And no sooner have I thought her name than Olivia and Lola step into the boathouse through the little door behind us. Hardly anyone takes notice of their arrival.
“How are we going to find them?” the third girl asks, chomping on a piece of gum and speaking up for the first time. If she only knew—if all of them only knew—how close they really are.
“We set a trap,” Lon says, grinning like he’s about to crush an insect beneath the sole of his shoe. “We have one of them now. The other two sisters will come for her. Gigi is our bait.”
A short laugh at the back of the group breaks apart Lon’s words. “You think the Swan sisters would be stupid enough to fall for that?” It’s Marguerite who’s spoken, and she rolls her eyes when everyone turns to look at her.
“They’re not just going to leave her here,” Davis points out.
“Maybe they’ll think she deserves to be tied up for being dumb enough to get caught. Maybe they’ll want her to learn her lesson.” Marguerite stares directly at Gigi when she says it, her gaze penetrating deeply so that Aurora knows she’s speaking to her: one Swan sister to another. It’s a threat. Marguerite is upset that Aurora allowed herself to be captured.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Davis says. “And until then, we don’t let any girls near the boathouse.”
“That’s not fair,” pink-parka girl asserts. “Gigi’s my friend and—”
“And maybe you’re one of them,” Davis snaps, cutting her off.
“That’s insane.” She snorts. “I didn’t even get in the water at the Swan party.”
“Then we should question everyone who did.”
The girl with the perfect ponytail drops her gaze to the floor. “Almost everyone swam that night.”
“Not everyone,” Lon adds, “but you did.” His eyes are harpooned on her. “And so did Rose.” He nods to Rose, who is standing a half step behind me, next to Heath.
“This is ridiculous,” Heath pipes up. “You idiots can’t start blaming every girl who was at the party that night. It might not have even happened at the party—the sisters might have stolen bodies later, after everyone was too wasted to remember anything. Or even the next morning.”
Lon and Davis exchange a look, but they’re obviously undeterred, because Davis says, “Everyone is a suspect. And Gigi is staying in here until we find the other two.”
“She can’t stay in here until the summer solstice; it’s over a week away,” parka girl says, her voice pitched.
“Well, we sure as shit can’t let her go,” Davis rebukes. “She’ll just kill someone else. Probably us, for tying her up.” Davis slaps Lon against the shoulder, and Lon cringes a little, like he hadn’t considered this—that he and Davis might be next on the drowning kill list for capturing a Swan sister.
Gigi tries to shake her head, to make a sound, but only muffled, garbled noises manage to make it through. The bandanna is tied too tightly.
Gigi’s parents will certainly get suspicious when she doesn’t come home; the police will be called, a search party sent to look for her. But the boys did get one thing right: Gigi Kline is a Swan sister—the only problem is that they can’t prove it. And I’m not about to tell them the truth.
Still, this is bad. Aurora has been captured. Marguerite knows it. And the summer solstice will be here soon—things are getting complicated. Aurora’s capture has made it complicated. And I just want to stay as far away from them and this mess as I can.
Heath has had enough, and I see him grab Rose’s hand. “Come on,” he whispers to her, then leads her out of the boathouse.
A new group of three guys—one I recognize as Thor Grantson, whose father owns the Catch newspaper—and one girl shuffle in through the doorway, coming to see Gigi Kline and determine for themselves if they think she’s been infected by a Swan sister.
The room suddenly feels claustrophobic.
“Hell no!” Davis says loudly, pointing a finger at Thor. “You’d better not write about this in your shitty paper, Thor, or tell your father.”
Thor lifts both hands in the air in a gesture of innocence. “I just came to see her,” he says amiably. “That’s it.”
“You’re a fucking snitch and everyone knows it,” Lon chimes in.
Pink-parka girl starts arguing with Davis in Thor’s defense, and soon the room is a cacophony of voices, all the while Gigi Kline sits tied to a chair and Olivia Greene stands calmly at the back of the group, leaning against the wall.
I can’t stay in here anymore, so I slip through the new group of people and stumble back out into the daylight, opening my mouth to breathe in the warm, salty air.
Rose and Heath are standing a couple yards away, but Rose’s arms are crossed. “They’re bullies,” I hear her say. “They can’t do this. It’s not right.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Heath says. “It’s going to be a witch hunt. And they could just as easily lock you up in there.”
“He’s right,” I say, and they both look up. “None of us are safe.”
“So we just let them keep her locked up and accuse whoever they want?”
“For now,” I say, “yeah, we do.”
The door to the boathouse swings open and Bo steps out behind me, blinking away the sunlight.
“Maybe they’re right,” Heath offers, reaching out to touch Rose’s arm. “Maybe Gigi did drown those two boys. Maybe she’s one of them. It’s better if she’s in there, where she can’t kill anyone else.”
“You don’t really believe that girl could be dangerous?” Bo asks, crossing his arms. I glance over my shoulder at him and a stillness settles over the four of us—each of us considering how dangerous she could really be, picturing her hands around a boy’s throat, her eyes wicked with revenge as she forced him below the waterline, waiting for bubbles to escape his nostrils and break at the surface.
Then Rose says, “Penny?” as if she’s hoping I might have an answer. As if I might know how to fix everything and make it all okay. And suddenly I feel the urge to tell her the truth: that Gigi is indeed occupied by Aurora Swan, and that the town is safer with her tied up inside the old boathouse. That setting a trap to catch the remaining two Swan sisters might be a smart move.
But instead I tell her, “We need to be careful. Act normal. Don’t give them any reason to suspect we could be one of them.”
“But we aren’t one of them!” Rose says sharply.
My eyes feel dry, unable to blink. Rose sounds so certain, she’s so sure that she understands the world around her, that she’d be able to see something as villainous as a Swan sister if it were tucked inside of Gigi Kline. She trusts her eyes to tell her the truth. But she can’t see a thing. “They don’t know that,” I say. “We shouldn’t even be here; we shouldn’t be anywhere near Gigi.”