What She Didn't Know (What She 1) - Page 59
They still did, and that was why I was here.
“Do you have any cookies?” Ash asked her as the older woman drew her into a hug.
She laughed and patted Ash on the back. “Of course I do. In the tin in the center cabinet, same as always.”
Ash darted through the screen door and Mrs. Punter motioned toward a small table set with small cakes and a pitcher of what I assumed was sweet tea. I hated sweet tea.
“Join me,” she said.
I sat down across from her, watching as the breeze lifted her white hair. “It’s almost as though you knew we were coming,” I said, as she poured me a glass of tea.
She smiled. Her smile was slow and scary. “The girls keep me up to date on Lynn. I thank God for them, because Lynn wouldn’t have anything to do with me otherwise.”
I took the glass she passed toward me. “Thank you.” I didn’t drink it. For one thing, I hated sweet tea. For another, I was afraid she’d drug me and drop me in a dark, deep hole.
“I’m guessing that you have questions for me.” She sat back and sipped her tea.
“You have a lovely home,” I replied.
She smiled at me again, but it was a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “It was my mother’s, and her mother’s before that. A family legacy.” She shrugged. Then she stared into my eyes. “Kind of like mental illness.”
I knew that some types of mental illness were hereditary. But other kinds were born from trauma, and I was pretty sure that Lynn’s mental illness was the latter.
“Have you lived here your whole life?”
She set her glass of tea on the table. “Why don’t you cut the shit, Mason? Ask me what you want to know.”
I startled a little, but tried not to let it show. “Why doesn’t Lynn come and see you?” I assumed that Shelly came often. Shelly was raised here.
“Lynn would prefer to lock the past in a dark room, rather than sitting and petting it, taking the chance it might bite her.”
“What does that mean to you?”
She smiled again, this time showing lots of teeth. Yet she didn’t reply.
I sat back in my chair and said nothing. I did look her in the eye, though it pained me to do so.
Finally she said, “Shelly came to live with me when she was six. She scared her father, they said. And a few times, she’d scared Lynn.”
“In what way?” I picked up the iced tea glass out of habit, then set it back down when I realized what I was doing.
“Her father started cutting up animals when he was six, we think. We didn’t know about it until some of the neighborhood dogs went missing.” She shrugged. “We tried to get help for him.”
“What kind of help?”
“The kind that would make him a gentle, kind, loving son. It didn’t work, obviously. I didn’t know how bad it had gotten.”
“Why did you end up with Shelly?”
“One day, after a particularly bad beating which Lynn took the brunt of, my son woke up to find his arms and legs tied to the bedposts with heavy cords. He had a knife pressed to his throat.” She shivered lightly.
“Lynn or Shelly?”
She snorted. “Oh, definitely Shelly. Lynn couldn’t hurt a fly. She would catch bugs in the house and carry them outside to let them go. Shelly, on the other hand, was just as bad, if not worse, than her father.”
“You haven’t called him by name yet. Why is that?”
“If you give evil a name, it has power over you.”
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