Iris, who was now two margaritas down, sniffed. “I know you think that you’re special but… you’re not. All siblings are crazy. But mine takes the cake.”
“Your sister?” I wondered.
“Yep,” Iris confirmed. “I know you’ve heard a little bit due to what I’ve told you, but back when we were little, Abby was on psych meds. She used to hear things that weren’t there. For instance, one night, she thought she heard me calling her name. I wasn’t. When I woke up, she was standing over me with a baseball bat. Right when I was looking at her, asking her what was wrong, she took a swing at my head.” Iris shook her head. “The one thing that saved me was the nightstand. I’d curled to where my head was pressed against it. That, and Abby’s screaming. My parents came in, and my dad took the bat away. Then she was taken to a psych hospital where she was evaluated for a few weeks and diagnosed with schizophrenia. From that point forward,” she dunked her chip into the salsa, brought it to her mouth and said before shoving the whole thing inside, “she only tried to kill me three other times. All when she went off her meds.”
There was a long, stunned silence and then, “Are you telling me that your sister has tried to actively kill you four times, and you’re just now sharing that with me?”
Iris blinked. “Only me, though. Not anyone else.”
“And that makes it better?” I asked, suddenly really upset. “Because, from where I’m at, the girl I fuckin’ love just told me that her sister, who is a suspect in the murder case of her ex-boyfriend, has tried to kill her multiple times… do the police know that your sister is a nutcase?”
Iris winced, but her eyes had softened. “You love me?”
I’d said that?
I had.
Son of a bitch.
“I…” I started, but it was Haggard who said, “He wouldn’t let you in his house if he didn’t love you. After the number Lindy did on him, he hasn’t spoken to a single person of the opposite sex without fully vetting them through either one of us or someone he knows. You, he just allowed right into his life without a single thought.”
Iris’s shoulders drooped. “I’m sure they know—the cops. They visited with my parents, and that’s something that they share with everyone when it comes to Abby.” She sighed. “At first, it was something they tried to keep secret. But it wasn’t something that could stay that way when she would scream out in class at her voices. She doesn’t do it at all anymore because her symptoms are treated with medication. She’s actually quite regulated with her medication. I haven’t seen her slipup in years.”
“That sounds suspicious,” Sophia dunked her chip so far into the queso in front of her that her fingers came back out covered in cheese. “I mean… meds are hard to take. Ask me. I’ve been taking birth control for years. Then I started taking a multivitamin and this fish oil crap. And my life doesn’t depend on it or anything, but I can tell you that I miss my ‘meds’ at least once a week. If I’m lucky.”
Iris snorted. “You haven’t met Abby, though. She’s anal about everything being ‘perfect.’ That includes herself.”
“Your sister sounds like someone that I don’t really want to meet,” Bram commented. “Sorry to say.”
Iris chuckled, but I could tell that she wasn’t finding anything funny.
She was in tune with me, and she knew that I was upset about her not mentioning that little tidbit of information.
In fact, I was so annoyed by it, the rest of dinner wasn’t even enjoyable. My mind was fucking everywhere, and I had this weird feeling that I was definitely missing something.
And Abby had a whole lot more involvement in this all than we knew.
• • •
“You gonna stay mad at me forever?” Iris asked as we walked out to my bike.
I sighed. “No, I’m not. But I can’t shake the feeling that Abby is the answer to all of this. That she’s the one that knows what happened to Teller. If she didn’t off him herself.”
Iris picked up her helmet and fitted it onto her head, uncaring of the way it shoved her ponytail askew.
“I agree with you without a shadow of a doubt that Abby was involved in some way,” she admitted. “I just can’t tell you how.”
“The fact that she is involved, however, doesn’t sit well with me,” I admitted. “At best, she was witness to him being murdered. Because why else disappear? Meaning, she has some information that could lead to finding someone that killed a cop.” There was a long pause as I shoved on my own helmet. “At worse, she did the deed herself. Then disappeared. And then I learn that she literally tried to kill you when you were kids… so yeah. I’m not getting happy vibes right now.”
Iris sighed. “My parents called while I was in the restaurant. They want to meet up at Teller’s place, since they think I still live there.”
“You didn’t correct them?” I asked curiously.
She wrinkled her nose. “No. Want to know why, before you get all bent out of shape?”
The wind in my sails immediately deflated. “Yes. Why?”
She smirked at me as she said, “What my parents know, my sister knows. She’s been able to hack into their information since she was a teen. So, like my mom usually does, she’ll put my new address into her phone so that she has it. Then my sister will know everything my mom knows, because my sister is a creeper like that.”
I reached out and caught her arms when she would’ve turned around to mount the bike.
“Tell me the real reason you haven’t told me any of this before,” I urged. “I want to know.”
She sighed, then leaned her forehead against my chest.
“Because my sister is, quite frankly, creepy as fuck,” she admitted. “I try really hard to ignore it all. And when I can’t, and I have to explain that my sister is batshit crazy, everyone looks at me differently.” She paused. “Trust me when I say, if I could’ve not told you in the middle of dinner, where almost all of your family was in attendance, I sure the hell wouldn’t have. Because now they all know that I carry that gene inside of me.” She sighed. “Do you know that schizophrenia is hereditary? People who have relatives with it have a higher risk of passing it on to their children. Do you know how awful that is? I would never wish it on anyone. And not because they’re inherently bad. They’re not. But they just don’t understand. They don’t know they’re being hurtful. They don’t realize that they’re trying to kill their sister. What if I had children, and one had it while another one didn’t? What would I do, as a mother, if one child tried to kill the other child? I mean, I can tell you what my mom did. She focused almost all of her energy on my sister, and not me. Which meant that, although I was healthy, I was all but forgotten. And I don’t want to do that to my kids.”
There was a long moment of silence and then, “I’ve killed eight people.”
Her breath hitched.
“Currently, we have the man that kept my sister hostage for a year in our custody, and every few weeks, I beat the shit out of him.”
My matter-of-fact words caused her eyes to widen in such a comical way, I almost wanted to pull my phone out and capture the moment.