Influenced

by Eva Robinson

  Ciara pressed her foot on the gas, her pulse picking up speed. She veered onto Kendall Avenue. “They all had punch that night at the party, and Peter ended up with roofies in his system. All Stella had to do was dose the punch with sedatives, then some with peanut powder. They all passed out, long enough that they missed Peter’s anaphylactic attack. Peter didn’t wake up again. And someone convinced them all to lie to cover it up.”

  “Exactly.”

  She careened around the corner into Stella’s driveway, then slammed on the brakes. The old Georgian house loomed over them, its white widow’s walk jutting out under the dark sky.

  She stepped out of the car and started to head for the door. Then the sound of a gunshot echoed from behind the house. Ciara pulled her gun, nodding at the gravel path that led around back, slanting down the hill.

  As they moved, Michael was already calling dispatch for backup, telling them shots had been fired.

  Ciara’s stomach lurched as they rushed along the path, down the slope of the hill, and behind the house.

  A man called out, “She’s still alive! You need to finish it. Now, now! You have to finish this now.”

  When Ciara turned the corner to the backyard, her heart leapt into her throat. She skidded to a halt at the base of the stairs.

  Two dark-haired women lay on the gravel path in the dark, both bleeding. They both looked like Rowan; she couldn’t tell who was who. One was unmoving, her body limp. The other, about twelve feet away, seemed to be crawling, moaning for help. She looked like she was trying to drag herself toward the long stair that curved upward.

  Heart thrumming, Ciara looked up at the deck looming above them—an enormous structure, nearly two stories high. It took her a moment to realize that Stella was there, leaning over a low railing. She was aiming her gun at the injured woman.

  “Police!” Michael shouted from the shadows. “Drop your weapon on the floor of the deck, then raise your hands where I can see them.”

  Stella darted back, out of view.

  “He said put your hands where we can see them,” Ciara shouted. “Everybody up there.”

  They could no longer see Stella, but they could hear a man speaking to her quietly. A low railing with vertical wooden posts surrounded the deck, but it was too dark to see movement behind them.

  No one responded. Had they gone back into the house?

  Ciara hoped their backup would arrive soon, but who the hell knew.

  A gunshot rang out again. The woman moving along the gravel screamed, covering her head.

  “She’s shooting from between the railings,” said Ciara.

  For the briefest of moments, she met Michael’s gaze and nodded at the stairs. She’d cover for him while he ran up the stars. He moved up them swiftly, silently. But the shooter had stepped back from the ledge, and Ciara couldn’t work out her location anymore. Her heart thundered in her chest.

  As Michael reached the top of the stairs, a third gunshot rang out, slamming him back down.

  Without waiting another heartbeat, Ciara bounded up the stairs, gun raised. Her breath was ragged in her throat by the time she reached the top.

  But now Stella was pointing the gun to her own temple. She was barefoot. Once, Jess had worn flowers in her hair, just like that. She looked so much like Jess just now—beautiful blond hair cascading over her sweater, flowers hanging from her braids.

  Jess was barefoot when they found her.

  For a moment, Ciara seemed to slip back in time. She wasn’t in Cambridge anymore, wasn’t on a porch, wasn’t a police officer. She was a teenager in a cemetery in Lexington, staring at her twin sister with a gun held to her temple. Ciara’s knees were going weak, and she could only hear the harsh sound of her breathing.

  Focus, Ciara. The pain of it all made her heart race. She needed to put a bullet in Stella’s head right now. She desperately wanted to glance back down at Michael, to see if he was okay. But she couldn’t take her eyes off Jess.

  Not Jess. It’s not Jess.

  Luke lurked behind Stella in the shadows, his hands raised, his face a bemused picture of innocence. Ciara tried to narrow her focus to the two people in front of her, though half her mind was still on Michael, half on Jess fifteen years ago.

  Stella’s eyes looked empty. “Luke thought I could kill everyone and blame it on Hannah, but it got out of control. I can’t keep killing everyone.”

  Luke shook his head, his expression sympathetic, like his friend had lost her mind and he was feeling a bit distressed about it all.

  And yet Ciara’s heart was beating so wildly that she could hardly think straight.

  One way or another, she had to end this now. Because Luke was a wild card. He looked far too calm for this situation, and that deeply unnerved her.

  Luke’s head tilted, nearly imperceptibly, to warn Stella. Then he started whispering.

  There it was. The wild card. Ciara could just barely catch a few phrases: “Everyone will know it was you… your name in the papers… only one way out…”

  Sweat slicked Ciara’s palms, but she just caught the movement—the slight shift in Stella’s gun. Ciara fired before Stella had the chance. The gunshot echoed across the pond.

  Ciara stared as Jess crumpled to the ground, a bullet hole in her forehead. All the air left Ciara’s lungs. Stella, she reminded herself. Not Jess. But her whole body was shaking, and she wanted to throw up.

  Michael had dragged himself up the stairs and stood next to her, aiming his gun at Luke. Blood poured from his shoulder, but he seemed lucid.

  Ciara closed her eyes for just a moment, trying to clear the image from her mind—the one of blood spilling through blond hair, of a skull blasted open at the back.

  When she opened her eyes, Michael was handcuffing Luke.

  “She lost her mind,” said Luke. “I had no idea. I did try to stop her. I had no idea what she was up to.”

  Ciara turned to cross down the stairs, legs still shaking as she called the dispatcher. They needed an ambulance here, fast. She wiped a shaking hand across her mouth.

  When she reached the gravel path, one of the women was still living, moving her head. “They’re trying to kill me,” she said, her voice choked.

  “It’s all over,” said Ciara.

  Forty-Three

  Sixteen swirls of the spoon in his tea. The bullet had hit Michael in the front of the shoulder, fracturing his clavicle and ripping through his muscles. The fall, luckily, hadn’t broken anything. But even weeks later, that fall kept replaying in his mind. It could only have been a short amount of time, just a moment. But it had felt like it stretched out, with enough time for him to wonder if he was about to die, and with the certainty that he’d botched his life up. That he hadn’t finished what he was supposed to do.

  As to what it was that he was supposed to do, he still had no idea.

  That wasn’t the only moment that had stretched out through infinity that night. After he’d landed, after he’d assessed the situation and realized he was still alive, everything had seemed too quiet. Ciara had run up the stairs, but she hadn’t immediately shot Stella. There had been a long moment there that he still didn’t understand.

  Sun streamed through the trees in Harvard Yard, the breeze rushing through the leaves. Students and visitors sat on the grass between the old brick buildings, drinking coffee, reading books in the late summer light.

  From here, he could see the old boundary around the yard—the brick wall, the iron gates.

  When he let his mind go quiet too long, another memory slammed into it—Stella, her pale eyes staring lifelessly at the night sky. Ciara wouldn’t admit it, but something about that night had disturbed her beyond measure.

  An infuriating, irrational part of his brain wondered if everything would’ve gone better if only he’d been able to tap the door sixteen times before he’d left the car. Instead, two women lay dead.

  The rational part of his mind told him that was only how he processed anxiety—with super
stitions that gave him the illusion of control, that narrowed all his fears to one simple thing. And he didn’t want to be a superstitious person—not like Ciara, with her “terrible events leave an imprint” theory of the world. He didn’t want to pretend that the Enlightenment had never happened.

  But the allure of distilling all your fears into just one thing…

  Ciara had told him something about the wilderness outside the city walls—it was where the Puritans had hung the gibbets and built the gallows. Outside the gates, they believed, primal terror dwelled in the wilderness—a devil who wore a tall hat and consorted with witches. And when things went wrong, you could blame it all on him, so you never had to wonder if you’d made the wrong call, if you’d done something wrong. It was all his fault.

  Michael watched Ciara as she walked through the gate into the yard, her earbuds in, sipping what he was sure was a triple espresso. As she approached, her ginger curls bounced over her shoulders. She beamed at him and pulled out her earbuds.

  She sat down next to him. “I heard you were here.”

  A heavy silence fell over them. Michael’s shoulder still ached.

  “So do you believe my theory now?” she asked. “That terrible events leave an imprint on a landscape? Peter died there, and then two more people. The whole place is toxic now.”

  “No, Ciara. Not even a little.” It was the favorite lie he told himself—that superstitions weren’t for him.

  “I’m not sure I believe it either. But what if I told you that the street Stella lived on was named after an accused witch?” Ciara asked. “Goody Kendall. And she was executed where you live, so I don’t even want to know what’s in store for you.” She flashed him a small smile.

  “Anything is possible.” He frowned at her. “How are you doing?”

  Ciara pulled her gaze away from him, staring out at the yard. “She looked like my twin sister.” The wind toyed with her fiery curls, and silence pressed down on them.

  “You mentioned that before. It disturbed you during the interview.” He knew there was more to this.

  “When I was seventeen,” she said, “she was found dead in the old cemetery near our apartment. It was called Ye Olde Burial Ground. It’s the old Puritan cemetery in Lexington. The oldest graves faced east so people could rise as soon as the apocalypse started, and there are carvings on the stones…” She trailed off again, her eyes down. “That’s where Jess shot herself in the head, apparently. And she lay there all night, till I found her the next morning. So when I went up the stairs, I thought Stella looked just like Jess, all grown up. I was getting confused, thinking it was her. I see flashes of it, a lot. I see the graveyard everywhere I go. Skulls, gaping eyes. Like the skulls that were looking over Jess’s body. And it turns out I see them when I should be seeing cartoon cats.”

  Michael’s throat tightened. “You said apparently? She ‘apparently’ shot herself?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what they said. But I never saw it coming. I didn’t know she was depressed. But that’s what they say happened. The gun had her fingerprints on it, so… Anyway, it was a long time ago. And Stella isn’t Jess. Stella was a murderer, and she wanted to kill us. She shot you. She was going to shoot me.”

  “How much do you think Luke was in control?”

  “Stella had a whole history of white-collar crime. But he knew exactly how to get her to do what he wanted. He wanted her to get rid of the witnesses. Because if there were no witnesses left, then he could try to get Stella to take the fall. And he was whispering to her, pushing all the right buttons. He was saying, ‘Your name will be in the papers; everyone will know what you did.’ Because that’s what really terrified her, being pilloried in public. And he knew it.”

  “The shame of it all was worse than murder, I guess. Worse than not seeing her kids ever again.”

  Here, with the sun streaming over the red brick, it was hard not to think about Rowan. In her post that night, she’d written,

  A writer who is a ghost. A dead writer. Bloated, grey, skin that turns into bone.

  “Maybe I get why Stella was so desperate to avoid the ignominy.”

  Ciara blew a curl out of her eyes. “The what?”

  “The disgrace. I once read that when people endure enough shame, they can develop the sense that they’re dying, and that’s why we say ‘mortified.’ It’s a medical term, too, for dead flesh. We die of shame, die of embarrassment. That was what Rowan felt like. Like she was already dead.”

  A line formed between Ciara’s brows. “Well, that’s what they say happened to Jess.” She cleared her throat. “Never mind. We should get to work.”

  He had a million questions he wanted to ask, all her stories he wanted to uncover—but he could wait.

  Forty-Four

  Hannah leaned back in the folding chair, looking up at a darkening sky of periwinkle and rose. Evening was falling over Arlington. Mosquitos were buzzing around her head, but she didn’t want the warm August night to end. Nor did she want to attempt to stand and use her crutches.

  After three months, she’d only just got the braces off, but metal screws still held her legs together. Yet none of that had been as painful as the three months she’d just spent with her mother.

  At last, she’d gotten a reprieve—she was taking a one-week vacation at Daniel’s house. Then it would be back to her mom’s for a while.

  She closed her eyes, feeling for a moment like she was falling again, the world ripped out from under her with nothing but darkness around her. She gripped the arms of the lawn chair to steady herself as vertigo slammed into her.

  When the bullet hit her, it had knocked her backward over the railing. The fall had seemed to stretch on forever—the feeling of plummeting through a void in complete solitude. In those moments before she hit the ground, she was sure she’d already died and gone to hell.

  When she landed, the pain had shot up her legs. Terrible as it was, it was a relief. At least she’d known she was alive.

  She was lucky, too, that Stella had only managed to hit her in the arm. Stella, for all her perfection in other areas, was a terrible shot. She’d been panicking so much that she could no longer shoot straight.

  Hannah’s bullet wound had healed long before her shattered legs.

  She glanced at the back of Daniel’s house—a little Georgian house, butter yellow with black shutters. Three stone angels jutted from the garden, their wings covered in moss and lichens.

  An old wooden fence encircled the yard, climbing with pale roses.

  The door swung open and Daniel stepped outside, holding two mojitos.

  “Nora’s finally asleep.”

  “You’re very good at that, Daniel.”

  He sat in the chair next to her. “I told her about my next sculpture and she just passed out.”

  Hannah took a deep breath. If her legs weren’t still shattered, she’d get up to watch Nora sleeping. Nothing in the world made Hannah happier than peering over Nora’s crib to watch her clutching her blanket as she slept.

  Every time she thought of Luke, a shiver of dread danced up the back of her neck. Not only had he manipulated Stella into murdering for him, but he’d been poisoning Hannah with amphetamines. Every night she’d woken at three a.m., certain that someone had poisoned her—it turned out she had been right.

  Thinking of him, she shuddered. At least she was sure that Nora would turn out nothing like him. Nora was sweet down to her marrow.

  She sipped her drink, lime and sugar.

  She didn’t want Nora to ever see Luke again, and now that he was being charged with accessory to murder, maybe she wouldn’t have to.

  “The news has finally forgotten about us,” said Hannah. “They still talk about Luke and Stella. The Ivy League Killers. They still talk about Rowan. But us? They’re bored of us.”

  “The worst I could have been charged with was improper burial of a body, obstruction of justice, and that’s not so compelling for the news.”

  She smil
ed. “Before this, I thought being boring was the worst thing in the world. And now it seems like heaven.”

  “We have disappeared for now.” He squinted into the sun. “But when your book comes out, we will reappear, right?”

  “I won’t write about you. Just the fraud case, and all the ways people buy their way into college.”

  “Promise me you won’t read the comments about your book when it comes out.”

  “Okay. But the articles about Stella and Luke, all the money they made… I can’t stop reading them. I just had no idea.”

  The reporting on the “Ivy League Murders” had quickly opened up another scandal—the hundreds of families who’d paid Stella and Luke to write them letters, to get their offspring’s names on papers. Then there were the doctored photographs of sporting victories, the ringers who took the SATs for mediocre students. On top of that, Stella had a history of securities fraud—which Hannah still didn’t understand—so she was quite the con artist.

  “Stella’s former friend wrote a tell-all essay about her. They lived together in New York during graduate school, and the friend always gave her share of the rent to Stella. And Stella would just deposit it, and charm the landlord into giving her an extension. Until one day, the landlord evicted both of them.”

  “And what about Rowan? Do they still write about Rowan?”

  A pit opened in her stomach.

  Every now and then, it would creep up on her—the slow, dark memory of Stella’s hands on Rowan’s back, shoving her over the railing.

  When she thought back on it, she felt herself falling with Rowan.

  In fact, she felt like she’d plummeted twice that night. The first time was when she’d realized the truth about Luke. It had been a disorienting, blind panic that had robbed her of all the ability to think clearly. It had felt like she no longer understood the rules of the world, like everything solid was dissolving around her.