Kiss of the She-Devil Read Online Free PDF

middle child, the type A of the three, the one willing to speak her mind (her truth) and let the chips fall. Emily was a doer. She got things done. She had been through a lot this past year with her mother and father, and the affair George had had with Donna. There were times when Emily had found herself in the middle of the affair, observing, asking questions, even confronting her father’s lover, and trying to talk her mother into divorcing her father and moving back home to Texas.
    “Where’s Dad?” Emily asked for a second time.
    “Well,” Andrew said, looking down and away from his sister, “I got into some trouble, and this is why we’re all here.”
    “No, you didn’t!” Emily shouted. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Now I know something happened to Mom. I need to know what !”
    They were surrounded by police, who were coming in and out of the room, standing around, listening to the conversation. What Emily meant by “I know” was that she’d had that premonition earlier in the night.
    One police officer pulled Emily aside and explained that she needed to go with him into another room. They sat her down in a chair, she said, and the room was “full of cops.” A female police officer, with a look of despair on her face, walked over to Emily. She knelt down on bended knee in front of Gail’s middle daughter. Andrew came in and stood nearby. The room was quiet. “I’m sorry,” the female officer explained somberly, “but your mother . . . She has been in an accident.”
    “That bitch! That bitch killed my mom,” Emily blurted out through tears, without another word.
    It was as if everyone in the room had frozen. The off icers looked at each other. Andrew put his hand on his sister’s shoulder and squeezed. The world had stopped.
    “What was that, Emily?” the cop asked.
    Emily looked into the female officer’s eyes. Everything else in the room, Emily recalled, faded. She was focused on this one moment.
    “Accident”? she said to herself. There was no accident.
    “I knew,” Emily said later, “that was not the case.”
    Emily felt the police had likely said this—calling it an “accident”—on purpose to see what type of reaction they would get from Emily and Andrew.
    She was right. Emily, Andrew, and George were all suspects at this point.
    “That bitch murdered my mom!” Emily blurted out again. She was crying more dramatically now. The entire complexity and totality of her day and night had come into focus. Emily knew why she had felt so strange all day long, why she had never bought her mother a Pampered Chef gift. Emily believed she had felt her mother’s presence leave as Gail died in that parking lot.
    As news of her mother’s death settled on Emily, she began to make sense of what had occurred.
    “I need to tell you what happened,” Emily explained to the police officer.
    “What do you mean by that?” an investigator asked.
    “I am seeing in my mind what happened.”
    There was silence in the room again.
    “You are going to blame my father,” Emily added. “I need to tell you what happened. It’s not my father. She did it with other people.”
    She . . . meaning the lover.
    “My sister here, Emily”—Andrew piped in, explaining in a halfhearted fashion, almost to imply that his sister had no idea what she was saying, that it was the trauma of losing their mother—“thinks she’s psychic!”

8
    T HIS SKILL EMILY Fulton described as intuitive, instinctual, and even supernatural perception hadn’t come to her overnight. It wasn’t something Emily pulled out of the air one day after watching a marathon of That’s So Raven (a Disney sitcom for teens with a supernatural slant) episodes, and then decided to take it on as some sort of protection against emotional trauma. It was not a wall she put up to defend against the broken home of dysfunction that she believed to be living in over the past several years. To downplay it all as trickery, or as a Sylvia