Don't Trust Her

by Elizabeth Boles

With the bottle of pills beside her bed, it would look like Paige had accidentally overdosed. I had no idea that she and Derek were having problems, so when I discovered that, it was a welcome bonus.

  No coroner would look at a woman with a valid prescription for Xanax, the bottle empty, and her going through a divorce and think foul play had been involved. So there would be no reason to order an autopsy unless Derek pushed for it. And why would he? His wife was depressed. He was cutting her off. She was taking pills for anxiety, for goodness sake.

  I was in the clear—until Faith had to stick her nose in my business.

  The only regret I have—and I do have one—is that I didn’t realize that Paige didn’t know that I am Brittany.

  That part I figured out when Faith, oh stupid Faith, read the second half of Paige’s note.

  If Paige had known my real identity, she never would have sent me the blackmail letter in the first place.

  Because after all, this was about her, but it was also about me. And of course, I didn’t know that Paige was Charlotte. I didn’t know her motive at all, other than she had once been my friend but she wasn’t anymore.

  Does that make my actions worse? That I knowingly sent a woman to her death without knowing why she was blackmailing me?

  Not in my opinion, it doesn’t.

  Do I have regrets? Yes.

  Would I kill her again?

  Yes.

  So there you have it. That’s the why and how, and that’s all you need to know. Now, where did we leave off?

  Right. Faith has a knife to Blanche.

  Chapter 49

  “I’m not going to prison because of you,” Faith says, her jaw tight. “You’re going to tell them what you did, Brittany. You’re going to tell those police officers what you did and why.”

  The knife lays precariously close to Blanche’s neck, as if Faith has forgotten that she’s holding it.

  “I will not,” I say slowly. “I will not go to jail, and neither will anyone else as long as we stick together.”

  “What if they know about the blackmail?” Faith demands.

  “Why the hell would they?” I counter. “Paige would have been hanging herself if they knew that. Blackmail is illegal. They don’t know, Faith, and they never will as long as we stay silent.”

  Faith looks at me, and her entire argument has crumpled. There’s no reason for her to hang on. She knows it and I know it.

  I reach for the knife. “Faith, hand it over. Let’s cut Blanche loose and forget that any of this ever happened. We’ll leave tomorrow, just like we planned.”

  But her grip on the knife tightens. “What if they look deeper into it? What if they do an autopsy?”

  “They won’t,” I insist. “There’s no reason for them to as long we stay strong.”

  Her brows pinch. She wants to join me on my side of the argument. I see it. But inside Faith there is also something else, that piece of her that pushed me off the cliff, that tiny crumb that exists where Faith and only Faith is ever right.

  And that’s the side of her that wins now. “No! I can’t trust or believe that. You’re going to turn yourself in,” she tells me. “You will.”

  “You owe me,” I snarl. “You shoved me off that bluff, Faith. All these years you kept your mouth shut. You never even admitted it when you thought I was still alive—not even one apology crossed your lips. No. You’re going to do what I say, and you’re going to do it now. Put the knife down.”

  Her lips quirk in satisfied smirk. “No.”

  Then rage, blinding-hot rage grows thick like lava in me. The sane part of me, the one that would never fight a woman holding a knife, breaks off in a huge hunk, never to be seen again.

  I throw myself at Faith, knocking her backward. The knife sinks into my shoulder. I feel as it rips the muscle. I yell and knock it away. It clatters to the floor, out of sight.

  The look of shock on Faith’s face almost makes me laugh, but I’m too angry for that. I grab her head and slam it into the ground.

  She screams and puts her thumbs in my eyes, pushing my eyeballs back. The pain is excruciating. I slap her hands away and push myself off her. My palm sinks into her doughy body. Faith yelps.

  I climb from her and search for the knife.

  “It’s over there,” Blanche yells, nodding toward it.

  The metal tip glints off the firelight. I race toward it, hands flung out, legs ready to plunge to the floor and nab it before Faith.

  My head snaps back as Faith grabs me by the hair and yanks me to a stop. A scream splits the air—my own.

  The pain freezes me. I can’t move. She pulls my head down, bending my back so that I’m staring at the ceiling.

  Faith’s hot breath slinks over my face. “You’re going down now, Brittany. Everyone will know who you are.”

  The pain is so sharp. She keeps pulling, twisting, enjoying every moment of my agony.

  I reach into my pocket and pull out the cable. I stare up at Faith’s face. “I have to tell you something.”

  Her eyes narrow. “What?”

  She leans in closer. I toss the cable over her neck, make an X with my hands and grab both ends, tightening it.

  Faith’s eyes flare, and she drops my hair, reaching for the cable. I drop it and launch myself at the knife. From behind me, I hear her coughing and stammering.

  The knife is in my hands, and I whirl to her. Faith moves with great lurching jerks toward the fireplace.

  “It’s over,” I tell her, and I proceed to cut Blanche free.

  A rivulet of blood trickles down my arm and pools at my wrist from where Faith’s knife slashed me. The cut isn’t deep, but my shirt is soaked at the bicep.

  Faith glances at the fireplace, wheels turning. One thin log sticks out from the fire. It looks like someone just tossed it atop the others, not caring where it landed in the hearth.

  One end is untouched by fire, and that’s the end Faith grabs, yanking it from the blaze. She waves it around like a sword, the flaming end warning us to stay back.

  “No,” she sneers. “This isn’t over until I say it is.”

  I tug away the last of Blanche’s binds and rise. “Faith, no,” I say.

  Faith shakes her head. “No one is going anywhere.”

  “What are you going to do, kill us all?” Blanche rises from the chair, rubbing her wrists. “That’s not you.”

  I stop myself from gaping at Blanche. Yes, that is Faith.

  She waves the stick back and forth, sending dark smoke billowing into the room.

  “Faith, do you remember when I fell from the bluff and the three of y’all formed your pact?” I ask.

  She eyes me suspiciously. “Yes.”

  “We need to create another one, right now. One that says that we will never speak about any of this again. For the sake of our families, we keep our mouths shut.”

  Blanche lifts her hand. “I swear it.”

  “But Paige—” Faith starts to argue.

  My hands curl to wring her neck. “We shut up about it. No one will look into it. My plan was perfect. It still is. The three of us can get out of this. Think about it—for over ten years I have lived a lie, and no one knew. Hell, even y’all didn’t. I’m that good, Faith. Stick with me and we’ll get out, scot-free, no questions asked.”

  Faith shoots Blanche a searching look. Her curls are frazzled like a cotton ball around her head, and her eyes are wild, uncertain about the next steps to take.

  Blanche, hand still raised, says, “I trust Brittany.”

  “Trust me,” I croon. “Trust me and I will get us out of here.”

  Faith opens her mouth to argue and shuts it again. I hold my breath, mostly to ward off the acrid smoke plunging into the room from the log that still burns in her hand.

  Finally she speaks. “Okay. Okay, I’ll go along with it. We won’t speak another word about what happened.”

  I don’t believe her, not for a moment. I edge away from both her and Blanche, toward the table wher
e I know Paige’s final letter sits. I tuck it in my waistband—insurance against Faith and her wishy-washy ways.

  Faith eyes the fire, not me.

  “Swear it,” I demand.

  “I swear,” she says.

  I lift my hand. “I swear it. We’re all in agreement?”

  The three of them nod.

  “Put that log back in the hearth,” I command her.

  Faith takes one step forward. It’s dark where she’s standing, and she doesn’t see a small lip rising in the rug. Her toe snags on it, and she falls forward, sending the log skidding across the floor.

  It rolls at an angle, across the rug and back onto the hardwood where it picks up speed, stopping only when it smacks into the heavy drapes that line both sides of the windows.

  The fire eats the drape like kindling. A whoosh fills the cabin, and a tongue of flame licks up the drape. In seconds the fire has reached the ceiling.

  “Pull it down,” Blanche screams. “Get water!”

  I run to the kitchen and throw up the tap, but nothing comes out. The water must’ve been pumped through by the electricity.

  “There’s no water,” I yell.

  By the time I return, the fire is snaking its way across the top of the windows.

  “Get the drapes down,” I yell.

  Thick smoke fills the air. My eyes pour water. The smoke coats my throat. Every breath burns.

  On the other side now, the three of us yank the untouched drape. The entire contraption plummets to the floor in a heap of fabric and flames.

  “Beat them out,” Blanche commands.

  But the burning drapes are already eating blankets that we’d carelessly thrown on the floor. It winds its way like a living, breathing beast into the rug and flares up.

  The pyre is four feet high now, writhing and hissing.

  “The ice,” Faith bellows. “I’ll get the ice.”

  Which seems like the best idea until the door opens, bringing with it a gust of wind that helps the fire to start consuming the couch nearest it.

  I beat at the flames with a pillow, but they snap and snarl back, laughing at my attempts to stop it.

  I can’t breathe. The air is strangled in my throat. I beat at the fire, and it rears back, moving away to consume something in the opposite direction.

  Faith throws ice on it, but the fire only licks its ways toward the walls.

  A hand grabs my arm. “We have to get out! We can’t stop it!”

  Blanche. She’s pulling me, tugging me away.

  No, I can stop it. I know I can.

  But as I’m yanked back, I see how it’s grown and spread like a web to the ceiling and starting to devour the trophy bucks on the walls, their dark eyes watching as they’re swallowed whole.

  “Get whatever you’ve got down here. We can’t go back upstairs. Put your shoes on,” Blanche commands.

  I find my shoes and shove my feet into them. Faith throws my coat into my arms. My purse is down here, somewhere. I spy it in a corner on the opposite side of the room.

  I lunge for it, but Blanche grabs me. “Leave it! Come on.”

  I hurdle through a wall of smoke and flame. The fire singes my hair and jacket. A line of heat flares down my right side. The heat winds its way to the marrow, and the smoke travels to the pits of my lungs, coating them like cotton.

  I stumble out the door and slide down the porch, falling in a heap on the ice, face-first.

  I hear the crackle and hiss of the flames, feel the fingers of heat as they reach for me.

  Clawing forward, I push myself to put as much distance between me and the cabin as I can. Faith and Blanche are behind me, their coughs and gasps competing with the fire for who can be the loudest.

  The side of Faith’s face is black, marred from soot and burned. Her hair is singed to the scalp, revealing an angry red flesh.

  Blanche coughs into the ice. Her fingers are black, and her skin is puckered.

  I don’t need a mirror to know that I don’t look dissimilar from them.

  Water pours from my eyes, and it takes a moment for me to see it, for me to realize what I’m looking at.

  A red light flashes in front of me. I know what that is. The fog of my brain parts, and I realize that the police are here.

  We’re saved.

  Chapter 50

  Booted feet are in front of me. I reach out, and two hands pull me up to standing.

  “Is there anyone else inside?” he asks.

  I nod. “Yes, but she’s already dead.”

  “What the hell happened here?”

  I wipe my tears and see a kind face looking back at me. Brown eyes; salt-and-pepper hair that is more salt than pepper covers the top of the officer’s head.

  “Fire,” I croak in answer. We’re not far enough away from the cabin. The heat still licks at me, stinging my already charred flesh.

  I claw past him and stumble forward. The farther I can get away, the safer I’ll be. But then hands circle my waist—his hands and he takes me to his truck, where he opens the door. He scoops Blanche and Faith from the ground and brings them over.

  He radios for emergency vehicles and a fire truck.

  He’s older, around sixty. Off duty, it looks like. He sighs and there’s something familiar about him. There’s something recognizable about his face. It’s on the tip of my brain, but I can’t seem to reach it.

  “Christ,” he mutters. His gaze sweeps the cabin and then rests on me. “You say there was someone else in there?”

  “Dead,” I remind him. My throat hurts so much. Every breath feels like it’s being sawed in half.

  He contemplates us and looks back at the cabin like why the hell did I get stuck with this shit?

  “I got an e-mail, something about a murder. I would have been here earlier, but the storm stopped me.”

  Blanche and Faith’s shoulders tighten. They don’t look at me. I don’t look at them.

  “She committed suicide,” I said. “Paige Varnell.”

  He nods. “That’s not the way the letter explains it. What are your names?”

  We tell him.

  “I’m Detective Roy. Sam Roy.”

  My mind explodes as a deep breath of air scalds my raw throat. In my pocket the folded letter jabs my leg. I pull it out and unfold it.

  “Sam Roy?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “You used to work in the town we lived in. I think you were a detective there.”

  His eyes narrow as he wonders where this is going. “Moved up here about ten years ago.”

  Not a coincidence. I show him Paige’s letter. “There’s something in here, accusations about you and what you did to a teenage girl.”

  As the flames flicker, shining orange and yellow on him, his face pales. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  It hurts, but I tsk. “There’s a copy. You can read it and decide what you want to do.”

  Paige, good old Paige, she had set everything up perfectly, hadn’t she? Making sure that the officer who came was the same one who ruined her life. I want to cry.

  Officer Roy, if he recognized Paige (she would have reminded him, I’m sure), would have made sure that each and every one of us was investigated to the fullest extent of the law. My fingerprints would have been taken. Because of a day long ago in high school, they would have been matched up to Brittany, a woman who died years ago. My secret would be wide open, and so would Blanche’s and Faith’s.

  But now, as Officer Roy reads the allegations of what he did, I know exactly how this investigation is going to turn out.

  Officer Roy isn’t going to do a damn thing except declare that Paige died in bed after an accidental cabin fire.

  The fire roars as he slowly reads the words, and the satisfaction that surges in me is as much relief as it is anything else.

  Paige wanted to win. This proves it. She would have ruined us, and if Faith can’t see that now, then she never will. But it doesn’t matter what she sees. I know the tr
uth, and that’s all that I ever need to know again.

  My gaze flickers to Blanche and Faith. Blanche hugs her hands, her eyes full of hope and worry. Faith is curled into a ball. She stares at the burning cabin as the fire breaks one of the upstairs windows with a crack.

  He drops the paper and stares at me, fear building in his eyes. It takes him a good long moment to speak. When he does, he says exactly what I had hoped.

  “What do you want?”

  I pat the driver’s seat and lick my lips. “Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

  Chapter 51

  It has been six months since Paige Varnell died in a fire that consumed her and her mountain cabin. It was a shame, really. She fell asleep and so did we. Then a spark from the fire ignited downstairs. By the time Blanche, Faith, and I woke up, we couldn’t reach the upstairs.

  We were just lucky that Officer Sam Roy happened to spot the fire from way off down the road. It was a miracle, really, seeing as how no one could even hear a scream from Paige’s bedroom balcony.

  Officer Roy had been dismissed as a detective years ago from our town after it was rumored that he’d had inappropriate relations with a few jailed women. Not quite at retirement age, he then took a job in a small mountain hamlet where no one knew him or his past.

  Officer Roy had been so kind to the three of us, backing up our story to the fire chief, whose own investigation proved that the fire had been accidental.

  The only thing no one could understand was why Paige had been sleeping upstairs with the power out.

  “There wasn’t enough room on the couches,” I had explained. “She wrapped herself up in blankets and tucked herself away to keep warm.”

  The fire chief scratched his head, but in the end he went with it as there was no reason to think otherwise.

  The temperature climbed enough the very next day to melt the ice on the roads. We went home, the three of us, after brief hospital stints. Faith’s burns were the worst and required skin grafting to repair the damage. In comparison, Blanche and I simply ended up singed.

  But Faith wound up with a deep scar burned into the side of her head like a part in her hair. No matter how hard she tries, hair still won’t grow, and she can’t seem to cover the blemish with the other hair—at least not completely. Part of the wound always shows, pink, puckered, and angry, screaming on her flesh as a reminder of how a weekend getaway can easily go wrong.