“Jade said that? Jade threatened you?”
“No,” Lauren says. “Josephine did.”
I don’t want to upset her and not be allowed to see my sister again. I bend down and put my arms around her. She clasps her bony arms around me, her breath hot by my ear.
When I step outside, Ashley is waiting. Her eyes are frantic as she searches my face. Behind her, Burke watches me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “She won’t tell me anything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Jade was careful—she’d found an abandoned property through Google Maps and planned her route so she didn’t have to pass through any tolls. But one security camera at a gas station near the border caught her driving past in Bailey’s car. The police were able to pull it a week after Bailey was found. It’s a grainy image, poor quality.
But it was enough for them to arrest Jade for the unlawful disposal of a corpse and interfering with an investigation. She refused to say why she’d done it—how she could pretend to mourn her missing best friend after she’d left her body cold in a snow pile.
Then Cathy found Bailey’s journal, stuffed in a slit in her mattress. The Hammonds had finally decided to clean out Bailey’s room.
I knew it would be bad when Detective Burke called my parents and asked if we would come down to the station. Ellie Knepper had tea waiting for us; Burke’s face was grim.
He didn’t let me read the pages, but he told me of the plot to kill me inside them. Bailey had become obsessed with me, fixated on the idea that Andrew and I were in some sort of secret relationship. Burke said it wasn’t clear who came up with the idea to kill me the night of the barn—but Lauren had undoubtedly saved my life by showing up and tagging along. She had seen the hunting knife in Bailey’s bag. The knife Bailey had picked up from Cliff Grosso the week before—the same day a neighbor spotted her car outside his house.
Bailey had changed her mind about the plan after that night in the barn. She wanted to back out, and Jade was unhappy about it. (Burke’s words—as if the difference between my living and dying could be compared to a customer’s reaction to overcooked eggs.) That’s why Cliff and Bailey were arguing the night of Sully’s party—Bailey had tried to convince Cliff to take the knife back, but he said he couldn’t sneak it onto the shelves of the hunting shop without his uncle asking questions. Then, when Bailey went missing, he was worried that the knife he sold Bailey was involved in the crime and could be traced back to him.
The investigators found the hunting knife locked in Bailey’s glove compartment, not a trace of blood on it. They never found the knife from our kitchen.
With Jade refusing to talk about how Bailey had wound up dead—stabbed to death by my sister—the prosecutors came up with a theory with the help from criminal profilers.
Jade was worried that Bailey would slip and everyone would find out they’d planned to kill me. She was losing control over Bailey—something she’d maintained since middle school, when she lied about Val starting rumors about Bailey. Jade wanted Bailey to herself, to alienate her from all her friends.
Once Jade figured out that Bailey was serious about leaving Broken Falls—and her—she couldn’t handle it. Backing out of the murder plot—the one thing that would bind them together forever—was the final straw for Jade.
We don’t know what Jade said to Lauren to convince her to kill Bailey. After the night in the barn, Jade came to my house while my father slept and told Lauren something. I can only assume it was all about a torrid affair between Andrew and me. Somehow, she must have convinced Lauren that they had to get rid of Bailey to keep her quiet, or else I would get sent back to New York and Lauren would never see me again.
We do know that she told Lauren to steal a knife from our kitchen, one no one would notice was missing. She told her to leave Bailey’s car and body at Leeds Park after it was done. After Tyrell dropped her off at home when the party ended, Jade left to pick up Bailey’s car. Jade then drove an hour and a half to the Minnesota border, where she dumped her best friend’s body. While she was there, Jade ditched the chef’s knife and the bloody jacket Lauren left in the car.
On her way home, before leaving the car in the garage at the abandoned house, Jade stopped at the Leeds Barn to make the bloody handprint—to make sure that the police searched for Bailey in Broken Falls. There was so much blood in the car that sitting in the driver’s seat drenched Jade’s clothes in it.
Jade was the Red Woman Chloe Strauss saw in the early hours of the morning.
Jade drove up and down the winding roads of Broken Falls, ditching the clothes—a bloody men’s sweatshirt, and a pair of pants that the police still haven’t recovered—before leaving Bailey’s phone at Cliff Grosso’s house. She then went home, where she showered, cleaned her bathtub with bleach, and went to sleep until Cathy Hammond called her.
The judge decided that Jade had preyed on a young girl who was vulnerable to manipulation. A forensic psychiatrist told the DA that it was his opinion that Lauren had experienced a psychotic break as the result of the stress in her life. She didn’t know right from wrong at the time of the killing, and suggested the minimum sentence.
They gave her eight years, to be served in a psychiatric facility. She still believes that Josephine Leeds, speaking through Jade, wanted her to kill Bailey.
They think that with proper treatment, she’ll be okay. That she won’t kill again.
The story is national news now. Jade’s picture is on the cover of People magazine, along with the caption: Pretty Little Psychopath.
Her mother, Beth DiMassi—formerly Beth Becker—showed up for the arraignment. She was very surprised to hear that she’d been dead for the past twelve years.
EPILOGUE
I can’t stop reading all mentions of the case. It’s an obsession now, a need to know that Jade will stay far away so she can never hurt me.
I get my wish two months into the summer, when Jade accepts a plea deal on all the charges. Combined, she will probably serve the maximum. Sixty years.
I can’t bring myself to show up for the sentencing, but Bailey has plenty of supporters in the courtroom. Val Diamond calls me after to tell me that Jade had a chance to speak—to make a statement, plead her case, and tell Bailey’s family to their faces once and for all why she killed her best friend.
But she chose to say nothing. She refused to pin it all on Lauren, like she could have. All we have are questions. The biggest one: Why? Why keep protecting my sister when she’s the one who drove the knife between Bailey’s ribs?
The prosecutor thinks it’s because Jade knows it won’t make a difference. She’s the one the public hates; she’s the psychopath who manipulated a damaged, troubled little girl.