Lynn’s grandmother was a stunning woman. She was tall and thin, and her hair was so white that it appeared to be almost blue. It was cut in a short little perfectly coiffed bob that almost touched her shoulders. She had eyes the color of the sky, and she kind of reminded me of Lynn a little, but then she looked straight at me and I realized that she was all Shelly. Deadly.

She extended her hand toward me. “It’s nice to finally meet you,” she said, her voice strong but quiet, as we stood there on her sprawling front porch.

I shook her hand, which was bird-like but strong, all at the same time. “It’s nice to meet you too, Mrs. Punter.” But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t.

She waved a breezy hand in the air. “You can call me Nana, son,” she said.

I’d rather not. I said nothing.

Ash was nearly vibrating with excitement beside me. The whole way, she’d talked my ear off about the few times she’d visited Nana with Lynn.

“She told me I could call her Nana, too,” Ash had explained, her feet drawn up in the seat under her in the car. “I never had my own Nana, so Lynn let me borrow hers.”

She’d explained to me that Lynn didn’t like to visit Nana, because the old farmhouse in Georgia was Shelly’s domain, and when Shelly was around, things always went drastically wrong.

They still did, and that was why I was here.

“Do you have any cookies?” Ash asked her as the older woman drew her into a hug.

She laughed and patted Ash on the back. “Of course I do. In the tin in the center cabinet, same as always.”

Ash darted through the screen door and Mrs. Punter motioned toward a small table set with small cakes and a pitcher of what I assumed was sweet tea. I hated sweet tea.

“Join me,” she said.

I sat down across from her, watching as the breeze lifted her white hair. “It’s almost as though you knew we were coming,” I said, as she poured me a glass of tea.

She smiled. Her smile was slow and scary. “The girls keep me up to date on Lynn. I thank God for them, because Lynn wouldn’t have anything to do with me otherwise.”

I took the glass she passed toward me. “Thank you.” I didn’t drink it. For one thing, I hated sweet tea. For another, I was afraid she’d drug me and drop me in a dark, deep hole.

“I’m guessing that you have questions for me.” She sat back and sipped her tea.

“You have a lovely home,” I replied.

She smiled at me again, but it was a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “It was my mother’s, and her mother’s before that. A family legacy.” She shrugged. Then she stared into my eyes. “Kind of like mental illness.”

I knew that some types of mental illness were hereditary. But other kinds were born from trauma, and I was pretty sure that Lynn’s mental illness was the latter.

“Have you lived here your whole life?”

She set her glass of tea on the table. “Why don’t you cut the shit, Mason? Ask me what you want to know.”

I startled a little, but tried not to let it show. “Why doesn’t Lynn come and see you?” I assumed that Shelly came often. Shelly was raised here.

“Lynn would prefer to lock the past in a dark room, rather than sitting and petting it, taking the chance it might bite her.”

“What does that mean to you?”

She smiled again, this time showing lots of teeth. Yet she didn’t reply.

I sat back in my chair and said nothing. I did look her in the eye, though it pained me to do so.

Finally she said, “Shelly came to live with me when she was six. She scared her father, they said. And a few times, she’d scared Lynn.”

“In what way?” I picked up the iced tea glass out of habit, then set it back down when I realized what I was doing.

“Her father started cutting up animals when he was six, we think. We didn’t know about it until some of the neighborhood dogs went missing.” She shrugged. “We tried to get help for him.”

“What kind of help?”

“The kind that would make him a gentle, kind, loving son. It didn’t work, obviously. I didn’t know how bad it had gotten.”

“Why did you end up with Shelly?”

“One day, after a particularly bad beating which Lynn took the brunt of, my son woke up to find his arms and legs tied to the bedposts with heavy cords. He had a knife pressed to his throat.” She shivered lightly.

“Lynn or Shelly?”

She snorted. “Oh, definitely Shelly. Lynn couldn’t hurt a fly. She would catch bugs in the house and carry them outside to let them go. Shelly, on the other hand, was just as bad, if not worse, than her father.”

“You haven’t called him by name yet. Why is that?”

“If you give evil a name, it has power over you.”

“So, he woke to find himself tied up and Shelly holding a knife to his throat,” I prompted.

She cleared her throat. “Yes.”

“She was six. What kind of threat could she have posed?” It made no sense.

“You’ve met Shelly, yes?”

“Yes.” Too many times.

“My son was evil. But he wasn’t smart about it. He couldn’t hide his crazy. It came out at the most inopportune times. He let anger get the best of him, and then he would hurt people, animals, anyone who stood in the way of what he wanted. Shelly, on the other hand, has always had cunning. She thought about her words before she spoke. And she planned everything, down to every last detail.”

“And that day?”

She shook her head. “Well, I wasn’t there, but I heard about it later.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

“He’d beaten Lynn pretty badly. Left a few wounds. Shelly patched Lynn up while their mother drowned herself in a bottle. Then, when everyone was sleeping, Shelly crept into the room, tied him up—their mother was passed out on the couch downstairs—and then woke him very gently. She looked into his eyes as she told him that one day, she planned to kill him.

“She told him that no matter how good he might try to be from that moment forward, he could never make up for what he’d done to Lynn, so he should expect to die slowly and painfully at her hand. She told him that she would chop him into pieces so small that no one would be able to find anything left of him. She told him that he had better watch out, that she’d be watching from that moment on.

“Then she smiled at him and walked into the room she shared with Lynn, dragging her teddy bear by one arm. She got into bed, and went to sleep. The next day, after his wife untied him, she brought Shelly to me. She left her on the doorstep with nothing more than a stuffed bear. Shelly never saw her again. She died of liver disease when the girls were teenagers. She did see her father, though.”

“When?”

“When she killed him, of course.” She got up, adjusted her blouse, and looked down at me. “My son was evil. He was pure evil, and I was glad when he found a wife and became her problem. Then they started a family, and I spent my days waiting for the call that something had happened to my grandchild. I knew it was coming. I just didn’t know when.”

She leaned toward me and braced her arms on the table in front of me. “What you don’t understand is that Shelly is just as ruthless as her father. Only, in her case, her homicidal tendencies only come out when someone threatens Lynn. The rest of the time, she’s a darling girl. She has friends, she goes on dates, and she hangs out with Lynn and the others. She takes care of all of them. That’s her purpose in life. So, Dr. Peterson…”

She stopped and stared into my face, and I saw that she believed every word she was saying. “Please know that you’re alive because Shelly lets you stay alive. You make Lynn happy. Well, until recently.”

My back straightened.

“Yes, I know about that, too.” She let out a light laugh.

“What do you know?”

She laughed again and turned, opened the screen door, and stepped into the house.

I finally let out the breath I’d been holding.

Mind-fuckery. These people were so motherfucking good at it. But what they didn’t know was that I had my own brand of crazy deep inside. I just hid mine well. You can’t live, day in and day out, with someone like Lynn and not change a little on the inside. By that time, I was desperate, full of worry, and willing to dig deep inside for strength I’d never needed. Until now. I needed my wife back. And I was going to make it happen.

These people hadn’t seen crazy yet.

---

I sat on the porch until Mrs. Punter came back out. She cracked the screen door and held it open wide enough for a person to slip through. “I have something here you might want to see.”

Ash. Oh, my God. My mind immediately jumped to Ash. It had been at least a half hour since the last time I’d seen her. “Is Ash all right?” I got to my feet.

“Ash is fine. She’s in the kitchen, raiding the fridge.” She opened the door another few inches, beckoning me inside without saying a word. “I have missed that girl. She has a pureness, a lack of artifice, that the others don’t have. She’s sweet and gentle, and yet she can kick some serious ass. When she’s gone, I miss her. I imagine you do too.”

I stepped into the house and a cold chill slipped up my spine. It made me think of the cold rooms you saw on ghost hunter shows. But there were no ghosts here. These were living people. Cunning, deadly, living people. And my wife was gone. I was stuck with the cunning, deadly, living people until she came back. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms.

“What did you want me to see?” I asked.

“Shelly’s room. If you want to.” She stared at me.

“Okay,” I said quietly, but inside, I was terrified.

I followed her up the winding staircase and stepped into a room that looked like a blast form the past. There were pom-poms on the bed and hand-drawn pictures on the wall of the two girls, side by side. In pencil drawings, I couldn’t tell who was who. I stared hard at them.

“It’s uncanny how much they look alike, isn’t it?” she remarked.

I had always been able to tell them apart in person. “They don’t look anything alike in real life. Not to me.”

“You’re the only one who’s ever said that. When Lynn would spend summers here, no one could tell them apart. They made a game of it, trying to play pranks and terrorize the neighborhood.”

“Why didn’t you try to get custody of Lynn? After they brought you Shelly and you knew how bad it was, why didn’t you try to get Lynn?”

She heaved a sigh. “I did try. I hired lawyers. I went to judges. I spent money. I did everything I could, but the investigators for the state where they lived found no wrongdoing. Besides, my son went to prison a couple of years after Shelly came to live with me. He was out of Lynn’s life for a while. Then he got out on parole, and then went back. He never got out again after that. Not until right before he died.”

“You’re sure he’s dead.”

“Positive.”

“Because Shelly said so?”

She shook her head. “Because Shelly didn’t say so. That was all I needed to hear. He was gone. She was in good spirits. Lynn was happy with you. Life was good. I chose to let it rest. I wanted to have a normal life, for once.” She turned to face me. “Do you want a normal life too, Mason? Don’t you, sometimes, wish Lynn were normal?”

“I’ve always known about Lynn’s friends. Through them, her past was revealed to me. And Lynn has become my new normal. She’s my everything, and she has been since the day I met her.”

“You might love Lynn, but you just tolerate the rest of them.”

“Not true,” I rushed to say. “I love all of her friends.” I picked up a shred from the plastic pom-poms and started to run it through my fingers. “I probably shouldn’t, but I do. They’re all a part of her.”

She nodded. It was a slow movement. “I believe you.”

“Frankly, Mrs. Punter, I don’t give a damn if you believe me.”

She smiled. Nothing more. Nothing less.

“Why did Lynn cut you out of her life? You weren’t even invited to the wedding. Why was that?”

“Lynn didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head.

“I told Lynn she needed to disassociate from all her friends. That if you two were going to be happy, she would have to stop seeing them, because they would rip you apart. I was adamant about it. What man in his right mind would want to marry a woman and put up with all her friends? Rather than argue with me over it, she stopped talking to me. Entirely.”

I felt the need to remind her. “I didn’t marry her friends. I married Lynn.”

“And her friends came with her.”

“Yes.”

“You’re as crazy as they are.”

“Yes. Probably.”

My eyes landed on a big box on the bed with writing on it. Lynn’s Letters, it read. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Lynn’s letters. What else?”

“What letters?” I asked, but I was already walking toward the box.

“When Lynn started therapy as a young child, her therapist suggested that she write letters recounting her day to herself. Kind of a diary, but they had to be in letter format. She would write them and mail them all here.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope. “She still does that. Matter of fact, this one just arrived.” She opened the box and laid the unopened letter on the top of a huge pile of envelopes. “No one has ever read them. They arrive, and I put them in the box just like she asked.”

My fingers tingled with the need to open the letters and read their contents.

“She doesn’t want anyone to read them,” she said, her voice unyielding.

“I understand.”

I walked toward the door and let myself out of the room. We went back toward the porch, and I was stunned to find Ash asleep on the porch swing.

“Whoops,” Mrs. Punter said. “I think she might have drank your tea.”

I looked at the empty tea glass and back to Mrs. Punter. Not an ounce of remorse showed on her face.

“Ash?” I said, leaning down to check her vitals.

“She’ll probably sleep the whole way home.”

I rounded on her, my hands in fists. “What did you give her?”

“Nothing dangerous,” she said with a smile and a shrug. “Just a very mild sedative.”

“What were you planning to do to me after you knocked me out?” I couldn’t refrain from asking.

“Search your car, your pockets, get to know you a little better. You know. The usual.”

“I would have let you do all that without having to drug me.”

She shoved her hands into her pockets. “Maybe. I couldn’t be sure.”

I hoisted Ash into my arms and she didn’t move a muscle. Her head lolled back and her mouth hung open, but she was breathing.

I put her in the car, and Mrs. Punter brought me a tin of cookies. “You’ll forgive me if I decline,” I said pointedly.

She tossed them into the backseat of the car. “They’re for Ash.”

“Who you just drugged.”

“That was meant for you,” she said petulantly.

“And that makes it so much better,” I muttered.

“It was lovely to meet you, Mason.”

I wished I could say the same.

I pulled away from the curb and drove a little way down the street. I parked where I could see her front door, but she couldn’t see me. Finally, about an hour later, she left in her car. I walked to the back of the house, broke a window, and crawled through it. I got the box of Lynn’s letters from Shelly’s room and carried it to my car, tucking it safely into the back seat. I put the seatbelt around the box, because it was precious to me, in that moment.

Then I went home, my heart in my throat, Ash snoring softly beside me, and my wife still missing. But I’d put together a few more pieces of the puzzle today, so that made it all a little more bearable.