“She avoided my phone calls, and of course I couldn’t even leave a message. I sent her an email to apologize, and it bounced back. No surprise there. She hates email because she can never remember her passwords.” Rachel rubbed her hands over her eyes. “Then I got a message from her.”

“When?”

“Middle of September. I was out of town for a youth retreat. It was short—she said something like, ‘I just wanted to tell you that I decided to get help.’ Then she said she was going away for a while and she would call me when she got back.”

“Do you still have the message?”

Rachel shook her head. “I saved it, but my voicemail automatically deletes stuff after thirty days. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t hear from her again?”

“No. I sent her a birthday card in November and then a Christmas card in December. That’s it.”

“So you didn’t know anything about another woman living in her apartment?”

“No, but it doesn’t totally surprise me,” Rachel said. I’d given her a quick rundown on the phone about the woman whose body had been found. “Claudia tries to help people. Maybe she was helping this woman.”

“It’s hard for me to picture Claudia on the giving end of the relationship,” I said, swallowing hard.

“I know, but that was just her relationship with you,” said Rachel. “She was always taking from you, I saw that myself. It’s like she thinks you have so much that you won’t miss it. But she was good to people who didn’t have much of anything. Like when she took me in after my boyfriend tried to kill me.”

I remembered being surprised by Claudia’s kindness at the time, but later I’d felt like Claudia was really taking advantage of my kindness, forcing me to shelter and feed her friend. “I heard that Claudia went to rehab in the spring,” I said. “Do you know the name of the place?”

“It’s funny you ask. I wanted to know where she’d gone, and she wouldn’t tell me. After our dinner from hell, I started wondering if the guy she was seeing was connected to the rehab center. And I don’t mean another patient. I think he was a therapist she saw there.”

I thought about this. If Rachel was right, why was Claudia worried about my fury? The idea of a doctor taking advantage of my sister made me livid, but that was nothing next to picturing my sister with my former fiancé. “I don’t know. Claudia was completely anti-therapy. She thought people who went to therapists were suckers.”

“Love can do strange things to your brain,” Rachel pointed out. “Like a drug.”

CHAPTER 16