Quiet in Her Bones Singh, Nalini (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖

basin tap, I drank before throwing the water onto my face. It was like ice, a shock to the system. I stared at myself in the mirror as droplets fell onto my chest. Stared at the head that held a malfunctioning brain.

I’d had a fucking conversation with Paige. I’d hallucinated her with perfect clarity.

On the other hand, what if what I’d now “remembered” was the delusion?

Skin cold, I wiped off my face, and made my way to the computer. The clock in the bottom right of the screen showed that it was only ­eight-­thirty. I’d had about ­two-­and-­a-­half hours of sleep. Blinking gritty eyes, I forced myself to bring up the browser and type in her name: Paige Jani Moses.

Her stunning face filled the right side of the screen, all sharp bones and perfect lighting. One of those bio sections about famous people the search engine automatically generated. But the other top hits were news headlines.

CATWALK MODEL PAIGE JANI CRITICALLY INJURED IN FALL

DID PAIGE JANI JUMP?

EXCLUSIVE: PAIGE JANI MAY HAVE BEEN DRINKING!

“Bullshit,” I muttered under my breath. The police had told me that she hadn’t been intoxicated or under the influence of drugs when she’d decided to climb up over our lower balcony wall and jump. If she’d jumped from the top balcony, the one outside the master bedroom, she’d have fallen to the lower balcony. No easy fall, but survivable.

But that wasn’t what she’d done.

My eye went to the top headline:

PAIGE JANI FAREWELLED FROM HER CHILDHOOD CHURCH

Paige had crashed onto a parked car far, far, far below our apartment. That she’d survived at all was a ­miracle—­but her survival had been a cruel mirage. Three hours later and she was gone.

There was vodka downstairs, endless bottles of it.

Whiskey, too.

Rum.

Any poison I wanted.

Mouth dry and hand shaking, I picked up my phone and called Dr. Jitrnicka’s office. “Can he fit me in?”

Turned out he could even though he was only working a ­half-­day. “Just had a patient call to reschedule because their babysitter canceled on them,” the receptionist told me. “I’ll put your name in their ten o’clock slot.”

I made my way methodically through an entire ­family-­size slab of chocolate in the interim. I had to make sure I thanked Shanti for ensuring the drawer stayed stocked. Had to be her. No one else knew my specific sugar addictions.

It was just after ­nine-­thirty when I walked out to the car. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I knew I had to talk to someone. Maybe the therapist could help fill the ­Swiss-­cheese holes in my brain, in my memories.

Paige was dead. Paige was DEAD!

I hit the steering wheel once before I reversed out of the drive and turned to head out, but didn’t press the accelerator.

Police vehicles sat outside Alice and Cora’s home. Trixi and Lexi, dressed in venomous ­lime-­green and ­burn-­your-­eyes pink, stood craning their necks on the other side of the cordon. They weren’t the only ones. The Dixons, Margaret in head-­to-­toe black leather and Paul with his bowler hat, were walking over to join them now.

Their faces were ­tight … and oddly voracious.

It struck me then that I’d never once considered them as being involved with my mother’s murder simply because of their age. But they were physically fit now, had been even fitter ­then—­and they obviously had no problem attracting younger women. My mother had also liked them.

“Mags and Paulie are wild, Ari. The kind of wild I want to be when I’m a wicked ­white-­haired budiya.”

Wild people often hungered for new highs, for constant new doses of adrenaline. It had been ­drug-­fueled orgies in their youth. Had it become murder in their senior years?

I tracked their movements, my brain in high ­gear … until it came to a screeching halt on the memory of those manic emails to Dr. Binchy, my mind skittering from person to person to person, leveling blame. And never looking at ­myself … never facing the memory of a motorcycle ride on a rainy night.

I pushed my foot to the pedal.

Trixi and Lexi raised their hands in hello as I passed, but I didn’t pause; I had no need to relive what had happened the previous night.

For the first time, I barely flinched when I drove past the site of my mother’s murder, my hands painfully tight on the steering wheel. Arriving two minutes late to my session with Dr. Jitrnicka, I walked straight in.

“Why don’t we ever talk about Paige?” I demanded the instant we were seated.

The doctor took off his round eyeglasses and buffed them clean on his navy sweater. “Because you made it clear she was ­off-­limits when you first came here.” He watched me with those gentle empathic eyes. “I’m very glad you’re ready ­now—­as I said when we began, she’s critical to who you are today. Your downward spiral began with her suicide.”

“She wasn’t trying to commit suicide. She was ­just …”

No judgment in that face that was just a little too long for perfect symmetry. “From what I’ve learned in the media, Paige Jani had mental health struggles.”

“She was seeing a therapist. She told me to go see one.”

“We’re not magic, Aarav. It’s a truth I had to accept early on in my career.”

Getting up, I paced the room in jerky steps, my crutches sinking into the thick carpet. “I only ever asked her one thing. Just one.”

“Are you willing to share what that was?”

The words burned bright against my brain. “Do what you want, but if you’re ever going to leave me, tell me first. Don’t just go.”

“Ah.”

Yes, it didn’t take a shrink to figure out why I’d made that demand. The funny thing was, I didn’t think I’d ever asked for the same promise from any other woman. At least not that I remembered. But right now, my memories were worth ­fuck-­all.

The scream I’d heard that night reverberated in my skull.

Had I truly heard it? Or had it been born out of my hatred of my father?

“That