Not a Happy Family

“But all fairytales are tinged with darkness.”

“Your family is like a fucking soap opera. What more could there be?’ Ted says. ‘Maybe she’s ill,’ she says. ‘Maybe that’s why they’re selling the house.”

“father doesn’t know that, but he might have guessed. He’s so cruel, she thinks, and so adept at finding vulnerabilities. And the house—she’s furious they’re selling it. It’s not because of the upkeep. He’s selling it so that she can’t have it. Just like he sold the business so that Dan couldn’t have it.”

“She is afraid there is an unknowable darkness at the center of her daughter. She doesn’t know if she will ever be able to look at her in the same way again.”

“Audrey is grateful that she’s never had any cause to worry about her own daughter.”

“But they would never have done it together. They don’t do anything together.”

“Reyes stares back at her and wonders if she and her brother were both there, at the same time.”

“Still, Catherine is her best friend. Rose trembles a little as they embrace. They must not find out what she’s done.”

“Audrey was just telling us that Dad changed his will before he died.”

“She and Jake hadn’t left the house right after the others on Sunday. They’d stayed longer, and there had been an argument.”

“The knife lay on the floor beside the body for quite a while—you can see the outline of it, where the blood dried. It was there for perhaps a day or more before it was picked up, cleaned, and returned to the block.”

“This changes things. She’s going to get her windfall a little sooner than she expected.”

“We’re free. All of us, we’re free of him.” Catherine’s face falls; she looks appalled. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” she says repressively. “And I would keep thoughts like that to yourself.”

“Audrey had always admired Irena, while she despised Sheila. Irena did her best for those kids, no one could deny that. She stepped in and did the mothering that Sheila wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do.”

“Just stay away from me. I don’t want anything to do with you,’ Jake says, and disconnects the call.”

“We’ll sue you if we have to, to get back what you owe my brother. And I will make it my personal mission to make sure you are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And you will never be accepted as part of this family.”

“Rose feels a fluttering in her stomach. This really is the sort of thing you dream of, if you’re raised by a single mom and your friends are wealthy. It’s like a fairy tale. But all fairy tales are tinged with darkness.”

“Did you know you would never see that money again? What were you thinking, Dan? Were you angry? Desperate? You’d been ripped off once too often?”

“Someone tried to kill me,’ Audrey insists. ‘Someone broke into my house and tried to poison me.’ She adds, ‘It has to be one of those kids.”

“I borrowed these. A couple of weeks ago.’ ‘Can anyone confirm that?’ She looks up at him angrily. ‘What are you suggesting? That I murdered my parents and kept these earrings?”

“She’d never known him to be violent, even when angry, but he was relentless in pursuit of his own interests. And after what Audrey told her – now she knows he was almost certainly a psychopath.”

“That family had problems,’ Audrey begins. ‘Sheila wasn’t good for my brother. She was weak and frivolous. She didn’t bring out the best in him.”

“I know a lot about that family,’ she says. ‘And unlike the others, I’m willing to tell you about it.”

“She sits in bed, seething at the television set, thinking unhappily about her lost inheritance, which she had so hoped to be able to enjoy.”

“Irena remembers how they used to turn on each other as children. Relationships and patterns are established early; they don’t change. Family dynamics play out again and again.”

“You found them,’ Irena finally exclaims, utterly shocked, ‘and you didn’t say anything? You left it to me to find them?”

“How cold-blooded do you have to be to see your parents’ murdered corpses and go home and act like everything’s fine?”

“thing,’ the attorney says. ‘Whatever you do, don’t talk to the press. Without evidence, the police can’t do much to you, but the press can still destroy you.”

“One more interesting thing,’ she says. ‘Fred Merton had advanced pancreatic cancer. He was dying anyway. He probably only had three or four months.”

“You don’t?’ Reyes says. ‘You have a grudge against your father, you’re in financial difficulty, and you now stand to inherit a very large fortune.”