How to Kill Your Best Friend

by Lexie Elliott

  Lenny proffers his hand to me, and I take it distractedly. “And Lissa,” I say loudly, to break through this absurd charade of politeness. Lenny glances at me, his dark eyes quiet and wary, my hand held for a beat too long in his firm, dry handshake before he thinks to release it. Everyone else is looking at me, too. “Surely you’ll be reopening the case now.”

  Jimi shakes his head. “There’s no reason to do that.”

  “No reason?” I’m genuinely incredulous. “Two deaths and one attack in one small remote resort, and you’re not even going to look at whether there’s a connection?”

  “Miss Ayers,” he says, in words so deliberately patient that the condescension is unmistakable, “do you have any evidence to suggest a connection between this crime and the unfortunate accident that befell Mrs. Kateb?”

  “I—no evidence, no, but surely—”

  “No evidence,” he repeats, nodding. “Exactly. You must understand, Miss Ayers, that we are policemen. We cannot just reopen a case without any new evidence.”

  I turn away, struggling to collect myself, to prevent my anger from spilling out in wordless vitriol, or worse, in furious hot tears. By the time I turn back, they’ve taken their leave, both of them, Lenny awkwardly matching his longer stride to his superior’s.

  “You okay?” Adam murmurs.

  “Yes.” Except of course I’m not. How could anyone be okay? “I’m not wrong,” I mutter defiantly.

  “Come and sit down.”

  I look at the table, which is big enough for six, and yet we are only four. We should have been six; if Lissa was still alive we would be six. We haven’t just lost Lissa; we’ve lost Jem, too, I think—if he was ever truly a part of the group. Lost. What a stupid expression. As if the person has been misplaced; as if you might walk into a room and find them after all. Maybe Jem feels like that; maybe he expects to see Lissa in every room he enters in that villa; maybe lost feels like the right expression to him. But I didn’t lose Lissa. She was taken. Cristina, too. It beggars belief that there wouldn’t be a connection.

  “Your knee needs a break. Sit down,” urges Adam again, and I allow myself to sink into a chair. He’s right; my knee is aching. All that hiking up and down the cliff certainly hasn’t done it any favors.

  Duncan clears his throat. He’s about to take charge, as if that’s his birthright as a male. In a deliberate show of disinterest, I pick up my phone and start to scroll through all the messages that came in through the night—junk mail, mostly; with all the vociferous complaints about the aggressive firewall, the IT department seems to have dialed back its efficiency to essentially nil—whilst lending half an ear to Duncan’s bid for authority. “What with all of this—Cristina, the attack on Georgie—I don’t much like the idea of Bron or Georgie sleeping in villas on their own.” I look up at my name and find Bron looking at me, her mouth parting as if she’s about to say something, but then she closes it again. I return to my phone. “I was thinking we should all move into one villa,” Duncan continues. “That would surely be easier for Jem, too; he can get started on closing up our villas. The presidential villa has enough bedrooms for us all, right? What is it; four, five bedrooms?”

  “Four, I think,” offers Adam.

  Sender: georgieayers698@gmail.com. It’s another email released from quarantine—I’ve been getting them in dribs and drabs; last night’s batch included the email with the white dress code for the memorial—but it’s weird; that’s my exact name, with the right spelling, but that’s not an email address that I own. And why would I be sending myself an email? The title is: Wish you were here. I can feel myself freeze. My pulse is beating so loudly in my ears that surely the others must hear it. I’m only dimly aware that Duncan is still speaking. “Georgie,” he says testily. “Right, Georgie?”

  I look up. “Sorry—what?”

  “The presidential villa, Georgie. Four bedrooms, perfect for the four of us. Right?”

  I look at Bron, who nods quickly in agreement. “Uh, sure.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” I hear Adam say easily, but I’m already looking back at the email, hunting through the quarantine information at the top to find the date it was actually sent. The night before she died. Actually, very late that night, probably only a few hours before she disappeared. It’s possible it was the last thing she ever typed. The world has narrowed to the small screen of my mobile phone. I start to read: Seriously, honey, you should be here. You were meant to be here.

  “Okay then,” Duncan is saying, starting to push his chair back. I need you to keep me in check. “I’ll go and speak to Jem about it. I’m sure it’ll be fine; it’s just one more night.” Actually, I needed you a while ago. I’ve not been entirely honest in my emails; I thought I could guilt you into coming out here. Alas, no. But this one is the unadulterated truth. I’ve done a bad thing and I’m not sorry.

  “Wait,” I hear Adam say, and his tone is sharp enough to yank me away from the email. “What were you and Bron discussing earlier with the chief of police?”

  It should have been my first question after the police left the four of us alone, but Cristina’s death derailed us all. Duncan pauses awkwardly, halfway between sitting and standing, and I see him glance involuntarily at Bron, and I see that he was the first person she looked to, also—and I know we aren’t four. We are two twos, except who am I kidding? I glance back at the email. The only two I’ve ever been part of was Lissa and me. We are two, and one, and one, and the math of that is very, very different.

  FIFTEEN

  BRONWYN

  “What were you and Bron discussing with the chief of police?”

  Of course Adam and Georgie were bound to wonder. Of course they were going to ask that very question. Duncan drops back into his seat and starts to explain. Ordinarily I would be irritated beyond measure by someone else taking charge of a narrative that relates to me, but on this occasion I’m perfectly happy to let Duncan do the talking. In fact, I’m curious to see how he’ll edit the message. He took charge with the local police, too, and was very insistent that the fraud be kept a secret—no need to publicly air the laundry of the dead, and it certainly wouldn’t help the hotel’s reputation—though perhaps Cristina’s death has put paid to that.

  Death. Murder, actually. Horrific and awful, of course, but surely completely unconnected to the fraud, or that vile message on the mirror? Now that the shock has had a chance to subside, it strikes me that this tragedy has actually lessened the threat level, as it relates to me. I expect Georgie is right in her assumption that the same man who attacked her must have killed Cristina. Perhaps she’s even right that the same person killed Lissa, but clearly we will never know. Either way, the safest thing we can do is leave; and we’re doing that tomorrow. Even the chief of police has approved our departure. I think again of Jimi’s reaction to Duncan’s precise, undramatic description of the fraud. I could swear he looked at me more carefully, when he understood what Duncan was saying about Lissa’s motivation, as if he might discern something he’d previously missed, as if he might suddenly spot the reason why Lissa—svelte, gorgeous, glamorous—would have become jealous of me. Me, the boring housewife.

  But I want to be the boring housewife; I want to be happy being the boring housewife. If all of this can be resolved without Rob needing to know anything, I’ll go home and be the perfect wife, mother, daughter-in-law, friend. I’ll put my hand up for every parent rep post, and I’ll make fairy cakes and cookies for every bake sale; I’ll have coffees and arrange kiddie playdates, and I’ll make sure I never again wish I hadn’t thrown in my job. Rob’s mother never worked, which can go either way for influencing a son’s expectations, but in Rob’s case, the outcome is clear. He never pressured me to give up, but he comments at least once a week on how much easier it is for him to just concentrate on his career instead of worrying about whether he’s supposed to be doing a nursery drop-off or preschool pickup.r />
  When Duncan drops the bombshell of where the money has been funneled to, for once Georgie’s eyes stop flitting down to her phone and grow comically round, and when I turn to look at Adam, sitting right beside me, I see that his jaw has literally dropped open. They didn’t know; I’m certain of it.

  “But—why? Who?” asks Adam, bewildered.

  “Not Cristina, then,” Georgie says definitively. Her mouth is a tight straight line, and each word is a sharp bite. “Lissa, I presume. Fuck.” She’s cross, I realize. Furious, in fact; it seems like it’s all she can do to stop herself from exploding in anger.

  “Lissa? But why? Why Bron? She’s . . .” Even as he’s saying it, I see Adam’s eyes swing round to me, and my cheeks redden in some kind of Pavlovian response. He’s doing the same kind of math as Duncan. “You and Jem?”

  “No, of course not! Why would you even think that?”

  “Lissa thought it,” says Georgie, with, if anything, more anger. She looks down at the phone in her hand. “She said she did a bad thing—fuck.”

  “What?” I stare at Georgie. “Lissa said what? When?”

  Georgie glances at her phone again, then sighs. The fight goes out of her slowly; it’s like watching a balloon deflate in slow motion. “I got two emails from her, sent in the days before she—she died. I only just got them; they were caught in my work’s ridiculous firewall. She was totally fed up with Jem flirting with all the female guests. And with you, Bron. Sorry.”

  “He didn’t,” I protest. My cheeks are reddening again. Duncan didn’t even take a breath before assuming I was having an affair with Jem, and Adam was only a beat or two behind. “He doesn’t.”

  “He did and he does,” says Adam unequivocally. “It’s like breathing to him.”

  “I . . .” I swallow. I can’t immediately think of a comeback; I change tack. “But there’s never been anything between us!” I rally hotly. “Ask Jem. We’ve never been even close to doing anything!”

  I look at Duncan. His face is contemplative, but when he sees me looking, he holds up his hands. “I know,” he says. “We all know that.”

  Georgie shrugs. “Sure, but it doesn’t matter.” Does Georgie believe me? I suppose she of all people has the most cause to doubt. “In her last email, Lissa said—well, she strongly suggested you and Jem were fucking. She was pretty upset about it.”

  I can’t help it; I flinch. It’s the word choice as much as anything. All week I’ve noticed how much unnecessary swearing everybody else indulges in. Maybe the change is in me, not them; maybe I used to be equally potty-mouthed. Probably it jars with me now because I’ve got young kids and I hang around with other parents and nobody—nobody decent anyway—swears around young kids. But even so, I don’t think I would ever have used the verb to fuck to describe whatever sexual relations I might have been having. I wouldn’t even use it to describe what Graeme and I were doing. To fuck is . . . clinical. More than that: repercussion-free. No, we were absolutely not fucking. “When is this torrid little affair supposed to have started?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe when they stayed with you in Surrey? I’m not sure. She didn’t sound . . .” She falters. “She sounded not herself.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Adam.

  Georgie looks down at her phone. “Well, here’s an extract.” She starts to read, deliberately putting no emphasis into the words, which somehow makes them land with all the more weight. “I swear he’s needling me on purpose now. He’s all: Bronwyn, your kids are so gorgeous! You seem like such a great mother! I really . . .” She stumbles. “Sorry, her spelling has always been atrocious, it’s throwing me off . . . I really want to cum on your enormous freckled lactating tits! Okay, he didn’t say that last one, but I know he’s thinking it.” Georgie looks across at me. I must be scarlet from head to toe, and I’m fighting the urge to cross my arms across my chest. Enormous freckled lactating tits. It’s about the only body part I possess that I’ve been consistently happy with, and in one fell swoop Lissa has made me feel like a cow with gigantic udders—an impressive feat from beyond the grave—despite the fact that I haven’t been lactating for almost two years. “Um, sorry, Bron,” Georgie says again, after a pause. “It says far more about her state of mind than it does about you. Or, um, your tits.” I nod without speaking. I’m not sure I can speak. So Lissa was horribly jealous over the wrong husband. I feel simultaneously both utterly guilty and also one hundred percent unfairly persecuted. And also just plain hurt: to write that in an email—it’s so mean. “No wonder it got caught in the firewall with that kind of language,” she mutters. I put the heels of my hands up to my eye sockets.

  “I personally have never considered ejaculating on your tits,” I hear Duncan say, mock seriously. “I mean, your stomach, maybe; but not your tits.” A short laugh escapes me, though my eyes are perilously damp behind my hands.

  “I’m an ankle man, myself,” Adam says. “Though I confess I do like a freckle or two. Are you freckled all over, Bron?” We’re all laughing now; it’s like a warm bath around me, easing the sting. I put a napkin up to my eyes and bend over, and Georgie slides over to put an arm round me, squeezing me around the waist. She doesn’t let go until I have dried my eyes and sat upright again.

  “So it was a fuck-you to both of you then, I guess,” says Duncan, businesslike once again. “That at least makes some sense; two birds with one stone, et cetera.” He looks across at me. “To be honest, if Lissa thought you were screwing Jem, I think you got off lightly, all things considered. And—not to speak ill of the dead or anything—she doesn’t sound like she was at her most balanced when she wrote that.”

  “In retrospect, I’m not sure she’s been balanced since Graeme died,” Georgie says, in a thoughtful tone.

  “Poor Jem,” says Adam, with a grimace. “He’ll put two and two together and realize that she could hardly have been expecting a happily-ever-after with him after stealing from the business.”

  Stealing. The word jars almost as much as fucking did. It is stealing, for all that the malicious intent makes it seem . . . other. Like a deadly sin—wrath, perhaps—something undesirable as a character trait, but not necessarily illegal. Duncan nods. “Yeah, I thought that, too. The money will get returned, though it might take a few weeks. Jimi said there’s a financial crime team that will handle it.”

  “Oh, one more thing.” I get out my phone. “This was written on my bathroom mirror. I found it the morning after the memorial.” Adam peers over my shoulder, then takes a sharp breath in. He takes the phone off me and hands it to Georgie, whose puzzled expression turns to shock.

  “Oh, Bron,” she breathes, looking again at the screen. Then her eyes find mine. “But why didn’t you say anything?”

  I feel like I’m squirming. “I don’t know, I—”

  “I’m not certain that it was meant for Bron,” interjects Duncan, thankfully moving the conversation off me as he explains his theory of the room keys. Georgie’s laser gaze doesn’t budge from me, though she doesn’t say anything. Her eyes are very green against her newly tanned face.

  “If not Bron, then Georgie, surely?” says Adam, his brow furrowed.

  “I can’t imagine who’s behind it, if it really was meant for me.” Georgie looks at the screen again, squinting as if she’s trying to perceive a three-dimensional image within the stark two-dimensional words on the screen. They weren’t two-dimensional on the mirror; the browny-pink lipstick jutted out in thick lumps and proud streaks.

  “But wait, does that really make sense?” Adam asks, his brow furrowed. “We did just grab keys, but Georgie wasn’t even here yet when the rest of us checked in; her room shouldn’t have been among them.” He’s right. I feel my stomach drop as if I’m on a roller coaster. I hadn’t thought it through; I was too busy clinging to the hope that that awful, brutal message was nothing to do with me. “Though I suppose the graffiti artist could jus
t have made an honest mistake on the room number.” He moves a hand, recognizing the incongruity of his language—honest mistake—but nobody bothers to respond. “If it was meant for Georgie, was it somehow connected to the attack on her?”

  “When we spoke to Jimi, he thought that was just an opportunistic mugging. The people who come to this kind of place are often decked out in expensive jewelry, watches, et cetera,” Duncan replies. “But that was before Cristina . . . I’m sure he’s keeping an open mind.”

  “That’ll be a first,” mutters Georgie. Duncan glances at her but chooses not to engage.

  “It’s your fault. What do you suppose is the it?” says Adam, as if musing idly on the meaning of song lyrics.

  “Lissa’s death, surely,” Georgie says. “What else could it be?”

  “But how is that anyone’s fault? You heard the chief; all the evidence suggests that was an accident,” I protest. Or suicide. For the first time I truly consider that. Was Lissa so distressed by Jem’s shenanigans, by him pushing her buttons, that she actually decided to end it all? She was always complicated: her highs were very high—usually fueled by alcohol or drugs—and her lows were crashingly low, but still . . .

  “An accident,” repeats Georgie. “So I keep hearing.” She’s silent for a minute or two. We all are, sitting slumped in our chairs like bored teenagers, completely sapped of all energy. “It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes any sense,” she mutters. Then she shakes her head and looks at me. “So that’s everything? Nothing else to share?”

  I nod. “That’s everything. You?”

  Her eyes shift to Adam, who is right beside me so I can’t see his face, but whatever is on it causes her to falter. “Nope,” Adam says for her. “That’s everything,”

  “Okay, then,” says Duncan, pulling himself to his feet like it’s an enormous effort. “I’ll go and speak to Jem about the presidential villa.”