Brittle Shadows by Vicki Tyley

interesting, like you, for instance.”
    “You already
know more about me than I know about you. Tell me more about your relationship
with Tanya.”
    He leaned back
in the chair, swinging a leg over one of its upholstered arms. “Not sure
there’s much to tell. Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl falls for a
different boy… well, anyway, you get the gist.”
    “Are you
talking about Brent or Sean?” Tanya’s marriage to gentle-giant Brent in the
early nineties had been short-lived, its Achilles’ heel his fixation with his
first wife’s memory. No woman could compete with a ghost.
    “Both. Brent, I
understood – genuine guy, if not quite all there.” He threw his hands in the
air. “But the other wanker – excuse my French – is another story. Not to speak
ill of the dead, but I never could work out what she saw in the sleazoid.”
    Snap , she thought. It wasn’t just her.
    “Sean did his
damnedest,” he continued, “to cut Tanya off from all her old friends, me
included, or should I say especially me. Mind you, I did threaten more than
once to hang him by his balls if he even thought about doing the wrong thing by
Tanya.”
    “Seems he beat
you to it.” Jemma stretched her legs out along the couch.
    He replied with
a dry chuckle. “Yeah, it seems so. He poisoned her mind so much that in those
last months, she wouldn’t even reply to my emails, let alone speak to me. Not
even after Sean topped himself.”
    “You weren’t
the only one. Didn’t you know, I’m the Wicked Witch of the West, W-W-W for
short.”
    He laughed, a
full-throated and resonant guffaw. “Yes, well,” he said, his mood sobering,
“when it came to Sean, all your sister’s clear thinking went out the window. As
far as she was concerned, everything that came out of his mouth was gospel.
Estranging her from her family and friends gave him even more power. And then
to discover in the worst possible way, his dirty secrets, must have been
earth-shattering.”
    Jemma sighed,
her shoulders sagging under the weight of more self-recrimination. “I should
have been there for her, been more understanding—”
    “Don’t go
there. We can blame ourselves as much as we like, but it can’t change what’s
happened.”
    “Yes, but—”
    Ash sliced the
air with his hand. “No buts. You know how strong-willed Tanya was. It wouldn’t
have mattered what you or I said or did.”
    “Have you ever
thought that she might have been right about Sean’s death, that it wasn’t an
accident? After all, don’t you think she would have known or at least suspected
if her fiancé were that way inclined?”
    He cocked his
head at her, saying nothing.

CHAPTER
11
     
    On her way downstairs to check the
mail, Jemma thought about Ash Bartlett and smiled. She liked his easy manner
and straight-talking attitude. But more than that, she felt an affinity with
him, as if somehow being in his company brought her closer to her sister. He
understood what Jemma was going through; understood it because he was
experiencing the same grief. Given the choice between Ash and Sean, she knew
whom she would pick. What had Sean had that Ash didn’t? Besides arrogance and
an over-inflated ego, of course.
    The lift doors
opened and she stepped out, her keys at the ready. Other than a pony-tailed
youth hard at work polishing the glass doors, the lobby was empty. Wrinkling
her nose at the faint ammonia smell, she searched the wall of brushed-steel
fronted mailboxes to her right for number 367, finding it in the sixth row from
the bottom.
    Sifting through
the handful of post, she found what she was looking for: the envelope from the
State Coroner’s Office addressed to her Perth address, redirected in Gail’s
rounded handwriting. Satisfied, she closed the mailbox and headed back up to
the apartment, resisting the urge along the way to open the letter. She needed
to be sitting down first.
    Except when she
got inside, she couldn’t bring herself to open it. Leaving the