11/5/2023 0 Comments Ruby heyer false witness![]() She looked across the open grave at Phil. Jerry continued, “‘I love thee to the level of every day’s/Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light/I love thee freely, as men strive for right.’” She’d been distracted by a long phone call with the man who ran the cemetery because he’d kept gently suggesting that a headstone with rabbits and kittens on it was better suited for a child.Ĭallie was her child, Leigh had wanted to scream, but she had passed the phone to Walter so that she didn’t reach through the line and rip the man’s head off.ĭr. She hadn’t been able to find her coat this morning. He kissed the side of her head through his mask. Walter’s arm wrapped around Leigh’s shoulders. Jerry cleared his throat politely before beginning, “‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways/I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach …’” Phil snorted from the other side of Callie’s grave.ĭr. “I’ve chosen the old gal’s most popular sonnet, so please feel free to recite along.” Jerry probably had no idea the poet had been a morphine addict most of her life. “I’d like to read a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” His mask had leaping kittens across the front, though Leigh wasn’t sure if he had worn it for Callie or if it was just something he had lying around. Jerry walked to the foot of Callie’s grave. Then nothing but a long, low sigh, as Callie finally let go. Leigh had ignored the needle sticking out of her sister’s thigh and listened to the slow, dwindling sounds of Callie’s breath.Īt first, twenty seconds passed between the rise and fall of her chest. The heat was already leaving her frail body. A large, spent syringe was sticking out of his back. She had completely missed Walter lying in the hallway because her full attention had been directed toward the two bodies on top of a pile of mattresses where the ugly orange couch used to be.Īndrew was lying across Callie. The first thing Leigh could recall was tripping over Sidney’s body in the carport. Leigh was standing inside Andrew’s empty mansion when she’d realized that Callie had played her. There had only been Callie lying on a filthy stack of mattresses in the house that her soul had not left since she was fourteen years old.Īt least Leigh had been with her sister at the end. Her eternal nightmare that there would be a late-night phone call, a knock at the door, a detective asking her to identify her sister’s body, had not come to pass. Andrew’s prints joined hers on the syringe in Callie’s leg, but Callie’s fingerprints alone were on the lethal dose of pentobarbital she had jacked directly into Andrew’s heart.įor years, Leigh had convinced herself that she would feel a guilty kind of relieved when Callie finally died, but now what she felt was an overwhelming sadness. ![]() Neither was the revelation that only Callie’s fingerprints were on the spoon, candle, and bag of powder. None of the findings were all that surprising. Heroin, fentanyl, Rohypnol, strychnine, methadone, baking soda, laundry powder. She had been dosed with a lethal cocktail of narcotics and poisons. Her lungs were only working at half-capacity. Callie’s liver and kidneys were diseased. The autopsy report revealed a body that had been ravaged by long-term drug abuse and illness. Her sister had weighed ninety-five pounds by the time she’d arrived at the medical examiner’s office. There were no creaks and groans from the pulleys. They watched Callie’s pastel-yellow casket being lowered into the ground. ![]() The cemetery was quiet but for a few birds chirping in the tree over the grave. Leigh sat in a folding chair beside Walter.
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