He had cut off access to the mainland and was backing me up almost to the tip of the headland. Straits Point, the very end of the world, where my phone might work again. On the strength of the reboot it had finally finished, it came alive in my hand, buzzing with messages and alerts I’d missed in the last few days. My attention jumped to it. Dev reached out, grabbed the phone, and threw it to the ground, where it hit a stone and shattered into three pieces: back, battery, cracked screen.
I screeched.
He looked surprised, even apologetic, at the destruction. “It’s your fault—you and your phobia coming to this place, of all places.”
“How is this on me? Maybe it’s my dead husband’s fault, since—”
“Everything has been so far,” Dev said. “Why stop blaming him for it all now?”
That got me boiling, screwdriver or no screwdriver. “You don’t know anything about him,” I said. “And don’t pretend that you care that he ever existed, or you wouldn’t have tried so hard to get in my bed.” But I didn’t want to talk about that night in my motel room. The whole thing had nothing to do with Dev. Even when he was looking at me with that devil’s grin, it had never been about him. Especially then. But Dev was right. I had put so much at Bix’s feet. The sleep-deprived part of me wondered if I had willfully misunderstood the reservation I’d found among Bix’s papers, just to avoid knowing what I now couldn’t deny.
“I feel sorry for the guy,” Dev said. “No wonder he went out on you.”
Were we going to start keeping track of who went out on whom? “You’re just being cruel because you can be. No one’s here to make you your better self, the way you’re always after Paris to be a certain way.”
“Leave her out of this,” he growled.
“Then you leave Bix out of it.”
“You’re the one who brought him up,” he said. “Again and again. Let the guy be dead already. I assume that’s who you meant that night.”
“What are you talking about?”
“‘He did this. He did this,’” he mimicked. “You were there. You really don’t remember?”
He did this. Colleen’s mother had shrieked something like it at Bix’s funeral, and I had come away with it, like a song I couldn’t get out of my head. He did this. “He did?”
“He did,” Dev said. He stepped forward, a beseeching look on his face. I took a step backward and felt the earth give way to sand. He came at me again, but I couldn’t decide if he meant me harm or only wanted to get things clear. “Malloy did. Didn’t think the accusation would come from you, but he did. He broke her—over Paris!—and then she shoved her mouth full of pills. In secret, alone, with a belly full of wine. She never had a chance and she didn’t give us one. We just wanted to help.”
His voice choked off.
We all did our part. “How did you help?”
His eyes jumped all around me. “They were just to help her get through finals, she said. Just this one time, so she could study for exams.”
“You got them for her. You were . . . pre-med? You had pills?”
“I knew someone—but then I don’t know what happened—Sam found her body and—” He put the heel of his hand to his eye, as though in pain. “We were all complicit. All of us. But he did it. He did.”
“Tash.” Malloy broke her heart. Paris was the reason. Dev got the pills. Sam found the body. A belly full of wine? Maybe I understood which death Sam had confessed for, though even Dev didn’t seem to know. And Martha. Where was Martha in all this? She was like a child they protected.
“Everyone thinks he’s so perfect, but he killed her, just as if he’d fed her the pills himself.”
If I was following along, Dev was skipping over the part where he himself had fed Tash the pills. “I was saying that,” I said. “I was sleepwalking and saying that.”
“So I took you to your room and shut the door, but then what you’d said—it broke everything wide open.” He took a step, reaching for me. I teetered backward, into the shallows. The water didn’t stop him. He splashed in after me, his eyes pleading for something I wasn’t sure I had. “It was everything we all believed. Everything we knew. We went to bed, but then I got up because Paris—I knew she was meeting him! I saw those messages she sent on your phone. Am I an idiot? I made her go back to bed, but I don’t know . . . That screwdriver sat in that bottle like a gun on the counter.”
There’d been several guns on that counter—the screwdriver, the bottle opener, which was far sharper. Hadn’t Martha pulled an actual knife out of the drawer at one point? Everything he was saying pinged around in my head. “Over Paris,” I said. “Malloy threw over Tash for Paris. Then how . . . how did you—”
“Well, it didn’t take, did it? He threw her over, too, almost immediately. Because he was—he was what he was. And then she chose me because I was going to be a doctor, but I only decided to become a doctor so she would choose me, so who won that battle? He did. He gets to do whatever he wanted—nothing, usually—and she still loved him best, anyway.”
“Paris?”
His eyes were wild. I had seen that shine before. A bad night. We would have had all the lights on. “All of them,” he spat. “Everyone. Do you know how hard I worked? In school and to fit in and to be—correct? Not too foreign, not too Asian, not too anything. The American dream my parents wanted—it all rested on me, but everything came so easily to him, while he never deserved it. Never tried at anything. Never worked a day. He’s a millionaire, did you know?”
“Is he?” So that’s why a twenty-seven-year-old pilgrim on the earth felt compelled to have a will. The pilgrim had significant assets. “Born to it?”
“The Halloway’s Heavenly dairy empire’s prince,” Dev said. Halloway’s Heavenly? I remembered Paris’s hot eyes on the pint of ice cream in my hand at the gas station. Now the feverish eyes belonged to Dev. “An ice cream king in the making,” Dev said. “Can you stand it? Milk-fed, from the ground up. A damn silver ice cream spoon hanging from his smug mouth, while he ruined everything around us like it didn’t matter. He was never sorry. He never felt a day of guilt in his life, while we—we all—”
“Is that why? Why you killed him?”
He went slack, blinking at me. “I didn’t kill him.”
We both looked down at the screwdriver in his hand. We stood up to our knees in the gentle water. He threw it away. The splash several feet away should have made me feel safer.
“I didn’t,” he insisted.
“What’s the gas for?”
He faltered, gaping up at the house. “This place,” he said. “This place took them from me.” The place was also covered in evidence, none of which he could live with. Who would get out alive?
“But what about—” Malloy was dead, but Dev had said it didn’t matter, not to him. Sam had confessed to at least some of the group’s crimes. He would go to prison and so he was lost, too. I was afraid to say Paris’s name. Dev watched my lips for it.
“Martha,” I blurted. “Martha needs you.”
“Martha doesn’t need anyone,” he scoffed. “Not Tash, not Malloy. Not . . . Paris. Oh, God, Paris. What good is it being a physician, when—” He shut his eyes and let his head sink back on his shoulders. I started to wade away, but he opened his eyes and caught me by the arm. “And Martha certainly doesn’t need me. She got what she wanted—”
“You’ll go to prison, Dev,” I said. My thoughts grasped, grasped. “Think of the baby, then.”
“The baby,” he mused, his grip on me going loose. “That baby is the new prince of Halloway’s Heavenly. He’ll never want for a thing.”
“A father,” I said.
He laughed. “He will, that. He’ll have to be tough like me, then, instead of soft and creamy. Won’t that be something, if he turns out like me?” There was something final in that. Whatever the child turned out to be, Dev didn’t think he would see it. The smile left on his lips was the devil’s own.
I shot out of his grip toward the
house, dragging through the calf-deep water, but Dev was faster. He grabbed me by the hair and pulled me back. I fell, went under, came up choking and clawing.
“Why are you—” I swiped at his face, at the open wound, and tore out of his hold. I ran, but didn’t get far.
Before I knew what was happening, I was stumbling, flailing, falling, my knee cracking against something hard under the water. I splashed forward, screaming. On hands and knees, I blinked at the rush of dark flooding the water below me. Blood? Under the water, my fingers brushed up against something unexpected. I grabbed at it.
The arc of the bottle of wine rising out of the lake was slow, solid. Full. Full like the gas canister. Loaded like a gun.
The bottle cracked against Dev’s head and smashed, cabernet dark. He fell backward into the water, splashing out of sight. I crawled over another bottle, another, my hands clawing and clawed at by the bottle my knee had smashed. I scrambled to find a foothold in the sand toward the shore.
Crouching in ankle-deep waves, I hesitated, stood, and turned back.
He was not coming after me. He had not surfaced. I held the shattered neck of the wine bottle until my hand shook and the glass slipped from my fingers.
I started for the house, then redirected for my phone, in pieces on the peninsula. Then turned back and rushed into the waves, stepping on and over bottles and broken glass, raking at the water to get to him, the man I killed.
He floated, eyes closed, head bleeding. I pulled him toward the shore, then onto the beach as far out of the water as I could. Was CPR just the chest compressions now or just the breaths? I couldn’t remember. I did both. I was breathing for him, watching his chest rise and fall, when I heard the wail of sirens under my own cries. I did this. I did.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
At the hospital, they sewed up a gash on my knee and tweezed pieces of glass out of both hands while Sheriff Barrows and Officer Perez pelted me with questions. The resident working on me listened with wide eyes. After my hands were cleaned and bandaged into two useless mitts, I dragged myself to the waiting room. No one waited for me.
In the corner of the lobby, a few reporters gathered. One of the sheriff’s men kept them at bay.
I wore sodden clothes, ripped, bloody, and wine stained. My shoes squelched as I walked. I didn’t mind. I had not had time to mind.
Cooley was safe. We had arrived by ambulance, beckoned by my ham-fisted attempts on the police radio. During the ride, I’d forgotten all about high bridges or dark skies. I worried about Cooley, about Dev, about what I had been a party to. About who I had become.
The pay phone beckoned from across the room. I should call Michele. Shouldn’t I? But what would I say? What would I say, ever, about what I had done?
I found myself wondering where Warren was, how it was possible that Warren Hoyt was not here. Losing Warren’s goodwill meant that I must have used up all the goodwill in the world.
I had nowhere to go. I slinked deeper into the hospital, dodging into the gift shop. The magazine rack was filled with smiling faces, scandals, women in aprons holding crockery out to the reader. There was still a world out there that cared for such things. I pondered gifts: flowers? A card? What did you get for the fiancée of the man you had killed?
Finally, I decided on an item and paid for it.
“We’ve sold the entire stock today,” the cashier said. “I had ’em for months and then, boom. Weird, isn’t it?”
I could not follow what she meant, and then my purchase didn’t quite fit in my purse. In the elevator ride up, a kid stared at it, then me. His mother noticed the stains of my shirt and pulled him close.
On the fourth floor, I got out. The hospital was small, the room easy to find. No one shooed me away. I sat down in the chair at her bedside.
Paris was a lovely disaster, tucked in among white sheets. Her color was better, but her lips had chapped. She wouldn’t have liked that. Her eyelids fluttered. I let my purse and camera, returned to me from Cooley’s car, slide to my feet. What would I say if she woke up? Not the truth. The truth was too much.
Footsteps at the hallway. Martha rushed into the doorway, stopping short when she saw me.
“What are you doing here?”
“Paying some respects,” I said.
“They’re only necessary thanks to you,” she hissed. Her eyes were puffy, her red lipstick smeared at the corners of her mouth. “Are you satisfied now?” She walked to the other side of the bed and patted Paris’s hand. Paris’s head was turned in my direction. She flinched at the touch.
“I didn’t mean to—” I gestured to Paris, shaking my head in what I hoped was a scolding manner. “I didn’t mean to.”
“That’s a sloppy job, then,” Martha said. “Because you did.” She pulled a chair to the bed and sat down. We regarded one another over the body of her friend. “Looks like we were right about you in the first place,” she said. “What’s it like to kill a man?”
A muscle near Paris’s mouth twitched.
“She might be able to hear us,” I said, finally explicit. “You may want to—”
“I hope she can,” Martha said. “She’ll find out soon enough.”
“But maybe,” I said calmly, as though speaking to a toddler, “maybe it’s not the first thing she needs to be aware of. If she’s your friend, why not protect her a bit?” Don’t tell Martha, indeed.
Martha turned her profile to me.
“Talk to me about Tash,” I said.
Martha freckles disappeared in the heat suddenly in her cheeks. “Why should I?”
“Dev said something about—”
“Stop saying their names!” Martha cried. “After what you did!” Paris grimaced.
“OK, you tell it, then,” I said, lowering my voice in the hopes of lowering hers. “What happened? D— He said you were all complicit in—her death, and that Ma— OK, I need to use some of their names or I can’t make sentences.”
“Tash overdosed on some pills she got hold of,” Martha said. Her eyes welled. “She was pulling all-nighters to study. She was competitive. She wanted to be the top of our class, and Dev was right there with her, sailing through his pre-med classes.”
“You two were roommates,” I said to nudge her along.
“She was a riot,” she said. “She brought us all together. She was our center.”
I must have pulled a dubious face, because she knew exactly where I was caught up. “Malloy, right? You thought Malloy was, and I don’t blame you.” She smiled toward the window for a moment. “No, in the beginning it was Tash. We were roommates, and she was dating Malloy, who lived in the same building as Dev and Sam and Paris. Tash was the string that pulled us tight. And then when she died . . . it wasn’t the same.”
For the first time, I fully understood that I had encountered these people at the end of their story, not at the beginning. Their youth threw me off track. But they had all lived a full life, ups and downs, before colliding with my story, which was also, I suppose, nearing an end. Not the end, only an end. I had miles to go. But that must have been what Malloy thought. Dev.
“Well, that’s college,” I said. “Afterward, everyone goes their own way.”
“Shouldn’t you be going yours?” Martha said.
“What?” I looked at the clock. “Plenty of daylight left,” I said, though of course I would have to stay another day.
Martha smoothed one of Paris’s braids off her forehead. Paris frowned, but again only I could see it. The poor woman wanted to be left alone. “What are you talking about?” Martha said. “What about daylight?”
“You know,” I said. “You’re well within your rights to make fun of me.”
She looked at me blankly.
For a moment I didn’t understand the disconnect. And then I did. She didn’t know. Out of all the chatter flying around about my neurosis, none of it had reached Martha. Don’t tell Martha. “Nothing,” I said, watching Martha straighten Paris’s covers. Nesting already,
and using her friend’s comatose and probably aching body as a dress-up doll. “Never mind.” I stood and pushed my chair back quietly and grabbed my things. “No offense, but she doesn’t seem happy with your fussing over her,” I said. “You might leave her alone.”
“I will never leave her alone. I’m all she’s got—have you thought of that?”
“No, I didn’t mean—alone. Of course you should be with her. I just mean she’s a little restless when you—you know what? Never mind. Do what you want.”
I walked to the door. Martha crooned over Paris, pulling the covers up around the woman’s chin. “There,” Martha said. “She’s gone now. You wouldn’t believe how much we’ve had to put up with since you fell.”
At the door, I turned in time to see Paris’s features contort. Her eyes rolled, opening, closing. She reminded me of a fish pulled from the lake, gasping for water.
“Paris?” I said. “Can you hear us?”
Martha raced around the bed, pushing me aside. “Pare? Hon?” she said, her voice shaking. “Can you hear me? Are you in there?” Martha looked up, her expression one of full panic. “Get the nurse.”
At the nurse’s station, I reported Paris’s status. The nurse at the desk took the news laconically and shuffled off to see if there was anything to it. Martha calling Paris’s name reverberated through the halls. For a moment I stood there, torn between witnessing a miracle and remaining outside what would happen. I had, as Martha suggested, done enough. From where I stood, miracles were hard to come by.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
At the end of the hall, Barrows and Perez were leaving another room. I waited until they were down the hall and then approached the room and slipped inside.
“Dang,” Cooley whispered when she saw the shape I was in. She didn’t look much better. Her head was bandaged, but a dark bruise peeked out from under the wraps. A bag of clear liquid dripped into a tube stuck in her arm. Her voice was hoarse, weak. “And here I was thinking I’d win the beauty pageant. Didn’t even make it to the swimsuit round.”
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