it off. “I get it. I’d be suspicious too. But that’s not why I came. The police found Tyler. He was hiding out at his cousin’s place in Indiana. He didn’t fight them. He told them everything. About the key, about the money, about Marnie. And he said something else. Something about the money Marnie gave him. It wasn’t from her inheritance. It was from someone else. Someone who’s been paying her to mess with Mom and Dad for years.”
“Who?” Michael said.
“Mrs. Hale,” Kara said.
Mrs. Hale. Our next-door neighbor for 25 years. The woman who’d brought us cookies when we were little, who’d watched our house when we went on vacation, who’d screamed at Dad 3 years before when he’d testified against her at the town zoning meeting. She’d wanted to build a strip mall on the empty 5-acre lot she owned right next to our house — the lot that backed up to the elementary school. Dad had told the council it would be dangerous for the kids, that it would bring too much traffic, and they’d voted her down. She’d lost $2 million on the deal, and she’d hated our family ever since.
“Tyler said Marnie told him Mrs. Hale has been paying her $500 a month for 2 years to dig up dirt on Mom and Dad,” Kara said. “She wanted something — anything — she could use to blackmail Dad into selling her the half of the lot he co-owns with her. Said if he didn’t sell, she’d ruin him. And when that didn’t work… Tyler thinks she gave Marnie the poison.”
It made sense. Too much sense. Mrs. Hale had the money, the motive, the access — she was over at our house all the time, borrowing sugar, asking Dad to fix her fence. She could have slipped something into their food any day. And she was a retired botanist, for God’s sake. She knew everything about plants. About which ones could make you sick. Which ones could kill you.
We called the police again, and 2 hours later, they were knocking on Mrs. Hale’s door. I stood on our front porch with Michael and Kara, watching through the hedges as they led her out in handcuffs, her silver hair pulled back in a tight bun, her face cold and calm, like she didn’t have a care in the world. She looked right at me as they put her in the back of the squad car, and she smiled. A cold, dead smile that made me shiver.
The police searched her house that night. They found all kinds of things in her sunroom — rare, poisonous plants from all over the world, books on toxicology, a notebook full of notes about my parents’ daily routine. But the worst thing they found was tucked in her kitchen drawer: a copy of the key Tyler had made for Marnie, and a handwritten receipt for $10,000, signed by Marnie, labeled “for services rendered.”
It looked like it was over. Marnie and Mrs. Hale were in jail. Tyler was cooperating with the police, facing only a minor charge for the key copy. My parents were still in comas, but the doctors said they were getting stronger, that they might wake up soon. I went to bed that night feeling like I could finally breathe again, like the worst was behind us.
I was wrong.
At 3 a.m., my phone rang. It was the lead detective on the case, his voice tight and urgent.
“Emily,” he said. “We just got the lab results back on the poison we found in your parents’ system. It’s a rare toxin from a plant called Aconitum napellus — monkshood. We found that plant in Mrs. Hale’s sunroom, so that matches. But there’s something else. We found traces of the same toxin on a pair of work gloves we seized from your husband’s construction truck this afternoon. And we have a witness who says they saw him at your parents’ house at 1 p.m. on the day of the poisoning. The exact time Marnie says she left.”
I froze. Michael was asleep next to me, his arm draped over my waist, his breathing slow and steady.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “He was at work. He has alibis —”
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“His foreman says he left the site at 11 a.m.,” the detective said. “Said he told him he had a ‘family emergency.’ Emily… is there anything you want to tell me about your husband?”
I looked at Michael. At the man I’d loved for 10 years, married for 8, the father of my child. And for the first time in my life, I didn’t know who he was.
