“It was her or us,” Sloane says at last. “She could get me expelled. She could send Nicole to jail, Margot. This is the best for you, too.”
I feel myself nodding, agreeing, because I know she’s right. Lucy saw what happened between Eliza and me. She could have placed me at the party; she could have come clean about everything. None of our secrets would have been safe with her alive, dangling them over us the way she always did. Playing with us like another one of her games, her entire life an illusion she simply created and pretended to be true. The irony of it is that Lucy is the one who helped me see it, the necessity of her death: talking about murder with such indifference, one scale rising while the other one falls.
“Once you find the right person, the right reason.”
It is possible to both love her and hate her; to trust and mistrust her. To feel so radically on both sides of the coin.
It is possible to want my friend back more than anything and to also want her to stay gone for good.
CHAPTER 66
We work quickly, quietly, wrapping Lucy’s body in layers of game bags we found stored in the corner of the shed. We’ve seen the boys use them before, lugging fresh kill back to bleed out, the very thing created to keep a carcass fresh. Everything we need is right here, right in this very room, the perfect place to bring something to die: a hose to rinse the remaining blood from the floor, a brush to scrub all traces of her clean.
The smell of death already there, ever-present. Just another body to add to the count.
“I’m sorry,” Nicole says for the hundredth time, practically shivering from shock as she stands off to the side. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault—”
“No, it’s not,” Sloane says, crossing her arms, her anger toward Lucy hardened into a scab, crusted over, protecting her from feeling a single ounce of regret. “I already told you. It’s hers.”
“Where are we going to put her?” Nicole asks, the two of them staring down at Lucy in her makeshift coffin, long and lean and wrapped in twine. “How are we going to get her out of here?”
“We’re not,” I say, the plan that’s started to formulate in my mind finally clear enough to communicate. “We’re going to put her in the cave.”
The cave, the basement. That little crawl space nobody knows is there. It’s risky, I know, keeping her in the house like this, but it feels even riskier to move her somewhere new. We could be seen; she could be found. Plus, it’s cool down there, so much cooler than the rest of the house, that draft that’s always creeping into my bedroom and chilling the floor. It might become a problem once it gets hot, in the heat of the summer, but that’s what the game bags are for and we’ll be gone by then, anyway. Everyone will be gone. Kappa Nu is suspended; it’s only a matter of time before they’re disbanded for good. We won’t be able to live here without them and they won’t be hazing anyone anymore. They won’t be using that space at all.
Once we leave, this place will sit empty, abandoned, the only people in the world aware of its existence never inclined to speak a word of it again.
“What do we do when the police start looking?” Nicole asks, panic creeping back into her voice. “People are going to notice she’s gone. Her car is still here; she won’t show up for work—”
“We’re going to play dumb,” Sloane says, a single bead of sweat trickling down her neck. “We’re going to let them think she ran away.”
“But why would they believe she just ran away?”
“Because they’re going to find things,” I say. “I’ll show you when we get inside.”
* * *
It’s strange, the clarity of my thoughts as we walk back into the house. Like Halloween night, swallowing that pill, the edges of everything are as sharp as the knife that’s been scrubbed three times and left to dry in the kitchen. It’s two in the morning by the time we move Lucy, get the shed cleaned up and the gravel in the driveway rearranged to hide the pressure of her body being dragged across the yard.
The little door on the side of the house latched permanently shut, obscured by the azaleas, only visible if you know just where to look.
“Shouldn’t she have that if she ran away?” Nicole asks as we walk into the living room, gesturing to Lucy’s phone sitting abandoned on the floor.
“No,” Sloane says, the remaining adrenaline making her fingers twitch. “They can track that. If it brings them here but they never find it, they’ll know she’s still on the property.”
I walk toward the phone and pick it up slowly, the collection of stars on the lock screen sending a fresh wave of sadness through my chest. I swipe up, attempting to get inside and instead getting a grid of digits as I rack my brain for any combination that could have some type of meaning, but nothing comes to mind. Lucy never shared anything with us—no special birthday or anniversary; no unique mixture of numbers she held close. We knew so little about her, only her name, and I feel the sudden prickle of knowing on my neck as I punch at the digits and watch the screen open.
Her name, Lucy. 5829.
She didn’t know much about herself, either.
“Here,” I say at last, navigating to her pictures before flipping through them quickly, going back months, years, until I find what I already knew would be there. It’s a picture of Eliza and me taken through her kitchen window, Mr. Jefferson sitting just by our side. We’re all together, laughing, the image grainy enough to know that Lucy had tried to zoom in as she watched us from a distance.
Somehow, after thinking about the picture she stole from Eliza’s bedroom, I had a feeling there would be more.
“Once the police realize she’s missing, we’ll let them find her phone and look through her pictures,” I say, flipping some more, taking in the others: Eliza and me in her bedroom, stomachs-down on the mattress. Eliza and Levi on the dock, her head light on his shoulder as they huddled close on the wood.
“They’ll figure out who she is,” I finish. “We’re just helping them put together a picture that already exists.”
“You’re going to let them think—”
“It explains them both,” I say. “Eliza and Levi. It’ll take care of everything.”
“Why don’t we just tell them ourselves?” Nicole asks, always so innocent. “Save them the trouble?”
“We can’t give ourselves a motive,” I say, shaking my head. “We don’t want them looking into us or the house any more than necessary.”
Nicole stays quiet, her expression unsure, but Sloane is starting to nod along now, too. I watch as she walks with purpose into Lucy’s room, reemerging with her wallet as she pulls out Lucy’s ID, a few credit cards. Things she would have taken if she decided to skip town.
“This is what Lucy does,” she says. “She takes off without warning. In the beginning, we act completely unfazed. Totally unbothered to hear that she’s gone.”
“Like it’s normal,” I add. “But after a while, we start to get nervous, scared. Everything they learn about Lucy, we act like we’re learning it for the first time, too.”
“Then one of us has to crack, just for a second,” Sloane says. We both look at Nicole, the weakest link. “Accidentally tell them something that will confirm their suspicions.”
“Like what?” she whispers, her face draining into a ghostly shade of white.
“That night at Penny Lanes,” I say. “The boys will remember it, too. They can corroborate it if they’re asked.”
Nicole nods, her cheeks hollow and pale before walking to the couch and collapsing onto the cushions, pushing her head deep into her hands.
“They’ll just think we’re na?ve,” I say, walking over to her now and rubbing her shoulders. “That our only crime is being too innocent to see her for who she really is.”
“That we’re just girls,” Sloane adds, her eyes distant and detached. “Just a couple of harmless little girls.”
CHAPTER 67
NOW