Chapter Thirty-Four
Olivia
I sat back on my bed, stupefied. Dec had come back to our room twenty minutes ago and told me all of his latest suspicions, and I was still feeling the effects of the shock. With anyone else, I would’ve told them they were crazy, and that this was such a far-fetched theory that it should be the plot of a campy Unsolved Mysteries episode.
But it was Dec. He was smart, and he wasn’t crazy. He cared for me, and he was desperately afraid that Mom was after me. And to be honest, it made a terrible kind of sense.
“A freckle? You think she injected this stuff into one of Callum’s freckles?”
Dec nodded. “He had a lot of freckles and small dark moles, right? Kinda like the ones you have on you.” He gestured toward me, and I nodded.
“Yes. It runs in my family to be pretty freckly.”
“Well, that’s the one spot no one would notice a needle mark on. Think about it. Some freckles and moles are so dark and have that raised, bumpy texture that there’s no way anyone could see a tiny puncture mark in them. And this stuff needs to be injected into either muscle or a vein. I’m sure your brother had a few raised freckles on his arms, same as you. Plenty of muscle in the arms. A coroner could’ve missed it.”
I put my hand over my mouth, suddenly feeling nauseated again. No, no, no. This couldn’t be right. But at the same time, I knew it had to be.
“She tricked me into coming on the show,” I said in a small voice when I felt I could speak again without projectile vomiting. “She said it was because she was desperate to find a replacement contestant. But there was never anyone to replace. There was only one dropout contestant, and that was a man, who you ended up replacing for her. She intended for me to be the twelfth female contestant all along.”
“Yes. She knew she could guilt-trip you into coming here,” Dec said with a nod.
I nodded, my hands trembling. “She told me it could help promote my jewelry website, and she also made me feel bad that we’d barely seen each other lately. She acted like being here on this island would give us some mother-daughter bonding time.”
“But really, she probably only wanted you here for a few weeks so she could start making you sick. Kinda hard to do that when you live across the country and never see her. So this was her opportunity for that.”
I shook my head slowly. “There’s one thing I don’t get. We already know what she’s been slipping in my food to make me sick while I’ve been here. Triclosan. It comes up in blood tests. So why would she give me that if she doesn’t want to get caught?”
Dec sat down and squeezed my hand. “You already know this. It’s to establish a pattern.”
“A pattern?” I wrinkled my nose.
He nodded. “Triclosan doesn’t kill you. It just makes you sick, like Dr. Donnelly told you. So if you were sick for a while, on and off, people would come to know you as that girl who was sick a lot. So then, six months from now—or whenever she planned to do it—when she injected you with the sux poison, which I’m pretty sure she has hidden away somewhere, it wouldn’t look that suspicious. That’s what happened with Callum, right? People were shocked that he died of heart failure so young, but at the same time, he’d been sick with nausea and headaches quite a lot in the months leading up to his death. So while it was surprising, it still seemed to make a little bit of sense. Right?”
I nodded miserably. “He was a sick kid for a while. So yeah. That makes sense. I guess she spiked his food with something for a while too.”
“And then he seemed to get better for a while, right? For a few weeks before he died?”
“Yes.”
“She was probably giving it time for the triclosan to wear out of his system. That way when she killed him with the serious untraceable poison, there’d be nothing on the tox screen results at all.”
I put my head in my hands, my mind whirling. I didn’t want to think my mother could do something this terrible, but it all made such damn sense. She’d always been smart as hell—she didn’t become an exec producer on her own show for nothing. And when Dad died, she was furious that she got such a small portion of his fortune, even though they’d had a nasty divorce so it made sense to the rest of us. The way she saw it, she was the mother of his children, and therefore she deserved it all, whether they were divorced or not. She hadn’t mentioned it in a while now, but I remembered her tantrums clearly from the weeks after his death.
And like Dec said, with Dad’s old job before he died (and the fact that the family owned a hospital in Monterey) she had access to this crazy chemical stuff that could act as an almost-perfect murder weapon. She could’ve waited a couple of years to kill Callum, then a few more to get rid of me. It made a sick, twisted kind of sense. After all, it was suspicious if both her kids died mysteriously at the same time, but like Dec said, if we died a few years apart, it was sad but simply unfortunate. People would probably rally around Mom, comforting her about how terribly unlucky it was that her two children died so young, so tragically. And only a few years after the death of their father, too. So sad.
I’m sure the hundred million dollars she would have access to after we both died would be of great comfort to her as well.
The nausea returned, and this time it was too bad to hold in. I dashed to the bathroom and leaned over the porcelain toilet, retching into the bowl. Dec followed me, stroking my back gently and murmuring soothing words. “It’s okay, baby girl. I’ve got you. You’re gonna be okay. I won’t let her touch you.”
“I…I can’t believe it,” I choked out between sobbing and retching. “She did all this, planned all this. Just for money. I don’t want to believe it, but it all makes sense!”
“Some people will do anything for a huge chunk of change. Look at me. I agreed to legally marry a woman just to get enough for Amelia’s treatment program.”
I wiped my mouth. “That’s different. You did it for your family. My Mom is probably trying to kill her entire family, for her own gain. See the difference?”
He sighed. “Yeah. It’s fucked up.”
“Even just this morning, when she said she wanted us to start spending more time together….I bet it was only so she could keep making me sick. Then eventually kill me. After you’d legally adopted me, of course. Jesus…it’s so messed up.”
Dec shook his head, cold fury etched into his features. “I can’t believe she thought I’d do that. As if I’m that fucking stupid that I wouldn’t see she was up to something dodgy when she asked me to adopt you.”
“Well, you might not have realized how dodgy it all was if you and I hadn’t gotten so close,” I said, before spitting some bile into the toilet bowl. I raised my head again. “That’s her downfall. Us. She had no idea we’d get together and share all our fears and secrets. No idea the stupid freaking Love Randomizer would put us together.”
“I’m fucking glad it did.”
I looked up at him, right into his eyes. “Dec, we need to end this. We need to prove it once and for all. We’ve figured it all out. At least we think we have. But we need more solid evidence.”
Dec gave me a thin smile and rubbed my back. “Don’t worry, princess. I’m already on it.”