Page 119 of Day Break

“You’re sick,” Chloe said.

“But then she went and fell in love with Rod,” Phillip said. “The bastard.”

“So, you what? Killed Sherry because she liked someone you didn’t?” I asked, hating them more than I had ever hated before.

“Like I said, we didn’t mean to kill her,” Derrick said again, tossing the apple out the back door.

“We saw her riding her bike home. You’d left her all alone. So, we pulled over to have some fun. Only, she refused to get into the truck with us,” Phil said.

“We knew she’d liked it plenty before. Even begged us for it by wearing all those short skirts and tiny bathing suits.” Derrick chuckled. “Remember that pink one she’d wear?” he said to Phil.

“You could see right through it when it was wet.” Phil chuckled.

“How?” I asked. My stomach turned, but I needed to know. “How did you do it?”

“Derrick finally convinced her to get into the truck,” Phillip said, looking down at his hands as if he was trying to decide whether he needed to clip his fingernails or not. “He held her down while I had my fun, then I did the same for him.”

“Only, somewhere in between, she stopped moving,” Derrick said with a shrug. “So we dumped her in the pond, weighing her down with some rocks in her clothes. Only, it didn’t work too well.”

“We both agreed it was an accident. It’s not like we planned it. So to get back at Rod for messing with our family, we decided to frame him. After all, we’d seen him talking to her at the gas station moments before,” Phil explained.

“You followed us?” I asked, remembering leaving my sister at the station so she could hang out there a little longer. I hadn’t seen Rod there that day, but if she was in love with him, she would have tried to keep it from me.

“Sure did.” Phillip laughed. “God, we used to love fucking with you.”

I remembered how many times they had tried to run me off the road on my bike with grandfather’s truck. If I told on them, they’d find me alone and sucker punch me in the gut. So, I stopped telling on them.

My cousins were so arrogant, they actually believed they had all the time in the world to confess to their crimes. And I did want them to confess to everything. I knew my phone was still in my pocket, most likely still on the call with the 911 operator. It was just a matter of time before help arrived. I only had to stall them from shooting us.

Whatever happened now, there was no way they’d get away with murder again.

“Imagine our surprise when Rod left the gas station that day and spent the next hour mowing a yard for the whole damn town to see. Then he headed out to dinner with his parents across the island. His alibi was rock solid. Yours, dear cousin, not so much.” Derrick shrugged.

“It was fun watching you squirm though.” Phil laughed. “God, our dads were so pissed. Everyone in the family was sure you’d done it. Even dear old grandpa thought you were guilty, at least for a while.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“Dumb ass over here slipped up,” Derrick growled out, motioning to Phil. “He mentioned something about losing his ring that last summer when Sherry died. Told his dad that he thought he’d lost it in the pond that summer. The fucking idiot.”

“My dad broke down and told your dad, who in turned told dear old grandpa last year,” Phil said.

“I think it’s why he had a stroke. Too bad it didn’t finish him off back then. Maybe then we would have gotten something in his will,” Derrick said. “How was I to know he’d recover and put two and two together? He’s old,” Derrick shouted.

“After that, our dear old grandfather moved back here and started calling us and asking for more details of that last summer,” Derrick said. “Asking me where I was, where Phillip was, when Sherry went missing.”

“It wasn’t until he hired you and we heard that he’d cut us out of his will that we understood he knew what we’d done,” Phillip said.

“Then, one day, while snooping around upstairs, I overheard the two of you talking about finding Sherry’s diary,” Derrick said. “I knew that bitch always wrote that shit down. Everything we’d done to her in the past. Whenever I used to visit your place in the city, I’d sneak upstairs into her room to jerk off in her underwear.” He and Phil chuckled. “She liked it when we did that. We’d always read her diaries and tear out all the pages where she spilled about all the fun we had together, our little secrets.”

“When we couldn’t find her last diary, we asked around,” Phil said, leaning on the counter.

I remembered Melissa mentioning someone asking her about it earlier that evening. She’d thought it was my uncles. It hadn’t been. No doubt it had been one of my cousins.

“So you broke in and destroyed her room looking for it?” I asked.

“Sure. Still didn’t find it though.” Phil sighed.

“Is that why you killed our grandfather?” I asked, feeling my anger spike again.