Graham stands up. “If you’ll excuse me, ladies.” I have to remind myself he is going to the bathroom. This is not a tactic. This is not a plan.
Margo and I watch him disappear up the stairs. As soon as he is out of earshot, Margo lights another cigarette. Bean has gone quiet. I’m about to ask where she is when Margo announces, “He’s bored,” like it’s a death sentence. She ashes her cigarette too early. “He’s been bored for a while now.”
“You’re such a dear to care so much,” I growl.
Smoke spools from Margo’s nose, dragonlike. “You’re going to lose.”
My nerves coil. “You set me up?”
Margo shakes her head. “She’s smarter than you. She plays dirty. Do you know how she got her job at Alphaspire? She left a trail of ruined careers behind her. She destroyed people’s lives. You won’t best her. She’s nasty. I selected her especially for you. You’re going to lose.”
No one has ever lost before. There is no hard, fast rule for what will happen. But it is obvious. These people don’t lose. If I do, I am not one of them. If I am not one of them, I am out. Graham will leave me, and that is just for starters. I know too much. I can’t just walk away.
“Does Graham know?” It’s the only thing I care about. Is he in on it, too?
“Not yet, but it’s for the best. I’m doing him a favor. He’ll appreciate it in the long run. Not that long.” The sad thing is, I don’t think she’s wrong. He is bored. He’s tired of me. I don’t want Margo to be right but she is. “It’s her or you.” Her dimples are showing. She thinks I still have a chance. I do still have a chance.
If anything, this makes it easier. Demi is nasty. She’s destroyed people’s lives. She’s not the nice, nervous girl she seems to be. She’s not a victim; she’s an adversary.
I can prove myself to Margo, to Graham. I can keep them entertained. I can shock them.
I will destroy her.
LYLA
I drink too much at dinner, and by the time we get home, my body feels tight. My muscles ache. I want to collapse into bed. Graham reeks of cigarettes. He smoked all the way home. He takes one last puff and pitches the cigarette into the dark. In California. Where the whole state is a tinderbox.
Our entryway is pitch-black.
“The bulb must have gone out,” Graham mutters at the gate, looping his hand around my waist to help me, shepherding me down the short steps to the courtyard. My foot lands on something soft. It gives beneath my weight and I startle, try to back away when it caves in with a wet popping sound.
I scream. Graham flicks on his phone light. It washes over the steps and I see Bean lying on our patio. Her eyes are glassy. Her tongue licks the floor. Blood stretches like fingers toward our door.
Graham pulls me back up the steps. “Oh, my God.”
“I’m going to throw up.” But I don’t.
“She’s dead.” He peers over my shoulder. “Maybe a coyote . . .”
I leave a bloody footprint on the stairs. I slip my shoe off and stand in one shoe.
“Shit.” Graham’s fingers play along my hip. We scan the dark: the cold stones of our patio, the sharp drop to the apartment below, the weird trees twitching. He kisses me quick on my neck. “Margo will never recover.”
“We can’t tell her,” I say just as fast. She will think it’s me. She will think its retaliation for what she confessed to tonight. Even though I was with her. Even though I have an alibi. The dog is on our doorstep. “She’ll find a way to blame us.” We both know I mean me.
Graham nods, but I don’t know if I can trust him to keep a secret from Margo. “Maybe we should call the police,” he says. “I don’t think an animal would do this.” A human is an animal, but I know what he means.
* * *
THE POLICE SEEM skeptical at first, but once Graham gets on the phone, they’re convinced. Graham switches out the shattered bulb on the outdoor light. He bags it.
“Evidence,” he says, proud of his work.
Two officers arrive. They look like father and son, like they were cracked from the same mold: black hair, cropped pants, one neck more crinkled than the other.
They seem happy to take their time, circling the body, taking pictures on their iPhones of the dog, the broken gate. They seem like amateurs dressed as cops, the way every cop does.
The younger one bends down, brushes the fur aside where the blood is the darkest. “It looks like a knife wound—”
“We can’t say for sure.” They are like this on everything.
“It was probably the same guy who blew through your gate.”
“That’s just conjecture.”
“Looks targeted.”
“It coulda been anyone.”
Like the best partners, they balance each other out so nothing gets solved.
Graham is walking the baby cop through the intricacies of our discovery, waving his cigarette with boozy enthusiasm. “We were just having dinner with my mother! It’s the house with the tower! Up there! I noticed the light was out and then—I was helping my wife through the gate and she stepped right on it! It made a popping sound!” He slaps his hands together. I flinch.
The officer moves to the dog, points his flashlight directly at the wound as a fly crawls free. “And your gate was broken when?”
“About a week ago,” I say.
He drops the light. “You should have it fixed.”
The other officer peers down into the yard. “Does anyone else live here?”
“Demi.” My stomach drops. In my shock, I forgot about her. What if this is her retaliation? But this hurts Margo, not me. Maybe she is setting me up. Maybe I am missing some crucial clue. Maybe this is all part of some master plan.
It doesn’t make sense, and that’s the scariest thing about it. I keep searching Bean’s body for evidence it was me. Even though I know it wasn’t. I am so sure I am being set up, so sure I am to blame, so sure this is all about me.
Graham hitches up his pants. “There’s the van, too.” He points through the open gate, where the van glimmers in the dark. “It just turned up one day. Can you open it? See what’s inside?”
“We’d need a warrant,” the older officer grunts. “Probable cause.”
I shiver something loose. “Why us? Why is all this happening to us?”
LYLA
I wish the police would take the body with them, but I know from experience that the police expect the victim to clean up the crime scene. “What should we do with it?”
“I’ll take care of it.” Graham slaps his bloodstained hands together, and when that doesn’t work, he walks over to the fountain to wash them.
I follow him, perching on the edge of the fountain beside him. “Do you think it was Demi?”
He cocks his head. “Motive?”
“Margo told me she was a plant when you went to the bathroom.” I debated telling him, but I can’t help myself as usual. I am too keen to see his reaction, too hopeful that he will leap to my defense, storm the castle, demand Margo change her plan.
“A plant?”
“Demi is a plant. Margo set this whole thing up to take me down.”
“So Demi knows about the game?”
“No. But Margo chose her because she’s smart. And nasty apparently. She doesn’t think I can beat her.”
He grunts softly. “How funny.” That’s it. I just confessed to him that his mother wants me to lose and all he can say is How funny?
“Do you want me to lose?”
“Of course not, darling. I want you to slaughter her.”
Someone screams. I wheel around to find the source. Demi drops her shopping bags at the gate. They spill down the stairs: necklaces, bags and dresses. Her face is ashen. Her eyes are wide. Her shock seems genuine, or she is working hard to make it appear that way.
Graham leaps up from the fountain, races toward her. When he reaches her, he wraps his arms around her, the way he does me sometimes. It’s odd watching your husband hold another woman. It’s like an out-of-body experience. For a second, I am her watching myself.