gone fishin'

“Effie, think about it.” He reached for her hand and she jerked backward before he could touch her. His arm dropped uselessly by his side. “Effie. Why the hell would I make somethin’ like this up? C’mon. What would be the point?”

She shook her head. “You tell me! You’ve said it. Are you trying to make them all hate you?”

“All that shit was true, she told me all of it. I don’t know what’s with her bullshitting about the post-mortem, I dunno whether that was a lie or the first one was a lie or maybe it’s all a fucked up lie and she’s just said it all to stir some shit? Which is kinda even more fucked up of her ain’t it, if that’s the case - I need to get the post-mortem results -”

“Sully! This isn’t a ridiculous crime series, this is my family.” She brushed her hand against her eyes. “And how could you say something like that about me - a joke? After everything?”

“Look how insane this sounds, Effie. I know it does! If I was gonna make some shit up I’d at least give it a chance of being believable. So it doesn’t make sense for me to make it up, does it?”

“I don’t know. None of it makes sense. But she doesn’t want to kill me, Sully. She’s my grandmother.”

“She’s both, Effie. Think about it,” he repeated. “Why would I lie about somethin’ like this? When it’d just hurt you?”

“I don’t know! But you’re asking me to believe my grandmother is a murderer. She raised me. Or do I believe that you’re a liar?” Her voice dropped, and when she looked up at him her gaze didn’t quite meet his eyes. “One of them has been true before, and I know which is more believable.”

“Effie -”

“So…” he cracked his knuckles, the talk he’d rehearsed in his head sounding feeble now the time had come. “I suppose you’re wondering why I gathered you all here today. Anyone -? No? That’s uh - no, that’s fine -”

Effie’s elbow landed a little too firmly into his side, and she raised her brows at him, a tight smile on her face. He coughed again.

“So - I, uh, said that already - uh -”

“Do you have a point here, Sullivan?” Ellery’s voice was cold. “We do have businesses we’re responsible for. I don’t have as great an allowance for time-wasting in my day as you evidently do.”

“Papa -”

“No, it’s ok. He has a point,” Sully said, even as his irritation was beginning to stoke, “though you really should stick around and listen a bit because if you don’t your daughter’s probably gonna end up dead.”

A chorus of three voices broke out. “What!?”

“Ah…” And - fuck. He’d had a little roadmap in his head of how he wanted this discussion to go, a list of pit stops and bullet points of what he knew, what he suspected and what was going to happen. And now he’d taken a wrong turn down the road; he’d meant to keep that nugget of information for a later point in the timeline of the discussion. It was the sort of thing that could cause a fair amount of grief and concern if blurted out without any preamble. As he’d just done, and as it just had. Effie looked stricken, Ellery looked disbelieving and Céilí looked like she’d just watched someone take a shit on the coffee table in front of her. Only Beatrice had made no remark or expression to acknowledge she’d even heard him. She possibly hadn’t even blinked. Maybe the latest Botox had frozen her eyelids this time -

Oh, no - there’s a blink. That would last her for the next hour, he imagined.

“Ok, so - I meant to say some other stuff before I got to that bit. But yeah. So I guess Beatrice thought she had to step her game up from trying to pay me off? After that didn’t work. ‘Cause she stopped by the other day and let drop the fucking H-bomb that she plans to actually kill Effie if we go ahead with getting married. She’s literally going to kill her granddaughter because she’d pissed with her choice of boyfriend. I mean it kinda seems like an over the top reaction, maybe it’s just me, I dunno - uh, also, she killed your dad. With poison. So she could run the show. So…”

Incredulous amusement was what she’d gone for, then. Beatrice burst out into a wheezing cackle, thumping her chest and stamping her foot. “The boy’s gone mad.”

So it was less taking a wrong turn, more him driving the wrong way down a state highway under construction and smacking into every road cone he could find.

Ellery’s gaze was harsh. “Is my family a joke to you?”

“I’m not joking, I’m serious.” He hadn’t looked at Effie yet, couldn’t manage to look at her face and see what was there, but in the corner of his eye he saw her hands clench into fists in her skirt, her spine curving as she curled in on herself.

“She came to our house and she told me. All of it. Because she knew you wouldn’t believe me - obviously, and you don’t, which I get -”

“I will not sit here to be insulted by you.” Ellery’s voice had risen, a rare failure of his composure, and he got to his feet. “I don’t pretend to know what game you’re playing -”

“It’s not a game. Just sit down -”

“I will not!”

“She told me all this shit. Ask her. She poisoned your dad with aconite, it’s a plant that mimics a heart attack. And she there’s no post-mortem report because she refused to allow one and -”

“Nonsense,” Beatrice interrupted. Sully’s head swivelled to her.

“Of course there was a post-mortem, boy. A healthy young man such as my husband having a heart attack? Of course they did one. We have a copy of the reports in my office. Shall I get Louise to fetch them, if you’re so convinced?”

“But - you said there wasn’t -”

“Why on earth would I say that? Why on earth would I have said of this - slander? Your brazenness is amusing in small doses but I fear you have far overstepped the mark - to insult and offend my family, to tarnish the memory of my husband - a good man, a good father to a boy he never got to see grow up. And to speak so horridly of a woman you profess to love? What kind of mind can fabricate such evil?”

“It’s exactly ‘cause I love her that I’m kinda against the idea of you killing her, you crazy old cunt!”

Sully looked quickly back at Effie. Her eyes were wide, her brows sharply turned up in dismay. She was upset, saddened - but then he saw her gaze keep flicking to her father, the sharp corner of her mouth - she was embarrassed by him. He shifted to face her on the settee, turning his shoulder to the others in the room, and lowered his voice.

“Effie, I know this sounds insane.” He took her hand between his. “You need to trust me, ok? I wouldn’t say this shit if it wasn’t true. She’s damn crazy, Effie.”

“She’s my grandmother,” she whispered, pulling her hand from his, “what’s wrong with you?”

She got to her feet, taking a few shaky steps back from the group. “I need to go outside.”

Ellery cast one more filthy look toward Sully and strode after her. Céilí, who had been watching the revelations with a quiet focus, and more than once had ended up staring at Beatrice, stood also.

“It kind of makes sense,” she called after Ellery, and then glanced back at Sully and shrugged before following them out also.