“Any others?”

“Besides Natalie’s computers, specifically her laptop.” Lucy opens the bottle I handed to her. “But we can’t be sure what else might have gone on. I wasn’t conducting counterspy sweeps every time I went to Virginia. Janet wasn’t either. We didn’t think we had a reason.”

“And now you’re sure there was spying going on?” I ask, and Lucy nods. “As Natalie was dying?”

“During some of it, I’m guessing. We may never know how much.”

“It would take a very special type of degenerate to do something like that.”

“And we know exactly who fits the bill. I have a very strong feeling she’s up to something really special this time.”

She means that Carrie is, and I’m back to the same suspicion, only more strongly. Something else has happened. But she’s not sharing that information with me for some reason, and I keep thinking about Benton. She was talking to him earlier. I don’t really know about what. Lucy isn’t going to say a word if he’s told her not to, and I herd her back to what started this conversation.

I ask her if Natalie might have been aware of the nickname I coined for Dorothy when we were kids. Might she ever have heard someone mention Sister Twister?

“If so, I don’t know about it.” Lucy tilts back her head and takes a swallow of Gatorade.

“I’m wondering if the subject may have come up in Carrie’s presence years ago when she, Janet, Natalie and you were still friendly with each other.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I can’t see any other explanation for how some anonymous cyber-menace would know unpublished personal details about my family. Unless it came directly from the source,” I add.

“You mean unless it came from Sister Twister herself. My mother the mad pincher,” Lucy says, and I don’t correct her.

It’s not true that pinching and pulling hair were Dorothy’s real crimes but I’m not going to tell Lucy that. I’ve never elaborated on just how sneaky, untruthful and violent my sister could be, grabbing an arm, an ankle, and twisting the skin quick and hard in opposite directions. What was called a snakebite or Indian sunburn back then was her specialty.

When executed with sufficient skill and force, it’s quite painful and leaves little evidence beyond a redness that early on I learned not to complain about. If I did, Dorothy simply would say that I had a sunburn. Or I was suffering from an allergic reaction. As usual I was wrongly accusing her. I was trying to get her into trouble, and when questioned, she would concoct the most elaborately imaginative falsehoods to explain my inflamed sore flesh.