After the Fake Heiress Jumped into the Sea

On my birthday, the family's fake heiress threw herself into the sea. She left a suicide note saying she was giving me back my rightful place in the family. I'd already spent every day in the Carter house walking on eggshells, and in a single moment her death dropped me straight into hell. My parents hated me. "We brought you back into this family and gave you everything. Was that still not enough for you? Why couldn't you let her stay?" My brother blamed me. "You were raised in foster care like some wild animal. You don't belong in this family at all. Chloe was the one who begged us to bring you home. Don't you have an ounce of gratitude?" Not one of them mentioned that my life of supposed privilege meant living in the Carter house as Chloe's maid and errand girl. After pleading for me to come home, Chloe beat me, cursed me, and humiliated me whenever no one was watching. Whatever happened, they took her side without question. From then on, they locked me in the dog kennel behind the house, and no one asked about me again. That winter, the housekeeper decided it was too cold to come out and feed me, so I ate snow to fill my stomach. The snow aggravated my already weak stomach, and before long, I developed a high fever. The agony lasted through the entire night before I finally lost consciousness. I never learned whether the fever killed me or whether I froze to death. Not long after I died, Chloe came home. Chapter 1 "Surprise! I'm home!" Chloe Carter came through the front door with a skip, dragging a hot-pink suitcase behind her, dressed in a brand-new Chanel suit. Her hair fell over her shoulders in glossy waves. Her makeup was flawless, and every inch of her glowed with youth and energy—a jarring sight in a house that had been smothered in gloom for days. The instant I heard her voice, my spirit froze above the living room. Her suicide had been a lie. I'd never imagined a ghost could such bone-deep cold, yet the hollow space in my chest seemed to be gripped and torn apart all over again. She was alive and perfectly well. Then what had all that punishment been for? What had my death been for? "Chloe!" My mother reacted first. She rushed across the room and crushed Chloe in her arms, bursting into tears. "You're alive? You're really alive? "You scared me half to death! Where have you been? Do you have any idea how frantic we were?" My father and my older brother, Ethan, crowded around them. Their faces held the same mixture of shock and wild relief. Chloe wrinkled her nose at them and linked her arm through Mom's. "I just wanted to travel around Europe. I knew you wouldn't let me go alone, so I…" She gave them a coy smile. "I played a little prank." "A prank?" Dad's face darkened, but fear and indulgence outweighed the anger in his voice. "You don't joke about something like that." "Exactly. Never do it again." Ethan tried to look stern as he reached over and ruffled her hair. Secure in the center of the family's affection, Chloe let her gaze drift around the living room as though the thought had only just occurred to her. "Grace won't be mad at me, will she? That note was only supposed to tell her I never wanted to steal Mom and Dad from her." No one answered her. The room froze on that one question. Every pair of eyes drifted toward the backyard at once, as if they'd all agreed on it beforehand. They remembered me at last. They remembered how, after Chloe's supposed death, they'd poured every drop of their grief and rage onto the person they'd decided was responsible. Me. The air turned thick and awkward. Chloe blinked with practiced innocence. "What's wrong? Come to think of it, where is Grace?" "I'll go check on her." For one fleeting moment, pity and guilt crossed Ethan's face. Chapter 2 Maybe Chloe's safe return had loosened whatever knot of anger and favoritism had hardened Ethan's heart. Maybe he thought that since Chloe was fine, my punishment could finally end. My spirit drifted after him. I watched my tall, broad-shouldered brother walking ahead of me, and I felt nothing at all. What use was concern that came after my body had already gone cold? The kennel in the backyard looked exactly as it had before I died. A heavy iron chain lay abandoned on the ground. One end was fastened to a wooden post; the clasp at the other was streaked with rust. Ethan stood in front of the kennel a long time without speaking. There was no trace that I'd ever been there, unless despair could linger in the air like a scent. "Mrs. Webb!" He straightened and shouted to the housekeeper hanging laundry nearby. "Where is she? Where's the person who was locked in here?" Doreen Webb hurried over with an eager, frightened smile. She'd been the first person to find me after I died. At the sight of my stiff body she'd screamed and collapsed onto the frozen ground. "E-Ethan…" Her gaze darted away as she pointed at the broken chain. "I don't know. She was still here yesterday when I checked. Maybe the chain wasn't secure and she worked herself loose. She must have run off." "Run off?" Ethan repeated. The last trace of warmth drained out of his voice, inch by inch. "Yes, exactly." When he didn't explode at once, Doreen grew bolder. "You know what she's like. A girl raised in foster care is bound to be wild. Some of them never learn to live with people. "Your family gave her food, clothes, and a roof, and she was never grateful once. Who knows how much resentment she was carrying around? The moment she saw an opening, of course she ran." "She ran." Ethan gave a cold laugh. Anger and contempt swept away his guilt. He kicked the kennel door so hard the wood cracked against its frame. "Ungrateful little wretch!" he snarled through his teeth. "What did this family ever do to deserve her? Chloe begged us for months to bring her home. "We let her live under our roof. We fed her and clothed her, and this is how she pays us back? She takes off without a word, without so much as an explanation. She really is an animal." I watched rage twist my brother's face, and the last ember of warmth I'd once called family went out inside me. He didn't know that Doreen had found my frozen body the morning after I died. She'd been terrified of taking the blame, and even more terrified that something so unlucky would cling to her. So after dark she rolled me up in a threadbare bedsheet and threw me out like a bag of garbage, in the loneliest stretch of wasteland in the woods west of the gated community. Because my body was never laid to rest, my soul couldn't move on. I could only remain like the most faithful audience in the world, watching day after day as the Carters lavished twice as much love on the daughter they'd miraculously gotten back. Laughter filled the living room again. Mom held Chloe's hands and fussed over her, desperate to make up for every moment of worry. Dad kept a stern face, but the adoration in his eyes gave him away. He even let Chloe charge a brand-new sports car to his credit card. After his brief flare of anger, Ethan soon melted under her wheedling and the gifts she'd brought him. Once more, they were a happy family. Then, on the seventh day, a call from the police shattered that false peace. Chapter 3 Mom answered the phone. Floating beside her, I heard every word of the calm, official voice on the other end. "Hello. Is this the Carter residence? This is the South Precinct. We've recovered the body of an unidentified young woman in a stretch of wasteland in the woods west of the city. Based on our preliminary findings and a comparison with missing-person records, we believe she may be your missing daughter, Grace Carter." The color drained out of Mom's face. Her hand trembled around the phone, and her eyes went straight to Chloe, who was sitting on the rug playing video games with Ethan. At the sound of my name, Chloe looked up. Something unnatural flickered through those wide, innocent eyes and vanished almost before I caught it. "Mom, who is it?" she asked carelessly. Before Mom could answer, Chloe seemed to guess what had happened and let out an exaggerated laugh. "It isn't one of those scammers, is it? They call all the time claiming something's happened to somebody's relative so they can trick you into wiring money. "Nothing's happened to Grace. She's probably curled up in some man's bed having the time of her life." The words seemed to snap Mom out of her panic. Disgust took its place at once. "Officer, you've made a mistake," she said coldly into the phone. "My daughter is perfectly fine. The girl you're talking about came out of foster care. She wouldn't follow our rules and she ran off on her own. She has nothing to do with this family. Don't call here with something so morbid again." She slammed down the phone. Strangely, I didn't feel any pain. Hearing my mother call the news of my death morbid, hearing her wave it away in contempt—I was oddly calm. Maybe I'd heard it so many times there was nothing left in me to wound. In their hearts, I didn't even rate having my life or death confirmed. Whether I was alive or dead carried less weight than one careless guess out of Chloe's mouth. They wanted to lie to themselves, but reality wouldn't cooperate. Half an hour later, a police cruiser stopped outside the Carter house. Two solemn officers came in, showed their badges, and explained in a few plain sentences why they were there. The family was to come identify the body immediately. Nobody could call it a scam now. The drive to the medical examiner's office was unbearably tense. Maybe Chloe found the silence too awkward. Maybe she just wanted to shore up her position while everyone was off balance. Either way, she started up a relentless "analysis." "Dad, Mom, Ethan, don't worry. I'm telling you, this is another one of Grace's stunts. She saw me come home, she saw all of you being nice to me, and she couldn't stand it. So she deliberately staged all this to win your sympathy. "Maybe she ran off with some sleazy boyfriend and got dumped. She's too embarrassed to come home, so she's putting on this whole performance to make us go begging for her." Ethan scoffed. "Who would date her?" "Somebody did," Chloe said eagerly, dropping her voice with theatrical disgust. "Did you forget? I told you I saw her pawing at some man outside school. He had to be pushing forty and he drove a beat-up old van—obviously bad news. When I confronted her about it, she talked back and claimed she was only picking up a package." Chapter 4 Chloe's words opened the floodgates of their memories. Bitterness rippled through my spirit. It hadn't occurred to me that even death wouldn't stop her from spreading filthy rumors about me. There had never been any inappropriate relationship between me and an older man. Chloe had ordered a mountain of things online but was too lazy to collect them from the parcel center at the entrance to our neighborhood, so she ordered me to go instead. On my way back, staggering under the weight of the boxes, I accidentally bumped into a middle-aged man who was moving house. He caught my arm so I wouldn't fall. That was all. Chloe embroidered that moment into proof that I was meeting an older man in secret. That night I wasn't allowed dinner. I was forced to kneel in the living room and reflect on what I'd supposedly done. Dad called me shameless and said I'd dragged the Carter name through the dirt. Mom said vulgarity was bred into my bones. Now that Chloe had dragged the story up again, the revulsion on their faces deepened. "I always said she was filthy," Mom said through clenched teeth. "What do you expect from a girl raised in foster care? There's nothing she wouldn't do for money." "Disgraceful!" Dad slammed a hand against the steering wheel. "Once we've confirmed it's her, we deal with the body quietly. Nobody outside this family hears a word." Ethan leaned against the window, watching the streets race past. "I hope she really is dead," he said, his voice glacial. "At least then it's over and she can't come back and put another stain on this family." They cursed me the whole way there, inventing one sordid offense after another. It was easier that way. If they decided in advance that I'd had it coming, they could blunt the horror of walking into a room to identify a body. They braced themselves for the squalid end of a daughter they'd already convicted. At last the car stopped outside the medical examiner's building, and an attendant led them into an identification room. "You should prepare yourselves," the examiner said evenly. "The decedent wasn't in good condition when she was found." A white sheet covered a stainless-steel gurney. When the examiner drew it slowly back, time stopped. I was skeletal. Every trace of softness had been drained out of me, leaving sallow skin stretched tight over bone. Bruised purple patches of frostbite covered a body that had gone hungry for months. Worst of all were the wounds on my arms, my legs, my cheeks. Stray dogs had torn down through flesh to the bone, and what was left of me was barely recognizable. Mom screamed. Her knees buckled and she went down on the floor. Dad lurched hard enough that he had to catch himself against the wall. For the first time, the authority in his face cracked wide open, and underneath it was nothing but shock. Ethan stood there as though someone had turned him to stone. His pupils contracted as he stared at my ruined face. His lips moved, but no sound came out. They'd imagined a hundred possibilities on the drive over. Not one of them had been this—that I would die in a way so wretched, so degraded, so far outside anything a person should suffer. Into that deathly silence came Chloe's voice, shrill and cutting, desperate to slash through the truth suffocating the room. "Oh my God. How did she end up like that?" She clapped a theatrical hand over her mouth. There was no grief in her eyes at all, only a flash of panic. Then she seemed to hit on an answer, and the venom came back with her certainty. "I know what happened! She caught something off that man, some filthy disease. Why else would she waste away like that? "She was too ashamed to show her face and she couldn't afford treatment, so she crawled off somewhere to die." She turned urgently to Dad and Ethan. "See? I told you she was a slut. Someone like that had it coming. Let's take her out of here and have her cremated quietly. This is humiliating. "What happens if the press gets hold of it? Think what that does to the Carter name." Every word scraped against the conscience of anyone in that room who still had one. Finally the officer who'd been silent the whole time spoke up. "Ma'am, I don't know what grievance you had with the deceased, but you'll show her some basic respect." Detective Nora Bennett fixed Chloe with a hard stare. "Our findings put her death more than a week ago. She died of organ failure brought on by extreme starvation and prolonged exposure to the cold. There's no evidence of anything you've described, so stop spreading it. "This was an unnatural death and the body was illegally disposed of. We're opening a criminal investigation, and all of you will cooperate."