“Yes? What is it? Something’s happened on the Hill? Not another bomb threat.”
“No, ma’am. I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to ask you a few questions.”
“What is this regarding, Officer?”
“Detective,” he says tightly, and she smiles.
“So sorry. Detective...?”
“Robson. Detective Harris Robson.”
“Detective Robson. What can I answer for you?”
“Can we sit down?”
“I don’t mean to be rude, Detective, but I’m having a brunch for my alumni and several donors. Can you just tell me what you need?”
“It’s regarding your daughter, ma’am.”
“Becca?” Finally, a sliver of dread starts to build. But Becca is at school. The safest of all possible places for her, tucked away in the Blue Ridge, riding roughshod over her teachers and friends alike. They are so similar, Ellen and Becca. Never willing to step away from a fight. “What’s wrong with Becca? Why are you here?”
That’s when she notices the small, quiet woman standing to the right of the detective. Wearing a collar. A minister, or chaplain, of some sort.
The woman steps forward. “Ma’am, we’re so sorry to have to tell you this, but your daughter has died. At school. Dean Westhaven will be calling shortly, but—”
The idea of blood draining from your face is such a cliché until you are faced with a shock, and then it fits. Ellen feels her blood pressure bottom out, puts out a hand, which the detective catches. He propels her to the foyer’s sofa, sits down next to her, two cushions away.
Ellen has come to her senses. “How? How did my daughter die? Was there some sort of accident? This is preposterous.”
Shock. She is in shock. She should be crying, she should be wailing. She is numb, light-headed. Can’t think. Can’t process the words. Becca, dead? Her Becca? Glorious, gorgeous, brilliant Becca? No, there is no way.
A moment of clarity: the press is going to have a field day with this.
The thought is tinged with regret and hate for the way her mind works, for the position she is in, that even when faced with the ultimate horror of the loss of her only daughter, her thought process would move immediately to the impact it will have on her career. But she has no choice. She is a senator, the midterms are coming, there’s an upstart out of Reston who is pushing her way into the race, and the polls are tighter than she’d like. A death in the family will tip them in her favor.
“I must call my chief of staff, we need to prepare a statement.”
“We have time,” the detective says. “The school isn’t going to make any announcements.”
“No, I simply do not believe this,” Ellen whispers. “How?”
“I don’t—”
“How?” The command is unmistakable this time.
“She was found hanging from the school gates.”
Dear God, Becca. What sort of message were you trying to send?
“Suicide? Impossible. I would have known if she was unhappy, if there was a problem. I spoke to her—” Ellen stops. When did she speak to Becca last? “Sunday. We talked Sunday and she was chipper and thrilled with the positive feedback she’d received on her thesis proof. She was happy.”
“A thesis? In high school?”
“Goode isn’t just any school, Detective.”
The chaplain starts to speak again, but Ellen shakes her head and holds up a hand. “I don’t need comforting, not right now. I need answers. There is simply no way my daughter committed suicide.”
“We agree. The sheriff in Marchburg agrees. The death is being investigated as a possible homicide.”
The race is hers.
“Someone killed her? Oh, my God.”
The chaplain jumps in again. “I understand this comes as a shock, ma’am. Especially with a child so far away from home.”
The judgment is clear. Senator Ellen Curtis has abandoned her child to a faraway school because she isn’t mother enough to handle her senatorial duties as well as raise a willful teenager. She’s seen enough of it from the press, she isn’t about to take it from some random chaplain the detective dragged along, no matter how soft and kind her features. Screw that.
“Stop. Seriously, just stop. You don’t know me, you don’t know my daughter, and you certainly don’t know the situation. For your information, Becca begged to go to Goode. Begged. I didn’t send her there. Detective, I want answers. I want to speak with the dean immediately.”
Harris nods again, gravely. “We don’t have all the information yet, ma’am. The investigation is ongoing. Dean Westhaven wants to speak with you, too, as soon as we can determine Becca’s last knowns before she disappeared and was found. There is an investigation underway. But there’s been a complication.”
“What?”
“A number of things. The last few days leading up to her death, for starters. There was some trouble, some infighting among the girls at the school. Dean Westhaven mentioned a secret society prank that went wrong...”
He goes quiet again, but she isn’t falling for it. She knows all too well how few people like a silence, how quickly they jump in with words to fill the pause. She is not normally one of those people. But now, she can’t help herself.
“When was she found?”
“Four hours ago.”
“Four hours! Why wasn’t I notified immediately? They kept a student’s death quiet for four hours? My daughter’s death? Me, of all people?”
“The locals needed to positively identify the body. Fingerprints took longer than we thought. We needed to be sure.”
“My God, if you had to fingerprint her...”
The detective takes a breath. “Her face was mutilated. Whoever killed her put out her eyes.”
If they think she is going to cry, they’re wrong. She is filled with fury, and it is all directed at Ford Westhaven and her egregious handling of the school. Ellen shouldn’t have been subtle about her bid to make the school coed. She made that endowment happen, she knows what the expansion will do for the school. She should have marched right into that shit hole of a town and told Westhaven that she owns the school now.
No more. She isn’t going to let Ford fucking Westhaven ruin any more girls’ lives. Or Jude, either, for that matter.
She stands, righteous fury on her face. “I am going to tear that school to the ground.”
The detective and the chaplain share a look.
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”
Jude steps into the foyer, her eyes wild. “Ellen? I’ve just received a text. The school is burning.”
EPILOGUE
New York City
Eleven Years Later
88
THE FLIGHT
She doesn’t recognize me.
This is a good thing, though I am momentarily outraged. After what she did to me, it’s insulting to see her eyes pass over me as if I’m just another person getting ready to step on the plane. She should be looking at me with horror, with shame and regret. With love. With happiness.
I am her sister, after all.
But her eyes light upon me and slide away, a small, polite, I’ve already forgotten you exist smile playing on her lips. All she sees is another privileged woman, sipping champagne in the first-class lounge before the doors to the flight open. If she had any idea what I’ve been through, she wouldn’t act so smug.
She makes this flight from New York to London regularly. She has business to attend to all over Europe, the UK, the Americas. She’s chosen an odd branch of maritime law that governs shipping and import/export issues, works for a company that distributes wine throughout the world.
After what she did, I can’t believe they let her into law school, much less Harvard, but she convinced them she was the victim, that she’d been terrorized, tha
t she was only doing what I forced her to so she wouldn’t die herself. She didn’t serve time. She was allowed to keep her visa. She inherited the bloody money, bought her way into Harvard, and has, by all accounts, lived a blameless life since.
God, she is such a superb actress. She always was a tremendous liar.
I haven’t spoken to her in person since that fateful day. She surrounded herself with people so it would be impossible to get her alone. Of course, she assumed I was dead. They all assumed I was dead. But I knew the tunnels better than they. I scuttled out while the fire raged, down the mountain, away, away, away.
She’s older. I mean, we all are, but I’ve aged a bit more than she. Granted, I’ve spent more time in the sun and she has a monthly appointment at the La Mer spa, dropping thousands at a time on treatments, but eleven years isn’t much time.
Still, she looks good. Fit. Healthy. A few barely perceptible lines on her forehead, the blond hair carefully highlighted now instead of natural. Still tall and elegantly proportioned.
Today is her thirtieth birthday.
She didn’t use her special day as an excuse to get out of the scheduled trip—she’s too responsible for that. She doesn’t mind spending the day alone. Though her wife protested, she wants the time to herself. To think. To reflect. A nice overnight flight to London, pampered by the flight attendants on British Airways. Life could be worse.
Life can always be worse.
This plane is set up with four seats across–one by each window, two in the center. She prefers to sit in the center seat, 2C, so I’ve chosen the one next to her as if we’re traveling together. The seats become beds, our legs angling away at a 30-degree angle, leaving our heads only a foot apart. It is fitting, really, when you think about how much time we spent plotting and planning.
I listen to her every word. I know her every move. She thinks she’s protected, but she’s not. She never was.
The pills were meant for me. I mean, this is no way to live, skulking about, lurking, spying on my lost sister, watching her lead the life I should have had. Some call it stalking, but when it’s information gathering, I think spying suffices.
I collected them assiduously the entire time I was watching over Piper as she lay dying, poor girl, before they realized the meds weren’t working and switched her to the Fentanyl that robbed her of the last bits of her sanity, then the slow drip of morphine that eventually killed her. Took her a few years to finally give it up.
A pill for you, a pill for me. Though I’ve never taken one, never indulged. It would have been so much easier if I had. They are strong, so strong they made Piper see dancing unicorns and butterflies—a better thing to see, I suppose, than the dark edges of a cloak and the reflection of your own wasted face in the scythe.
The police moved in and out of her room in the rehab facility for weeks, the crow-eyed woman and the bear of a man, thinking she would remember how the fire started, what she saw that day, but her memory was seared away like the last of her flesh. They thought they could solve three mysteries at once if they understood her garbled words—Becca, Camille, the fire. They assumed I turned to ash like the rest of the school.
They were wrong.
I should have just killed the poor girl, put her out of her pain. But I wanted to keep my sister close, somehow, so I became Piper’s titular caretaker. The BFF from school who wouldn’t leave her side. Where was her real BFF? After a single, brief visit at the beginning, Vanessa never came again. Which made it easy to pose as her.
Was I doing penance? Perhaps.
The nurses loved me. No one doubted my sincerity. No one thought twice about my devotion to my friend. Lucky for me, I suppose.
No, I never gobbled down her pills, as much as I wanted to, as much as I knew they’d make my pain go away. I’ve been saving them for the proper time. For a while, I thought I might take them all at once, standing on a stone bridge, watching the snow kiss the Seine. Perhaps I would change my mind at the last minute and throw them into the gray water. Perhaps I would keep them taped to the back of the bathroom mirror in the flat I would rent, let the delicious temptation of them sing to me day after day.
And then I saw her, quite by chance the first time—the first time—in the street, those red-soled heels clicking as she navigated desiccated dog shit on the grate in front of her Upper East Side brownstone, and I knew exactly what to do with the pills.
Takeoff is smooth. Dinner is served. The meal is tasteless, cardboard; drenching it in salt doesn’t help a bit. I sip the wine, a meager cabernet—really, I expected better, almost a shame to even call it so—drink a cup of the freshly overbrewed tea, then wait for the bathroom lines to clear before taking my bag and stepping into the tiny space.
Eight pills? Nine? How many will it take to kill a woman of her size? I have forty. Forty pilfered OxyContin. One for you, sweet sister, one for me. I was afraid the security agent was going to ask to see the prescription bottle, so I used one of my old antibiotic bottles, excavated from the shoebox under my sink, the label so faded the date and name are indiscernible.
I twist open the top and shake one into my hand. Large, cylindrical, chalk white. Lick the edge, savoring the divinity in the acrid taste on my tongue.
Mmm. Death tastes so good.
It takes me a full five minutes to grind them into a fine powder with the heel of my shoe—not red-soled, I’ll have you know—and return to my seat.
She sees me then, though she still has no idea who I am. I am gracious, as expected.
“Good flight?”
“Is that a question?”
Rude.
I want to launch into the speech I’ve rehearsed, the conversation to make it seem like I’ve only just recognized her, a hand on her arm, lightly, gently, my mouth in a tiny O of recognition.
Wait, aren’t you the woman who went to the private school that burned down? I know I saw you in the papers recently, with the former dean, what’s her name?
Westhaven.
That’s right. She’s a big-name author now. Wrote a novel about the school. Married to some young buck she was seeing, oh, wasn’t that the scandal?
True love.
And wasn’t there some incident with an impostor, sisters? All those girls, dead. What a shame. Amazing that they rebuilt. Of course, coed, but it’s such a good school. Such a good reputation.
But she’s already turned away, wedged in her earbuds, pulled up a movie. A delightful rom-com, a woman who needs a wedding date, by the looks of it.
Maybe we’ll talk later.
Said the spider to the fly.
I wait.
I wait.
Finally, finally, the flight attendants do their dessert pass, and she takes a refill. Such a creature of habit, our little wine connoisseur.
Excellent. It’s easier to obscure this powder in wine than water.
And here’s the second moment I’ve been waiting for.
She unfolds from the seat—I always forget how tall she is—and heads to the loo.
I dump the powder in my wine and stir it with my finger.
And then I lean over, my hand snaking out of my pod into hers, and with a quick glance to make sure no one is watching—these seats afford so much privacy—I switch the glasses.
Easy.
Done.
She comes back and settles in again. Goes through her whole flight-nap routine, dabbing on ChapStick, spreading the pashmina across her lean legs, pulling out the sleep mask, putting in the earbuds.
I play along, yawning and primping, as well, showing off a gold crown I had placed when I scraped together enough cash. That big open spot always bothered me.
The helpful flight attendant comes by one last time with her it’s sleepy time bottle raised high. We chat for a few moments. I’d love a chocolate, thank you, no, no more wine for me.
Ther
e is a small kerfuffle to my left—oh, God, is it happening already?—but I see she’s only dropped her ChapStick. The flight attendant retrieves it, offers the bottle.
To my unerring delight, she swallows half the glass, takes a top-off of wine, stretches and sighs heavily, kittenish, and speaks.
“Ah. So tired. Wake me when we’re landing, won’t you?”
She smiles. Looks me right in the eyes and slides on her sleep mask.
When she disappears behind the black faux fur, I take a celebratory gulp of my wine, then another.
“Cheers.”
Cheers, I say to her quiet figure.
Cheers, I say to my old life.
Cheers, I say to the future. It’s time for me to take back my life.
And something starts to claw at the back of my throat.
Spots. I’m seeing spots.
My breath slows, hitching in my chest.
Oh, God. Oh, God. What’s happen—
89
THE LAST
She looks so sweet, asleep like this, with her mouth slightly open, her head turned to the side. I remember when she used to look like this, innocent in repose.
With a last smile to the flight attendant, I slip on my red-soled heels, my black sunglasses, and don my coat. I gather my carry-on from the overhead, stuff my pashmina in my tote, and she doesn’t move. Still asleep. Precious princess.
Just another woman on a plane. Though forever asleep.
I leave the plane, walk up the Jetway, breath coming in tiny little sips. A hand moves to the small brand under my left breast, riding high on my rib cage, and I remember a girl with forest-green eyes and soft, silky lips. This was for you.
No one stops me. No calls. No screams.
I exit the terminal, hand my carry-on to the driver, slide into the back of my town car, and am off to the May Fair Hotel.
I don’t look back.
Yes, I knew it was her. Yes, I suspected what she had planned. She’s been stalking me for months. Listening. Watching.
Yes, I saw what she did when I went to the loo.
Yes, I swapped the wineglasses back when they were looking for my ChapStick.
Good Girls Lie Page 35