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“Yup.”
“And so the picture is complete,” he said. He steered us up the on-ramp and onto I-95 south.
“Very nearly,” I said.
“Great heavens, there’s more?” said Brian with mock horror.
“Quite possibly,” I said.
“Do tell.”
“Well,” I said slowly, “just speculation here, but if it was me…?”
“Oh, dear,” Brian said. For the first time he frowned. “Poor dear Vince—surely they wouldn’t?”
I shrugged. “As I said. Speculation. They might not actually kill him.”
“But in any case,” Brian said, “disgrace, dishonor, discredit, and dismissal.”
“Almost certainly,” I said.
“And that we cannot allow,” Brian said. “Since he is our hole card, and we need him alive, well, and highly credible.”
I looked at
my brother with some fondness. He had cut right to the very practical chase, without dithering around about friendship, gratitude, or honor. It was nice to be around somebody who thought so much like me. “Precisely,” I said.
“If some dreadful accident happened to Anderson…?” he suggested.
“I admit it’s tempting,” I said. “But it would look a little too convenient for me.”
“You would have a wonderful alibi,” he said, a little too seductively, I thought. “No one could ever pin it on you.”
I shook my head. “Deborah would know,” I said. “She has already hinted that she might rat me out someday.”
“Mmm,” he said, and I knew what he would suggest before he ever said it. “There could be two dreadful accidents….”
I opened my mouth to tell him to forget it, drop it, put the thought permanently out of his mind. Not Deborah, never my sister, no matter what might happen. It was out of the question, off the menu, not remotely a possibility—and I paused, closed my mouth, and pondered. It had been pure unthinking reflex to deny the merest thought of Accidenting Deborah, and like so many reflexive denials, it did not truly bear the weight of logical thought. I would never have considered it before, even for a moment; family loyalty and obligation, all drilled into me by Harry and so many years of acceptance and practice, made it impossible. Deborah was unthinkably untouchable. She was Home and Hearth, Kith and Kin, as much a part of me as my arm.
But now?
Now, after she had so thoroughly disdained, dismissed, and disowned me? So very completely rejected Me and all I am? Was it really unthinkable to send Debs away on the Long Dark Journey now, when she had already suggested that she did not find it at all unthinkable to do exactly that to Me?
I felt a small, sly, slithering purr from deep inside, where the Passenger napped, nestled in webs and shadows, and I heard it whisper to me what I realized I already knew.
It was not unthinkable, not at all. It was, in fact, suddenly very thinkable.
More: It could even be painted with a light patina of true justice, in a sort of Old Testament way. Debs was willing to see me dead—didn’t it make perfect, eye-for-an-eye sense for me to see her dead first?
I remembered her words: never really my brother. They still stung, and I felt a slow-burning anger smoldering at the outer edges of my Harry-built propriety. I was never really her brother? Fine. That meant that she was never really my sister. We were now and forevermore unsibling, unfamily, unrelated.
And that meant…
I became aware that Brian was humming happily, so very far off-key that I could not even recognize the melody. He would be just as happy, and perhaps much happier, if I gave him permission to do away with Debs. He didn’t understand my past objections, and certainly felt no hesitation himself. After all, he had never thought he was related to Deborah; that had been my tragic fallacy. And even though he was no more capable of human feelings than any other reptile, it was Brian who had come to my aid, after Debs had refused with great self-righteous loathing. The Great Illusion of my bond with Deborah had been exposed, rejected, flung from the fracas at the first real trial. And instead, blood had proved true after all.
And yet…
I still found it very hard to picture the world without Debs.
