by Andrew Hart
“Si,” she said. “Of course.”
“Of course?” said the prosecutor.
“Si never misses a chance to show off.”
She smiled as she said it, but it was a knowing, disdainful smile, and I happened to glance at Simon. He blinked, as if slapped, and bit down on his lip, his eyes lowered. Five minutes later he started whispering to his lawyer, and the trial was halted for the afternoon. When we returned, the tenor of the proceedings had changed and Simon was on the stand, listlessly but clearly recounting what they had done and why.
It came, to everyone but Melissa, as an immense relief.
There were no huge surprises, but I was still amazed by the calculation behind that last night when they had tried to kill us all. They had already interrogated Gretchen and had no reason to believe she had told anyone what had happened to Manos Veranikis. Their plan, Simon said, had been to probe the rest of us for what we knew or suspected, me in particular, but Brad, already a thorn in their sides after his freak-out with Gretchen’s underwear, disturbed their set up of the generator hose. Melissa panicked, hitting him from behind, then I had come downstairs, and that brought everything else forward.
“We knew then that we would have to kill them all that night,” he said, almost casually. “That had always been the plan, but we hadn’t meant to do it so quickly. We still wanted to know who Jan might have told—we assumed she was the one sending the messages because it was the kind of thing she would get off on—so we chained her up in the basement and tried to get her to tell us what she knew. That was a mistake,” he added, giving me a quick, blank look. “We should have killed her first.
“Anyway,” he continued. The courtroom had become utterly silent as he spoke, his words echoed by the Greek simultaneous translator, the prosecutor holding back, letting him talk. “We got Brad back up to his room. He was sleeping alone because his wife didn’t want anything to do with him. Then, while we took turns to question Jan in the basement, we flooded the west side of the house with carbon monoxide.
“It was a simple plan. Perfect, really. Mel’s idea, of course. The east wing, where our room was, is self-contained, so we could stay there. We’d use the scuba gear to make sure we didn’t get poisoned, but we figured we’d just pretend to find everyone dead in the morning, discover that the hose had come disconnected from the genny, and no one would be the wiser. Apart from us, everyone who knew or had even the smallest suspicion about what happened to Manos Veranikis would die in that house. A tragic accident. We would walk away and get on with our lives.”
The baldness of the admission was staggering, as was his composure when, at the end of it, he looked at his wife and added, “I guess this time, you don’t get what you want.”
I never heard Melissa speak again.
I thought back on some of this as Gretchen nodded vaguely.
“I don’t know,” she said. “They just seemed like such nice people—Mel, anyway. So welcoming and . . . I don’t know. Maybe it’s our fault, you know? That we somehow messed everything up. I mean, I know they did terrible things, but if we had never met them . . . who knows?”
“Gretchen, practically the first thing Mel told you when you met her in that bar was that Simon had killed Manos Veranikis a few years earlier.”
“Well, that wasn’t the first time we spoke. Remember, we were old school friends.”
I brushed past this embroidery.
“Even so, she told you her husband had killed someone!”
“Well, yes, but it sounded like it was an accident.”
“Which they didn’t report.”
“No, but now they’re saying he did it on purpose. That doesn’t seem right.”
“Simon was angry at Mel for the way she played with men. When he saw the boy—one of the people she had led on quite deliberately—he lost it and ran him over. It wasn’t a coincidence or an accident.”
“You don’t know that, though. Not for sure. You can’t know what was in his mind. Not really. And even so, that wasn’t Mel’s fault, was it?”
I tell Marcus all this when we are back in Charlotte, the day I went to the graveyard, and he just shakes his head.
“She wants to hold on to her impression of who they were because they made her feel better about herself. Like she was singled out by rock stars or royalty to be their friend. Of course she wants to think the best of them.”
“They tried to kill her!”
“Yeah,” says Marcus, giving me a sideways grin. “There is that.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be close friends with Gretchen.”
“Despite the bond of imprisonment and attempted murder? Hard to believe.”
We walk a few paces in silence, leaving the cemetery and moving to Marcus’s rain-misted Camry.
“What about us?” I say. “You think we’re going to be close friends?”
He gives me that little side look again, and his smile this time is smaller, more watchful.
“I think it’s possible,” he says, turning away so I can’t read his face. “What do you think?”
“Definitely possible,” I say. “One condition, though.”
“What’s that?”
“We never buy a generator.”
“Deal,” says Marcus. “When the lights go out, we’ll light a candle.”
“And hold hands.”
He turns to me at that.
“You OK?” he says.
I look past him across the car roof, back to the wet, indistinct gravestones beyond the cemetery railings, and I nod, turning away from them and facing the future.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m good.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Gray Reinhart, John Hartness, Sean Higgins, and Scott Abell Johnston for their help on carbon monoxide and breathing apparatus; Cannon Cory on commercial real estate; Gregory Wilson on store operations; and Chris Bruney on diving. Special thanks to my first readers, Finie Osako, Kerra Bolton, Sarah Werner, David B. Coe, and wonder agent, Stacey Glick. Lastly, thanks to my editor, Kelli Martin; Danielle Marshall; and all at Lake Union who helped to make the book a reality.
About the Author
Andrew Hart is one of the pseudonyms of New York Times bestselling and award-winning author A. J. Hartley. His sixteen novels straddle multiple genres for adults and younger readers and have been translated into dozens of languages worldwide. As Andrew James Hartley, he is also the Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. His website is www.ajhartley.net.