“Before you go getting high-and-mighty, you should know that with Ana, with that baby? I didn’t take a dime from anyone. That wasn’t business. That was me taking pity on a girl that your world had spit out like she was nothing.”
I wasn’t sure I bought the idea that Ellen had helped Ana out of the goodness of her heart, but I knew better than to say that out loud.
Not when we were this close to answers.
“You helped Ana find a home for the baby.” My heart was beating in my chest like there was actually a person in there with a gun, firing it over and over into my rib cage. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“A good home,” Sadie-Grace added.
A certain kind of home, I thought, but what came out of my mouth was: “Did Lillian help you?”
My brain didn’t really latch onto the question until after I’d asked it. But it made sense. I had no idea how Greer had found Two Arrows—or Ellen or the pregnant Beth. But when it came to imagining the reverse—Ellen looking for a certain kind of home for a newborn—it wasn’t all that hard to picture her asking the one person she knew who ran in those circles.
Two, I thought suddenly. Davis Ames grew up hereabouts. She knows two people who run in those circles.
“Lillian don’t know a thing,” Ellen spat, like she meant that, all the way down to the marrow in her bones. “And she certainly didn’t help.”
“But you found a family,” I pressed. “For Ana’s baby.”
And that family paid Ana, even if they didn’t pay you. She left here with enough money to travel. She never had to ask her family for money. All these years later, she still has expensive tastes.
“Just tell me who took the baby,” I said. “That’s all I want to know, and you’ll never have to see either one of us again.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.” For the first time, Ellen sounded like Lillian.
She sounded the way my grandmother had when I’d realized the truth about my father.
What is going on here?
Ellen took another drink. Looked me over. Looked me down. Opened her mouth—and then, before she could say a word, there was a knock at the door. I wasn’t sure at first that she was going to answer, but she downed the rest of the drink, then stood.
“Don’t take it in your mind to wander,” she warned me. “You hear?”
“I hear.”
“I also hear!” Sadie-Grace added cheerfully. “No wandering for me.”
Ellen snorted and disappeared into the hallway. I heard the front door open, heard a muted, murmured conversation of some kind.
My eyes wandered. Ellen had told me to stay put. She hadn’t said I couldn’t look. The kitchen was small, small enough that I could have reached out and touched the refrigerator from where I sat. There were pictures—dozens of them, if not hundreds—stuck to the side. The latest additions were hung up with magnets: photographs of Makayla and a dozen other kids within five years of her age. Some of them were school pictures, but more had been printed out on plain white paper.
The side and front of the fridge was papered with them, and when I lifted my hand to flip one of the pictures up, I realized there were more underneath.
Years’ worth.
The ones on the bottom were faded and taped to the fridge. I looked through them, half expecting to see my grandmother, before I realized that none of these photographs were that old. The oldest one I could spot featured Ellen, looking more like Lillian than she did now, like life hadn’t yet carved their fortunes into the wear and tear on the skin. The picture in question was a family photo—Ellen and six kids.
The youngest couldn’t have been more than four or five, and the oldest, the teenager was…
What the hell…I leaned closer, nearly falling out of my chair. The picture hadn’t aged well. I couldn’t make out the details of the faces as precisely as I would have liked, but Ellen’s oldest child bore a striking resemblance to her mother, to my grandmother…
And to Aunt Olivia. She looks a lot like Aunt Olivia.
“Anyone ever tell you to keep your hands to yourself?” Ellen reappeared in the hallway outside the kitchen. “I told you not to wander.”
“I didn’t,” I said, letting my hand drop to the side and the years of photographs fall back into place, obscuring the one I’d been looking at.
“I have some business to tend to,” Ellen said, giving me a hard look that said my snooping had not gone unnoticed. “I’ll give you girls one more glass of lemonade, and then I need you gone.”
She walked over to the kitchen counter. Her back was to us as she added ice to the pitcher. My mind went briefly to the business she’d referred to—and the person she’d talked to at the door—but I forced myself to focus on the reason I’d come here.
All I needed was a name.
“One more glass of lemonade,” I countered as she poured. “And the name of the family that adopted Ana’s baby.”
Ellen sat down and took a long gulp of her own drink. “Girl.”
At first, I thought she was addressing me—or possibly Sadie-Grace—but her next words made her meaning clear.
“The baby was a girl,” Ellen said. “Arrived at daybreak. If I’d been naming her, I would have called her Dawn.”
Get to the point, I thought. But somehow, in my head, the words came out muddy. Slow. I felt suddenly like I was seeing double. I tried to say Sadie-Grace’s name. I might have succeeded, but I wasn’t sure.
I was sure that, across the table, Sadie-Grace was now slumped over.
I tried to stand, grabbing at the table in an attempt to find purchase. But all I ended up doing was knocking over the lemonade.
The lemonade.
I could see Ellen in the kitchen, her back to us. I could hear her putting what I’d thought was ice into the drinks.
“What…” I couldn’t keep standing. I was going to fall. Things were already fuzzy around the edges, and those fuzzy edges were going black. “Why would you…”
“Because,” another voice said from the hallway, “I asked her to.” Heels clicked against the linoleum as their owner strode toward me.
I went down. Ellen caught me under the armpits. I couldn’t even feel her grasp as she lowered me to the floor.
I could barely see the person standing over me. I blinked, forcing things to come briefly into focus.
“You brought this on yourself, young lady,” Aunt Olivia told me. Then she turned to Ellen. “Thank you for your assistance, Mama.”
iv made it back from delivering Trina to wherever it was she’d come from and greeted Charlotte with a smile—and an order. “Help me unload the car, Char.”
It soon became apparent that what Charlotte was supposed to unload was camping equipment—several thousand dollars’ worth, at least.
“I tried to talk her out of it,” J.D. said as he hauled the tents and sleeping bags down from the car. He’d gone along with Liv to drop Trina off.
Charlotte wondered what else Liv might have come back with if he hadn’t.
“You drove?” Charlotte asked him quietly as she helped him unload the supplies.
“Of course I did,” J.D. replied. “The last thing she needs is a DUI. Liv’s not herself right now, Charlotte.”
Charlotte wanted to agree, but she thought back to the way Liv had gone hurtling off the edge of the cliff, the way she’d lorded her power over Trina, then turned on a dime and decided they could be friends.
That was classic Liv Taft.
J.D. was just too smitten to see it.
Charlotte woke in the middle of the night to find that Sterling wasn’t beside her. He had been, when they’d fallen asleep.
He’d kissed her.
Charlotte could feel her heart beating, just thinking about it. She sat up and realized that Sterling wasn’t the only one missing. Julia was asleep on top of her sleeping bag. Thomas was passed out beside her.
But J.D., Sterling, and Liv were gone.
Charlotte stood up. It was dark, b
ut the moon overhead was bright. She heard something in the distance.
In the direction of the cliff.
Wishing she had a flashlight, Charlotte followed the noise. There was a giggle, and another, unmistakable sound.
Cheeks burning, Charlotte quickly turned on her heels. What J.D. and Liv were doing out there was none of her business.
And then, on the way back to her sleeping bag, she ran smack-dab into J.D.
woke up in darkness. At first, I thought there was something wrong with my vision, but as my eyes adjusted, I realized that it was the dead of night. It took me a second to focus visually and longer than that for my brain to catch up. Scant moonlight overhead made it possible for me to just barely see—and eventually, realize—where I was.
A hole.
I could smell the dirt all around me, but I couldn’t feel it against my skin. I was lying on my back, my eyes skyward. I couldn’t feel anything except for my face.
I couldn’t move.
“Sawyer, are you there?”
Turning my head felt like swimming through cement. I only managed a slight movement, not enough to even brush my cheek against the dirt below me. “I’m here.”
“I can’t feel my feet,” Sadie-Grace told me, her voice high, the words bursting out at rapid speed. “Or my hands. Or my elbows…”
To say that Sadie-Grace was not the optimal person to wake up drugged and halfway buried alive next to would have been an understatement. She was 50 percent uncontrollable babbling and 50 percent utterly misplaced optimism.
When Aunt Olivia came to check on us, I fully expected Sadie-Grace to start chatting away and blow our cover, but she stayed quiet. I heard the sound of Aunt Olivia moving up above—and then the sound of a shovel hitting dirt.
I waited for her to toss it in the hole, waited for my proper, prim, perfectionist aunt to properly, primly, perfectly bury us alive.
But she didn’t.
After a minute or two, she dropped the shovel and left, and I resumed my job of managing the situation—and Sadie-Grace. The entire time, I silently reminded myself, over and over again, Aunt Olivia called Ellen “Mama.”
I had no idea what to make of that, and as I listened to Sadie-Grace insisting that the glass was half full and that she could somehow give herself a boost out of this godforsaken hole, I tried to make any of this make sense.
We’d gone to my grandmother’s twin to ask her about Ana’s baby. Lily had been there when we’d arrived, and by the time we’d gotten midway through our conversation with Ellen, Aunt Olivia had interrupted.
Not my aunt. If she’s Ellen’s daughter, she’s not my aunt.
I thought back to the picture I’d seen on the fridge in the Two Arrows house: Ellen, with her six children. The oldest was a girl, one who closely resembled Ellen—and Lillian.
And Aunt Olivia. The picture was old enough and the resolution crappy enough that I hadn’t been able to tell how close the resemblance between Ellen’s daughter and Aunt Olivia was.
What were the chances that they looked identical?
“I’m not leaving you.” Sadie-Grace was stubborn. She’d made her way out of the hole, but didn’t want to leave me. Unfortunately, whatever drug we’d been given was wearing off more slowly for me. The feeling was just now starting to return to my body. Even if Sadie-Grace could somehow get me out of what amounted to an open grave, until I could shake the numbness, until I could really move—I’d just slow her down.
“You have to.” I willed her to listen to me. “I have no idea where we are, but you need to be somewhere else when she gets back.”
The hole was significantly lonelier without Sadie-Grace. I had too much time to think about the fact that I might not get out of here.
About all the things I might never get to say.
I forced my arms to move. The movement hurt. I’d never been so grateful for pain in my entire life. It only hurts if you can feel it. I can feel my arms. The legs are getting there.
Sadie-Grace had left me propped up. Trying to shift my weight sent me facedown into the dirt. I managed to roll, all too aware that if I’d ended up facedown when Aunt Olivia—or whoever the hell she was—had tossed us down here, I probably would have suffocated.
Who knew what could happen still?
Sadie-Grace will get help. I struggled to my knees, trying not to really think about the fact that I was pinning my future survival on Sadie-Grace Waters, who had once told me, in all seriousness, that she thought that fish probably went to a separate heaven, because in regular heaven, people ate fish.
“Sawyer?” In the distance, I heard someone call my name. “Sadie-Grace? Are you guys out there?”
Campbell, I thought. Thank God.
y rescuer quickly proved to enjoy playing hero almost as much as she relished telling me how paranoid and deluded I seemed. And, yes, the story I’d just told Campbell sounded far-fetched, but what about our lives for the past year hadn’t? Regardless, persuading Campbell Ames that I hadn’t lost my mind currently ranked a distant third priority, behind finding Sadie-Grace and getting the hell off of King’s Island before our kidnapper came back.
“Please tell me you have a way off this island.” I leaned my weight into Campbell and allowed her to help me hobble toward the edge of the tree line. I might have been able to walk on my own, but for now, as the last of the drugs wore off, I’d take all the help I could get.
“Of course I have a way off the island,” Campbell retorted. “Do you think I swam here? My Jet Ski’s beached on the east shore.”
I wondered if Sadie-Grace had found it yet. The island wasn’t that big. I’d taken Campbell in the direction my fellow captive had gone, but so far, there was no sign of her. For someone with an utter lack of stealth, Sadie-Grace was surprisingly good at hiding her tracks.
“How did you find us?” I asked Campbell as we stepped into a clearing. The added moonlight now visible overhead cast just enough light that I was finally able to take in her appearance. “Also: nice robe.”
Beneath the scarlet robe, Campbell wore nothing but a thin white shift and long white gloves.
“When I was the only one of the four of us to show up for initiation,” Campbell said, “I was suspicious. When Victoria told me that Lily didn’t make the final cut, I assumed that you and Sadie-Grace had bowed out in solidarity, but then Victoria said that she’d heard from Lily—that Lily had said the White Gloves should expect both of you in attendance tonight.”
“She made us promise,” I remembered out loud. At the time, I’d been annoyed.
“How did you know we were on the island?” I asked Campbell again, wondering what strange alignment of the stars had caused Aunt Olivia to bring us here.
“We knew you were here because once initiation wrapped up,” a new voice said behind me, “we asked Sadie-Grace’s little boyfriend to use the Find Your Friend app on his phone, and it told us your location was awfully close to ours.”
I turned toward the voice, nearly throwing Campbell off-balance. A moment later, two figures emerged from the woods—Victoria Gutierrez and a beaming Sadie-Grace Waters.
“I found help,” Sadie-Grace told me cheerfully. “And you found Campbell!” She paused for maybe half a second and then babbled happily on. “I’m wearing a smartwatch. Miss Olivia took our phones while we were unconscious, but she must have forgotten about my watch, so Boone was able to track it. You know, in a way, this means Boone found us. Very heroic.”
Even on the tail end of having been drugged, kidnapped, and thrown in a hole, Sadie-Grace glowed when she talked about Boone. I couldn’t help thinking that it would never occur to her to keep anyone at arm’s length. She didn’t protect her heart. She wouldn’t even have known how.
If I’d been the only one in that hole, there wouldn’t have been anyone to track me, I thought, the realization gumming up my brain like tar. Nick didn’t even know that I was gone.
“Yes, Sadie-Grace,” Campbell said with an elaborate roll of her
eyes. “Boone is the real hero in all of this. Now, might I suggest we find Hope and get the hell out of here before the storm hits?”
“Hope’s here?” I asked.
“Everyone else cleared out after initiation,” Campbell replied. “But since Hope’s the one with good enough taste to have chosen me as her replacement, she hung back when I did.”
“She didn’t stay for you,” Victoria informed Campbell. “Hope lives on the edge. She likes trouble.”
“And she’s on this island,” I said. “Somewhere.”
I had no idea what, exactly, the person calling herself Olivia Taft had planned to do with us, or why she’d chosen this island as the place to do it, but given that we’d kept all things White Glove a secret from her, I had to believe that she’d expected this island to be as vacant and abandoned as advertised.
Thunder boomed in the distance. Victoria raised the hood of her scarlet robe and turned toward Campbell. “What do you think the chances are that Hope doubled back to the boats?”
“Only one way to find out,” Campbell replied. As we limped our way toward the east side of the island, I processed the fact that Victoria hadn’t asked a single question about why Sadie-Grace and I had missed initiation or why we were covered in dirt and still unsteady on our feet.
I wondered how much Sadie-Grace had told her.
I wondered how much of what Sadie-Grace had told her she’d believed.
The last twenty yards to the shore, I spent every step expecting “Aunt Olivia” to pop out of the shadows. Was she still on the island? Or had she left us, assuming that Sadie-Grace and I were well and truly contained? Or did she leave when she realized that we weren’t the only ones on the island?
“What the hell?” Campbell’s voice went up an octave as we arrived at our destination. “Where’s my Jet Ski?”
Even through the dark, I could tell that the gravelly beach on the east shore was bare. No boats. No Hope.
“My ride’s gone, too,” Victoria stated calmly. All four of us stared out at the water.
Deadly Little Scandals Page 22