Such a Perfect Family, page 29
“…lied for you…let Bobby…always.” A grunt. “Don’t you know?”
The humming started up again.
I recognized it now. Shumi. That was the song Shumi had been humming while she made the chai. Was she in the kitchen making more things? Diya had said she cooked compulsively when grieving.
But when I looked toward the kitchen, it was to see that it, too, was dark.
“Diya?” It came out weak and near-silent.
Shoving up off the sofa, I tried to get to my feet. My knees collapsed under me, pain shooting through my kneecaps.
Smoke.
Curling on the carpet, licking its way into my air passages.
I coughed and began to crawl frantically toward that humming sound. With each little foot of space, I gained more of my strength. “Diya!” Louder this time, before smoke-induced coughing took over.
When I stopped coughing, I realized the humming was gone, the world silent.
My heart punched in my rib cage. “Shumi? Diya?”
The smoke was thicker now, a fog through which I could no longer see. I knew I should turn, smash out that big window with the view, and get outside—but not without my wife.
More strength in my body now, I crawled faster.
I saw her foot first. With that yellow nail polish on her toes that she’d put on with patient care last week. It had taken her a while, since she couldn’t sit bent over for long periods, the position causing pain to internal organs that weren’t yet back to normal.
But when I grabbed on to her foot, there was no response. “Diya!” Telling myself it was fine, that she was still warm, I quickly made my way to the top of her body, where I could check her breathing.
“Thank God.” She was alive, her respiration even. “Come on, baby, we have to get out.” Even as I struggled to sit up so I could drag her out, I yelled out for Shumi.
Nothing. And the smoke was growing thicker.
I fumbled for my phone, input 911, only to realize I’d fucked up. I was in New Zealand. My chest spasmed with the urge to cough as I canceled the call and input the correct local number for emergency services: 111.
Dropping the phone to the carpet on speaker, I got my hands under Diya. “Fire!” I yelled at the operator when she answered, blurting out the address straight after.
I didn’t hear what she said in response. I had a firm grip on Diya now, was able to move her. “Shumi!”
“Why are you awake?” A very confused-sounding question.
Chapter 74
Shumi
Shumi sat inside a café on the opposite side of the road from the café where Diya and Violet had taken a seat outside, beneath the spreading branches of a leafy tree. Diya smiled up at the server who’d just delivered them their coffees.
A double-shot latte with soy milk.
That was Diya’s order, had been for years except for when she wanted something more decadent and decided to go for a mochaccino.
Shumi didn’t know Violet’s usual order and didn’t really care.
Taking a sip of her own spicy chai latte—it wasn’t real chai, but it would do—she watched as Diya laughed at something Violet had said. Shumi’s stomach clenched at the light in her best friend’s face, at how she chattered so brightly to Violet.
Diya was pulling away from her again.
She’d thought it was over after Kalindra decided to move to Wellington before things got bad enough that Shumi had to act, but now Violet was here and they were constantly texting and calling, and Shumi knew that wasn’t good for Diya’s fragile mind and heart.
Her best friend needed Shumi to watch out for her, and for that, Shumi needed to be the closest person in her life.
It had been bad enough when Risha had lived with the Prasads, her room right next to Diya’s. The only thing that had kept Shumi from acting was the knowledge that Risha was a temporary guest, one who’d be gone soon enough.
But Violet…Violet lived in Rotorua, was talking about becoming Diya’s partner. They’d be working together day in and day out.
Her chai latte spilled onto the saucer as she put the double-walled glass down too hard.
No, she couldn’t let this happen, had to act.
Chapter 75
Diya’s sister-in-law stood in the hallway, smoke curling up around her calves as it rose toward the ceiling.
“What?” I shook my head to clear it. “Shumi, there’s a fire! We have to get out!”
“I know.” Pure calm. “I was pulling Diya out. Now you’ve gone and spoiled it.”
I stared at her, my sluggish brain trying to make sense of what she was saying. “Go open the door!” It was still some distance away, this spacious vacation home suddenly too big. “I’ll bring Diya.”
“You’re meant to be asleep,” Shumi insisted. “I put in a double dose to be sure.”
My brain started to catch up with her words, with the way she was just standing there, but it was already too late. Because Shumi had a knife in her hand, a massive thing that she held firmly by the handle. “I had to go to the kitchen to get this,” she said, before coming toward me with the knife raised high. “It’s not how I wanted it.”
Having slid my hands under Diya’s shoulders to drag her to the door, I couldn’t evade Shumi’s first blow. It went right through that vulnerable space beside my shoulder blade, a screaming line of fire inside and out.
“Shumi! Stop!” I shoved her off with that pained cry, but she dug in the knife and twisted.
“You’re meant to be sleeping,” she gritted out, right before I threw back my fist.
It made hard, direct contact with her face, and she tumbled backward, taking the knife with her.
Something splintered, broke.
I couldn’t smell blood, the acrid scent of smoke and fire blotting out all else. Not hearing Shumi move, I hoped I’d knocked her out. I couldn’t go over and check—given the gray soup of smoke, I might never find my way back to Diya. I could barely make out the route to the front door as it was.
Coughing, I pulled Diya up again despite the agony in my shoulder, and began to move.
The knife punched into my back again, and this time, it hit something bad. Something that made the taste of blood fill my mouth and threatened to take the air from my lungs.
“It’s meant to be us!” Shumi screamed. “Me and Diya! It’s always been meant to be us! I’m the one who looks after her!”
Barely able to hear her through the crackle of the flames I could now see roaring to life in the living room, I shoved back with my whole body.
It drove the knife in even deeper, but it also took her to the floor. Twisting, I went to punch her, just get this over with, but, free of whatever drug she’d used to incapacitate me, she was faster, slid away and kicked at my face.
My head snapped back.
“I did so much for her! I do everything for her!” Her voice was hoarse, her words making no sense. “I keep her safe! They never understood her! They didn’t deserve her!”
Coughing, the sound wet now, I felt my hand touch something. The broken leg of the fragile table against which she’d initially tumbled. Picking it up, I rose to my feet, while staying right beside Diya, and swung wildly, made no contact. “You killed everyone,” I managed to cough out.
“She doesn’t need anyone else! She just needs me!” A disembodied voice in the darkness.
Using the sound of her voice to pinpoint her location, I swung again. A fleshy thwack of sound.
Shumi screamed and kicked out, but I somehow managed to avoid it this time. She was coughing now, yelling. “You ruined everything! I won’t let you take her!”
I swung while she was ranting. The contact was solid. A thunk followed by a thud that was her body falling to the floor. My vision hazy and my balance shot, I crashed to the floor on my knees and got my hands under Diya again. “Come on, baby.” Blood bubbled in my mouth. “We’re gonna make it.”
I began to drag and pull, and with each wrench, felt another spurt of blood down my back. I blocked it out, focused on Diya.
My light.
My one good thing.
My salvation.
I would not let her die. Not my Diya.
The taste of wet iron filled my mouth.
Chapter 76
Shumi
“Do you love me, Shumi?”
“Of course I do, Bobby.” Shumi laughed. “You’re my husband!”
Bobby, so handsome with his dark hair and that stubble on his jaw, his upper body bare as he stood by their bedroom window, turned to look at her. “Sometimes, I’m not so sure. I feel like you’re just out of reach, no matter how hard I try.”
“Oh, hush now.” Shumi kept her voice soft, affectionate, because she did truly like him a great deal. “You know you were the only boy I ever wanted—having you love me is a dream come true.”
In many ways, that wasn’t even a lie. Without Bobby, she’d never have been able to stay so close to Diya, continue to keep her safe as she had since the day she’d first met the baby who’d laughed and grabbed at her hand, and who’d always loved her even when her own mother couldn’t.
Shumi’s mother pretended, but she wasn’t a good actress. Shumi had figured out as a very small child that she meant nothing to her, was just a mouth she fed to keep up appearances. But it hadn’t mattered because she had the Prasads, who’d always been kind to her. Then had come Diya, this tiny and bright light who had toddled after Shumi and who had always wanted to play with her.
Diya loved Shumi in a way no one had ever loved her.
To stay close to that love, Shumi had been more than happy to stick tight to Bobby. He was handsome, and sexually, they were more than compatible. It was no sacrifice to have a hardworking and good-looking husband who took his time making sure she was always satisfied.
Ensuring it stayed that way was an easy matter.
She rose from the bed and walked to take his hands as the moonlight filtered in through the window. “I adore you, you know that,” she murmured, looking up at him with the big doe eyes that always did him in. “I’m just…you’ve seen how my mum is. I think sometimes I get scared of how much I love you.”
She swallowed hard. “Please don’t stop loving me. It would destroy me.”
“Jaan, meri jaan,” he said, enfolding her in the warmth of his arms and holding her with that endearing gentleness of his; sometimes, she wished he’d be a little rougher, a bit more exciting, but in the grand scheme of things, it was a minor complaint.
“I could never stop loving you,” he told her. “I tried so many times over the years when we were younger—I thought it was just proximity, that we’d grow apart. But it was and will always be you. My Shumi.”
Kisses pressed to her temple before he slid his hand to her abdomen. “Any news?”
Shumi shook her head, her face downcast. “Got my period again.”
“That’s okay. We’re young.” He nuzzled at her. “And it’s so much fun trying, isn’t it?”
Giggling, she pressed a kiss to his chest, the curly hairs there tickling her lips, but she didn’t answer with words. Because while, yes, it was fun having sex with him, they weren’t actually trying as he believed—she’d had her doctor put her on long-term birth control the day Bobby began to talk about having kids.
It wasn’t that Shumi didn’t like kids—it was that she had her priorities in life and knew she couldn’t give a baby the time and attention it deserved. Not now, not when Diya needed her so much. First she had to extricate her vulnerable best friend from the clutches of her stranger of a husband, then she’d have to settle her down in the no-doubt emotional aftermath.
It wouldn’t be hard. She’d been digging into Tavish Advani, had an entire dossier on the computer with all kinds of damning information. She’d thought about showing it to Rajesh and Sarita, but her in-laws didn’t know how to handle Diya. They’d yell at her and demand things and then Diya would get rebellious.
Shumi knew her best.
Diya’s heart was soft and generous and ready to love.
Shumi would have to go delicately, drop a little piece of information here, an ounce of doubt there, until Diya began to worry. Only then would Shumi show her the pages and pages of articles and other data she’d collected about Diya’s new husband.
The Jocelyn Wai situation spoke for itself.
Everyone thought he’d murdered the woman; they just couldn’t prove it.
It wouldn’t take much for Shumi to make Diya understand that Tavish had targeted her because of her fragile mental state, that he got a kick out of hurting and controlling women.
Shumi knew exactly what to say to make Diya question her impulsive decision. After all, she’d made it without Shumi’s counsel. In some part of her, she already knew she’d messed up.
Shumi just had to bring that awareness to the surface of her consciousness.
Once Tavish was gone and Diya back where she belonged…yes, Shumi might have a child. It’d keep Bobby happy, and he’d be a good father, would pull his weight. Diya would be a wonderful aunt, too, the baby bringing them even closer together. Perhaps she’d even suggest Diya move in to help Shumi with the baby. Such a loving reason. One that made sense in every way.
Diya would finally be where she belonged: under Shumi’s loving care.
Life would be perfect.
Chapter 77
They told me later that they found me on the lawn on my front, with a huge knife sticking out of my back and an unconscious Diya beside me. I’d have died if I hadn’t made that frantic call to emergency services.
My luck, it seemed, had finally come in.
“Jesus Christ, I fucked this one up.” Detective Ackerson, who’d come to visit me at the hospital, put her hands on her hips, her suit jacket flared out. “But in my defense, your batshit sister-in-law did a good job of looking as innocent as Mother Teresa. She’s still protesting her innocence even though she got caught on that emergency call as good as confessing to it all.”
“Any chance she’ll escape the charges?” I winced as I tried to make myself more comfortable in my seated position on the bed. “She didn’t actually say she murdered everyone.”
“What she did say is plenty,” Ackerson reassured me. “Her obsession with your wife, though…” She shook her head. “The word ‘stalker’ doesn’t quite capture it. The shrinks are having a field day with her.
“Apparently, she thinks she’s Diya’s protector, the only one who understands her. Extreme maternal urges. I say unhinged, but, hey, I’m just a mum who never murdered my daughter’s friends for daring to take her away from me.”
I thought about Shumi’s own mother, the complete lack of a mother-child bond. Because Shumi’s obsessive attachment to Diya hadn’t appeared out of thin air; it had been born in the cold abandonment of her own childhood. “Her family still supporting her?”
“Only one she’s willing to see is Ajay. Poor kid. He’s shattered.”
I hadn’t seen Ajay since the events in Taupo—I’d been in the hospital. That final knife strike? It had perforated my lung and nicked other things. I’d made it worse when I’d slammed into Shumi. “How is she doing physically?”
“Better than you.” Ackerson folded her arms. “She only made it out because you called 111. Otherwise, she’d have died from smoke inhalation well before the fire got to her. House is only a little damaged—your sister-in-law had to make do with what she could find in terms of accelerants, and it wasn’t much. I think the plan was to make it look like a terrible accident.”
“A second fire?” I asked skeptically. “She really thought people would buy an accident?”
“Yeah, she was decompensating by the end. Shrinks say she wasn’t prepared for the impact of losing the support structure of the senior Prasads as well as her husband. They propped her up in ways she didn’t understand before she destroyed that structure.”
It made sense; Rhiannon and Violet, those crimes had been so well planned that not even a droplet of suspicion had fallen on Shumi. The Lake Tarawera Incident, in contrast, had been a mess that I still didn’t understand, while Lake Taupo had been a full-on psychotic fantasy that would have put the spotlight firmly on her even if it had gone exactly as she’d wished.
“What about the drugs?” I asked. “Where did she get those?”
“Plain old sleeping pills. Her doctor prescribed them to her for insomnia, but she must’ve stocked them away at her and Bobby Prasad’s home—her family confirmed that she did go back after she was released, to get some clothes, personal items, that kind of thing.” The cop scowled. “I hate shrinks but I can see why someone would need some head shrinking after this. You and your wife should get therapy.”
I took a sip from the juice box Diya had left for me before she went out to get me a burger with every fixing imaginable. I was craving one like you wouldn’t believe, and it wasn’t like knife wounds meant I had to be on a bland invalid diet.
Ackerson crossed her arms over her chest, pinned me with her gaze. “Did you hear that both of Jason Musgrave’s soon-to-be-ex-wives—though I guess only one is legally married to him—did a Dateline interview? Both redheads, so he has a clear type. They’re pissed and planning to form a united front against the murdering bigamist.”
I stared fixedly at the curtain around my bed. “Virna deserved better, deserved more.” Warm, generous, kind, she’d spent forty years with a husband who barely paid attention to her, too busy with his business interests, had only begun to fly after he was dead. “What a waste of a life.”
I caught Ackerson’s nod out of the corner of my eye, but when she spoke, it had nothing to do with Virna. “Baxter says the original detective on the Jocelyn Wai case still thinks you had something to do with it.”
