Without Mercy - Lisa Jackson [192]
Nudging the towel with her toe.
Sopping up the liquid. Slowly.
In an S formation.
As natural as if she did it all the time.
Jules, standing near the window, stared at Shay’s foot. The circular motion. Familiar. Dark.
Her heart nearly stopped beating.
In a flickering memory, one that she’d repressed for years, she saw her sister’s small boot-clad foot on another towel, dropped onto the floor near Rip Delaney’s body, covering a small stain of blood. Not blood that Jules had spilled from pulling the knife from her father’s body, but from the wound already there.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. In her mind’s eye, in jagged pieces she caught a glimpse of her father, lying dead, the knife in his leg, bleeding out from his femoral artery. She was already too late as she’d walked into the room with the flickering television screen and found Shay mopping up the blood with her foot. Jules had screamed and yanked out the butcher knife, but it had been too late.
What had been Shay’s excuse? She was trying to help?
The memory, so long a blur, was clear as glass.
Jules’s insides turned to ice.
It couldn’t be!
And yet the motion that Shay did so naturally was identical to the one in her mind’s eye.
No way! She had to be imagining things! Her head began to pound painfully as she remembered the bloodstain near Andrew Prescott’s body in the stable. Swiped over, as if someone had spilled his blood and tried to wipe it away in a smooth, swirling motion, the darker “S” shape visible.
Another flash of memory: the small smeared pool by Maeve Mancuso’s corpse. Again, smooth, sure strokes. A snake-like shape darker in the wiped stain.
And, no doubt, on the sleeping bag where Nona Vickers had lost her life there was the same bloody signature: Shay’s signature. The snakey, blurred S.
Jules swallowed hard, her head screaming denials.
She focused again, back in the moment, her gaze fixed on Shay’s foot. God help us. Glancing up, Jules saw her sister staring at her, a knowing smile playing upon Shay’s full lips. “For the love of God, Shay,” Jules whispered, her voice trembling. “What did you do?”
This couldn’t be happening! Couldn’t! Shay wasn’t a killer! There had to be something else, someone else…But the light in her sister’s gaze in that moment burned bright with triumph and something else, something far more sinister and evil-bred.
In that instant of recognition, Jules knew. But she had to hear it from her sister’s lips. “You killed them?”
No, not Shay. NOT SHAY!
“Nona? Drew? Maeve? You murdered them?” she asked again, hoping beyond hope that she was wrong. Please deny it. Please. I’ll believe you!
“How else was I going to get you to believe me?” Shay asked innocently, an undercurrent of satisfaction in her voice, not a trace of denial. “How else would you have gotten me out of here?”
“No, you couldn’t have,” Jules whispered, shaking her head, refusing to think her sister was a monster, horrified to believe Shay capable of cold-blooded, premeditated murder.
“Are you too stupid to see that you would never have gotten me out of here unless you thought there was danger to me and my life?” Shay asked, anger sparking. “You thought I should be locked up; you just came down here to make yourself feel better about it.”
“I don’t…no…” But that much was true. They both knew it.
“Right, and it wasn’t bad enough! That was the problem. So someone had to die. I figured it should be someone who thought they were smarter than I was, someone who got off on being mean to me. Nona and Maeve, they were a good start. Andrew; he just got in the way. You know, that same old problem: Wrong place, fucking the wrong girl.”
“What! Wait a minute. Don’t lie, Shay,” Jules said, clinging desperately to the belief that Shay’s talk was just bravado; that she’d snapped when Eric Rolfe and Missy Albright had trained rifles at her back. “You didn’t kill them! You couldn’t!” Jules argued, trying to