Free Someone Is Watching by Joy Fielding Page A

pretty much all I know.
    Claire throws a head of lettuce into the bin, as if it is a football she’s spiking after scoring a touchdown. “Eliot? How would Iknow? Haven’t seen the prick in years. Daddy was certainly right about that one.” She shakes her head, laughs her surprisingly girlish laugh. “Maybe we
should
have our own reality show.”
    I watch my half-sister as she begins shoving items into the pantry next to the fridge, admiring her proficiency. I used to be like that. I used to be all kinds of proficient.
    “Believe it or not,” Claire is saying, “Jade was a very sweet girl until her fourteenth birthday. Then she just kind of … turned.”
    “Happens to the best of us,” I say.
    “Really? I’m betting you didn’t give your mother such a hard time.”
    “I’m sure I had my moments.”
    Claire stops what she is doing. “It must have been very hard for you when she died.”
    I quickly turn away so that she can’t see the fresh tears that spring to my eyes. Almost three years, and I still feel the loss of my mother as acutely as if it were yesterday. “I had anxiety attacks pretty much every day for a year after she died,” I confess. It’s the first time I’ve ever told that to anyone. I’m not sure why I’m telling her.
    “Did you see anyone about it?”
    “You mean like a psychiatrist?”
    “Or a therapist. Someone to talk to.”
    “I talked to Heath.” Although my brother was in worse shape than I was.
    She looks skeptical. Clearly, my brother’s reputation has preceded him. “Was he any help?”
    “We’re very close,” I say, although I know it doesn’t answer her question. “Are you close to Gene?”
    “I guess. I know he can be a little self-righteous and a bit of a prig. He thinks he’s always right. And, unfortunately, he
is
right most of the time. But he’s also honest and moral and all those things I’m not used to in a man, so …” Her voice drifts off, the sentence lingering in the air, like smoke from a cigarette.
    “What about the others?”
    “You mean our esteemed half-brothers, Thomas, Richard, andHarrison?” She endows each name with appropriate dramatic flourish.
    I smile. “It’s been years since I’ve seen them.”
    “Can’t say I’ve seen very much of them either. Until recently. This lawsuit,” Claire says, then breaks off abruptly. “Sorry. And sorry about the lawsuit,” she adds. “If it were up to me …”
    “I understand.” Do I?
    “What was your mother like?” she asks, seeking safer ground.
    “She was pretty special.”
    “Our father was certainly besotted with her.”
    I smile again.
Besotted
seems such an old-fashioned word for her to use. But it’s also the most accurate. “I guess he was.”
    “You were lucky.”
    The word is as strange now as when the police used it after my rape. My mother died when I was twenty-six years old. How can that be considered lucky?
    It was my mother who suggested I become a private investigator. She probably wasn’t serious when she said it, but I glommed onto the idea like chewing gum to the sole of a shoe. I quickly discovered I could get my license online, which allowed me the opportunity to stay home with her during those last precious months of her life. I already had years of college behind me, years spent trying to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. For the previous three years, I’d been majoring in criminology. Becoming a private investigator was a natural fit, a no-brainer.
    Footsteps in the hall return me to the here and now. “Haven’t you started making dinner?” Jade whines from the doorway. “I’m starving. You said we were just going to eat and go home.”
    “Why don’t you set the table?”
    Jade chews angrily on her gum. A huge pink bubble blossoms between her lips, growing until it blocks out the entire bottom half of her face. She clomps toward the kitchen drawers and begins opening and closing them until she finds the one with the