The Wife's House by Arianne Richmonde

Author:Arianne Richmonde
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781838889500
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2020-08-23T18:30:00+00:00

TWENTY-SEVEN

“What are you doing?” It was Dan. He’d been watching me, my gaze fixed on that spot. Staring at me from behind a pine tree, reaching into my guilty thoughts, for sure. Beanie barked as if demanding the same question.

I spun round, my heart lodged in my stomach, my pulse shot with adrenaline racing a thousand miles an hour.

“Dan! Oh my God, thank heavens you’re here. And Beanie—I didn’t know where he was. What a fright! I just saw a rattlesnake. It was—it got into coil mode, but when you called my name it got scared by the noise and slithered off!”

“Are you sure?” Dan’s eyes were suspicious slits.

“Yes! It was right there!” I waved my arms vaguely. I didn’t want to draw attention to the site. “It disappeared really fast when it heard you.” I staggered towards Dan uneasily, trembling from my close call. What had I been thinking? Lurking and hovering around so close to the last place on earth I wanted him to discover.

“Rattlesnakes usually hibernate,” Dan said.

“I know, but with the weather as crazy as it is, the winters so warm and climate change, there’s been a surge of confused rattlesnakes! It frightened the life out of me!”

Dan held my gaze, unbelieving.

“The rain hasn’t helped either,” I went on. “With all that tall green grass around, it encourages more rodents, which means more rattlesnakes.”

“Let’s get out of here, it’s getting dark,” Dan warned. “What the hell were you doing taking so long? I was worried about you.”

“I’m really low on energy. I’ve been trudging up that hill for what seems like hours. How’s your poison ivy?”

He turned his hands over; both the palms and the backs did not look in the slightest bit red.

“False alarm,” he said. “Maybe a spider bit me or something. I guess I just freaked out. You know, once bitten twice shy?” He enunciated his last sentence as if it had a double meaning, his eyebrows disappearing behind his flop of hair.

I stole a glance at him—we locked eyes for a nanosecond. What was he saying? Was that an allusion to the phantom rattlesnake, or some cryptic warning? My paranoia whooshed through me like a seventh wave. What did the triplets know? Had they been playing me all this time? I regretted trusting them. I should have followed my instincts and got rid of them. I hung my head, afraid I’d vomit again.

“I got poison ivy all over me once, as a child,” Dan explained. “Never had so much pain in my life. But then I thought about it. It’s December, there’s no poison ivy around right now.”

The penny dropped. He’d been spying on me all along. Poison ivy, my foot. It was a ruse. They’d fooled me too many times already, these canny triplets.

Just because you love certain people, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be axed out of your life. And that’s exactly what I was going to do. Axe them out.

Tomorrow. First thing in the morning. This time I meant business.

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