She shakes the gun in my direction. “Sonny is lying in the ICU thanks to you! Why do you think I was crying that day? He wouldneverhave broken up with me. He was trying tohelpme. I asked him to keep you busy so I could get into your house.”
That’s when I remember a little tidbit Harper mentioned about her boyfriend—he was named after his father. So to avoid confusion, everyone called him Sonny.
The name of the man in the ICU: William BennettJr.
I blink at her, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. “But… I don’t understand. Why?”
“Why?” she repeats mockingly. “You still don’t know why?”
I open my mouth, but no sound comes out.
“To be fair,” she says, “I didn’t expect you to come down here. I expected to finish this one off…” She kicks his leg with her high-heeled boot, and Philip lets out a low moan from his altered state of consciousness. “And then leave the police a little tip to let them know what was in your basement. Isn’t that what you did to your dear father?”
There’s a lump in my throat that’s making it hard for me to breathe. “How do you know about that?”
The police promised me nobody would know—they would say it was an anonymous tip. I didn’t want my father to know that I was the one who told the police about his little basement workshop. I wanted to try to save Mandy Johansson. But I was too late. By the time they got there, she was dead.
I failed.
“He told me,” Harper hisses. “You think he didn’t know what you did? He trusted you, and youbetrayedhim. He knew. And he will never forget.”
I reach out for something to grab onto, to keep from collapsing, but my hand touches only air. “Who knew? Who told you?”
She blinks at me. “Our father.”
“Our…” I shake my head, but that was the wrong thing to do. I feel so dizzy all of a sudden, I fall to my knees. “Oh God.”
Harper bends over me, smiling. She lowers her gun slightly, probably because she doesn’t think I’m a threat. “I see you ate the soup I made for you. I wasn’t sure you would. That’s going to make this allsomuch easier for me.”
The soup. She must’ve slipped something into it. No wonder I’m feeling so out of it. Somehow, that knowledge makes me feel better—that there’s a reason for my dizziness. I summon every last ounce of my strength and get back to my feet.
“What are you talking about, Harper?” I say. “Why areyou calling that man ‘our father’?”
She looks amused. “Because he is. He’s our father. Yours and mine.”
“I… I don’t have a sister.” My father couldn’t have knocked anybody up in prison, could he?
“Oh, but you absolutely do.” She smiles at me. “I guess nobody ever told you that our mother was five months pregnant when you called the police on our father. That’s why she killed herself, you know. After she found out the truth, she didn’t want to bear any more of his children. But unfortunately for her, I survived. And she didn’t.”
I suck in a breath. My mother was always overweight. Had she seemed bigger back then? I can’t remember. It’s possible. I do vividly remember her throwing up after she caught me watching the news story about Mandy Johansson—was that morning sickness?
But if she was pregnant, why didn’t she tell me about it? I was eleven years old. Old enough to know something like that.
Was it because she was afraid of me?
“Our grandmother refused to take me in like she did you.” She sneers. “She wanted to pretend I didn’t even exist. So I was put up for adoption. A sealed adoption, where I wasn’t supposed to ever know who my real parents were. But I found out.” She winks at me. “I’m very resourceful.”
Don’t collapse again. Stay on your feet, Nora. It’s your only chance.
“And that’s how I met our father,” she continues. “I went to the prison to see him, and he told me everything. We really connected. It was like finding the missing puzzlepiece. And I have to say, I am amuchbetter daughter than you are. I would never do what you did. You’re a traitor. He told me he wrote to you every week, and you never even came to see him.”
“Because he’s evil!” I spit at her. “He killed like thirty women! He tied them up and did terrible things to them!”
“Yes.” That disturbing smile is still on her lips. “He did do that. He taught me so much. Like did you know that a Kukri knife can slice clean through bone?” She nods at Philip’s left arm, dangling lifelessly off the side of the chair. “He’s not going to be happy about that when he wakes up.”
I cover my mouth, swallowing down another wave of dizziness. “You don’t have to go through with this.”
“But I want to.” Her blue eyes are on mine. “Everything has been leading up to this moment. I found you and got a job working with you, so I could see you every day. The big, important surgeon. Saving lives, even though I know what you really wanted to do to those people. At least our father and I are true to ourselves.”
