Sins of the Fathers
“So glad you could make it!” Mary enthuses. “Sorry for the last minute invite, but the best parties are sometimes impromptu!”
“I thought they were lying,” Charlotte says, her eyes frozen on her mother’s face. “Jessica told me you were dead.”
“Jessica,” Mary says with a dismissive wave of her hand. “So small minded. Expecting everyone to be uptight and judgemental if they found out she had an evil twin.”
“It was you, then?” Charlotte asks. “You pretended to be her? You told me what to do? How to hurt them?”
“Of course,” Mary nods. “And you were so good at it! A natural! A chip off the old block!”
“Why?” Charlotte asks. “Why didn’t you tell me you were my mother? After everything I’d been through-”
“I had to consider the big picture,” Mary tells her. “Jessica had them lock me away in Radley and throw away the key. Solitary confinement. Straitjackets. Limited contact with the staff. But I came out ahead in the end. Not everyone had forgotten about me. I had a helper. An angel. A man who took pity on me. He weaned me off the sedatives until I was almost myself again. One night when the security staff was searching the grounds for two other escaped patients, he smuggled me out in a laundry bin and I escaped.”
“Was it Wren Kingston?” Charlotte asks.
“Of course not,” Mary scoffs. “It was an orderly. Eddie Lamb.”
“Did you switch places with her?” Charlotte asks. “The night Bethany and I ran away?”
Mary nods. “Jessica saw you hit Alison with that rock. But before she could get outside, I stuffed her into a closet while you were sobbing over Ali’s body. I helped you bury her. They told me Charles was dead. But I recognized you the moment I saw you. It was magical. Like you were your own twin.”
Charlotte’s frown gets more pronounced. “Not really,” she says, gruffly. “And how much could you have loved me if you sent me right back to Radley! Under lock and key!”
“But with an airtight alibi,” Mary explains. “I dragged Jessica back there myself, and locked her in there in my place. I decided to leave town. Alison’s death gave me a perfect cover to ditch the yawn of a husband and that ghastly house.” She shakes her head. “I should have stayed gone, I suppose. But everything happening back here was just so close to my heart. The answer to my prayers, really.”
Spencer catches sight of a shadowy figure moving silently along the far wall. All of Jessica’s attention is focused on Charlotte. She looks at the others, noting that Aria is using strips of her sleeping bag to tie the lid of the snake box shut. Emily is stuffing a sock into the exhaust pipe of the fake muffler. Mona is carefully dismantling a piece of the interior portion of the blowtorch, rendering it useless, while Hanna tries to subtly break off one of the lower metal spikes with her heel. She feels a surge of hope.
“What did you have against them?” Charlotte asks. “If you helped me bury Alison, what did they matter to you?”
“They matter,” Mary Drake insists. “More than you know.”
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It was a dark and stormy night in Rosewood. Lightning flashed outside the windows of the DiLaurentis house, as Peter Hastings pressed Jessica against the kitchen counter and kissed her.
“Do you want us to get caught?” she asked him.
Neither saw Mary’s face pressed against the window.
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Jessica walked confidently through the halls of Radley. She’d finally found a place that would be discreet about her sister. Forced Kenneth into a donation large enough that she’d be placed on the board. Mary was listed as a voluntary commitment for now, but surely when they realized how ill she was, they wouldn’t think of letting her leave.
She strode past the chapel and into a small office to wait for her sister. They were going to try family counseling. Their facilitator walked in and sat down, smiling pleasantly. Jessica didn’t especially like him, but he at least he knew how to keep a secret.
Mary swept into the room. “I have news,” she told them. “I’m pregnant!”
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“He’s threatening a lawsuit,” Jessica laments. “The brother. Byron Snootgomery.”
“Let me talk to him,” Peter says, an arm around her shoulder. “Man to man. Maybe we can come up with a solution.”
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“She’s a Jezebel!” Byron shouts, gesticulating wildly. “A harlot! She got him kicked out of the rehab program!”
“She’s dangerous and unpredictable,” Peter agrees. “We need to make sure she can’t cause any further trouble for him. Or for you.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Byron says, self-righteously.
“Yes of course,” Peter says, smoothly. He pauses ever so slightly. “How much money would it take for you to settle?”
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“We’ll need some kind of shell company,” Peter suggests, shirtless and smoking one of Kenneth’s cigars on the rumpled sheets of the guest bedroom. “To handle the pay out.”
“She has a trust fund,” Jessica offers. “But I hold the purse strings. We could siphon some of it off.”
“You’re thinking small,” Peter says. “If this works, she’ll be locked away permanently. She won’t need it anymore. We might as well put it all in your name. That way it’ll be available someday. For the kiddo.”
“It might be a bit complicated,” Jessica hedges. “There are certain stipulations for her care. My parents didn’t want her to be indigent, or a burden on the state.”
“I know someone who’ll take care of all that for us. Finance guy. I golf with him at the club. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”
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“You have a visitor,” his secretary says over the intercom. “No appointment. It’s a Mrs. DiLaurentis.”
“Yes,” Peter says, clearing his throat. “Please send her in.”
His visitor walks in and closes the door behind her. She’s wearing a trench coat and a naughty expression on her face. Peter locks the door. Hopes the partners won’t notice.
She claws at him as they make love on the couch, leaves scratches on his back. He’ll have to wear a t-shirt to bed for a week or Veronica will start asking questions. Still, it’s exhilarating. She’s like a drug. “What’s gotten into you?” he asks. She seems full of raw passion, her skin looks like it’s glowing.
“I’m grateful,” she says coyly. “I know you’re going to help me take care of my sister.”
“I am,” he promises. “I will.”
“I’m nervous, Peter. What if it doesn’t work?”
“It will.”
“I get so nervous. Just run me through the details one more time, would you? I’d feel so much better.”
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Pam Fields was pushing her shopping cart through the narrow aisles of the local market. She was flipping through her pocket book, sure that she had a coupon this week for Hamburger Helper.
She stops cold in the middle of the cereal aisle, frowning at a woman in a long trench coat eating fist fulls of Fruit Loops right out of the box. She shakes her head disapprovingly, notices that there’s an open jar of pickles in the woman’s cart as well. What is the world coming to, she wonders, about to retreat to the dairy section. But then the grocery grazer turns around, and Pam feels a shock of recognition.
“Jessica?” she says tentatively. “It’s Pam. From the library book club?”
The woman looks at her suspiciously.
“I hope we read Dick Francis next month,” Pam presses on, trying her best to be friendly. “I love a good mystery.” She watches as her new acquaintance shoves a handful of cereal back into the box, wipes her hand on her coat and nods.
“Me, too.” she says. “Me too.”
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Pam knocks on the door of the DiLaurentis house later that afternoon. Jessica is sitting at the head of the dining room table with three men, none of whom are her husband. Pam feels a surge of disapproval, wondering what kind of lady Jessica DiLaurentis is. Then again, they have papers and briefcases. She shouldn’t be so close minded, she tells herself. Should keep out of other people’s business.
Jessica comes to the door and smiles brightly, looking perfectly put together. “Pam,” she says, warmly. “So nice to see you again!”
She steps out onto the porch, closes the door behind her. “What can I do for you?”
“I wanted to apologize,” Pam says. “For earlier, at the grocery store.”
Jessica furrows her brow.
“I know I was looking at you as if you were from outer space,” Pam continues. “It’s just, I’m still getting used to things around here. We don’t know many people. And I saw you with the open jar of pickles, shoving that sugary cereal into your mouth - and I just thought it was another strange thing about this strange little town. But then I got home, and I thought it over, and it dawned on me.”
“It dawned on you,” Jessica repeats.
“Congratulations!” Pam says. “Have you told Kenneth yet? Is he over the moon?”
Jessica’s laugh seems forced, tense like a guitar string about to snap. “I haven’t told him,” she whispers, conspiratorially. “But of course you figured it out! I’m pregnant! Why else would I be eating processed sugar, right?”
Pam laughs, too. “Wayne and I are going to start trying.” She blushes at the thought. “Once he gets promoted. He’s away so much now, I’d be on my own most of the time.”
“Well,” Jessica says, clearly jittery. “When the time is right, it’s right. I might go back to Georgia for a few months. Be with my mother. Let her take care of me a little.”
Pam nods, wondering what kind of a marriage this woman has. Something just doesn’t seem as it should be. She pulls a book out of her purse.
“I just finished this one,” she says, handing Jessica the latest Dick Francis novel.
Jessica reads the back flap skeptically. “I’ll give it a try,” she promises. “But I don’t care much for mysteries.
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“We have to accelerate the time frame,” Jessica insists. “She’s able to get out, to wander the town. Who knows what plots she’s hatching against me right this minute?”
“I’m not sure about this,” Tom Marin says, hesitatingly.
“Think of the commission checks,” Peter tells him. “Twenty years worth, at the very least. A deal this size, it could make your career.”
“And she is a nutcase,” Byron Montgomery assures him. “We’re doing the town a favor.”
“What are we calling it?” Tom asks, filling out the paperwork for the shell company. “We’ll need a name, a destination for the money we’re wiring out of the trust.”
Peter rests his hand next to Jessica’s, just close enough that his thumb grazes her pinkie. “Carissimi,” he says.
Byron looks at the two of them, and Peter has a flash of panic. Leave it to that little runt of an Art History professor to speak Italian. But Byron doesn’t say anything, just quirks a sardonic eyebrow and signs his name to the paper with a flourish. Peter and Jessica sign as well, then pass the paper to Tom, who signs and notarizes.
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