“That was absolute genius!” you exclaimed, your face aglow when we disembarked the Flashback ride at Six Flags. It took a lot of encouraging on my part to get you on that roller coaster, and nobody expected it would be Ruby who got off. But sometime between the steep ascent and the stomach-churning final loop, Ruby appeared. I remember bursting out laughing when I heard you talk.
“What’s your problem?” you asked in your Ruby voice, and sent me a nasty look before socking me in the shoulder.
“Nothing,” I said, still chuckling. “You’re the best, Ruby. That’s all.”
“Well, you’re not so shabby yourself, I suppose,” you offered in return. “But let’s not ruin a brilliant ride by getting all mushy, shall we?”
Brilliant.
That’s you, Ruby, absolutely, utterly brilliant.
I hope some of Ruby, most of her actually, can stick around if you ever become integrated into one personality. She’s a blast, that one.
She also knows something about the night of the murder, doesn’t she? Something she’s not telling us.
But what do we know?
There’s the million-dollar question, and unfortunately, the answer is: not much. We know the name Chloe came from your life before us. Chloe was your twin sister who tragically died at birth, and that’s certainly going to get featured in my film. Though I have to be careful not to turn it into a soap opera or a made-for-TV movie. Cue the da da dun dramatic music!
I don’t know if Chloe is some kind of subconscious channeling, a weird little psychic link, or if you simply needed a name to use and you remembered Rachel talking about your dead sister. After all this time and effort to sort things out, I feel no closer to any answers about you, or that night.
Why would Rachel go to prison?
That’s what you told Dr. Mitch in the bathtub at Edgewater, and that’s what Mom relayed back to me.
I don’t see how this new information fits in with all the other strange things you’ve said, or how any of it helps Dr. Mitch prove in court that you were in a psychotic state at the time of the killing. But it may mean something? There has to be some kind of connection.
Then there are those places you keep going on about, places I know you’ve never visited with us:
Alabama … Alaska … Pasadena … Tucson …
We vacationed at the water park on the Cape, never in Arizona. Did Rachel bring you to those places? I know your birth mom was into drugs, that she’d been arrested on a distribution charge, so is that what this is all about, Penny? Drugs? Are these places she took you to pick up narcotics? Was that the reason she got in touch with you, to use you as a drug mule? Did you go to her house that night expecting one thing and end up getting something else entirely?
I have to be honest, these questions are keeping me up at night and away from my schoolwork, which is something I promised Mom wouldn’t happen. But I’m obsessed now. We all are, to a certain extent.
Maybe Mom’s greatest wish will come true and somehow we’ll find out we were wrong and you’re not a killer. I don’t see how that’s possible, but after all this searching I feel no closer to an answer, though I do have a new question. Surprise, surprise, it’s about Ryan.
We got into a fight about you, and that fight was my fault. I was needling him intentionally, wanting to see if he’d snap. And oh boy, did he snap, all right. There’s got to be a reason he dropped out of school so soon after your arrest. Is there a connection?
I get that Eve protects you, Penny, but my question is this: Are you protecting Ryan?
CHAPTER 39
WITH THE TRIAL LOOMING, Sunday workdays were commonplace, and Greg Navarro gave no objection to coming to Annie’s house in Swampscott on what was typically a day of rest so that she and Grace could show him the war room they’d constructed. It had been Grace’s idea to convert an available study into a headquarters of sorts. One wall in the room contained note cards, string, newspaper clippings, and various timelines that allowed them to better visualize information they’d gathered about Penny’s case. Ideally Grace would have preferred to set up the war room at her house, but since Ryan had cooled off after his altercation with his brother, she didn’t want to stoke those fires again.
If it weren’t for Mitch, Grace knew they would be heading to trial with the slimmest hope of keeping Penny out of prison. The hope meter hadn’t shifted much in a positive direction, though, as Mitch hadn’t unleashed some psychotic state that would prove Penny belonged in Edgewater. What he’d done mostly was get them more questions than answers.