Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
“I didn’t know you were all coming to the estate until you arrived,” Bea said. “Grace hadn’t told me. I panicked, hid. But then I saw Darcie with Ash and I got so mad.”
“Creepy Bea.”
“It was the one thing she didn’t take from me. Said I could have the ugly monstrosity.” A sigh. “Does it make me evil that I enjoyed hearing her scream when she found it on her bed?”
“No. I’d have done worse.”
Elevator doors opened, disgorging two orderlies with a patient on a stretcher. “Evening, ladies,” one of them said, while the other smiled.
We smiled back at them before they headed off in the opposite direction, and we came to a stop at the glass wall at this end of the corridor. It looked down into a dark carpark, the lights of the nearest town glimmering in the background.
“Bea?” I untangled our arms so that they hung side by side and I could weave my fingers through hers. “You know the rest of what to say to the police?” I’d visited earlier, while Ratene was still at the estate, and we’d walked that time, too, our conversation more desperate.
Looking at me with those blue eyes that weren’t desiccated and burned but vividly alive, she said, “Grace drugged me when I realized what she was doing to Kaea, when I argued with her about her plans for vengeance. I didn’t want any of it—but she’d become obsessed with the idea of avenging me and wouldn’t stop.”
“Yes.” I squeezed her hand. “You somehow made it to the living room the night of the fight.”
“Grace was late in giving me the dose. It hadn’t quite kicked in when she left me alone.” Her fingers tightened on mine. “She really was late.”
“I know. Why do you have cuts on your hands?”
“I got in between Darcie and Grace in an effort to stop their fight.”
“What if anyone asks why you came in wearing Darcie’s dress?” We had to prepare for that on the off chance the police went to the trouble of tracing its provenance.
“Grace gave it to me. She must’ve stolen it to mess with Darcie.”
“Good. That’s all you know, all you remember, your memory is foggy.”
Rain in my mind again, a ferocious drumming on the roof of the Land Cruiser. A silent Darcie, her heart still beating but her body shutting down—and Bea in the back seat with the blood-soaked dress. “We need to get her out of that dress,” I’d said to Grace.
“I’ll help you.”
As it was, I’d managed to strip Bea on my own. But afterward, Grace, weak as she was, was able to help stand her in the rain behind the warmth of the car’s exhaust while I poured bottles of water over her as fast as humanly possible.
Bea, naked in the dark, runnels of what would’ve been pink in the sunlight racing down her lax body to become lost in the water that was the world as the skies continued to thunder down.
No more blood on her face, on her chest, under her nails. Her hair rinsed and rinsed again.
Then, putting her in Darcie’s dress and allowing that to get wet, too—but only after we’d smeared it with Darcie’s and Grace’s blood. No underwear, but she was a woman who’d been drugged and barely conscious of her actions.
Plausible deniability.
Rain, so much rain, a waterfall of sound in my ears as the world blurred.
Placing Bea back into the Land Cruiser, then using my belt to bind a seated Grace once more.
“No one will ever know,” she’d said again, and we’d both understood that she wasn’t talking about Darcie anymore.
“There’s a missing knife. It wasn’t beside Ash.”
A shake of her head, her words starting to slur as she said, “No. It’s in the kitchen drawer. I washed and bleached it.”
I hadn’t known what to do with the bloody dress or the tag from the one on Bea, had stared around me as I stood with the small bundle scrunched in my hand. I couldn’t just drop it in the ravine. Too high a chance it’d be seen.
“Bury it.” Grace’s weakening voice. “In among the trees. Ground’s wet.”
Easy to dig.
I’d turned and hiked up into the thick and tangled forest that loomed over us, while the rain erased my footprints from the mud behind me. I hadn’t been able to go far, not with my vision. I couldn’t risk becoming lost in the dark. But it hadn’t mattered. I’d found a fallen branch, used it to dig a hole near the roots of a forest giant. Afterward, I’d covered that area with leaf debris until it looked exactly like the rest of the rain-lashed area.
The rain had cleaned my hands and body of all evidence of dirt, but my boots had been muddy. No one cared. I’d hiked to the barn by my own admission, and I’d gotten out to check the bridge before we made it out. Jim, the first person to see us, hadn’t even questioned why three of us were wet when we turned up.