The Sinner (Notorious 1)

1

SAVANNAH

“Katie,” I sang. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”

I snuck up to the huge rosebush, searching through the wild pink tea roses for a glimpse of my kid .

“Gotcha!” I pushed apart the thorny branches only to find C.J., the orange tabby, sleeping beneath its leaves.

This is getting ridiculous.

A quick Saturday morning game of hide-and-seek with my eight-year-old was turning into an all-day event. I pushed through the ivy and weeping willow branches that dominated the back courtyard, but Katie wasn’t in any of her usual spots.

She’d upped her game.

I tripped over a broken cobblestone and caught myself against a thick blanket of vines that had eaten up the fountain and obliterated the bird feeder.

It was getting very jungle-like back here. Soon these games with Katie would require a machete.

That would add a whole new dimension to hide-and-seek.

“I told you,” I cried. “You can run but you can’t hide.”

The branches of the cypress rustled over my head and I smiled, backtracking to the trunk of the old tree.

This is new.

It was only a matter of time before Katie worked up the courage to climb the tree. The hundred-year-old cypress was a beauty—bigger than the two-story house in front of it, and its roots were pushing through the cobblestones, breaking up the courtyard like some kind of underground monster.

As if it had been yesterday, my foot found the small lee in the trunk, my hands found the knobs on the lower branches and within seconds I was halfway up into the leaves. Carefully looking for snakes, and hoping my daughter had done the same.

What would my clients say if they could see their staid researcher now? The kids at the library, would fall over their stolen library books if they saw Ms. O’Neill climbing trees.

I found my daughter lying across one of the thick branches directly over the decrepit greenhouse and back stone wall of the property. The girl had only been up two hours and the new red silk pajamas Margot had brought back from her cruise were covered in dirt and leaves.

“Found you!” I cried. “You’re doing dishes for a week.”

“Shh!” Katie hissed, not turning away from whatever scene she was spying on.

“What’s up?” I whispered, climbing a parallel branch, shimmying out over the courtyard on my belly.

“Margot,” Katie whispered. My sweet wild child daughter pushed the red tangle of curls behind her ear, revealing her freckled face, her wide lips and long nose. She looked nothing like me, which was going to serve her well. Because she was so much more than pretty. She was tough. Independent. Beautiful in her own wild way. Pure at heart.

Everything I am not.

“I think she’s crying,” Katie said.

I tore my eyes from my daughter and sought out Margot’s amongst the weeds and broken buildings beneath us.

“Back wall,” Katie said. “Someone wrote something on the stones.”

Not again.

I saw Margot, wearing her white linen, pumps and no doubt “the” diamonds scrubbing at the back wall. The letters—SLU—

“I can hear you girls up there!” Margot yelled without turning around.

“What are you doing, Margot?” I yelled back.

“Contemplating bear traps,” she said and threw the thick yellow sponge into the bucket of water at her feet. Margot turned and faced me in the heat of the morning. Her long white hair was perfect, her face as stunning as the diamonds at her wrists and ears. You would never guess she was pushing eighty.

But right now Margot was one pissed-off matriarch. And when Margot got mad, things got organized. And cleaned. And worst of all, changed.

Shit.

“Every year,” I yelled, shimmying back down the tree, shamed by my grandmother’s elegance into at least acting like an adult. “You know this happens every year. As soon as school gets out for summer, we get every teenager trying to prove to their friends how cool they are.”

Why vandalizing our home was considered cool was one of the great mysteries of local teenage life.

I swung down from the lowest branch and landed on the broken cobblestone. Katie was carefully scrambling down after me.

“Careful,” I said, which was what I found myself saying all the time to my daughter. Not that it did any good. When Katie got within reach I lifted her down, holding her close for just a second, smelling the sunshine and rose smell of her skin.

The pajamas were toast.

“What were they writing?” Katie asked, pointing to the letters on the stone walls. I shot Margot an arch look.

“Child, please. Like you don’t qualify?” Margot asked.

“Officially, I’m not an O’Neill.”

“Honey, an O’Neill by any other name is still an O’Neill.”

The truth was, every O’Neill female was born with secrets, and through our own legendarily bad decision-making, each of us had our own sins. Not that the men had it any better—my brothers had their own crimes and mysteries.

Secrets upon secrets, that was the O’Neill legacy.