The Photo Said I Must Die novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: What Mom Wrote

My sister was awake by four o'clock, in a room at the hospital in Rockland, with a police officer at the door.

The doctor said the powder in the wine had been a heavy sedative, enough to stop a breathing body in an hour.

He said the mouthful she'd taken, and the walking, had saved her.

He did not say how close.

I stood at the foot of her bed with Oliver beside me, and Judd waited in the hall.

The police chief sat in the visitor's chair with a notebook.

"I'd like to say it all once," Briana said.

Her voice was a thread.

Her hair had come out of its twist, and the pearl bracelet lay on the blanket where the nurse had taken it off.

"You don't have to," the chief said. "A lawyer..."

"No lawyer. Please."

She looked at me.

"I was fifteen," she said. "Mom had been in bed three months. I went into her desk for stamps and found two envelopes. I read them both."

Nobody spoke.

"Mine said I died at a table by the sea, on the ninth of September, the year I turned thirty. A man tried to reach me. The back said so, in Mom's hand: she does not get up." She swallowed. "The back of yours said she gets up."

"Why did you swap them?" I asked.

"Because I did the arithmetic." Her eyes filled. "One of us at that table. The frame always happens. The note on my print said a woman didn't rise, and yours said a woman did. I couldn't see how both could stay true unless somebody else filled the chair."

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