The villa’s atrium was eerily silent and dark.
Henrietta muttered a worried cluck.
No one else made a sound.
They shuffled forward in lockstep toward the interior hallway that opened into the ballroom.
The door groaned open, almost comically loud. Like a bad sound effect in a cheesy horror movie, revealing the tableau inside.
Peach, Cici, and Jalen stood huddled tightly together directly in front of them, a mirror of how Plum, Sofia, Marlowe, and Jude clung to each other. Peach, Cici, and Jalen swiveled their heads to the doorway. Their faces wore the same shell-shocked look Plum assumed hers did. A short-circuited expression strung between surprise, horror, and exhaustion.
Cici’s eyes were round, her mouth open slightly in shock.
Peach extricated one of her hands from Cici’s grip long enough to point at something that Plum couldn’t see from the doorway.
The cluster of four new arrivals to the scene shuffled into the room, turning almost as one unit, like meerkats scenting danger.
Shelley was lying flat on her back, her arms and legs spread out like a starfish’s. Her body was near the wall by the stereo system that Warix had uncovered earlier.
Her phone and a charging cord lay on the ground. The wall, where the cord was plugged in, had a large black scorch mark tracing up from the socket.
The ungrounded, ancient socket.
“She . . . she . . .” Cici stammered.
Jalen shook his head forcefully. He winced as the gesture disturbed his bandaged chest.
Through her shock, Peach seemed to register that Warix and Dude were missing. Her eyes traveled to the empty door behind her sister and her friends, then back to their group, then back to the empty door, as if waiting for the two men to appear.
Plum shook her head. “There was an explosion.”
Peach nodded dazedly.
“Oh, we thought that was the transformer,” Cici said. Her sculpted eyebrows were pressed together in a frown of shock and sorrow. Tear tracks were etched in her makeup.
There was no note waiting near the body. Still, no one suspected that Shelley’s death had been an accident.
Their killer had trained them too well for that.