“One of you planted the knife in Tanya’s room,” Chloe murmurs. “For me to find it.”
“None of that makes any sense.” I frown. “If the goal was to make it seem like Tanya was the culprit, then why kill her too? It ruined the obvious suspect. It threw doubt on the whole thing again.” Which makes me think you put the knife in there yourself, I want to add, but I refrain.
“Unless there are two separate killers?” Chloe says. “Maybe Tanya did kill Poppy after all. And then someone killed Tanya.”
“For revenge on Poppy’s murder?” I shake my head. “That’s even more crazy. Something isn’t right here.”
“Besides Tanya and Poppy being murdered, you mean?” Esther puts in.
It still feels unreal, as if I’m trapped in some awful nightmare. Any second now I’m expecting Poppy and Tanya to walk through the door, claiming it was some kind of elaborate prank, that they were pretending.
“What happened to the painting?” Chloe asks.
I’m struggling to keep up with her train of thought. “What painting?”
She gestures out the window, as if that will help. Outside, the storm has picked up. We can hear the rain in the pitch black, only visible when a flash of lightning sparks the whole island. Thunder always follows closely behind, louder than anything I’ve ever heard back home.
“From the scavenger hunt,” Chloe says. “After last night, we all had things from the scavenger hunt. The Capri-Sun wrapper was outside my window. You had the broken mirror, Annabel. Esther woke up with lipstick on her stomach. I didn’t find the painting at all. It’s vanished.”
“Maybe it just blew away,” I suggest. “The winds were already starting to pick up earlier.”
“Maybe.” She isn’t convinced.
The ruined canvas was the worst item in that stupid game.
Poppy’s painting. Her final art project ten years ago.
We must all be thinking about it, because Esther brings the subject up. “Before she died, Poppy said there was more to come from the scavenger hunt. Do you think she was going to make us relive every moment?”
“I think so,” I say. “But she never got the chance. That was the reason she brought us all back, wasn’t it?”
“To make us talk about what happened at the art exam.”
Chloe clears her throat. “Tanya always said we should have just brought it up at the start, apologised and dealt with it. We were the ones insisting it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Because Poppy was the one who said she was willing to let the past go!” My voice is raised, but I can’t help it. “Why should we bother dredging it up? It really wasn’t that bad!”
“About that,” Chloe says. “I tried to bring it up at the time, but none of you would listen. It’s about the burglary.”
“The burglary?” Esther finishes her tea. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Well, I told you, the thief stole my laptop.” Chloe starts drumming her fingers on the table, a nervous habit. “And that was all they stole, so the police thought it was some kind of weird fan stalker thing.”
“Yes, so?”
“It had the video.”
My heart sinks.
“The video?” Esther’s face falls. “You don’t mean that video?”
Chloe nods.
“I thought you’d deleted that years ago,” Esther hisses. “What the hell were you thinking, keeping that on your laptop like that?”
“I did delete it originally! It wasn’t like I was watching it every day or something! It was an accident,” Chloe insists. “It transferred over with my old files when I switched laptops. It must have been saved in an archive or something. I only knew it was there after the laptop was stolen, when I was checking my backup drive and found it.”
Esther stands up and grabs Chloe by the shoulders, shaking her. “You stupid bitch. Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I tried to! None of you would listen. None of you wanted to talk about the past. You all pretended like nothing ever happened.”
“Oh, don’t use that excuse. You should have tried harder to tell us. Too busy fucking Annabel’s husband to worry about it.”
Stung, Chloe shakes herself free of Esther’s grasp, and stands up too. “But the point is, what if it was Poppy who burgled me?”
“Poppy?” Esther echoes. “But how?”
“She knew our addresses,” I say, realising what Chloe is getting at. “She posted those invitations to us. How did she know our addresses? I never thought to wonder about it. I guess I just figured she’d found out somehow, but how? And when? How long had she been watching us? Making her plans?”
Esther’s face has gone very pale. “If Poppy was the one who stole your laptop, then she had the video. She’s had it for months and months. She knows for sure now exactly what happened that day and what we did.”
“She’s been planning this for a long time,” I whisper, horrified.
Esther is less appalled. “Annabel, it’s alright! She’s dead. She never got to follow through with anything else. This is all just speculation.”
The bruises on Esther’s neck have turned green, large angry rings that wrap themselves around.
“What else was she planning?” I say. “What if she’s already done it, sent something to everyone we know? She said there was more. What if her being dead doesn’t matter because it’s already been done?”
“No.” Chloe buries her face in her hands. “No, no, no. She can’t have.”
“You idiot.” Esther rounds on Chloe again. “And you, Annabel. You both need to calm down!”
And then everything goes black.
Chloe screams; I do too, I can’t help it. We’re plunged into darkness. Lightning flashes, and for a brief second I see Chloe and Esther, equally as terrified, and then it’s black again. A loud growl of thunder rumbles over our heads, shaking the lodge, and then all we can hear is the hissing of rain, powering down on the roof in an unrelenting tirade.
“Shit, what’s happening?”
“I can’t see anything!”
“Fuck!” Esther collides with a chair and sends it smashing to the ground.
“What do we do?” I shout.
“There are torches under the sink!” Esther calls back. I don’t know why we’re shouting; something about the panic, the sudden blindness, seems to necessitate it. “I saw them while we were looking for the bloody flares. Fourth cupboard to the right of the fridge. If we could just get there.”
I’m not sure whether the others are trying. I fumble my way along, feeling the cold walls with my fingertips. It seems to take an age, stepping like this, afraid at any moment something is going to trip me up, each of us aware that we’re in a room with a killer and we won’t be able to see where they’re coming from.
My hands find a kitchen counter, scraping at the edge. Moving across, I find the fridge, a different material to the rest.
“I’ve found the fridge!” I yell. “Fifth cupboard along?”
“Fourth! I’m almost there too from the other way!”
“I can’t move!” That’s Chloe, shrieking from a short distance away. She clearly hasn’t even stepped an inch, frozen to the spot. I don’t blame her.
I count along, feeling the grooves of the cupboard doors to make sure I’m counting correctly, and then fling open the cupboard door I think is fourth. I collide with several random objects, hearing them spill out onto the kitchen tile, making crashing sounds.
“What are you doing?” Chloe cries. “What’s happening?”
“Just feeling around for the torches!” On my right, something grabs my arm, and I scream again.
“It’s me!” Esther says. “Let me help too.”
A particularly close bolt of lightning crashes down outside. I’m sure it has hit the island. For a moment the ground seems to pulsate, reacting to the blow. But it’s a blessing in disguise: illuminated finally, the cupboard becomes visible, and right at the back tucked between two cardboard boxes of cleaning products I can see four torches.
Esther and I reach for them at the same time, smashing our hands together. She even scratches me in what I hope is an accidental move. She grabs one and switches it on, just as we’re plunged into darkness once more. I grab two, switching one on and keeping the other for Chloe.
I shine a spotlight across the room, and we find Chloe rooted to the spot, scared. Dodging the various things that fell out onto the ground in my search, we hurry around back to her and I pass her the third torch, which she switches on straight away, grateful for some actual light.
“Thank God they have the batteries already in,” I say. “I don’t know what we would have done. Good memory, Esther.”
We’re lit up like we’re telling ghost stories, standing together in a circle.
“What even happened there?” Chloe asks, a little breathless.
“It’s the storm.” I direct my torch to the window, and we see nothing but darkness. “It’s cut off the power.”
“There must be a fuse box somewhere,” Esther says. “This place has to get power cuts all the time.”
“If there was one, it’d probably be round the outside of this building, where the telephone was,” I say. “That would make sense.”