Kiss of Death

by Lauren Henderson

  She raises her eyebrows.

  “I thought this would be the perfect opportunity—up in Scotland, a different location. It has to look like an accident, of course. The smoke bombs were such a good idea, weren’t they? I knew no one would ever think a teacher would do something like that. And that note I put in your room!”

  Aunt Gwen is almost beaming with perverse pride. “So clever! With all those St. Tabitha’s girls around, there were bound to be some who you’d had a fight with! I know exactly what teenage girls are like—best friends today, deadly enemies tomorrow. Ugh, such a waste of an excellent plan!” She sighs. “If you’d only been killed falling down that staircase … I gave you a hard enough push, God knows! It would have been absolutely perfect. They’d have looked at the smoke bombs, found the note, and thought it was a prank that went horribly wrong.”

  I’m pushing down on the arms of the chair now frantically, with everything I have, trying to get my feet underneath me to take my weight, but my legs keep collapsing. I’m never getting out of this chair under my own steam. Panic is rising in me. It might seem totally unbelievable that I haven’t freaked out before now, but the antihistamines make me feel as if I’m being wrapped in layers and layers of padding; it takes ages for anything to sink in, to seem real. Let alone a story as insane as Aunt Gwen’s.

  I know it’s true, every word of it. She’s relishing telling me all this; I can see the malicious gleam in her eyes. Everything fits—especially because it slots in the last puzzle piece to Mr. Barnes’s hit-and-run killing of my parents, his motive for doing that. And it explains why both Mr. Barnes and Aunt Gwen were so violently opposed to Jase’s and my falling in love with each other.

  “It’s time,” she says, standing up. She tugs down her skirt, smoothing it out, a banal, everyday little gesture that somehow intensifies the horror of what she’s about to do.

  I shake my head frantically, a scream building inside my skull, wanting to explode from my mouth; but I can barely manage to make any sound at all.

  “I have no idea why on earth you’ve been babbling about all this ghost nonsense,” she says almost cheerfully. “You’ve never seemed that sort of silly, childish girl. But it’s perfect for my purposes. You’ve had two collapses in three days. You’re acting so hysterically every single teacher is concerned you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So, my story will be very simple: I brought you up here to talk to you and see how you were, Scarlett, because I was worried about you. After all, you are my niece. I left to make another cup of tea, but when I came back, the window was open. And you were gone.”

  She walks toward me, reaching down and pulling me out of the armchair. I can’t believe how strong Aunt Gwen is; I try to struggle but I have nothing at all to do it with. No juice, Taylor says, when we’ve worked out so hard our muscles feel soft as toffee and we’re too knackered even to lift the remote to change the channel on the TV, lying there watching a blah program rather than mustering the energy to find something we’re actually interested in. And right now, I have no juice, not a drop of it. Aunt Gwen hauls me up and out of the chair, gripping my sweater rather than my skin, and I know this is so she won’t leave any marks on me that might be suspicious. My feet flail at the ground as she frog-marches me over to the window.

  “You opened it yourself, of course,” she’s saying complacently. “That’s why I got you to do it, in case anyone was suspicious—your fingerprints are all over the latch. You wanted to get some air, but you leaned out too far. A tragic accident. I’m not stupid enough to try to fake a suicide—even though it’s terribly common among teenage girls, apparently. Though if that’s what the police choose to believe …” I feel her shrug as she nudges the window open with an elbow and starts to shove me through the frame, out onto the ledge.

  Desperately, I do the only thing I can think of. Fighting her isn’t working; the antihistamines have sapped my muscle control. Instead, I slump against her, making myself a dead weight. My feet catch on the windowsill, and she curses, trying to lift me. The rubber of my trainers catches on the paint of the wall below, providing resistance against her attempts to haul me up.

  She’s swearing now, a stream of filthy words pouring from her—in any other context it would totally shock me that Aunt Gwen has this kind of vocabulary. I’m hanging from her grip like a huge, unwieldy doll, and I feel her knee come into the small of my back, boosting me, shoving my legs so they fold up enough that she can hoist me through the window frame.

  I’m trying to push back, fall back on top of her, make myself so heavy that she can’t maneuver enough to make the final shove. It’s freezing out here, the wind icy on my face, lifting my hair, my fingers feeling numb with cold, and it’s sapping me. I’m exhausted, shocked, and dazed from the drugs she’s given me; part of me still can’t believe that it’s my aunt who’s doing this, my own flesh and blood. My aunt, who’s made several attempts to kill me, and is going to succeed this time …

  My neck wobbles, tipping my head forward, despite my best efforts. And that’s fatal for me. An adult human head weighs about ten pounds—I had that dinned into me for years at gymnastics, to remind me to tuck my head in when I somersaulted. The extra weight helps with the rotation.

  And now it’s helping Aunt Gwen, tilting my body in the direction she wants it. Forward. Out the window. Off the ledge. Chin resting on my chest, I’m looking straight down at the ground below. It’s hard concrete: the empty parking lot. Not even a car that might break my landing.

  Aunt Gwen’s planned this perfectly. There are no lawns below, no soft grass. No question that this fall will kill me.

  I close my eyes, not brave enough to watch myself plummet into space.

  And then my head spins dizzily as I’m dragged back so abruptly that I hit my head against the side of the window. Pain shooting through my skull, I tumble awkwardly onto the carpet inside, my knees shooting up into my chest, rolling into a ball to protect my face and chest, because Aunt Gwen and someone else are struggling, trampling each other, feet shuffling right next to me, one tripping over my leg as I scramble as best I can to get out of the way.

  My back pushes against the armchair. I curl up against it, eyes snapping open, staring in disbelief at what I see: Aunt Gwen and Taylor, swaying back and forth in the window embrasure. But no, not Taylor; that’s what I’m finding so hard to process. It’s a male version of Taylor, built on a bigger scale; the same shaggy hair, the same wide shoulders, the same strong features.

  My brain’s firing so slowly that it takes me a ludicrously long time to work out what’s blindingly obvious.

  “Seth!” I say finally. “You’re Seth!”

  He swings round at hearing his name, momentarily distracted, his heavy fringe tumbling across his eyes, his hold on Aunt Gwen slackening. Aunt Gwen, gasping for breath, reaches out, hand rising like a claw to scratch at his face. I scream a warning to him. Seth looks back and slaps her hand away just before her nails can make contact with his skin.

  And that’s what sends her off balance. Her feet slide from underneath her, her legs shoot up. She snatches desperately for the window frame, and misses. It looks as if she’s sitting down in thin air. Her skirt bunches up around her knees, her bottom tips back. Her head jerks madly, her eyes bulging more than I’ve ever seen them before; her mouth opens in a scream.

  The last thing I see of Aunt Gwen is the soles of her shoes as she falls off the ledge, back into nothingness, her scream thin and faraway. The scream of someone who knows she’s already dead.

  seventeen

  “I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH, SCARLETT”

  I’m sitting quietly, turning something over in my hand. A pendant on a silver chain, a bright blue stone that I used to think was an aquamarine, in a simple silver setting. It used to belong to my mother; my father gave it to her on my fourth birthday, because it was the same color as my eyes. Wakefield blue, she called the color, and my father must have gone to a lot of trouble and expense to find it.

&nb
sp; When Mr. Barnes deliberately knocked my parents off their scooter that summer day, when he stopped the van he’d been driving to make sure they were dead, he took this pendant from my mother’s neck. Like a trophy. And he gave it to his wife, Dawn, Jase’s mother, who never wore it, because she was suspicious about where it came from—he told her not to wear it out in public, not to show it off to anyone.

  Dawn, who couldn’t say boo to a goose, wasn’t brave enough to ask any awkward questions. Scared, intimidated by her increasingly drunken and violent husband, she put the pendant in a drawer and pretended it didn’t exist. And years later, when Jase and I started seeing each other, Jase remembered the necklace his mother had left behind, and thought I might like it, because it matched my eyes.

  I loved it from the moment he gave it to me; I wore it constantly. Until Lizzie Livermore, who, if nothing else, is an expert on expensive jewelry, looked closely at it and told me it wasn’t an aquamarine at all. It’s a round-cut blue diamond, very rare and very valuable. And when I learned that, I started to trace the story of the pendant, like tugging on a loose thread that ends up unraveling a whole garment.

  Of course, now that I know it’s a diamond, I wonder how I could ever have thought it was anything else. It sparkles as I hold it to the light, and though it glints brightly, the layers of blue beneath are velvety, with a depth that—according to Lizzie—is too rich for a semiprecious stone, but is characteristic of a diamond.

  I never let Aunt Gwen see me wearing it, because Jase had given it to me, and she was so opposed to our relationship that she was quite capable of confiscating any present from him. But of course, that was before I knew the truth about the necklace, what it really was. I realize, thinking over the whole story, that it would have driven Aunt Gwen crazy to know that Mr. Barnes had taken my mother’s necklace for Dawn. To me, that says that although he killed my parents in a conspiracy with Aunt Gwen, it was purely for financial benefit. His feelings must always have been with his wife, if he bothered to lean down and snatch this pendant off my mother’s neck for her.

  I swallow hard at the image this calls up. It’s horrible. And it was all for nothing. If anything, Aunt Gwen was worse off after she had her brother and sister-in-law killed; not only did her lover, Mr. Barnes, turn into a drunk, her mother—my grandmother—marooned her in the gatehouse with an orphaned four-year-old.

  All for nothing. I can’t think about it too long; the pain and the waste are too overwhelming. If I let myself think about what my life would have been like if I’d grown up with my parents alive—parents who loved me, and would probably have had more children, so I’d have had little sisters and brothers to play with—it makes the biggest lump come up in my throat.

  And then I think, the first time this idea has ever come to me: If I had a younger brother, it would be him who’d inherit Wakefield Hall, not me. Because the whole estate is entailed on a male heir, if there is one.

  It wouldn’t be fair. I feel a rush of resentment rise up in me at the thought—and not just resentment, but a love for Wakefield Hall I didn’t even know I had. The centuries of history, the beautiful old central wing; the maze, the lake, the terraces with their views over Lime Walk. It’ll be all mine one day. It’s a huge responsibility to take care of it, to keep it as perfectly as my grandmother does. The weight settles on my shoulders. I’ve always known it was there, and now I’ve accepted it.

  The idea of my parents having a boy after me, a boy who would take that all away from me, is harder to bear. For the first time, I feel something in common with Aunt Gwen. I have an inkling of the anger and resentment she must have felt, growing up knowing that her brother would, one day, have all of Wakefield. Aunt Gwen wouldn’t be cast out without a penny, of course. There’s plenty of family money to go round. But it must have been really bitter for her to realize that just because her brother was a boy, he was the crown prince, and she was a very distant second.

  I can’t ever forgive her for what she did to my parents, and what she tried to do to me. But at least I can understand it, a little.

  “Scarlett? Scarlett!” Penny, my grandmother’s secretary, has to call my name twice, I’m so lost in thought. She leans over her desk, waving her hand to catch my attention. “You can go through now. She’s ready for you.”

  The entire Wakefield Hall contingent came back on the train from Edinburgh first thing this morning. We only got back to school half an hour ago, and Miss Carter brought me straight to my grandmother’s suite of rooms. I’ve got my pull suitcase here, propped up against the wall, and for a moment I debate taking it in with me, before Penny gestures to me to leave it where it is.

  I pause with my hand on the doorknob. I can’t believe I was seriously considering dragging and bumping my suitcase into my grandmother’s elegant, exquisitely decorated study. I must be feeling even more disoriented than I realize. I’m dreading this interview with my grandmother. It’s all still sinking in, probably because I was zoned out for most of yesterday, knocked out by the trauma of my struggle with Aunt Gwen, the shock of her death, all heavily overlaid with the antihistamines she’d given me. The strain of keeping my story straight to the police was horrendous, even with Seth backing me up.

  We kept our version of events as simple as possible: Aunt Gwen was taking me up to her room to make me some tea when Seth walked into the school, making a surprise visit to his sister while traveling through Edinburgh. Aunt Gwen naturally offered Seth a cup of tea too, telling him he could wait with us until the rest of the school party got back from their excursion; I felt dizzy, Aunt Gwen kindly opened a window to give me some cool air, leaned out too far, slipped, and fell in a terrible freak accident. Seth coached me over and over before the police came, telling me not to add any extra details that might catch us out, focusing completely on putting across the most basic story possible.

  Even so, the police didn’t like it at all. I wanted Seth to go before they came, telling him he shouldn’t be mixed up with them, but he’d refused, saying that they wouldn’t believe a story this implausible unless there were two witnesses. Seth turned out to be right; they questioned us for hours, trying to find holes in the story, convinced that we were in some sort of conspiracy. It helped that everyone, especially Taylor, swore up and down that I’d never met Seth before, which made it incredibly unlikely that we would have got together to plan something as extreme as killing my aunt; in the end, with no evidence to the contrary, and both of us telling the same story, there was nothing they could do but let us go with great reluctance.

  Seth was amazing. I was pretty much a total wreck, and he was a tower of strength: calm, detached, clearheaded, focusing not on Aunt Gwen’s awful death, or what she’d tried to do to me, but on the single task of selling our story to the police. He seemed so much older than me; I know he’s twenty, which is quite a bit older, but honestly, it was like talking to an adult, one I could completely trust. I liked him and was intimidated by his poise in equal measure. And it made me realize why Taylor’s so confident in so many areas: with a brother like that to model yourself on, how could you not be?

  Afterward, I was so shattered they put me straight to bed. I passed out, sleeping through until Taylor woke me this morning in time to pack and catch the train; and then, in the first-class seat Miss Carter had thoughtfully booked for me, I passed out all over again, watched over by her and Jane. It’s extraordinary how the aftermath of extreme stress can knock you out utterly and completely as the adrenaline floods out of your system, leaving you just a drained, exhausted shell.

  But as I eventually turn the handle and step into my grandmother’s sanctum, the sight of her shocks me to the core. However bad I felt yesterday and today, she looks infinitely worse. Lady Wakefield is always perfectly poised and groomed, her white hair smooth, her twinset and pearls exquisitely appropriate, her blue eyes bright and sharp. This afternoon is no exception; she doesn’t have a hair out of place. But her face is a pale, fragile mask, white as paper and massed with lin
es, like tissue that’s been crumpled in someone’s hand; her eyes are faded and full of pain.

  I’m supposed to call her Lady Wakefield in term time, because I’m a pupil at the school and she’s the headmistress. My grandmother imposed that rule on me as soon as I came here as a student, and she’s very strict about it.

  But, running toward her, full of worry at how frail she looks, I forget it completely.

  “Grandma!” I exclaim, plopping down on the upholstered footstool next to her chair, taking the hand she’s holding out to me.

  “Oh, Scarlett …” To my utter amazement, she starts to cry. It should be frightening, my grandmother crying, showing her vulnerability, because she’s always so strong. But actually, surprisingly, it comes as a huge relief. “Scarlett,” she sobs, “you’re all I have left.…”

  She raises her other hand and strokes my hair gently, something no one has done for a long, long time. It’s so comforting that tears form in my own eyes. I lean against her knees.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Grandma,” I assure her, trying to find words that will make her feel better. “I’m right here—I’ll always be here.…”

  “Both my children, gone,” my grandmother sobs quietly. “And Sally, lovely Sally—she and Patrick adored each other, they were such a happy couple … how could this have happened? How could my family have come to this, just one Wakefield left, apart from me? I thought Patrick and Sally would have a whole family of their own, running around the gardens, playing on the lawns … and now it’s just you left, Scarlett. Just you.”

  She’s still holding my hand, so tightly that her rings are cutting into me, but all I do is squeeze hers back, too choked up to be able to say a word.

  “It’s my fault,” she says desolately. “I loved Patrick better, and Gwen knew it. Children always know if their mother has a favorite. Poor Gwen, I never felt the same about her, and I couldn’t pretend to. She was her father’s pet, but he died too young. If he’d lived, maybe everything would have been different … maybe Gwen would have been less bitter, less resentful … but he died, and I miss him every day.…”