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

the one with a bloodstained rug I had to throw out.” It was a wild stab in the dark.

“That bitch was the one who started throwing the glasses,” my father said with a sneer. “Just because I had better aim, she’s suddenly a saint?” A snort. “It wasn’t even a big cut. Rug would’ve been salvageable if you hadn’t vomited all over it after getting home from the hospital. Had to rip the doctors a new one to get you onto other painkillers.”

My hand squeezed the end of the chair arm. “You cut her that night, you admit it.”

“It was nothing, a flesh wound after a shard of glass ricocheted off the mantelpiece.” My father shrugged. “The way she screamed, you’d have thought I’d stabbed her, but the bitch was barely bleeding when she left.

“She probably drove herself into the bush despite what the cops ­think—­she was ­off-­her-­face with vodka. And she had the gall to swipe my most expensive whiskey as she walked out the door, just to spite me.”

A fragment of memory crashed through the blockade created by my broken brain.

“You can’t drive! You’re trashed, you whore!”

“Try to stop me, you ­limp-­dicked bastard!”

“Put down the damn whiskey, Nina. You know how much that’s worth?”

“Oh, bechara Ishi. You can lick it off the road after I pour it out!”

Echoes of words spoken by ghosts, bouncing inside my skull. Real memories? Or ones my mind was manufacturing based on the fuel of my father’s words? “You’re saying you didn’t hurt Mum that night?”

My father held my gaze. “I stayed home and fucked my secretary.” He smiled, hard and bright. “You didn’t know that, did you? Aurelie had the brass balls to come knock on my door after she saw Nina leave. And since she was offering, I accepted. Then I kicked her ass out when you messaged to say you’d gone off the road.”

Aurelie had lied after all. My father looked too ­self-­satisfied to be telling anything but the truth. But why had she done it? Because it placed her in the house during the critical time period? What, after all, had I seen? Red taillights driving off into the distance. My mother could’ve already been dead, Aurelie in the driver’s seat, with my father following to make sure she didn’t lose her nerve.

My father might be telling the ­truth … but lying about the timing.

“Convenient,” I said. “Will she back you up if I ask?”

“If she has a single brain cell, she’ll keep her mouth shut.” My father leaned back in his leather chair. “She was stalking Nina, you know that? Nina saw ­her—­and I emailed Aurelie about it. Still have her reply admitting to it.”

His smile was ­razor-­edged. “She came back two weeks after Nina vanished, but I was bored of her by then and let her know ­it—­I was pretty sure you heard her bawling in my study, but you never said anything about it.”

I kept my silence, because his words hit a total blank in my mind. My father was a master ­game-­player, and right now, I had no idea which game he was playing. “Except you just said she was with you when Mum drove away.”

He shrugged. “She’s smarter than she ever let on. For all I know, she paid someone to off Nina.” The faintest stretching of his skin over his bones. “If she did and I’d known that at the time, I’d have put my hands around her neck and squeezed the life out of her. Nina was mine.”

“Funny how you’ve never before mentioned Aurelie being there that night.”

“I forgot about her. She was nothing, just a bit of fun.” He waved off his former secretary’s existence. “But she was so obliging that she sat for photos for me more than once. I have to say I still take them out from time to time. Shanti is a good wife, but Aurelie ­had … talents.”

So he’d used the photos and the emails to blackmail Aurelie into silence. No wonder Aurelie had all but thrown up when I tracked her down. My father had gotten to her first.

The question was why. After all, she could verify his alibi.

Maybe it was because he’d taken great pleasure in painting my mother as the one at fault for the failure of their relationship. His halo would fall with a spectacular crash should his sexpot secretary come out with the salacious details of their affair.

Then again, he could be spinning lies out of murder.

I rubbed at my forehead, things so foggy and confused in my head that I almost missed his next words.

“Gossip around the police watercooler is that Nina’s ribs were marked as if she’d been stabbed multiple times.”

“How do you know?”

My father rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Find the right person, don’t push too much while keeping things sweet, and all kinds of information flows to you.” Reaching for the glass of water on his desk, he took a sip before putting it down with deliberate care. “You had cuts on your hands that night, son. Doctor noted it on your medical chart.”

I stared at him.

“All I’m saying”—­he leaned forward on his ­desk—­“is keep your mouth shut. You’re not Aurelie. Tu hai mera beta. Khoon ka rishta hai ye.”

How I wished the latter weren’t true. That I wasn’t his son. That we weren’t bound by blood.

“If you killed your mother,” he continued, “then we deal with it inside the home.” In his eyes glinted an avaricious joy; he thought he had me, could control me now.

The urge to do violence was a roar in my blood.

Restraining it with ­ice-­cold ­deliberation—­I needed answers more than I needed to smash in his ­face—­I said, “I didn’t touch her.” I had to believe that; my love for my mother was a fundamental foundation of my personality, the thing that kept me on the right side of the psychopath line. If that proved a ­lie …

“Good.” My father smiled. “Keep repeating that until everyone believes it.”

53

That night, I