The Sister-in-Law

THE SISTER-IN-LAW

Pamela Crane

Copyright

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Copyright © Pamela Crane 2021

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Cover photograph © Karina Vegas/Arcangel Images

Pamela Crane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008378394

Ebook Edition © April 2021 ISBN: 9780008378400

Version: 2021-03-08

Dedication

To Angie, the inspiration behind the story. Thank you for making your brother single for me, you evil genius.

To Missy, the inspiration behind the characters. Not because you’re crazy, but because you’re crazy awesome.

To Jamie, the inspiration behind the family bond. You set the bar high for all sisters-in-law to follow.

To every sister-in-law out there, this book is dedicated to you. May family drama never drive you to murder.

Epigraph

No matter what you’ve done, I’ve done worse. I’ve been a thief, a liar, a killer. But I’m also a wife, a mother, a sister. They see me, but don’t really see me. Not the real me, the darkness under my skin. And I’ll do anything to ensure they never find out.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1: Harper Paris

Chapter 2: Lane Flynn

Chapter 3: Candace Moriarty-Flynn

Chapter 4: Lane

Chapter 5: Harper

Chapter 6: Harper

Chapter 7: Candace

Chapter 8: Harper

Chapter 9: Harper

Chapter 10: Harper

Chapter 11: Candace

Chapter 12: Harper

Chapter 13: Harper

Chapter 14: Candace

Chapter 15: Harper

Chapter 16: Candace

Chapter 17: Harper

Chapter 18: Lane

Chapter 19: Harper

Chapter 20: Lane

Chapter 21: Candace

Chapter 22: Harper

Chapter 23: Harper

Chapter 24: Candace

Chapter 25: Candace

Chapter 26: Harper

Chapter 27: Harper

Chapter 28: Candace

Chapter 29: Harper

Chapter 30: Harper

Chapter 31: Lane

Chapter 32: Harper

Chapter 33: Candace

Chapter 34: Harper

Chapter 35: Candace

Chapter 36: Candace

Chapter 37: Candace

Chapter 38: Lane

Epilogue: Harper

Acknowledgements

The Boy in the Mirror

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Harper Paris

I didn’t believe in therapy, but I believed what my court-mandated therapist once told me: You are what you leave behind. According to this logic, we were a composition of our choices. You leave trash? You’re trash. You create beauty? You’re beautiful. As I ran from the living room, I left behind a bloodbath, but I wasn’t sure what that made me as I sobbed at the sight of crimson residue staining my hands.

The sight of my husband of twelve years sprawled out on the sofa, a knife jutting from his chest cavity, palms loosely circling the hilt – that was the reason I screamed. It was a howl that shattered my voice, the wail flowing up from my chest and out into the empty air. When the last bits of my cry wafted away, I pressed frantic fingers against his neck, his wrist, finding him deathly cold. Then I ran. And kept running until I found myself on the front porch, the scent of metallic blood singeing my nostrils and the taste of bile burning my throat.

Don’t ask me why I ran to the porch. Not the bathroom, not the kitchen sink – both more reasonable places to purge my stomach – but outside, where a floral scent lingered with my vomit. One never knows how you’ll react in any given situation until you’re in the midst of it. I was in the midst of my husband’s gruesome death, and all I could do was scream and cry and run out my front door into the night, apparently.

I needed to go back inside, but I was terrified. Terrified that it was real.

‘God help me,’ I whispered, drawing in a shaky breath. My voice was drowned out by the cacophony of crickets.

By now I was certain I was having a heart attack as the panic thrummed against my chest. Every beat physically hurt. The fresh air, soaked in lavender and honeysuckle, helped a little, but not much. Feeling faint and feverish, I raised my hand to my forehead, damp with sweat that drizzled down my temples. My body pulsed, hot and cold all at once. Delirium started to set in.

My temples drummed with a terror of something unnamed and unknown. I didn’t know what to do. There was no way Ben could still be alive. I had checked, several times, pressed my fingers to his neck searching for a pulse. Ran my hands along his wrists, his face, begging for him to come back to me. It was the call of regret for a mistake I couldn’t take back. And now he was dead, because of me.

The only man I had ever truly loved was nothing but cool skin against my warm touch. I’d realized he’d been long dead when his stiff arm fell against my leg, causing me to yelp. Mere hours ago I had relished the feel of his flesh; now it scared me to touch it.

It. My husband was no longer him but it. Dead, rotting flesh.

I relived it again and again, that first moment when I arrived home. The living room was black, under night’s spell. He fell asleep on the couch again, I had grumbled to myself when I vaguely saw Ben’s form cocooned under the blanket I had custom made with a family photo woven into it. While I tidied the coffee table of an empty potato chips bag and a half-drunk bottle of vodka, his arm had fallen off the slippery leather cushion, thumping against my thigh. I jumped back at the rigidity of his limb, then gasped at the sight of the knife in his chest, and that’s when I noticed what the shadows had hidden: he looked gray.

Gray like death.

I cupped his unshaved cheek, only to find it cold. The husband I had snuggled up against in bed to keep me warm, the father whose arms wrapped effortlessly around our children, now rigid. That’s when the wave hit me – this was real. I screamed. I searched for life. Ben was dead.

Holding myself upright against the porch railing where honeysuckle vines wrung around the posts like leafy fingers, I used the breathing technique my therapist had left me with. Smell a flower – in. Blow out a candle – out. In, out. In, out. Eventually, a calm mellowed the panic after about forty in-outs, forty flowers and candles. My fingers brushed against the Christmas lights we had never taken down. A classy white LED string that took Ben four hours to individually wrap around the railings and up the Corinthian pillars. Removing them would have been an all-day project, which Ben had never made time for. And never again would.

My stare settled on the lit window across the street and two doors down, half hidden by an azalea bush in full bloom. A sweet but sad elderly woman lived there, the neighborhood night watch. Miss Michelle, I called her, because I could never remember her last name, even though I knew it was something simple with an H. Hall? Hill? I didn’t remember much these days, as each one blended into the next in a hurried blur. Miss Michelle had often kept late hours since her husband passed from cancer. I can’t sleep with the emptiness next to me, she once told me.

Would I ever sleep again?

A breeze ruffled my hair, sticking curly tendrils to my lips. After wiping the bile from the corners of my mouth, I returned inside, petrified to look at him. Tears mixed with mascara stung my eyes. I pressed my palms against my face to stop them falling, but it only made it worse as yesterday’s makeup scraped against my eyeball.

I needed to call someone. But where was my phone? In the kitchen? I couldn’t remember.

I headed into the kitchen, fumbling in the dark for the light switch as my fingers, wet with blood, slipped across the wall. When I finally turned on the light, the room glowed eerily. The mahogany cabinets soaked up most of the brightness. My obsessive-compulsive brain gave me two orders: wash the blood off my hands, then make the call. I turned on the faucet and watched the pink swirl of blood circle the drain while I scrubbed the smear of guilt from my hands.

My palms were clean but my shirt – and my soul along with it – were not. I wanted to change clothes, but I knew better. No wife reeling from the unexpected death of her husband should have time for a wardrobe change. I searched for my purse, where my phone was tucked inside. As I passed through the kitchen, clinging to the mottled granite counter to hold me upright, a flutter of paper crinkled under my hand, then tumbled over the edge of the countertop. A single, yellow, lined page floated down to the polished oak floor, the kind of paper Ben used for scribbling notes during investor meetings and money management seminars. It had been ripped from his legal pad. I picked it up, immediately noticing the salutation: My darling Harper.

A letter. Of course Ben would leave a letter. Anything to heap the guilt on me as his corpse decayed on our Ethan Allen sofa. It was his final hurrah. Ben always got the last word, and up until this moment I never minded. It’s what made our marriage work – I was always right, but he always got the final say. We’d often laugh about that.

My fingers trembled as I squinted away the sooty tears and read through the haze:

My darling Harper,

You saw this coming, didn’t you? You knew one day you’d walk into our home and find me like this, taken by my own hand. You had to, after all the suffering. All the secrets. All the pain.

You can’t blame me for this. You put me here, after all. It was only a matter of time before I escaped the pain of this world, because it was all that was left to do. I couldn’t carry on anymore … not after what happened. What you did. What I could never forgive. I tried. I really did. But in the end, trying isn’t enough. It’s not enough to erase the past. It’s not enough to blur the memories.

You’ve spent the last year hating me, and I’ve spent the last year missing you. We’re not who we used to be, and I realize now we’ll never find ourselves again. When you lose too much of yourself, there’s no way to rebuild. Moving on without you wasn’t an option, but this was.

I loved you, Harper, but love isn’t enough to vanquish the cruelty of life. Death is, though.

Your ghost for eternity,

Ben

My lips mouthed those final words – your ghost for eternity – but no sound came out. Our love couldn’t vanquish the cruelty of life? Waxing poetic wasn’t Ben’s style; football was. Golf was. Beer brats on the grill was. These words didn’t sound like the man I knew. But it could only be him, because only Ben knew all of our secrets … well, all but one. The biggest one. The one I’ll take to my own grave.

The scrawl seemed to match the handwriting I’d seen on hundreds of permission slips and to-do lists and meeting notes. A businessman’s neat print, the letters capitalized. It had to be Ben, but a version of Ben I’d never glimpsed until now. I actually liked this broody, raw, profound edition of my husband I had never met, because it was better than the lying, cheating one I had spent the last year living with. I hated how I had always loved him, no matter how deep he cut me. Love was the ultimate dichotomy – it tore the heart apart. I’d take the pain of heartbreak over no pain at all.

I felt his haunting words, and I wondered what his last moments were like as he wrote them. I guess when a guy like Ben ponders death, something else takes over. Something deeper and darker, something that uses words like vanquish and cruelty of life.

What you did. His message flooded me with guilt and regret. The blame was clearly on me. I did this to him. I nudged him to the edge, then shoved him off of it. If only he had known the truth … but would that have changed anything? Or would knowing only have pushed his goodbye sooner? It was a question I’d never know the answer to. A question I could never ask him.

The letter slipped from my hand to the granite as I swiped away a trickle of snot. I felt myself slipping. I needed help. Should I still call 9-1-1? What then, after the police showed up? What if they asked questions?

Where were you when he died? What were you doing when he died? What does this letter mean? What secrets is Ben referring to here?

No, the risk was too great. My brain was too cloudy to make a thoughtful decision. I was drowning in deep water. There was only one person I trusted in chaos like this, one person who could help me. The same person who helped me the last time I faced Death.

Lane Flynn. My brother, my best friend, my savior. That’s what a brother was for – to help his sister when she locked herself out of her car, or forgot to pick up the kids from school, or when her husband turned up dead. Lane would know what to do.

I couldn’t find my purse on the counter where I usually dropped it – along with a stack of mail or my grocery haul – when I got home from running errands or shopping. Where had I left it? For the life of me I couldn’t remember. I could only vaguely remember anything prior to this moment. All I remembered was cleaning up, being hit by that awful stench of death, then seeing Ben properly. I must have dropped my purse then.

I didn’t want to venture back in there, near the body that had once been my husband, the kids’ father, now a skin-wrapped shell housing flesh and bones. I didn’t want to relive the reality that he was gone – the kids’ hero, our financial security, the handyman who kept our home running smoothly. Who would fix the leaky sink in our master bathroom? Who would remember to change the oil in my car? Who would replace the lightbulbs in that ridiculous light fixture hovering twenty feet high in the entryway? God knew how much I hated heights. Ben knew too.

Selfish bastard. Taking away the one thing I depended on – him.

I rounded the corner into the living room, bracing myself for the sight and smell and aura of decay. Sure enough, I found my purse – and a tipped vodka bottle – at the foot of the sofa, right below where Ben’s head hung crookedly off the cushion. Anger rumbled from an unknown place deep within me, and I picked up the bottle by the neck and threw it at the wall. It smashed into a ring of liquid that dribbled to the floor, joining the shards of glass.

How dare he do this to me! How dare he do this to our kids! How dare he make me a widow! How dare he, how dare he, how dare he! Hot, furious tears rolled down my cheeks, the tears of a scorned woman. Ben had rejected me; had rejected our life together.

Through the sobs I grabbed my purse strap and rooted through tampons and a wallet and lipstick until my fingers felt the slickness of my phone. I pulled it out and ran to the bathroom, hovering by the toilet in case I threw up again. I dialed, praying through one ring, two rings, three rings, that Lane would pick up. On the fourth ring, he answered.

‘Hey, Harp. What’s up?’ Husky with sleep, Lane spoke so casually I almost forgot I wasn’t calling about dinner plans, but about my husband’s suicide.

‘It’s Ben.’ Thick and unsteady, I didn’t recognize my own voice.

‘Hold on.’ The line crackled as Lane shifted the phone. ‘What time is it?’

‘I don’t know. Listen to me, Lane. Ben’s dead!’ They were the only words I could push out before I slipped into a blubbering stream of sobs.

‘Slow down, Harp. I can’t understand you. What’s wrong?’ Lane spoke coolly, evenly, his calmness tempering my frantic nerves, but only momentarily.

‘He’s gone, Lane.’ I didn’t believe it as I said it. It couldn’t be real. And yet the reality of it was painted on my shirt in blood.

‘Who’s gone? Harp, what happened?’

‘Ben.’ The tears flowed freely, but I found a sliver of my voice, just enough to say everything I needed to say. ‘On the couch … he killed himself.’

Lane stopped me with the urgency of his tone. ‘Oh my God. Ben’s dead?’

‘I don’t know what to do. How am I going to tell the kids?’

‘Where are Elise and Jackson, Harp?’ Lane intercepted. ‘You can’t let them see that.’

‘They’re at Mom’s for the night. What do I even say to them? They’ll never understand. And Jackson … this will destroy him, Lane. How will I pay the bills? I don’t have a job, and Ben’s life insurance won’t pay out for suicide. We depended on him for everything, and he took it all away! How could he do this to his family?’ One after another, the worries scrambled to get out of my mouth.

‘Harper, listen to me carefully.’ Lane broke through my hysteria. ‘Do not call 9-1-1. The police cannot know about this. And don’t touch anything. I’ll be right over. Stay there – I’m on my way.’

As the line went dead, I knew what would happen next. Knew what Lane would tell me to do. And I’d do it all, down to every last detail. That was when I realized what all of this made me. The pain and suffering I had left in my wake was enough to make my husband kill himself.

I was a monster.

Chapter 2

Lane Flynn

‘It’s going to be okay,’ I told Harper.

It was anything but okay.

It was worse than I imagined, seeing my brother-in-law like that; stiff and ashen and tinted with blood. The knife sticking out of Ben’s chest looked more like a prop, and the scene was comparable to any number of zombie shows I’d binge-watched, his face waxy and fake. But the smell … there was nothing fake about the stench of an hours-dead corpse.

I knew the smell because I experienced it almost daily at the hospital where I worked. Most people were terrified of the dead, but gore and blood and death were my everyday life. I just never expected it to be my brother-in-law. And not like this.

I stood over the body formerly known as Ben Paris, transfixed by the awful display while Harper broke down in my arms, her sorrow soaking into my shirtsleeve. I doubted she could survive a second round of pain so soon. It wasn’t fair how life discriminated against her. Kissing her head and rubbing circles on her back, I tried to comfort her.

‘It’s going to be okay.’ I had recited this same line a year ago, not knowing if it was true. It felt like just as much of a lie today.

‘We’ll get through this together.’ It was the best I could offer and – this time – the truth.

‘Lane, can’t you do something for him?’ she asked.

‘Harp, I’m a nurse, not Jesus. I can’t bring him back from the dead. I wish I could, but I can’t.’

She pulled away and looked up at me, cool air rushing into the gap of space between us. Her watery eyes searched mine. It was familiar territory to me, the pleading eyes of those left behind seeking answers about their departed loved ones. Did he die peacefully? Was there anything else you could have done for her? Why, why, why? As a nurse, I watched countless sick people arrive on their feet but depart on gurneys. Questions always followed. Answers rarely offered solace. For my sister, I had only one answer. One she would hate, but one she would accept because Harper accepted everything I fed her.

‘What I can do, is try to protect your family,’ I said.

‘How, Lane? He’s gone. The kids have no father. I don’t work. I would be lucky to find a minimum wage job. Without the life insurance money we’ll lose everything. I don’t … I don’t know what to do.’

I placed my hands on her shoulders, forcing her to see me, hear me. ‘You’re strong, Harp. You’ll get through this. I know this is horribly difficult, especially so soon after …’ I didn’t finish my thought, because she already knew. She didn’t need the reminder. ‘But I promise to take care of you. I have a plan, okay?’

She nodded wordlessly.

‘First of all, get rid of that suicide letter. That can never be spoken of again. Understand?’

Another nod.

‘I’m going to stage the house to make it look like it was a robbery. It’s very important that you tell the police you came home to this and have no idea what happened. Ben never killed himself, got it? He was murdered during the robbery.’

She covered her mouth as a gasp slipped out. She was unraveling, and I could barely keep my own emotions spooled right now.

‘Please listen, Harp. I need to know you understand me.’

‘Why murdered? Isn’t suicide better?’

Murder, suicide, both ugly words. There was no easy out, and Harper needed to accept that if she was going to get through this without losing everything … or facing jail time.

‘Not if you want to get your life insurance payout. They don’t pay out on suicides, Harp, which means you’ll lose everything, just like you said. Considering what you’ve been through in the past year, I don’t think you’d be able to handle that big of an adjustment right now.’

Her gaze drifted as she considered my words. ‘What if the police think I killed him?’

‘You didn’t kill him, so there won’t be anything that points to you, right?’

She glanced at the floorboards, her eyes shifty. Stepping out of my grasp, she ambled across the room and sunk into Ben’s lambskin armchair, the one she had bought him for their fifth anniversary and made me pick up and deliver as a surprise. Everything in this room screamed Ben, from the oversized leather sofa with gaudy nailhead accents, to the hideous abstract artwork on the walls.