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“My mother didn’t try to fly,” she continued. “And she didn’t accidentally fall over the side, either.”
“Then what?”
“She killed herself. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
She stopped speaking to let that land.
“Like my stepfather,” she went on, “but not like him. He killed himself because of the way he had been abusing Crissy. I walked in on them. You didn’t know that, did you? Crissy sure as hell didn’t tell you. She doesn’t even tell herself. And my mother? She didn’t know until the day she died. That very afternoon, Detective. She killed herself because she found out what her dead husband had been doing to her daughter.”
“You told her? That day you were hiking?”
“My God, no. Never. I planned to take that to my grave. It wasn’t my story to tell. And the man was dead. But you saw what it did to Crissy—what he did to her. The solitude, the body issues, the bulimia—”
“Your sister has bulimia?”
“Uh-huh. Why do you think she became Diana? Why, for that matter, do you think she became someone else? Anyone other than who she was?”
“If you didn’t tell your mother, then who did?” Patrick asked. “It was just the two of you on that hike. How did she find out?”
It was the big question. And the answer was the backpack, the very one that Crissy had brought up last month when they had had their reunion lunch at that middling buffet out in Summerlin.
“The day after my stepfather killed himself, my mother was supposed to be one of the high school chaperones on the annual class trip to Washington, D.C. She used to use this ancient L.L. Bean canvas backpack from the 1980s—though it wasn’t such a dinosaur back then. And he wrote a suicide note and put it in the backpack. I guess he knew she would find it there. She obviously wouldn’t be going on the trip: he knew that, too. But she’d already gotten the backpack down from the attic and had it beside her dresser. I guess he wanted a spot where she would find the note, but Crissy and I wouldn’t. So, for instance, the dresser itself was out.”
“But she didn’t find it?”
“Nope. She just brought the backpack back up to the attic. And she never used it again until that day the two of us went on the hike and did the shrooms. It was bigger than she needed, but—I don’t know, once a Girl Scout, always a Girl Scout—she packed it with an actual canteen, chocolate bars for the two of us, gorp, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was more food than we needed, but she was excited by the adventure. And she recalled how the other times we’d done mushrooms, she’d gotten hungry. The munchies. Again, kind of like THC.”
“Do you still have the note?”
“I burned it. Long gone.”
“Did he say why he was going to kill himself? Did he say what he’d done?”
“Do you mean what he’d been doing?”
The detective nodded. Betsy supposed the woman had heard it all, but her eyes nonetheless went from steely to soft, and her blink lasted a millisecond longer than usual.
“He did,” she answered. “More or less. He wasn’t explicit. But he was clear enough. He probably assumed my sister would tell our mother. Or I would. But neither of us did. How could we? Our mother’s second husband had just died. Try and process that. She was a wreck. And I was ten, Crissy was eleven. What I’d seen, what our stepfather had done. How could we tell our mother and add to that grief?”
“So she only learned years later.”
“Decades. Anyway, after my mom read the note, she handed it to me and walked to the edge of the cliff. I thought she was just dazed. Stunned. I thought she was just taking it all in: what sort of person her second husband really was. At that point, I figured she knew her daughters were mostly okay. I was a social worker, and Crissy was out here with a residency. My high school craziness was in the past, and Crissy’s bulimia was—as far as Mom knew—also in the past. She always assumed Crissy had an eating disorder because she was an actor. That’s what Crissy told people. That’s still what she tells herself.”
“And you saw your mother…what? Jump? Walk off the side?”
“She dove.”
No one said anything, and so she repeated herself. “She dove, Detective. She was a very good swimmer and a very good diver. She stood at the edge of the cliff, spread her arms wide, and then dove.” She watched as that sunk in.
“You say you weren’t at Red Rocks,” Felicia said after a moment. “You said it must have been someone else.”
She nodded. She hated herself, but she did.
“Do you think it was your sister? Do you think Crissy might have killed Yevgeny Orlov?”
Rory met her eyes. She knew she was supposed to say yes. Or, at least, tell the detectives that her sister was capable of such violence. She had to for Marisa. The girl was their chip, and she had no idea where the child was, even now.
It dawned on her—not with the measured, leisurely light of daybreak but the coruscating, blinding midday sun of Las Vegas—that no matter what she was about to say, whatever words came from her mouth, she was going to screw either her sister or her daughter. There was no answer that could save them both.
