Lucy was the first into the house. The lights were off in every room except the living room, where only one of the two floor lamps was switched on; dimly, at that. Grace and Candace were stretched out, one on each sofa, half asleep. As Lucy and the others walked in quietly, the two girls pushed themselves into an upright position. And stared, bleary with confusion.
With every minute that passed, the bag of money worried Lucy more. They should have left it behind. She’d felt this at the time, but had been too shocked, too generally overwhelmed to make any kind of argument. The other three had been so confident that it was safe to keep the money.
Theft was theft. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as killing, but it might end up being more dangerous.
The night’s events were already coiling into a knot of hideous complexity. She could barely stand to think back on any part of the evening. Earlier that day, Lucy had still been struggling with the immensity of her own revelation, after the hypnosis. A huge deal at the time; something to be absorbed slowly and considered.
Right now, Lucy would give anything to be back there. To be able to rewrite history. Why had she even waited until the afternoon before going to the cops? Maybe if she’d gone first thing in the morning, they wouldn’t have been so busy?
Grace cleared her throat, struggling on sleepy legs as she stood. “Where have you all been?”
“Has anyone come by the house?” Maya asked, ignoring Grace’s question. Maya was all about that, tonight: ignoring what didn’t suit her, acting like some weird kind of cold-blooded badass. A teenager playing out a life she’d only ever seen in the movies—totally relatable. Real life had no context for what they’d been through in the past few hours. At times, Lucy had felt like she was back on a studio lot, sleepwalking through a scene straight out of a cop show.
“No one,” Grace answered, shaking her head. She was examining each one of them curiously. “Which one of you got hurt?”
Paolo was the last into the house. In silence, he went up to Grace and hugged her. Lucy noticed the girl’s eyes closing for the briefest moment as he held her, the way her limbs instantly relaxed, and it was like a light going on. Briefly, a tiny smile found its way through her anxiety.
Grace and Paolo have started something.
After a second or two, Grace pushed Paolo off her gently. “Was it you?”
Paolo shrugged, trying to hide a guilty expression with a puzzled grin. “Was what me?”
This time, Grace shoved him, hard. “Stop lying. We saw the blood.”
Candace stepped forward. She also looked angry. For Grace, however, Lucy could sense it was personal. Something was brewing there, for sure.
“You’ve made us sick with worry,” Candace said, agitated. “We were about to call the cops. The only reason we didn’t, the only reason . . .” She paused as her voice cracked. “Don’t even think about lying to us.”
Lucy was still as she watched Candace struggle to control her emotions. You were never quite certain, with an actor, what was true, what was fake. But Candace did seem kind of overwhelmed.
“Thank you,” John-Michael said. His voice was sincere with gratitude. “Please do not think about calling the police.”
Grace stared from Lucy to John-Michael. She couldn’t seem to look at Paolo, Lucy noticed. At her sides, Grace’s hands tensed and relaxed, over and over. “So we were right, something bad happened?”
Lucy checked with her coconspirators. One by one they responded with the slightest of nods. She turned to Grace and Candace. It was time to lay out the story they’d prepared. “We knew you’d worry. And we love you all too much to lie to you,” she began, her voice shaky.
“Good,” Candace said. Her lower lip was trembling. “Don’t.”
“But that means that we can’t tell you a whole lot. Because anything you know could be used against you. And us.”
The sisters’ facial expressions crumpled. Candace said, “What the hell?”
“Yeah,” Grace said, gasping. “You don’t get to leave us hanging.”
“We thought about it a lot,” John-Michael admitted.
“Yes,” Paolo added firmly. “We thought about telling you the truth, we thought about lying. We can’t do either one of those, because, like Lucy says, we love you guys too much for that.”
“You love us, so you won’t tell us where the four of you have been, why you left your cell phones here, presumably so we couldn’t contact you, why there’s blood on the floor, why you took the stupid rug?” Grace stopped abruptly, incredulous.
“Which is where, by the way?” Candace asked.
No one answered that.
“We care about what happens to you. Which is why we can’t tell you. It might . . .” John-Michael paused. “It might put your lives in danger.”
“Oh,” Candace said blithely. “That’s okay, then. I mean—it’s not like you did something bad and didn’t want us to get you into trouble.”
“It’s also that,” Lucy confessed. “If we want them to trust us, we have to be honest about whatever we can.”
“Lucy,” Paolo said softly, “of the four of us, you’re the one who did nothing wrong. Not a thing. You’re not going to take any heat for this from anyone. I’ll see to it.”
Grace stared at both with undisguised hostility. “Which is it, then? You all did a bad thing? Or just some of you?”
“All of us,” Lucy said, now decisive. “The details don’t matter.” She may not have delivered any of the damaging blows, but she also hadn’t stopped any of it from happening. She’d driven the car, she’d aided and abetted, at least. This night had made criminals of all of them. There was no pretending otherwise.
Candace ran one hand through the straggles of her hair. “So, let me get this straight. You’ve put all our lives in danger?”
Lucy forced herself to nod. The two hit men were dealt with, but the person who’d ordered the hit was still out there. The idea that Dana Alexander, movie star, Shakespearean actor, could have any involvement with the kind of people who arranged murders . . . It sure sounded delusional.
And yet. Lucy knew what she’d seen, that night at the Hollywood party. Dana Alexander, holding a man down underwater. Until all the struggling stopped. Until he bobbed, motionless, to the surface. And she knew what she’d experienced afterward, Dana Alexander’s seductive persuasion, bending reality to her own ends.
Who knew what kind of people Dana Alexander was mixed up with? Who she could buy? If the housemates were right about Ariana, the movie star had managed to plant a spy in Lucy’s life years ago. And when Lucy had moved to Los Angeles, another spy had been found—Maya.
Someone like that must move smoothly in pretty scary circles.
“I know I’m in danger,” Lucy admitted. “And I can’t tell the cops how bad it really is. Please don’t ask me why, Gracie. But I will give that testimony.” She paused. “I’m going to find that nail polish, the bottle that Dana gave me that night. I know it’s in my room in Claremont, somewhere. Then the cops will know that I really did talk to Dana that night. We’ll make her sorry that she ever made me feel like a dopey little kid who couldn’t tell the difference between a dream and reality. When she tries to change her story about what happened, you’ll see, the cops are going to become real interested in her background. Who knows what else they’ll find?”
Grace stepped back. Her eyes grew large. She wrapped both arms around her chest, trembling. “Thank you.”
Gently, Lucy smiled. “I will do whatever it takes to make this right. Your dad’s been in prison for long enough.”
At this, Grace burst into tears. This time it was her stepsister who was at her side in an instant, taking her into her arms for a close, comforting hug.
Lucy felt tears of her own, stinging and hot at the corners of her eyes. Not just from relief, but fear. It was long past time that she faced up to the truth of that night, almost nine years ago. But that didn’t make the possible consequences any less terrifying.