May kept her well-practiced smile pasted to her face as Nate fumbled with the lock to the terrace door. “Wow, we were all too shell-shocked the first time I was here to pay much attention to your apartment. This view alone is worth the price of admission.”
She reached past him and flicked the latch to the left. “It’s sticky.”
He took a quick step outside before turning right back. “And, yep, I’m still weird about heights.”
“This was my sanctuary during the shutdown,” she said, allowing herself a few breaths of fresh air from the twentieth-floor view.
“I can imagine,” he said.
He was wearing a lightweight button-down, khaki shorts, and loafers. Kelsey had been the first to greet him, welcoming him inside with a classic Kelsey hug. Watching her arms wrapped around Nate was different now, and May had tried not to think of the two of them together. She was, however, confident that Kelsey had accomplished goal one with that hug—make sure there was no gun in his waistband.
It was a good thing that Carter and Danny hadn’t parked themselves in her bedroom. The first thing Nate asked for once May poured him a glass of red wine was the tour he didn’t get when they’d come here after Kelsey’s arraignment. She could feel him studying her during the quick walk-through. Did he know she suspected him?
That moment when he walked into his apartment with Kelsey’s laundry—she was replaying it another time, questioning every second of the interaction. Saying Don’t you need to get that? when her phone rang. Was that a normal thing to say? His keys in the lock only seconds earlier. It took time to put a key in a lock, and she had been talking to Kelsey’s father until that very second. He could have heard her.
That was the phone call that broke everything open for May, when she asked Bill Ellis why he and Jeanie had gotten divorced. He didn’t want to answer at first. “Not everything has to become a public matter, May. Some families have secrets.”
She told him she thought she knew what their secret was. Kelsey and Nate.
“Jeanie and I…well, we would find them. At first, they were just little kids, holding hands and rolling around together. We were thrilled the children loved each other. It was everything we hoped for—a way to make a family after we’d each lost a spouse and our children lost a parent. But then we saw them kissing in the backyard, and not like siblings. They swore they were just curious. Jeanie’s therapist friend said it wasn’t unusual, even for real siblings, to experiment out of curiosity. We were told that it might be scarring if we made a bigger deal out of it than it was. So we kept an eye out for any other warning signs, but over the years it didn’t really seem to be an issue. Then one time when Kelsey was staying the weekend to get a break from her freshman roommate, Jeanie and I came home early from some horrible movie. We heard them in Kelsey’s room. Then saw them. We were horrified. I still feel sick when I think about it.”
“And that’s why you got divorced?” He was confirming what she had suspected about Kelsey and Nate, but it didn’t fully explain how it split up the family.
“I blamed Nate because he was the boy and I know how boys are. He took advantage of his own sister. But Jeanie blamed Kelsey. Apparently she had known that Kelsey had been sexually active for years already. I most certainly wasn’t aware of that. She made Kelsey out to be the predator. After something like that—it just changed how we saw our children, and that had been a big part of what made us a family. There was no fixing it. Why are you digging all this up?”
She had started to explain when she heard Nate’s keys in the door and hung up. How much—if any—of that phone call had he overheard?
Nate bent over and scooped Gomez from his dog bed. “Hi, Mr. Gomez. Nice to see you again, pudgy puggy.” Gomez began wiggling and jumped back to the floor. “I guess someone’s not a cuddler.” Nate took the seat next to Kelsey on the sofa, setting his glass of wine on the coffee table. “Kelsey said your fiancé’s out of town?”
“Yeah. Corporate boondoggle in Napa.” She was becoming an excellent liar.
“Nice.”
She pushed any thought of Josh to the side. Once they all got through today, working things out between them would be her top priority. That morning, he called to remind her about the calendar entry for this Friday, the drop-dead date before their deposit became nonrefundable. Apparently he thought they might be calling things off in the next three days, but she couldn’t think about that now.
She made sure to sip her wine spritzer slowly—much more spritz than wine—as Kelsey talked about having to reschedule all her meetings and the shows they’d supposedly been binging since they’d become court-ordered roommates.
“How long is this supposed to go on?” Nate asked. “Kelsey said you were trying to get clarification from the court and instead the judge let slip that he was listening in on gossip from Boston.”
They had agreed that if at all possible, they’d wait until Nate was the one to bring up the investigation. They didn’t want to make it obvious that they were trying to get him to talk about the case.
“Right. Well, I’m glad you and Kelsey are here together, because the news isn’t very good. So you know I’ve been trying to get that detective in East Hampton to see that Bill may have done this on his own, without Kelsey having any idea. But he’s telling me the Boston police are convinced that Kelsey had to be involved, because even if Bill knew about David Smith, he wouldn’t have known where to find him in East Hampton unless Kelsey told him.”
“Unless he was having him tailed,” Nate said.
“Two months after they broke up? They’re not buying it. Kelsey called her dad Saturday morning on the way back from Montauk to get Josh’s car, and they’re convinced she told him about her run-in with Dave.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Kelsey said. “I called him because if I don’t, he calls me, and I wanted to get it out of the way.”
The only person Kelsey had talked about David Smith with was Nate. It was another piece of evidence that Lauren and May kept emphasizing.
“Well, I think they’re just trying to intimidate you,” Nate said, swallowing the rest of his wine and reaching for the bottle on the coffee table. “They can speculate all they want, but they can’t prove you were involved, because you weren’t. Hell, they can’t even prove the two cases are related.”
“Oh, turns out that there’s new information on that,” May said, her tone growing sharper. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Kelsey.”
“Tell me what?”
“The latest update from my detective friend. They got the ballistics evidence back on David Smith.” She looked at Kelsey with the expression she used to wear when cross-examining a defendant. “He was shot with the same gun that was used to kill Luke—”
“That’s bullshit,” Nate interrupted. “I mean, don’t cops do that all the time? Make up some evidence they don’t have, hoping to get you to confess? I think that cop’s playing head games with you, May.”
She shook her head. “Nope. I thought the same thing. I told him to send me the results. Cashed in a favor with a guy who used to testify for me at the DA’s Office. It’s solid, Kelsey. And when I was prepping you to talk to that detective, I asked you point-blank about any phone calls you made. You never told me about calling your dad Saturday morning.”
“I probably forgot.”
“Stop lying,” May said, keeping her gaze aimed directly at Kelsey. “How could you have dragged all of us into this? Are you ever going to start telling us the truth?”
“What are you talking about? Oh my god, are you accusing me again? I thought you were finally on my side.”
Lauren was walking out of the kitchen with a bowl of chips. “May, this is really screwed up. Is that why you brought us all here, to interrogate Kelsey in front of us?”
“You’re supposed to be my lawyer.” Kelsey’s voice was filled with the pain of betrayal. Nate wasn’t the only actor in the Ellis family.
Nate set his wineglass down on the table. “May, this feels straight-up unethical. What are you doing?”
“Honestly, after what she’s pulled, I don’t care. I’m not even a practicing lawyer anymore and she tricked me into representing her. Why, Kelsey? So I wouldn’t figure out the truth, or because I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone once I did?”
“Hey,” Lauren said sharply, “don’t put that on her. That was Nate and me.”
“Well, she shouldn’t have let me hitch my horse to her wagon. And what about you, Lauren? You’ve spent years feeling sorry for her, when she’s an entitled little Veruca Salt rich girl who got her daddy to kill two men all because she can’t stand being rejected. Daddy always buys you what you want. Your spot at Wildwood. Prep school. College admission. Your job. Isn’t it that simple, Kelsey? It wasn’t about the embryos or wanting to be a mom. You just hate being dumped.”
May had been worried she wouldn’t be able to pull off her monologue, but it turned out she still had enough built-up resentment to deliver the lines convincingly.
“Stop it,” Kelsey said, her shoulders beginning to shake. “I swear I didn’t do it.”
“It’s okay,” Nate said, reaching to wrap an arm around Kelsey. “It’s not even true. She’s lying to you.”
“About what?” Kelsey asked beneath what sounded like actual tears.
“The test results. Luke and Dave weren’t killed by the same gun.”
May had been fiddling with her phone the whole time and snuck a glance at the screen, waiting for the text message from Decker. They all knew more now than they did three days ago. Carter had found the Hertz reservation to prove that before Nate arrived in East Hampton by train on Monday, he had rented a white Chevy Malibu in downtown Manhattan on Saturday, returning it early Sunday morning with 272 miles added to the odometer, more than enough to get to the East End of Long Island and back.
Boston police had learned that the night Luke was killed, Nate called in sick for the small role he had in an indie play in the East Village.
And May was pretty proud that she was the one who found a cashier at the Jersey City AutoZone who recognized Nate as a customer from the previous weekend. He couldn’t confirm what he purchased, but the store did sell the kind of LED lights a driver could mount on a dash. Unless Nate had gotten rid of them already, she was confident Decker would find the lights and a police uniform in his apartment once he could enter with a search warrant.
“I’m not lying,” May said. “Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know, but you are definitely lying about the guns.”
“How can you possibly know that?” she pressed.
Kelsey was slumped on the sofa. She was no longer playing a role in this setup. When tears began to form, May could see that they were real. She was crying because she knew the truth now.
“Because it was two different guns,” Nate said. “I know I saw that somewhere on the internet.”
It had been public knowledge that Luke was killed with a .38, but the police had not yet released the fact that David Smith was shot with a 9mm.
A new text from Decker. That’ll do it. The evidence they had, combined with Nate’s apparent certainty that two different guns were used in the murders, would suffice. Carter could get his search warrant. And from there, they could make an arrest. The plan had been May’s idea. Carter went along with it only after she promised that she would not push Nate any further once they had the bare minimum for a probable cause affidavit.
The room fell silent as Nate realized what he had let slip. “I mean, it couldn’t possibly be, right? Because you didn’t do this, Kelsey. And even if some hit man was hired to kill two different men five years apart, they wouldn’t use the same gun. It just doesn’t make sense. That cop’s messing with you, Hanover.”
May nodded as if she was taking in new information. “I guess it’s possible he sent me a ballistics match from a different case and told me it was from Luke and Dave?”
He pointed an index finger toward her. “Bingo. I bet that’s exactly what he did.”
Lauren moved behind May’s chair to give her a quick shoulder squeeze. “It’s been a stressful week. We have to stop hauling out accusations against each other, okay? We need to stick together.”
“I can’t believe I fell for it,” May said. “I’m so sorry, Kelsey. For him to make up something like that? It probably means they don’t have any evidence at all.”
It was exactly as they had planned it. Lower the temperature, continue with drinks, pretend everything was normal. Keep Nate occupied while Carter got a search warrant and went to Nate’s apartment.
But Kelsey was still crying. Nate rubbed her back. “It’s going to be okay. Did you hear her? There’s no evidence.”
When Kelsey looked up, she turned to face her brother. “When I called you earlier, I told you that if my father did this, he did it for me, and yet it only ruined my life.”
“But he didn’t. Nobody we know did this.”
“You did,” she said. “And you ruined my life. Can’t you see that?”
“Kelsey, no—” He reached as if to hug her, but she leapt from the sofa, upending the coffee table. A glass shattered. Wine began to spread its way across the rug. So much red.
“I’m a pariah now, Nate. I order food under fake names. I have to keep working for my father for the rest of my life, who pays me just enough to have a good life but not have actual freedom, because no other employer will touch me. Men—you certainly made sure I’d never have a relationship again, didn’t you? Luke and Dave didn’t deserve to die. And Marnie? Did you really kill Marnie, just because she heard your crazy talk that night?”
“I didn’t kill anyone, Kelsey. May’s gotten all up in your head.”
May was trying to stem the flow of the wine, worried it might spread under the sofa, where the recording device was planted. “It’s like Lauren said. We need to stop accusing each other—”
“They know about the Hertz rental, Nate.”
May bit her lower lip. There was no way to walk that back. She had to hope Carter and Danny were still listening.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nate said defiantly. “They won’t be able to prove anything, because I didn’t do it.”
“They’ll try to prove it, though. The trial will be front-page news. I’ll have to testify about my surgery, my embryos, lying to Dave about my own name—everyone will find out everything. You may or may not go to prison for the rest of your life, but any hope I have at a normal life will be gone forever. This whole time I’ve been standing by you, you’ve been a murderer—since college.”
Nate was facing Kelsey, his hands on her knees, as if no one else was in the room. “With Marnie, I didn’t mean to. I was grabbing her arm to get her to understand why she couldn’t tell anyone. She pulled away and tripped. Her head was bleeding.”
“So you drowned her?”
“I thought she was dead and I freaked out. That’s not murder. And Luke? Fuck that guy. He dumped you and was going to keep you from having children.”
“No, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare convince yourself you did this for me. I hate you. Do you hear me? I fucking hate you.”
Their heads all turned in the direction of a door slamming in the hallway outside the apartment. It had to be the door from the stairwell. They were here.
It happened so fast, Carter pushing through the apartment door first, Danny right behind him, as Nate jumped from the sofa, looking back once to Kelsey before reaching for the terrace door.
Why hadn’t May locked it when he stepped back inside? The sticky latch would have stopped him. Carter and Brennan would have gotten to him.
“No!” Carter leapt over the upended coffee table in an attempt to close the distance.
May felt a gush of hot, humid air as the door opened. She watched as Nate hiked his sockless, loafered right foot over the metal railing. “She didn’t know,” he yelled. “She didn’t know anything.”
He was gone.
May began to scream—that shrill, ear-splitting, panicked noise she had no idea could come out of her little body until last year.
And then she decided to stop. She was in control of herself again.