The Sister-in-Law: An absolutely gripping summer thriller for 2021 by Pamela Crane (best romance novels of all time .TXT) 📗

Put your blinker on! Accelerate slowly! Red light half a mile ahead! Slow down before you kill us! Every instruction an exclamation point.

I prayed over the next mile as the cop car followed me, mumbling pleasedon’tswerve pleasedon’tswerve pleasedon’tswerve. Several glances in the rearview mirror later and he was still there, still following me. Two turns, always behind me. Was he tailing me on purpose? Had Detective Meltzer told him to keep tabs on me?

A burst of blue and red lights sent my heart into overdrive. The siren cut through my concentration. He was pulling me over. My first DUI. I slowed to a crawl, aiming the car toward the berm, and prayed he wouldn’t give me a breathalyzer test. If I could talk my way out of it, I still had a slim shot of not getting caught. I hadn’t broken any driving laws … that I knew of, at least. As I mentally prepared my defense – I thought I was going the speed limit, Officer. I used my signal for every turn, sir – the cruiser shot out from behind me, flying into the open lane beside me, careening ahead with siren blaring and lights flashing.

It hadn’t been for me after all. Thank God for bigger criminals than me. Heart attack averted!

At last I reached the turn-in to my mother’s subdivision. Exhaling a breath of relief – had I held my breath the entire drive here? – I passed my mom’s house twice before crookedly pulling into the driveway.

I stumbled my way out of the car, up the walkway, onto the porch stoop, and dizzily knocked. Mom answered in a huff.

‘Harper.’ Ouch. Her shrill voice hurt my ears. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I … I need you, Mommy. I need your help.’

‘Oh my God. Are you drunk?’

So I wasn’t hiding it as well as I thought.

‘Nooo,’ I blurted, then tripped over my own foot while just standing there. ‘Okay, maybe a little tipsy.’

She exhaled an annoyed sigh and dragged me inside by my arm. ‘Get in here. I’ll make you a coffee. You can’t possibly drive home like this. You’re lucky you made it here alive.’

The fragrance of lilac assaulted my migraine-sensitive nose.

‘Sit,’ she ordered.

Wobbling my way into the living room, I fell into the first armchair I came to. From the kitchen I heard her tinkering with coffee mugs and the coffeemaker.

‘You hungry?’ she asked. ‘You should probably eat something to help soak up the alcohol.’

Silly Mom. I was already two sheets to the wind. No amount of food was going to soak up the wine flowing through my veins. But I was craving something salty, so I shouted, ‘Got any chips?’

‘Lord help me,’ she mumbled. ‘What is wrong with you?’

‘I heard that!’ I yelled. ‘Are you mad at me?’

A clatter of ceramic later, Mom entered carrying two mugs of coffee and took a seat on the sofa across from me. While I sobered up on black coffee, Mom topped hers off with cream and sugar.

‘No, I’m not mad at you. Disappointed though, yes.’

‘Don’t pull that motherly disappointment on me. I wrote the book on it.’ I often used that same line on Elise when she disobeyed. I wonder where I learned it from.

‘So what’s going on that has you drunk as a skunk in the middle of the afternoon?’ she asked, resting her hand on her bare collarbone.

‘Where’s your necklace?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I must have forgotten to put it on today. I still need to fix that clasp before I lose it. So …? Don’t deflect, Harper. Spill it. What’s going on?’

‘Everything’s gone to shit, Mom.’

She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Language, Harper. You know better than to talk like that.’

‘Apparently I don’t know better. I told Candace about Ben.’

‘What about Ben?’

‘That he had been cheating on me. That I saw him at the hotel with the other woman. I don’t think – now I could be wrong, because the details are fuzzy – but I don’t think I told her that Lane and I tampered with the scene that night. But God knows what all I said. The whole conversation is a blur.’

‘Oh, Harper.’ She plunged back in her seat, shaking her head. Coffee sloshed onto her pants. ‘That is bad. Please tell me you’re kidding.’

‘I wish I was.’

‘Certainly you didn’t tell her everything?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ I wasn’t sure at all, to be honest, ‘but more than I should have. I can’t imagine what’s going through her head right now.’ I groaned. As Julia Roberts so aptly said in Pretty Woman, ‘Big mistake. Big. Huge.’

Sipping the black coffee, I winced at its bitterness. ‘At least I didn’t tell her about Medea Kent.’

‘Medea Kent? Who’s that?’

That’s right, I hadn’t told Mom about that fun little discovery. ‘Oh, the other beneficiary on Ben’s life insurance policy. The name of his mistress.’

‘He named his mistress on his life insurance policy? You can’t be serious.’

‘Yup, I have officially hit an all-time low.’

I set my coffee on the white-painted table between us. A lilac-scented candle flickered like a jagged talon, its spear point hot and alluring. Staring at the flame, my vision glazed over as a disk of wax pooled at the base of the wick. While my mother’s voice wah wah wah’d in the background, my thoughts drifted back to Jackson in his bedroom, setting the pictures aflame. I wondered what it felt like to be engulfed by fire, to watch everything burn, and for the first time I understood my little pyromaniac.

‘Harper!’ Mom’s stridence shook the daydream loose. ‘Where’d you go off to inside your head?’

‘Sorry, my brain keeps wandering.’

‘As I was saying, there’s nothing you can do except to regain the upper hand. And you can only do that by gaining Candace’s trust, restoring family order.’

I grinned. Candace. So Mom did know her preferred name.

‘Ha! Family order? What order do we even have? I’m probably a suspect in my cheating husband’s murder, Lane married a pathological liar, my son is now an arsonist, my daughter