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K ai was still thinking about his night with Lulu when he knocked on Dana’s older sister’s front door. She lived in a housing development in Springwood, the kind with lots of families and an elementary school nearby.

He’d called Jillian Cartwright Evers the day before to set up an appointment to talk to him for the profile he wanted to do regarding Dana and her family. They’d settled on this morning after she took her two children to school.

“Come in,” she said, stepping back so he could pass. “Would you like some coffee?”

“I’m good, thank you.”

“We can talk in the kitchen,” she said. “You don’t mind if I have a cup, do you? I need my caffeine.”

“Of course, not. Go right ahead.”

They settled at the round kitchen table after Jillian poured herself a cup. She looked like her sister, especially around the nose and chin, but with a different hair color.

“What do you want to know? What kind of article are you planning to write?”

“The plan is a human-interest piece,” Kai explained. “I want to make sure that my readers know your sister as a person, not just as a statistic.”

“And you’re planning to speak with my parents?”

“I am, but we haven’t been able to work out a time yet. I know that they’re grieving, and I want to respect that. Your grief, as well, Mrs. Evers.”

“Call me Jill. All my friends do.” She leaned forward as if she was going to tell him a secret. “I agreed to speak with you because I wanted to be sure that the true story was told. You’ll just get a bunch of revisionist history if you talk to my mom and dad.”

“Revisionist?” Kai echoed. “In what way?”

“They sort of try to gloss over some of the things my sister has done in the past. She was - to be blunt - self-destructive. She made poor life decisions and then expected everyone to go out of their way to help her fix whatever she’d broken. It was the sad pattern of her life, and a few years ago, I decided that I was done doing that. I’ve taken quite a bit of abuse from my parents for doing this. But I told them that they weren’t helping Dana in the long run. And then this happened. I can’t say that I’m shocked.”

Wow, did this woman even like her sister? Was she victim-blaming? Jillian didn’t appear to be a woman grieving, but to be fair, people grieved in many different ways especially over time. Just because she wasn’t crying and wailing, didn’t mean that Jillian wasn’t devastated in her own way.

Sometimes that was when people were at their most combative, angry at their loved one for leaving. They wanted someone to blame, and since there wasn’t a killer caught yet, it was often easier to blame the dearly departed.

“How about we start at the beginning,” Kai said. “You describe Dana as self-destructive. Can you give me some examples of that behavior?”

“I will because Mom and Dad won’t,” Jillian replied bitterly. “Heaven forbid we say anything negative about Dana. If you talk to them, they’ll say she was perfect but still finding herself. That’s my mom’s favorite description. Dana was finding herself. In reality, Dana had terrible taste in friends and men. They brought her nothing but trouble.”

“Does Jay Bradford fit that description?”

“Jay was the only decent man Dana ever dated, and she couldn’t even hold onto him,” Jillian scoffed. “He’s a good guy who thought he could fix Dana’s issues, but the fact was that no one could. She had to do it on her own, and she was too lazy to do it. Dana was always looking for the shortcut in life. She didn’t want to have to do the real work of making something of herself.”

“Did you ever share that point of view with her?”

“Pretty much every time I saw her,” Jillian replied. “I know that sounds mean, but you see, she only ever reached out to me when she needed something. Whether it was money, a favor, a ride, her tire changed, she didn’t call to hang out and chat. She’d call when she needed me to do something for her. After a while, I got tired of it, and I told her off.”

“What did she say?”

“She’d just laugh and shake her head. She’d tell me that I was too intense and that I took things too seriously. That I needed to lighten up. Then she’d ghost for me months before crawling out of the woodwork again when she needed to borrow gas money. I think she thought getting lectured by me was the cost of whatever she wanted. I doubt she ever listened to a word I said. She certainly never changed, that’s for sure.”

Jillian held up her hands in surrender, her eyes glistening with tears.

“I’m sure that I sound like a total cold-hearted bitch. I can hear myself, and I wouldn’t disagree. But you have to understand that it’s been over a decade of this. Dana was a thirty-year-old woman who acted like she was eighteen. She refused to take on any adult responsibilities. I guess she wanted to be Peter Pan or something. And the rest of us were only around to clean up when she made a mess.”

They were cold, hard words. The sister’s description of Dana wasn’t flattering in the least.

But the real question…was it accurate? It was too early for Kai to know.

“You said that she expected others to fix her bad decisions. Can you expand on that?”

“Do you see my house?” Jillian asked, her gaze roaming the room. “My husband and I worked and saved to pay the downpayment for it. We pay the monthly mortgage, and all the bills associated with being an adult. Now Dana had a far different life. She lived in my late grandmother’s house for free. My parents were supposed to sell the house and split the proceeds between us, but then they backed away from that because poor, poor Dana was renting an apartment she couldn’t afford with a roommate that she didn’t like. So, they let her move in. I’d like to say she at least paid the utilities, but I seriously doubt it. I think they were even paying for Dana’s car insurance. Do you see what I’m talking about?”

He did. If he’d had a sibling like this, he wouldn’t be thrilled either. He’d seen this inequity in some of his friends’ families. One sibling was the responsible one, and they were expected to just suck it up when the screw-up needed help.

And they constantly needed help. It made him glad that he was an only child.

“That must have made you angry. Frustrated.”

Enough to kill?

“Yes, but my husband would always remind me that it was Dana who was really being hurt in those circumstances. My parents were keeping her from growing up and taking responsibility for her own life. In the end, I was stronger for not depending on others for my day-to-day life.”

“Dana did have a job,” Kai observed. “That’s something.”

“She did,” Jillian sighed. “But it was a party job. She wanted to pretend that she was still a party girl in her early twenties, so she got a job at a bar with a bunch of people younger than her. It was pathetic, if you ask me. I don’t think she made all that much either. My parents constantly offered to send Dana back to school for dental hygiene or paralegal. Anything to get her off the gravy train.”

“She didn’t take them up on the offers?”

“Of course, not. Then she’d just be one of a crowd of people who work nine to five. Dana thought she was so different, so edgy. She was simply far too special to do something so ordinary.”

Kai could hear the bitterness ooze from Jillian’s tone. It was clear that there was no love lost between the sisters.

Just where were you, Jillian, the night that your sister died?

Clearing his throat, Kai shifted on the chair. It was time to change the subject a bit - perhaps to something that would help Lulu.

“Was Dana seeing anyone recently?”

“She was always seeing someone,” Jillian replied with a shrug. “But I don’t know who.”

“What about Jay Bradford? Was there any chance of the two of them getting back together?”

“There might have been, but his new girlfriend put an end to that happening. Thank goodness for him, honestly. I think Dana was presenting herself as having grown up, but that was a lie. She was as dysfunctional as ever.”

“Did you ever hear Allie threaten Dana?”

“No, but I wouldn’t blame her if she had. Dana was always calling Jay for some bullshit favor. I doubt she even really wanted him back. She just wanted more of his attention. To her, it was a competition with Allie, and she wanted to win.”

What the hell…throw out a name.

“What about Glen Foster?”

“I heard the rumors, too,” Jillian said. “That she was sleeping with Glen when she and Jay were married. I think that’s the one thing that my sister wouldn’t do. She loved to party and have fun, but she wasn’t a cheater. I will say that much about her. She just wasn’t the type. I wouldn’t put it past her to flirt a bit though. She liked having male attention. But she loved Jay, even if she wasn’t ready for a mature, adult relationship. She loved him. She was truly upset when they divorced.”

“The divorce was Jay’s idea?”

“It was. He needed to be married to a grown-up, and Dana didn’t want to be a grown-up. In the end, he was tired of taking care of her all the time. He was looking for a partner, not a child. He gave her many chances, but I don’t think she took him seriously. I think she thought he’d keep giving her chances like Mom and Dad. Like I said, they weren’t doing her any favors. She had a strange idea of reality.”

This wasn’t what Kai had expected when he’d made the appointment to speak with Jillian. He’d wanted to do a human-interest piece, but he couldn’t very well write an article that the recent murder victim was an immature, selfish asshole via stories from her own sister.

“Jillian,” he said, measuring his words carefully. “I don’t want to upset you, and I very much appreciate your time today. But I have to say that I don’t think I can put a lot of what you’ve told me into the article I’m writing. I will make sure she’s not made out to be a saint. I want to be honest, but not cruel. Is there anything positive that you can tell me about Dana? Anything at all?”

To his surprise, Jillian smiled and chuckled.

“I never thought you’d write any of that,” she replied. “I just wanted to make sure that you knew that Dana wasn’t some golden light in this town. She wasn’t perfect. That’s what my parents will tell you, but it’s not the whole truth. If you’re looking for cute and sunny stories, I do have a few. She wasn’t always a pain in the ass. When we were kids, we actually spent a lot of time together.”

It looked more like Jillian simply needed someone to offload all her emotions to, and not that she hated her sister with a passion. She had to be having conflicting thoughts about the person she loved but didn’t always like very much.

Jillian launched into a few far more positive and funny stories from when they were kids growing up in a small town. These were more likely to get printed, and hopefully, no one would notice that there weren’t many stories from when Dana was older.