“Don’t remember.” Melissa squinted again. “She said she’d gone in April, or maybe May. No, April. Claudia said something weird, like, if I tried it and didn’t like it, there was another place she’d tell me about. It was like there was some big secret she was going to let me in on, but only if I went to rehab first. I told her I didn’t need rehab and she looked at me like I’m some kind of street junkie.” She gestured with her cigarette, annoyed. “She said the place got her into yoga. She was really obsessed with yoga.” Melissa’s eyes were slightly glazed, as if picking through her fractured memory for broken bits of conversation. “She had her broken tooth capped. Suddenly she had this big smile like Julia Roberts or something. White Chiclets teeth.”

I realized that Melissa was right. When I’d seen my sister over Labor Day weekend, she’d been on a screaming high and I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. But the front tooth that Claudia had broken in a drug-fueled fall on the pavement was whole. Sometime after I’d left for Spain in January—and before I’d come back for a visit in September—it had been repaired. “Do you remember anything else?”

Melissa studied her cigarette for a moment, then dragged on it and furrowed her brow. “At the time, I thought she was being a pain in the ass, trying to flaunt how well she was doing.”

“She wasn’t doing well when I saw her in September. She was shooting up again.”

Melissa nodded her head. “You can get away for a while, but after a while it’s like an old lover calling to you. Then you realize they’ve still got you, deep down.”

CHAPTER 12

“The phrase they used was criminal element,” Detective Bruxton said, grimacing. “They said it applied to both you and your sister.”