ON DEVIL'S BRAE (A Psychological Suspense Thriller) (Dark Minds Mystery Suspense) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Thailand when she was too young to have known him, she had always considered she was the only daughter. Being young and lacking in confidence, she wondered if she had been a ghastly child. Or was it because she so boring and uninteresting they packed her off to boarding school as soon as she was ten years old. School had been only marginally better than the long dreary weeks spent at home during the school holidays. If she was invited back to stay with a friend, Cassandra leapt at the opportunity. A few weeks away from the family home were wonderful. And she got to meet her friends’ brothers and sisters. Being the only child in her own home, siblings fascinated Cassandra, especially boys. How she dreamed of having brothers or sisters to share those long monotonous, mind-numbing days back at Larchfield. Which was why when she discovered the grainy photographs of Susan in the back of a leather-bound book, she had felt so many mixed emotions. Cassandra knew about an older brother because she vaguely remembered him, but a sister?
    Clutching the pictures in her hand, young Cassandra rushed off to speak to her parents. She found her father in his study. As soon as he finished his phone call, she thrust the photographs on the desk before him. Reginald Potter flinched as he looked down and fiddled with his watch strap. After a few seconds, he gathered them together in a pile, barely glancing at his daughter as he stood up and ushered her towards the door. “I haven’t time now, Cassandra. I suggest you go and ask your mother.”
    Bemused, Cassandra stared as the door was shut in her face. Blinking back her tears, she wandered through to the drawing room in search of her mother.
    “But who is she, Mummy? Why do I feel I know her? Is she a relative?”
    Daphne Potter glanced up at her daughter with a cold look, hardly meeting her eyes. Between thin, tight lips, Cassandra heard her say those four astonishing words. “She’s your sister.”
    Startled, Cassandra mouthed an O. “What do you mean?” she gasped
    Her mother finished arranging the flowers in the vase and stood back to admire her display before continuing. “You had to know sometime, I suppose. Daddy and I always meant to tell you, but time drifted by, and we’re always so busy. We were waiting until you were old enough to understand.”
    Cassandra hopped off the chair she was sitting on and went to stand nearer her mother. She smelt the familiar scent of her cloying perfume hanging in the air around her. “Understand what?”
    Daphne Potter waved a hand in Cassandra’s direction and gave a short sneering laugh. “Her name’s Susan. At least that’s what she was named at her christening. I have no idea if she changed it.”
    Cassandra felt as if she had been slapped round the head and hugged the photographs to her. She was afraid to comment. She and her mother never shared secrets. Her mother was a stranger to her. Frigid and distant.
    “Susan is eighteen years older than you and left home when she was seventeen.” Cassandra peered into her mother’s unemotional, expressionless face, seeing only the heavily made-up eyes and lips, the tightly permed hair. Cassandra was thirteen, so that meant Susan was thirty-one. Goodness, she was old . She couldn’t imagine having an adult sister. Susan would never have been one with whom to share childish secrets, or bring home friends of her own she could moon over. She felt cheated. Susan . It was hardly a romantic name, either. Whatever would her friends at school think?
    Cassandra’s mother and father had always seemed so much older than her friends’ parents, and for the first time, Cassandra really understood why. Apart from Rupert, her long-departed brother, she had an older sister too! Eighteen years was a huge gap between sisters. Why had they waited so long to have another child? A chilling thought struck her. Was she an accident? An unwanted baby and her parents being Christian people would never have…done