CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

After leaving the big house the night of the mescal shots and wild partying, Ivy had gone back to her small room next to the chicken coop and sat on the bed compiling her notes to send over to Ally and Lemon. She plugged the keyhole camera into her laptop to review her footage. Who knew what her bosses would do with this? She’d gotten a thrill out of uncovering the dark underbelly of the retreat, but no matter how rich and how ridiculous these women were, these videos could ruin their lives if they were leaked. And there was the fact that Janey was in the video, all passed out on the chaise longue. She’d decided to wait until the morning to email anything back to the States. Her plan for the next day was to grab some footage of the actual workouts in the hope that those would be useful to SoarBarre and less icky for everyone involved.

That morning, she’d barely arrived at the compound when a maid ran out of one of the yurts screaming. She followed the commotion and came upon a scene straight out of Law & Order. A perilously thin woman lay lifeless on a gurney in the yurt, her chest covered in blood. The faux rustic dwelling had been transformed into an operating theater with high-tech machinery, IV lines, and a scrum of nurses in white uniforms. A white man in green scrubs was in the process of applying a defibrillator to the woman.

“MOVE. AWAY. EVERYONE GET AWAY!” screamed the small woman Ivy recognized as Sara Strong. She saw one cook snap a photograph of the scene with his phone and watched as Sara dove through the air to tackle the formidable man and claw his phone out of his hands. She looked like she wanted to spit in his face.

“How dare you!” she shrieked at him. Ivy turned quietly and made for the big house, pulling her own phone out of her pocket and dialing 0 before calmly asking the operator who to contact in case of an emergency. Behind her she could hear other guests gasping in horror as Sara Strong tried to contain the scene.

“Go back to your rooms!” the woman screamed. “Get away from here!”

The operator put Ivy through to the local hospital and she repeated the address twice for the dispatcher, who thankfully understood her despite the pandemonium in the background. She continued through to behind the kitchen, where Carlo was smoking a cigarette.

“The price they pay to look like they do.” He exhaled and offered the pack to Ivy. She shook her head. She’d never smoked a cigarette; no one her age smoked cigarettes.

“Do you know what happened?” she asked.

Carlo nodded. “The doctors came to do a quick nip and tuck and something went wrong. Happens all the time. I thought these women were rich. Why do they come here to do surgery? It’s cheap, but sometimes no good.”

“What do you think went wrong?”

“Who knows?” Carlo said, his eyes falling down onto Ivy’s chest. She crossed her arms, knowing the maid’s uniform was too tight across her breasts. “They get what they deserve.” He took a final puff and stubbed the cigarette out on the ground.

She heard the ambulance siren before she saw the vehicle pull into the gravel parking lot.

“Who called them?” Sara Strong screamed. “Who made that call?”

In the distance Ivy could see Janey jogging up the sandy path from the beach. For a second her cousin’s eyes rested on her, and she thought she saw a flicker of recognition, but Janey turned and ran over to join the commotion.

Ivy wanted to grab her cousin and sprint out of this place, escape the middle-aged debauchery together. Neither of them belonged here, but she knew Janey would be pissed if she learned Ivy was spying on her. A man who could have been a police officer or a member of the national guard was closing off the area around the yurt with a roll of yellow and black police tape, and Ivy knew it was only a matter of time before someone pulled her into a room to be questioned and quickly pieced together that she wasn’t supposed to be there at all. She slowly backed away, tiptoeing across the lush green lawn. The grounds were like an obstacle course of flowering bushes, palm trees, and bocce courts, and it took forever to get back out to her car, parked alongside the beaten-up used cars owned by the rest of the staff.

For the next couple of hours Ivy let her phone go straight to voicemail. Her bosses were calling every ten minutes or so and texting rapid-fire questions. What did she know? Had she seen anything? Was it true that Miranda Mills had a heart attack at The Workout retreat? Social media was fast. Too fast. Their glee at Sara Strong’s takedown was too palpable. She also got a text from Kelli that just said, Please come home.

She was almost home. Her plane would land soon.