“Did he admit to murdering Dr. Mehr, too?”
“Yes. She’d asked her husband for a divorce because she thought Calvin intended to do the same with Diana.”
“Let me guess—when Calvin blew her off, she threatened to confront Diana. So … your mum. He found out that she knew about the affair with Dr. Mehr?”
“The worst of it is that my mother wasn’t going to tell Diana, but Calvin couldn’t take a risk on that.” My mother had confronted Calvin privately, had railed at him to be a better man, to be the man Diana deserved.
“It’s so controlling,” Lily muttered. “Killing to hold on to a woman you’re disrespecting the whole time. Because there had to be other affairs.”
I’d been thinking about that since I read the article. “Calvin lost everyone he loved as a boy. I don’t think he has the emotional capacity to bear even the slightest threat to his current family—it’s almost as if he’s trying to be the exact opposite of his father. Protecting where his father destroyed.”
“Sounds like a cop-out to me. He wanted to have his cake and eat it, too.”
I didn’t reply. Lily and I both knew that childhood pain dug deep craters into the soul, caused pathways to twist and mutate. For Calvin, it had morphed into a pathological need to create a perfect family no one was allowed to endanger.
To say Diana was devastated was a vast understatement. She’d put Calvin on a pedestal, all but worshipped him. But the one thing Calvin hadn’t understood until now was that Sarah had been more child and less sister to Diana. And what Diana loved even more than Calvin were her children. She would never forgive him for what he’d done.
I’d spoken to her more than once in the aftermath, and every single time, I saw the guilt that was eating her up from the inside, a corrosive acid.
“Sarah came to me once because she was uncomfortable with how Calvin was looking at her,” she’d told me as we sat in the clearing where my mother had died. “She said she thought he’d spied on her while she was showering. I’ll never forgive myself for how I reacted—I told her he was a good man and to never make such allegations.
“I thought she was trying to cause trouble because Calvin insisted on discipline and had told her she couldn’t have her boyfriend in the house.” Sobs shattering her words. “That was the last proper conversation I had with my sister. She was so angry and hurt that I wouldn’t listen, and when she vanished, I thought she’d run off but would eventually come home. She knew I loved her, would always love her. But she never came home.”
Instead, Calvin had kept Sarah alive through emails to and gifts for Mia and Beau. “Sarah” had sent only one message to Diana:
I hate you. I never want to see you again.
The cruelty of it was incomprehensible.
“What about you?” Lily asked. “Did Calvin finally explain why he started screwing with your head?”
“It was all because of a comment I made soon after they found my mother—something about the rose garden. Apparently, I’d been looking at Calvin at the time.” I shrugged. “I can’t remember, but it made him see me as a threat. But what really pushed him over the edge and had him seriously upping the dosage was when Mia mentioned I’d been asking about Sarah.”
Calvin’s guilty conscience had done the rest.
Calvin Liu didn’t need much impetus. He killed anyone who might ruin his fantasy of the perfect family. As for my mother, it was as I’d theorized in the time since his arrest: Calvin had just returned home from a late surgery when he saw her walking groggily to her car. On any other night, Diana would’ve heard him arrive home—but she’d been so exhausted from being sick all day that she’d slept right through it.
He’d gotten my mother into the passenger seat by saying he’d take her to the hospital to get her head wound examined. My father’s handiwork. The glass shard that had hit her had done far more damage than he’d admitted. Then Calvin had taken her to that lonely spot and used the switchblade he kept on himself for protection on late-night runs to stab her to death.
My mother, already hurting and drowsy, had been a helpless victim.
After pushing the car down the slope, Calvin had run back, using that marathoner’s body to make the trek at speed. He’d hidden in the trees at one point when he heard a motorcycle; according to him, the driver didn’t appear to have a good handle on the powerful machine, and had been traveling at a crawl.
Me. Trying to find the woman Calvin had already murdered.
It all fit, but I couldn’t confirm it—my own memories of that night remained fragmented shards. “Cops found the knife Calvin used on my mother in his office at work,” I told Lily, “along with a chain that belonged to Dr. Mehr, and the name bracelet Diana gave Sarah for her sixteenth.”
Ugly trophies of evil.
“I bet you there was more.”
“A ring that didn’t belong to any of the three, as well as a scarf.”
Neri and Regan were digging through Calvin’s past for other suspicious deaths or disappearances.
“I told Diana I suspected it was her. Going after women who she thought were showing an interest in her husband. Do you know what she said?” When Lily shook her head, I repeated Diana’s words: “ ‘I loved Sarah so much that I would’ve forgiven her even if she’d had an affair with Calvin.’ ”
Her face far too thin, permanent bruises under her eyes, she’d hugged her arms tight around herself and added, “I’d do anything to have her back, but at least I’ve been able to bury her properly. And I’m glad I talked all the time to my roses. I used to talk about Sarah and about how much I missed and loved her.”
Diana hadn’t planted new roses after they’d removed
