Chapter Thirty-Five
Dec
That bitch was going down.
Going. The. Fuck. Down.
Violence against women was a terrible thing, but holy shit, I couldn’t stop myself from wishing someone would burst in here and strangle Ellen right now as she stood before us in her office.
“What did you just say, Dec?” she asked, face still drawn into a mask of composure.
“I said our deal is off. Our sham marriage is off.”
She narrowed her eyes, almost imperceptibly. “You can’t do that.”
“I can do whatever the fuck I want. And we haven’t gone public yet, so really, it’s no skin off your nose. No embarrassment for you.”
She smiled thinly. “If you say our deal is off, then our marriage gets annulled. Immediately. Our contract is then voided, and your family gets nothing. Are you really willing to do that to darling little Amelia?”
She looked like she was about to laugh, and it took every bit of resolve I had to not pick something up and throw it in her damn smarmy face.
“Amelia will be fine. I have enough money to keep her treatment payments going for another couple of months. That should be enough time for me to properly receive my share of the money I’ll get from winning this shit-show.”
Ellen’s brows shot up, and this time she did laugh. “Oh! That’s your plan? You think you’re gonna win Wed At First Sight? My show?”
“Yeah. I am. And Liv’s on my side in all this,” I said, slinging an arm around Liv’s shoulder. “She’s gonna help me do it. She’s already helped make us the most popular couple so far, after all.”
“Oh, and it was my idea for us to win, Mom,” Liv added.
Ellen had the good grace to actually look surprised, although that was difficult with all the Botox in her forehead. She took a faltering step back, the first sign that she’d realized her little house of cards was about to topple. “What?”
“Dec and I are together, Mom,” Liv said smoothly.
“What?”
She was beginning to sound as parrot-like as William. I loved that damn bird. If it wasn’t for him constantly shouting the word ‘freckle’ I never would’ve realized what Ellen likely did to her own son.
“We’re in a relationship. We haven’t just been faking it for the show. We’re really together.”
“No. No, you can’t do this,” Ellen said, wildly shaking her head. “Liv, you can’t possibly betray me like this. If you two win, I risk losing the show and my job. We’ve been through this already! Someone from the crew could get pissed if you get the prize money and they could tell the network heads who you really are! Then I’m screwed for putting you on the show in the first place.”
“Oh, Mommy dearest, you’re about to lose a lot more than your job,” Liv said sweetly. “So I wouldn’t even worry what the network thinks of you at this point.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we figured out your plan,” I cut in smoothly. “We figured out everything.”
“What plan?”
“I found the adoption contracts in your drawer.”
“And I found out that you tricked me into coming here,” Liv chimed in.
To her credit, Ellen mostly kept her cool. “I can explain all that,” she said with a flustered wave of her hand. “Dec, I thought you legally adopting Liv would make our fake marriage more convincing to others. And Liv, yes, I did trick you into coming here. I wanted to spend more time with you. That’s all.”
“Wanted to spend more time dropping hand sanitizer into my food and drinks, you mean?” Liv asked, her face etched with fury. “Dec found that, too. In your third drawer with the adoption papers. And Dr. Donnelly ran tests on me last week which showed that I have a very high level of something in my system which only comes in…you guessed it. Hand sanitizer.”
Ellen’s mask was beginning to slip, but she managed to keep a grip despite her rapidly-whitening skin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I…I’ve never even used hand sanitizer. One of my staff members must’ve just left it in my drawer by accident.”
“With a syringe?” I said scornfully. “Wow, what a convenient accident!”
She didn’t reply, but a red tinge was beginning to creep over her face.
“You thought I’d just put it down to stress or something, didn’t you?” Liv said. “You didn’t think I’d go to a doctor for some random nausea and tiredness. But I did. See, I guess my own brother dying at the age of fifteen from a sudden mysterious illness made me a touch paranoid about my body and my health.”
“And speaking of Liv’s brother,” I interjected. “His death wasn’t a freak incident. We think you killed him, Ellen, with something your ex-husband probably told you about years ago, back when he was still alive. It’s pretty cool being married to an anesthesiologist, isn’t it? You learn all sorts of shit.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said flatly.
I pressed on. “We also think you’re slowly trying to do the same to Liv, just so you can get your hands on all that sweet, sweet cash that you felt so slighted about not getting in Joe’s will. You never really wanted a trophy husband in me, and you never really cared about helping my family, did you? You just wanted a husband in general. Someone to inherit everything when you couldn’t legally do so yourself. And you saw me as a good target for that, because you knew how Joe screwed my family over years ago. That’s why you chose me to ‘marry’. Right?”
“You have no proof of any of this,” Ellen said coldly.
That solidified her guilt in my eyes. An innocent person being accused of such awful things would never say something like that. He or she would break down in tears, wondering how people could think something so awful about them.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” she went on. “If you had even the smallest shred of proof, aside from a few easily-explainable things you’ve found in my drawers, I’d be sitting in a prison cell right about now, waiting for my lawyer.”
Liv shook her head. “Is that really all you have to say, Mom? That we don’t have any proof? You aren’t even denying it,” she said softly.
Ellen smiled grimly. “I’m not stupid, Olivia. I know what you two are up to. You’re hoping I’ll admit something out loud. Something you’re probably recording on a phone in your pocket. I know that trick, honey, and I’m not falling for it.”
I smiled back at Ellen. “You might not be stupid, Ellen, but neither are the police back in California. I called them earlier and told them my suspicions. They were happy to listen, and as we speak, they’re getting a permit from a judge to exhume Callum’s body.”
She still didn’t crack. “An autopsy already showed that my son died of natural causes.”
“Sure, because they didn’t suspect murder. A regular post-mortem process isn’t gonna check for some random rare metabolites in the kidneys when there’s no reason to think it was anything other than natural causes. And the coroner had no reason to think Callum’s death was suspicious at all, because there were no visible needle marks on his skin. Right?”
Ellen sneered. “Sure. Whatever you say, Dec.”
I held up one finger. “But, the lack of needle marks doesn’t matter. Now that I’ve told them what I suspect you injected Callum with, they’ll look inside him again. At whatever is left in his kidneys, specifically. And they should still be pretty well-preserved even after two years in the ground, given how they deal with embalming of corpses these days. If they find succinic acid and choline in them, which I think they will, you’re screwed.”
That did it. Her mask finally slipped, and her demeanor changed in an instant. “No! No! Call them back right now and tell them it was all a joke!” She grabbed her cell phone from her desk and held it up.
I smiled scornfully. “Why? Because you did it?”
“Just…just do it!” she screeched. “I’ll give you anything. I’ll let you win the show, whatever you want!”
“Holy shit,” Liv whispered. She took a step back. “Wow. You did kill Callum, and you were really gonna kill me too. Just for all that money, right, Mom?”
Ellen realized her mistake. She’d gone too far, said too much. Even though she hadn’t directly admitted it, she’d said enough so that anyone listening to our conversation would be suspicious. An innocent person wouldn’t beg for us to tell the cops it was all a joke and offer us ‘anything we wanted’ in return for our silence. She knew it, too.
“Please, Liv,” she begged, tears forming in her eyes. Crocodile tears, no doubt. “I…I didn’t mean to…”
She didn’t finish that sentence. I suspected she realized there was simply no excuse for her awful actions. She crumpled to the floor, and Liv took a step toward her.
“You were wrong. We weren’t recording you. But there is someone right outside listening. Someone who is probably very interested in what you just said. Two someones, actually.”
Ellen looked up. “What?”
“Dec and I discovered all this stuff yesterday, Mom. We knew we had to sit on it because there’s no police on the Starling Islands. So we did some Googling and made some calls when you weren’t in your office. Managed to convince a lawyer and his police officer friend from Johannesburg to fly out here as soon as possible. That’s the closest major city with English-speaking law officials and jurisdiction over the islands. Anyway, they’ve just heard everything you said, and they’re obligated to follow up on it. So as we speak, they’re probably contacting officials back in the States. The whole process will probably take some time, but you’re caught and you’re going down. They’ll have to hold you in custody in Johannesburg until it’s all sorted out. Don’t worry, I hear it’s just lovely there.”
Ellen’s eyes flickered wildly from me to Liv. “Wait…you never called the police back home, did you? There’s no exhumation being ordered, is there?”
I grinned. “No. Cops don’t work that fast. I made that part up to make you crack. But there will be an exhumation now. Now that you’ve as good as admitted it all.”
Ellen let out a wailing scream and tossed the cell phone in her hand across the room, aiming for Liv. “I wish I killed you first, you little bitch!” she screeched before breaking down into wracking sobs.
The phone she’d thrown happened to hit William’s cage lock instead of Liv, and the door flew open. William flew out and settled next to Ellen, and he pecked at her left arm, squawking gleefully.
“Wow. Even the bird hates her,” Liv remarked through gritted teeth as the door opened and the police officer standing outside finally burst in.
“I wonder if he was actually flying around the house early that morning and saw her inject Callum,” I mused. “Maybe that’s why he kept screeching the word ‘freckle’ whenever anyone was around. He wanted his owner to pay for what she did to her son. African Grey parrots are very intelligent, after all.”
“Maybe,” she said softly. “I guess we can never really know.”
“There is one thing I do know, though,” I said, turning to her. In the background, Ellen was screeching at the police officer, who was trying to subdue her into going with him, and also at William, who was still circling her and trying to peck her.
“What’s that?” Liv asked, looking up at me with her big, beautiful eyes.
I grinned. “I fucking love you.”
Her face flushed and she smiled back at me, despite everything she’d just been through with her duplicitous, maniacal mother. “Dec,” she said. “I fucking love you too.”