Climbing to the top of Falling Springs required looping around and navigating a wide path through the brush and rocks along the side. Behind me, Campbell fell in beside Victoria. I let her, keeping my focus on the climb. The incline ranged from mild to the occasional vertical that required finding a steady tree limb or stone to grip for support. I’d just grabbed on to a rock and tested it as a handhold when Victoria latched her fingers onto its side.
I glanced back and saw Campbell trailing by five or six feet. I was betting that meant her attempts at conversation had been less than fruitful. I’d just about decided on a way to bring up Ana when Victoria saved me the trouble.
“I don’t have a sister named Ana,” she informed me without prelude. “Or a cousin. My mother is my father’s second wife. He was in his sixties when I was born, so if you’re looking for a Gutierrez in her thirties…”
She very purposefully trailed off and pulled past me. I barreled onward, pulling even with her an instant before the path narrowed to allow only one of us through at a time.
Victoria took the lead. “I will admit, something about the way you said that name—Ana Sofía Gutierrez—got me curious, so I called up the least overprotective and dictatorial of my many much-older brothers and asked if he knew of an Ana in the family.”
“Got any rogue Anas running around?” I asked. I could see the ground leveling out ahead. We were almost to the top. Campbell, Sadie-Grace, and Lily were only a few feet behind.
“My brother hung up on me,” Victoria informed me, “but not before ordering me to never so much as think that name again.”
I didn’t know Victoria, but I was willing to bet that her brother could not have stoked her curiosity more if he’d tried. I offered her a bit of information, in hopes that she’d be able to do something with it. “Ana was a Debutante with my mom. Midway through the year, the whole family moved.”
“That would be my brother Javier and his wife, Freja,” Victoria supplied, “which I know, because after Javier shut me down, I called my second-least overprotective and dictatorial older brother. He wouldn’t tell me what happened, but he did tell me who Ana was.”
“Black sheep of the family?” I guessed. It was a familiar story, close enough to my mom’s—and mine—that the answer mattered to me, viscerally.
“I didn’t even know Javier had a daughter,” Victoria replied as we came to a plateau. “He won’t talk about her. According to Rafi, no one in the family has heard a word from her in twenty years.”
Twenty years. Since she got pregnant. Before I could say anything, Lily and Sadie-Grace made it to the top of the cliff and took up positions beside us. Campbell followed, and without so much as a glance back at Victoria and me, she walked over to stand right at the cliff’s edge.
“What do we do with our suits?” Lily inquired politely. You would have thought she was asking about a coat closet, not the particulars of how and where we should strip.
“Leave your suits here.” Victoria gestured to the base of a large oak tree. “I’ll make sure someone fetches them for you. After.”
Sadie-Grace was the first one to ditch her bikini. Campbell was next, followed by Lily, whose experience with Secrets made her strangely adept at casually positioning her arms for maximal coverage.
“Pretend you’re getting a massage,” she advised me.
I made a face. Massages, saunas, spa days, and casual nudity were all things I could have done entirely without. But if I wanted an opportunity to get closer to the Gutierrez family, Victoria was it. And if I wanted to stay in Victoria’s orbit…
I needed the White Gloves.
So I got naked. And I jumped.
ulia. Joo-lee-uh.” Liv drew out the name.
Charlotte tried to catch Julia’s gaze to impart a silent warning, but the other girl, in true Julia style, didn’t have time for such nonsense.
Have it your way, Jules, Charlotte thought.
“Are you drunk?” Julia cut straight to the meat of the situation as she ignored Charlotte in favor of Liv.
Story of Charlotte’s life.
“Julia Ames.” Liv waved regally at Julia, like she was wearing a tiara and riding a Bison Day float, not slumped up against her father’s tombstone. “Took you long enough to get here.”
Julia finally spared a look for Charlotte. “Is she serious?”
“Deadly serious.” Liv beat Charlotte to an answer. “Get it? Deadly.”
“Liv.” Charlotte cut in before Julia could reply. Julia Ames was not a particularly sensitive individual. She was smart. She was merciless. She was Liv’s best friend. “I know you’re hurting, Livvy, but, sweetie…”
Liv stood—without stumbling, with far more grace than she should have been able to muster. “I’m not feeling sweet. I’m tired of sweet. Aren’t you, Julia?” Liv barely paused. “I’m tired of the rules. I’m tired of this place. I want…”
Charlotte watched as Liv spread her arms out to the sides, like she was soaking in the sun. Like she could fly.
“I want everything.” Liv closed her eyes. “People live, and they follow the rules, and then they die. Don’t you want more than that, Jules?” Liv’s voice dropped to a whisper as her hands fell back to her side. “I do.”
“We should get her home.” Julia ignored Liv in favor of speaking directly to Charlotte—for once.
We should, Charlotte thought. We should take Liv home and put her to bed. The grief was intense now, but it would get better. Liv would get better.
And things will go right back to the way they’ve always been.
Charlotte stepped toward Liv, responding to her—not Julia. “I do,” Charlotte said. “I want more, Liv. Your daddy said you could do anything you wanted to do in this life. Just this once…”
Charlotte knew this was a bad idea, but there was something buzzing inside her—power, maybe, the kind that came from knowing that she could finally break out of the role in which she’d been cast when her family moved to town in the fourth grade.
She didn’t have to be the good girl. The sensitive one. The sidekick.
She didn’t have to be Liv’s second-best friend.
“Just this once,” Charlotte repeated, “I want to break all of the rules.”
he summer air was warm, even in the dead of night. But as I bulleted downward, gathering speed, goose bumps rose on my skin. I didn’t have time to think about all the reasons that jumping off a cliff naked, in the dark, into a blackened body of water was a bad idea. My feet hit first, but I felt the sting of contact ten times more in my arms when they slapped the surface of the water, and my entire body plunged down into the deep. I’d thought it was dark outside, but that was nothing compared to the sensation of being completely submerged, unable to breathe, feeling my movement slowing, all too aware how easy it would be to forget which direction, in the pitch black, was up.
I kicked. It was only a matter of seconds—could have been two, could have been twenty—before I broke the surface. I gasped for air, even though I knew on some level that I hadn’t gone without it for long. From the moment I’d jumped until now, time had seemed to stretch sideways. My heart was thumping. I could hear other girls breaking the surface all around me, gasping and giggling. Adrenaline surged through my body.
And before I knew it, I was laughing.
“Anyone want to go again?”
We stayed in the water until someone had fetched our clothes. Most of the other Candidates had jumped off one of the two lower ledges. Victoria was the only senior member of the White Gloves who’d joined us at the top.
“That was…” Lily was pulling her swimsuit on beside me on the shore. They’d turned off all of the lights on the boat but one—for modesty’s sake.
Because we’re all so very modest.
“That was amazing.” Lily was giddy. “I thought we were going to die!”
“I didn’t,” Sadie-Grace said seriously. “I thought the rest of us were going to be fine, but Campbell was going to die.”
“I thought that maybe you had a heart condition that you didn’t know about.” Sadie-Grace paused. “Is this what Greer means when she says I let my imagination get the best of me?”
“No,” I replied before Campbell could. “What Greer means is that maybe you imagined her wearing a fake pregnancy belly. She’d give anything to convince you that you don’t know what you know.”
In the ultimate irony, Sadie-Grace’s stepmother—the third participant in my mom’s pregnancy pact, who’d lost her baby and hung the others out to dry—was currently faking a pregnancy. None of us had any idea how she thought that would work out, given that her August “due date” was quickly approaching.
“It’s not Greer’s fault she’s grumpy.” Sadie-Grace was the world’s most understanding stepdaughter. “Faking the third trimester is exhausting.”
“You have got to tell your dad,” Lily said for probably the hundredth time.
Campbell sidled up beside me.
“Later,” I told her quietly. I’ll tell you what Victoria told me later.
“Everybody decent?” Hope didn’t wait for a response to the question she’d just called out before she yelled, “Let there be light!”
One by one, the boat lights came back on—and then some. An instant later, music was booming from the direction of the boats.
There wasn’t much of a shoreline directly beneath the cliffs, but on either side, girls stood shivering on rocky ground. I could feel bits of sand and gravel pressing themselves into my own feet. The beat of the music was impossible to ignore.
Every inch of skin on my body felt alive.
“The Candidates are many,” Victoria called out. She was standing in the light now, her black hair soaked, the weight of the water pulling it straight. “The Chosen…”
“Are few.” The last words were yelled by more than one person.
“You know who else is few?” Campbell murmured beside me. “People with ovaries enough to jump off the…”
Top. My brain filled in the end of her sentence, but instead of finishing it, she screamed. The sound was horrible—piercing and guttural and without end.
“Campbell?” My heart rate had just stabilized, but I could feel it ticking upward, feel the chill of something in the air, the way I had on the way down.
Beside me, Sadie-Grace started screaming, too.
“Oh dear,” Lily said, preternaturally calm in a way that freaked me out more than the screams. “That’s…”
The rest of the sentence caught in her throat. I followed her gaze, to the place where the lake met the shore. Water sloshed gently against the rocks, and scattered among them…
…was a skull.
he’s almost here, Sawyer!”
“Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Just do it, Sadie-Grace. Pretend you’re still unconscious. Until we can move, until we can fight back, the name of the game is stall.”
here were numerous downsides to discovering human remains while cliff-jumping, naked, in the middle of the night. For example: explaining to the cops the circumstances surrounding the discovery and becoming acutely aware that your body and the body had been in the lake—in close proximity—together. Two weeks had passed, and I still didn’t feel like I’d showered enough.
I also hadn’t stopped wondering about the corpse—how old it was, who it was, how long it had been in the depths of Regal Lake before the storms had dredged it up.
As a bonus, I’d also spent the past two weeks “not grounded.” To say that my aunt had not been pleased when the Lake Patrol had escorted us home that night would have been an understatement. Since Lily and I were legally adults, Aunt Olivia had contented herself with very pointedly not scolding us and not punishing us, while simultaneously foisting so much family togetherness upon us that leaving home without her company had quickly become a fond memory and nothing more.
I’d taken to hiding out on the roof just to get a moment of peace. That was where I was when my phone rang. I answered it quickly, lest it announce my location to the occupants of the house. “Hello?”
I half expected it to be one of the White Gloves.
“Sawyer.” The voice on the other end of the phone paused after saying my name. “It’s Nick.”
The sound of his voice had me flashing back to The Big Bang and the moments after he’d jumped the bar.
“So I’m not Miss Taft anymore?” I asked pointedly, remembering the exact expression on Nick’s face as he’d taken the drunk frat boy off my hands: pissed at him, reluctantly appreciative of me and my ability to damn well take care of myself.
“Once someone starts a bar fight in my establishment and offers pointers on my tossing-out-dirtbags technique, we’re pretty much on a first-name basis by default.”
“I didn’t start the fight. I finished it. And if you keep tossing people out like that, you’re just asking for a case of tennis elbow.”
“Message received,” Nick told me. “Loud and clear.”
We descended into silence then. I thought about the way he’d looked tossing Frat Boy out on his ass. The clenched jaw, every muscle in his body tight.
“You still there?” he asked on the other end of the line.
“Yup,” I replied. After another second or two, I issued a reminder. “You called me.”
Another pause, shorter than the last. “I need a favor.”
Of course you do, I thought. Of course he hadn’t called just to reminisce about my endearing knack for self-defense. He’d had my number for months. If he’d wanted to call—at any point in time—he could have.
“What kind of favor?” I asked.
“Before we get into the specifics, I’d like to remind you that you owe me.”
“Debatable.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
He was right. After everything I’d helped Campbell put him through last spring, I did owe him. “What do you need, Nick?”
He replied, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I don’t speak incoherent mumbling.”
“There’s a party next weekend,” Nick gritted out. He did not appear to be relishing that statement. “A fund-raiser Davis Ames is throwing at the Arcadia hotel.” He said Ames like it was a curse word. “I need you to go with me.”
I’d never been much for dating, only partially because I’d never been the kind of girl that boys dated. I could handle catcalls and propositions and rumors about what might or might not have happened under the bleachers, but anything beyond that was virgin territory.
No pun intended.
“Sawyer?” Nick prompted.
“And here I thought you were going to ask me to plan a jewel heist,” I quipped, because quipping was easier than thinking about what he had asked in any level of detail.
“If I wanted to plan a jewel heist,” he retorted, “I would have called Campbell.”
Hearing him say her name didn’t hurt, even knowing their history. Thank God. My utter lack of an urge to wince reinforced for me that I was still on the right side of the fine line I’d spent my life skirting. Flirting was fine. Thinking was fine. Physicality, even, I could handle.
Just not feelings.
“Why didn’t you call Campbell?” I asked. They’d been each other’s method of blowing off steam, once, and if I owed him, she owed him big.
“Because,” came the reply. “I called you.”
That—and the way he’d said it, his voice softening—wasn’t something I had any intention of letting my mind linger on for long.
Luckily, Nick chose that moment to enlighten me as to why he wanted to go to some party badly enough to call in a favor. “I have a sister. She’s fifteen. Lives with our grandmother. Wants to do the stupid Debutante thing in a couple of years.”
He sounded so disgruntled at the idea that I grinned. “And this requires me going to a party with yo
u why?” I asked.
“I have money now.” He sounded disgruntled about that, too. “I just don’t have the connections she needs. Or the reputation.”
“Are you asking me to make you respectable?” I said, enjoying this more than I should have. “What is this, a Jane Austen novel?”
“I like Jane Austen,” he replied evenly. “And you owe me.”
I did—and as long as I owed him, that was all this had to be. A debt I could pay. Maybe we’d get another dance in.
Maybe I could get him out of my system.
“You have yourself a deal,” I said. “Mr. Ryan.”
Before he could respond to my use of his last name, Aunt Olivia called out for Lily and me from inside the house, and I stifled a groan.
“What was that?” Nick asked.
My traitor lips ticced upward. “Goodbye, Nick.”
I hung up just in time to hear Aunt Olivia trill out, “Who wants to make personalized memo boards? And then I’ll show y’all the absolutely darling little outfits I got for Greer’s shower.”
My desire to make a memo board for a dorm room I hadn’t even agreed to live in yet ranked only slightly above my utter lack of inclination to attend a baby shower for a baby who I knew for a fact did not exist. I’d been expecting Sadie-Grace’s stepmother to have a “miscarriage” for months. When we’d received the invitation to the shower, I’d even tried telling Aunt Olivia that Greer was faking her pregnancy.
Aunt Olivia had shushed me. “Don’t be silly, Sawyer. I’m sure you simply misunderstood.” Personally, I thought witnessing a woman strapping on a fake pregnancy belly was the kind of thing that was pretty darn hard to “misunderstand,” but Aunt Olivia wouldn’t hear a word about it. “To think that any woman would do such a thing! Pshaw. I’ve had enough ridiculousness for one summer, thank you very much. We’re going to that shower. End of story.”
“Don’t you think the girls have been punished enough?” Uncle J.D. asked, right inside the window. As much as I agreed with the sentiment, the fatherly tone with which he’d said girls, plural, hit me like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.
Deadly Little Scandals Page 6