My hand wouldn’t close, and the area around the knuckles was puffing up. “Something might be broken,” I said.
“Is Paris around?” Dev said.
“She’s in the shower,” Martha said.
“I could use an ice pack,” I said.
“She’s showering, in a crime scene?”
Dev released Martha, turned, and marched out of the room. Martha watched after him, but when he didn’t stop in the kitchen for ice, she trailed out into the hall and called after him. “I didn’t think of it that way. What’s going on?”
“I’m packing,” he said.
Martha disappeared through the doorway. “Hey,” I said. “A little help here?” I followed her through the kitchen and to the foot of the staircase.
“What’s the hurry?” Martha said to Dev’s retreating back.
“I’m not spending another minute here,” he said. “Not as long as she’s here.” He was up the stairs and past the closed bathroom door. Martha stood on the landing, left behind.
“Who? Hey,” she called and then started after him. “Don’t go. If you leave, that strands three women here, alone.”
I hadn’t thought of that. I had only been thinking about the accusation of sleepwalking, the texts on a phone that Dev might have put there. I couldn’t decide—did I feel safer with Dev in the house, or knowing he was leaving? Martha took to the stairs after him. I hesitated and then followed, up the stairs, past the door with the shower running behind it, and down the hall to the bedrooms, which I had never seen.
Dev entered the first room on the left and closed the door. Martha pressed herself up against it. Something about the shape of her body against the door embarrassed me. I glanced toward the bathroom door.
“Dev? You won’t stay here another minute if who is here? Do you mean Paris?” Martha said into the door. “Or do you mean Eden?”
When she noticed me there, she opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it firmly behind her.
I was left outside, wondering. What had just happened?
Chapter Eighteen
My mouth was open. Me? Dev wouldn’t stay in the house because I was here? It was a form of mental whiplash, comforting Martha only to have her feed me back out as fresh bait.
Enough. I had only a few more hours of daylight in this town, and I would spend them barricaded behind one door or another. It didn’t matter which one. And if someone got locked out of a motel room and found my door, it was staying shut—locked. I didn’t give a damn who came knocking. They were all trouble.
Cooley would be picking us up soon enough. My hand throbbed. I would need that time to pack, one-handed.
As I started to turn for the stairs, I noticed the yellow scene tape across the door at the far end of the hall. And then the open, not taped door next to it. I went to this door and peered in. Most of the room was tidy, except for the bed. Someone had kicked the covers out at the foot of the bed on one side, while the other side stayed tucked and neat. A wineglass with a sizable serving left in its bowl sat on the dresser, a few bits of jewelry resting against its foot. Rim, bowl, stem, foot—I’d heard Sam filling in the vocabulary the night they were pouring Malloy’s last drink. Wineglass vocabulary, as if anyone cared but Sam. And Sam did seem to care so much.
A powder blue overnight bag peeked out from underneath the bed.
Through the wall, I heard Martha’s flirty laugh. Maybe she could bring Dev around. Or if she held him there long enough, then Paris would.
If she held him there long enough, I had time to look around.
I moved as quickly as I could, rushing to the bed and pulling out the bag. Inside, a carefree packing job: panties jammed into one pocket, a cotton dress rolled up in a ball, some silly bunny slippers. Underneath, a bottle of vitamins rolled, rattling loudly. I raised my head and listened for Martha or Dev. Nothing. The bag had a side panel zipper. Inside that pouch was a manila envelope, the seal broken, and inside the envelope, a sheaf of paper in legalese. Martha didn’t seem to me like the kind of girl to bring work along on her big reunion weekend, but then deadlines had a way of following you home. It hadn’t been so long since I’d had a job. I zipped the bag up and shoved it back in place.
I stood and hurried to the dresser, using the hem of my T-shirt to open the top drawer quietly with my uninjured hand. Inside, men’s T-shirts and boxers neatly folded. In the second drawer, some collared sports shirts, precision-folded as if for a display in a store, shorts and khakis folded as though with a ruler. The cops had been more careful with these clothes than they had with mine. The other drawers were empty. Martha hadn’t bothered to store anything. Like me, she was living out of her bag. The difference was she was staying the week and I had decided not to stay at all.
Next door, something banged against the wall. I closed the drawer and raced to the door. The hallway was still empty. Martha’s laugh trilled again. I listened to the musical notes of it and was suddenly overcome with the crushing loneliness of a woman who had not laughed with friends in some time. Bix had made me laugh. Despite his many faults, he was at his best in a crowd, telling a story that was only slightly exaggerated. A performance. Something he could put on, like a suit. I might be dragging from a long, bad night with him, but he would never show it. After one of the worst nights, I’d watched from the sidelines at a backyard barbecue, smarting, while he picked apart his time in Afghanistan for laughs. He lit up a room. He was flame.
At times like these I wondered how much of what he’d done I had already forgiven. Too much.
At the third door, Malloy’s room, I covered my hand again and reached through the criss-crossed police tape.
We had promised not to mess about in the room, but what harm could it do to take a peek? They’d already worked over the room for fingerprints and that kind of thing, right? Martha could work out the legalities of it. I ducked under the tape, contorting into smallness that, once inside the room, I felt compelled to keep. The room felt stilled, interrupted in midbreath.
I had been in a dead man’s room before, of course—my own. It had been hard to return to our bed afterward, after a few nights in the guest room at my sister’s, at Bix’s mother’s house, in our guest room. When I went back to our room alone, it was with all the resolve and accommodations I could gather. All the lights on, of course.
I paused to think of the house, the sunshine through the blinds moving across the kitchen in an afternoon. The light switch plate I’d bought at that cute store on our honeymoon. I’d waited six years to own the home that deserved it, six years of Permanent Change of Station orders that were permanent only until the next move, six years of temp housing and dislocation allowances and all the federal acronyms that came with them, six years waiting for Bix to find the end of his Army career so I could maybe start one. That house. I’d planned to grow old in that house. I’d thought Bix and I would spend our lives together there.
Once, we’d planned to have a family. It hadn’t worked out, but then our plan B was so strong—each other, forever. We’d already survived two wars together, hadn’t we? We didn’t need anyone else.
Or so I had thought.
Damn it, Bix. Damn it. He had ruined everything, at least twice.
I had not forgiven him that.
But if I thought about all the things I hadn’t forgiven, I would be here all day. Instead, I turned to the scene at hand.
Malloy and Hillary’s room was the largest of all, more spacious than even the suite. Interesting that they had arrived last and yet still commanded the largest room. What’s more, Malloy hadn’t even made the arrangements. Dev had, Martha said. His ownership came not from a dibs system but naturally. I couldn’t imagine wielding that kind of easy power. What might he have talked these people into? Hadn’t he suggested that he’d already done so? All this from admiration?
For the first time since the screaming began, a wave of real terror washed over me. I had been thinking of Malloy as maligned, as a victim of a cruel misundersta
nding, something distant. Distant, even though I had touched the cooling skin of his corpse.
But I had no idea why one of these impossible friends of his had taken his life. They would have had reasons. They wouldn’t be good reasons. Murder couldn’t be explained away—could it? I remembered the screwdriver carefully pulled from the neck of the bottle, the wine spilled, and the glint of the tool stuck to the hilt into his throat. The blood on his fingertips—he must have tried to pry the screwdriver from his own neck. A whisper, a moan. The smear on the wall from his hands as he slid to the floor. Gently, though, or I would have heard the crash, surely. I shivered.
To the culprit, the reason for Malloy’s death would make sense. It would have seemed . . . deserved.
The room was awash in sunshine from a series of windows along the two outside walls. When I checked, Malloy’s things were stacked all together in the bottom drawer of the dresser, leaving the others for Hillary. In one of hers, I found the slinky new sleepwear tucked into a corner. Everything was a little loose from having been searched.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting to find. The police had already combed over my belongings, theirs.
Movement caught my eye, and I looked up to find a patch of light dancing on the wall. I went to the window and stood in the path of the light, which turned out to be a reflection of sunlight off the shimmering lake. I stood there, the glare in my eyes, wishing things had gone differently and I could walk the beach. I hadn’t dipped a toe in the water or taken a single photo—
Click.
An actual click.
I pressed my face to the window to search for the source of the noise below. I could see almost straight down to the back door, but not quite. Nothing. Traveling the length of the room, I searched each window, but the lawn was empty, the shore desolate.
Down the shoreline on the public beach, a lone woman, thick in a bright blue jacket, walked with her head canted toward the water. Something in the way she had tilted her chin toward the waves made me wonder what she was mourning. It was a shame to spend misery upon such a gorgeous landscape—we had that in common. She reminded me of someone, maybe only myself. I left her to the beach and kept moving along the windows, past the corner of the room to the last of them, where I could see all our parked cars awaiting their drivers. One of the sheriff’s cars was also down below, with an officer’s uniform leaning in at the window. When the guy shifted, Officer Cooley was behind the wheel. She wore sunglasses but by the set of her mouth, I could still tell she was pissed. Dev. She must have dropped off Dev to get his things, and was waiting for some of us to come out for a ride back to town. One car, six people to shift. I hadn’t packed a thing.
The noise, though—what was that? I went back along the windows but couldn’t find anything out of place—and then I saw him. Sam emerged from the back of the house, laden with something heavy. He disappeared from my view for a moment, keeping close to the back of the house and out of eyeshot from where Cooley was parked. Where Cooley and the supposed guard of the crime scene were complaining about us.
When at last Sam reappeared, he was hauling the carrier bags of wine away from the house, two in each hand.
Is this what he considered packing?
He checked over his shoulder, then headed toward the lake at a shallow angle to the shore. At the water’s edge, he veered south, away from the beach and toward the headland, that curling peninsula namesake of the park.
What was the plan here? That stretch of land thinned to a point that ended in Lake Michigan tides.
I crossed the room, climbed quickly back out of the tape, and pulled the door closed. Fingerprints. I used the edge of my shirt to wipe the door handle and, satisfied, turned around, straight into Paris.
“Were you inside Malloy’s room?” she asked.
She wore a thick pink scalloped towel tucked around her, her slim brown shoulders still wet. Her braids were pulled back into a spiky twist at the top of her head, the dark crown of an angered queen.
She’d seen me leave the room, so I saw no point in answering. I tried walking around her toward the stairs, but she blocked me out, a feint to one side and then the other until she had backed me up to the railing that overlooked the living room. I felt the dig of the wood into my hip as Paris forced me into the bannister, her face close to mine.
“What were you doing in there?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just having a look around. I have to—”
“What? Are you Nancy Fucking Drew now?”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. In my head, I’d only been Nosey Fucking Parker.
“Are you involved in all this?” she demanded, her eyes terrible. “Did you kill him?”
The railing groaned with my weight. I pushed away from it and slipped past her. “No, I just—”
The door behind Paris opened. She turned and found Dev standing there, looking between us.
“You’re here,” Paris said, her voice gone soft and grateful. Her face relaxed into sweetness.
Martha’s curly head peeked out from behind Dev’s shoulder. Paris stiffened. “What’s going on? Why is she in our room?” she said. The distance in her voice from speaking to Dev to scolding Martha was a vast, cold wasteland she’d crossed in a split second.
I left them to it, taking the stairs two at a time and reaching the front door just as Cooley opened it from the other side.
“Now what?” she said.
“Old friends working out some differences,” I said. “I have to—”
“Is anyone else dead?”
“Not that I know of, but I—I haven’t looked in the suite yet.”
The joke fell flat, deservedly. Cooley leveled me with a heavy gaze. “You haven’t packed? What have you been up to? Cheese and crackers, hurry up. I have a job, you know—”
“Get out!”
We both looked up. Paris, still in her towel, her eyes wide with rage. Dev stood between them, his jaw set. Martha’s neck was pink and blotchy but her chin was thrust out, daring.
“—you’re a vulture! Every man—”
“—you never—”
Their words tumbled over one another in chaos, the two women flinging insults and their hands at each other across Dev.
“Hey,” Cooley barked. “Did you take a shower—”
“You just can’t be satisfied with anyone but the ones who don’t belong to you!” Paris screeched. “If you couldn’t have Malloy, then it had to be Dev.”
“Tell me where you’re better,” Martha said. “You treated Dev the same way. He’d still belong to you if you actually wanted him!”
Dev held the women apart with the span of his arms, stoic.
“He still— You don’t know anything about our relationship,” Paris said. “Stop pretending that you know anything about relationships at all.”
“I know plenty,” Martha said with a wink in her voice.
“Sleeping with other women’s men doesn’t count,” Paris scolded. “Of course, if one of them knocks you up, then I guess that’s a kind of future.”
Martha glanced at Dev. “What are you talking about?” she said, but her confidence was gone.
“You haven’t had more than a sip of wine since we got here,” Paris said. “The guys might not notice, but, sweetheart, I’m not dumb.”
“You are,” Martha said. The taunting voice was back. “It’s all happening under your nose, but you’re too distracted by that second-mortgage diamond ring to notice.”
Dev’s eyes blinked to life and found mine. “Let’s get packed,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Nice try,” Paris said. “Not that you would understand what a mortgage is, either. You never owned a thing in your life except that three-buck dye job.”
“Come on, now,” Cooley tried.
Martha crossed her arms over her heaving chest. “Pare baby, if it’s pawned beyond your ability to ever pay for it, you don’t own it, it owns you. That’s a mortgage, and you’re in it up to your padded
bra.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Paris said, flipping her head. The beads in her braids, still twisted at the top of her head, flicked against one another. “We’re fine.”
“Fine until the estate recalls that loan Dev took,” Martha said.
No one moved. Estate. All eyes turned to Dev.
“What is she blathering about?” Paris said.
“The loan he got from Malloy,” Martha said. “To keep you in the lifestyle you demanded, I’d guess. To buy your status-symbol diamond. Your engagement ring was paid for by Malloy. Just like you always wanted. Well, maybe not exactly like you wanted.”
Paris stared at Dev, who watched the floor.
“It’s in his will,” Martha said breezily. “The loan’s not forgiven just because he died. His heirs will want that diamond and anything else you bought with his money. And since he’s dead, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all due immediately.”
I remembered the paperwork in the pocket of Martha’s overnight bag. Legalese, pages and pages of it. Martha handled divorces, she’d said, and wills. Martha, running after Sam claiming to be his lawyer. I looked between them. Was she Malloy’s attorney, too? What was a twentysomething man in the fit of health doing with a will? Even Bix, years older than these people and a big believer in both military action and life insurance, had died without one. And Malloy hadn’t just died, despite Martha’s tone. He was murdered, and now money, secret money that would not be forgiven, was in play. Motive. I shot a glance at Cooley, who stood looking up at the trio above with her mouth hanging open.
“How could you take money from him to—to buy my ring?” Paris said. She held her left hand out as though to admire the sparkler there, but then couldn’t seem to look at it. Her hand fell. “Of all the things—”
“Well, we didn’t have the money,” Dev said. His voice seemed strangely hoarse from being silent so long. “Not while I was in med school and residency. And you had to have the best.”
“We could have made do another way,” Paris said. “Pulled money from some other fund—”
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