He loved you.
I don’t know why hearing those words out of Jane’s mouth hit me like they do. Maybe because Jane, of all people, wouldn’t want that to be true.
But Jane is a good liar.
I can tell, looking at her. I can also tell that she isn’t at all the girl Eddie thought she was. A girl who would smash his face in with a silver pineapple, then sit here with his wife—who she’d been told was dead at the bottom of a lake—drinking wine.
I like this girl, so much that I almost feel sorry for Eddie that he couldn’t see this side of her.
He might have liked it, too.
Or maybe he did. Maybe, as much as he hated to admit it, Eddie knew she was like me.
Knew that it was what had drawn him to her in the first place.
She takes another sip of her wine. She is petite, pale, her hair a color between blond and brown that isn’t particularly flattering, and the clothes she’s wearing look like muted imitations of the other women in this neighborhood. Maybe that was enough to fool Eddie, but he should have looked into her eyes.
Her eyes give it all away.
For example, she’s nodding at me, sitting there calmly, but her eyes are almost fever-bright, and I’m sure she’s not buying my story of what “really happened.” The affair, Eddie killing Blanche, locking me away, framing Tripp. I’d counted on her thinking Eddie is smarter than he is, but that might have been a miscalculation.
In fact, looking at her now, she reminds me of Blanche. After the funeral.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Bea hugs Blanche tightly, feeling just how thin she is in her black dress. Bea is not wearing black, going instead for the dark plum that will be a signature shade in this year’s autumn line at Southern Manors.
Blanche hugs her back, says how sorry she is over and over again, but as she leaves, Bea thinks she catches something in Blanche’s eyes. She’s not suspicious, not exactly. Blanche would never make that big of a leap. But Bea can tell there’s something about all of this that isn’t sitting quite right for Blanche, even if she’d never say it, never even let herself think it.
Later that night, Bea sits in the wingback chair she’d had shipped from Mama’s house, the only thing she’d wanted out of her godawful childhood home, and finishes off the bottle of wine. It helps her to feel numb and fuzzy, helps to block out the picture of Mama’s face right before she fell.
She had been high, that part was true, completely zonked out on whatever the current flavor of escape was. Klonopin, probably. Bea had watched her make her way down the hall like a woman much older than fifty-three, her footsteps slow and shuffling.
She had told Mama to get rid of that hall runner right there by the stairs, but of course she hadn’t listened. Still, she’d only stumbled rather than fallen outright. She would’ve been fine.
Bea can’t even say for sure why she pushed her. Only that she was there, and Mama tripped, and as she did, Bea’s whole heart seemed to rise up joyfully in her chest, and it had felt like the most natural thing in the world to just reach out and … shove.
Her face didn’t register fear or horror or shock. As always, Mama just looked vaguely confused as she fell.
It occurred to Bea at the funeral that she was lucky. If she’d just broken an ankle or fractured a collarbone, Bea would’ve had a lot of explaining to do. But she hit her head hard at the edge of the filial there at the bottom. Bea had heard the crack, seen the blood.
She didn’t die right away, but when Bea had looked down at her, she’d seen that the injury was severe enough, the blood already pooling around her head.
Still, if she had called 911 right then instead of the next morning, if she’d pretended to hear a thud in the middle of the night rather than waking up to find her mother at the bottom of the stairs, Mama probably would’ve made it. It was the bleeding that did it in the end, after all.
Lying there all night alone at the foot of the stairs, blood gushing then slowly leaking onto the hardwood.
Bea had waited for months to feel bad about it, but in the end, all she’d felt was free.
And she’d put it out of her head, mostly, for years. Even Eddie didn’t know the truth about how her Mama had died. She’d given him a vague story about Mama’s drinking, and since Eddie was vague enough about his own past, he’d let it slide. It hadn’t come up again until just a few months before Blanche died.
The two of them, having dinner at that same Mexican restaurant they’d gone to after Bea had met Eddie.
Things had been tense—this is after Bea catches Eddie and Blanche at lunch, after she fucks Tripp in the bathroom, not that Blanche knows about that—but Bea is still unprepared for how angry Blanche seems that night.
“He doesn’t know, does he?” she asks, and Bea stares at her until she’s the first to look away. “Eddie. That all your shit is fake. That this whole”—she waves one arm in the air—“Southern Manors thing was basically stolen from me.”
“I know it’s hard to believe the world doesn’t revolve around you, Blanche, but I promise that’s the case,” Bea replies, her voice calm even as her pulse spikes.
Blanche takes another drink, sullen now. Was she always like this, or is this what being married to Tripp has done? Bea wonders.
She even looks like him now, her hair the same sandy shade as his, cut nearly as short. But her body is rail thin, unlike his, bangles jangling on her wrist as she plucks a chip from the basket. Bea can’t help but inspect those bracelets, looking for something familiar, but no, not a one of them is from Southern Manors. They’re all Kate Spade, and she wrinkles her nose.
Blanche sees. “What?” She’s not eating the chip she’s holding, just picking small pieces off of it, and Bea reaches over to wipe away the pile of crumbs.
“If you need bangles, we just did a new line,” Bea says. “I’ll send some over to you.”
Blanche’s lips part slightly, eyes wide, and after a moment, she gives a startled laugh that’s too loud. “Are you fucking serious?” she asks, and Bea sees heads turn in their direction.
Frowning, she leans closer. “Lower your voice, please.”
“No,” she says, letting the remnant of her chip drop to the table. “No, I seriously want to know if you’re pissed because I’m not wearing your stupid jewelry. I want to know if that’s what’s happening right now, Bertha.”
“Mature,” Bea replies, and Blanche hoots with laughter, sitting back in the booth and crossing her arms over her chest.
“I’m asking you if your husband knows that everything about you is a lie. You’re bitching about my bracelets, and I’m the immature one, okay.”
Bea’s hand shoots out, grabbing her wrist, the one covered in those goddamn bangles, and she squeezes so hard Blanche yelps.
“You’re drunk,” Bea tells her through clenched teeth. “And you’re embarrassing yourself. Maybe leave that to Tripp.”
Dinner ends early that night, and it’s only two days later that Eddie is asking why Bea never told him her mother died in a fall.
Which is when Bea realizes there is no affair, when she realizes that even if Blanche had wanted to hurt her, Eddie did not. And because Blanche did not get what she wanted for once in her life, she’s now acting out, firing the only ammunition she has left.
Bea shows up with coffee the next morning and breakfast pastries. She even gets Blanche one of those gluten-free abominations she likes.
“Peace offering,” she says, and she can tell that a part of Blanche wants to believe it, that she wants things to go back to the way they were.
The lake trip is another peace offering. Another olive branch.
And Blanche grabs it with both hands.
Jane sits there, twirling the stem of her wineglass between her fingers, and I watch her mind work. I like not knowing exactly what she’ll do, and it is oddly satisfying to see how shallow her loyalty to Eddie really is.
I hadn’t lost him after all.
It surprises me how much that thrills me.
But maybe it shouldn’t. Some of the things in the diary were for show, to cover my tracks—the majority of it, really—but the sex? The way I felt about Eddie?
That had all been real.
But then Jane sits up a little straighter and says, “We should call the police. Tell them what Eddie did. Let him pay the consequences.”
Is she playing with me, or is that what she really wants? The ambiguity that I’d enjoyed so much just a moment ago is now irritating, and I wave one hand, finishing my wine.
“Later,” I say. “Let me enjoy a few hours of being out of that room before I’m stuck answering a bunch of questions.”
Looking around, I add, “You really didn’t do anything new with the place, did you?”
Jane doesn’t answer that, but leans closer, reaching for my hand. “Bea,” she says. “We can’t just sit here. Eddie murdered Blanche. He could’ve murdered you. We have to—”
“We don’t have to do anything,” I reply, yanking my hand out from under hers and standing up.
“The stressful part is always making the decision,” Bea used to remind her employees. “Once you’ve made it, it’s done, and you feel better.”
That’s how it was with Blanche.
Once Bea has decided that she has to die, it’s easy enough, and the rest of the steps fall into place. She invites Blanche to the lake house, then texts Tripp at the last minute. She’s going to need a fall guy this time, after all. One person dying in an accident while she’s alone with them is one thing. Two would be harder to pull off.
So, Tripp.
Blanche is not happy when he shows up.
“I thought this was supposed to be a girls’ trip,” she says, and Tripp settles on the couch next to her, already drinking a vodka tonic.
“And I am a Girls’ Tripp,” he jokes, which is so terrible that for a moment Bea thinks maybe she should kill him, too.
But no, she needs Tripp to play a part in all this.
He does it well, too. Blanche is so irritated he’s there that she drinks even more than Bea had hoped, glass after glass of wine, then the vodka Tripp is drinking.
And when Tripp passes out, as Bea had known he would thanks to the Xanax she’d put in his drink, Blanche actually laughs with Bea, the two of them dragging his limp body into the master bedroom, Bea pretending to be just as drunk as Blanche.
That’s the thing she remembers the most about it all later. Blanche was happy that night. It had mostly been the booze, but still, Bea had given her that.
One last Girls’ Night Out.
When they get onto the pontoon boat Bea bought for Eddie last year, Blanche is so unsteady, Bea has to guide her to her seat.
More drinks.
The sky overhead is dark, too, a new moon that night, nothing to illuminate what happens.
As with Mama, Bea doesn’t have to do that much work, really.
When Blanche has slumped into unconsciousness, it’s a simple matter of taking the hammer she’d bought, the heavy one, the one that looks exactly like the kind of unsubtle murder weapon a guy like Tripp would buy, and she brings it down.
Once. Twice. Three times. A sickening crunch giving way to a meaty, wet sound, and then she’s rolling Blanche off the deck of the boat. It’s dark, and her hair is the last thing Bea sees, sinking under the lake.
She stands there and waits to feel something.
Regret, horror. Anything, really. But again, once it’s done, she’s mostly just relieved and a little tired.
Swimming back to the house is something of a chore, her arms cutting through the warm water, her brain conjuring images of alligators, water moccasins. Below her, she knows there’s a flooded forest, and it’s hard not to imagine the dead branches reaching up for her like skeletal hands, to see her body drifting down with Blanche’s to lay in that underwater wood.
Something brushes against her foot at one point, and she gives a choked scream that sounds too loud in the quiet night, lake water filling her mouth, tasting like minerals and something vaguely rotten, and she spits, keeps swimming.
The story is so simple. Girls’ weekend. Tripp showing up unexpectedly. They went out on the boat, they drank too much. Bea fell asleep or passed out, to the sound of Tripp and Blanche arguing. When she woke up, Blanche was gone, and Tripp was passed out. Bea panicked, dove in the water trying to save her best friend, and when she couldn’t find her, swam back to the house.
Tripp had been so drunk he won’t have any idea what happened, won’t even remember he wasn’t on the boat, and everyone knew he and Blanche were having problems. Maybe he’ll luck out and they’ll assume Blanche fell or jumped in of her own accord, never finding her body there at the bottom of the lake. Maybe they will find it, see that hole in her skull, and think he murdered her.
Either one works for Bea.
And it all would have been just that easy had Eddie not come along and fucked it all up.
He’s in the house when Bea walks up the dock, his eyes going wide as he sees her. She doesn’t even think about how she must look, soaking wet, shivering even though it’s hot. All she can think is, Why is he here?
And that’s it—the moment she loses it all.
She should’ve been paying more attention to just how weird it was that he was there, to that panicked look on his face. Eddie never had handled being surprised well, and like a lot of men, he always thought he was smarter than he actually was.
Bea had always believed that a man who overestimates his intelligence is a man who can be easily manipulated. Turns out, he’s also a man who can be really dangerous.
Later, she wanted to tell him just how badly he’d fucked it all up, that she would’ve taken care of it, that she had taken care of it, just like she always did, but of course Eddie rushed in without thinking, just like always.
I stood there in the living room of the house Eddie built and I created, and I thought about that again, about what Jane had said.
He loved you.
That was it. That was the piece that made it all make sense. Why he didn’t call the police that night, why he didn’t just leave me to die upstairs. If all he wanted was the money, I had given him the perfect excuse to get rid of me and take it all. We hadn’t signed any kind of prenup because I’d wanted to prove to the world—mostly to Blanche—that I trusted Eddie more than anything.
He could’ve taken what I’d given him.
But he hadn’t.
And okay, yes, he’d met Jane, yes, he’d planned to marry her—but he still came up to my room, still talked to me, still made love to me.
All that time trying to figure out what the secret was, the key to unlock all of this, and it was that simple.
He loved me.
Jane was in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen now, her phone in her hand. “Bea, I know you’ve been through something horrible, and you’re probably in shock, but we have got to call the police. We can’t wait any longer. This is crazy.”
She looked back down at the phone, went to punch numbers in, and suddenly I was there, her wrist clutched in my hand, her bones so fragile underneath my fingers.
“Don’t,” I said, and in that moment, I saw the flash in her eyes that told me she understood what was really going on here.
I liked Jane, respected her even, but she was not going to fuck this up for me.
For us.
A thin, piercing alarm suddenly went off, startling both of us, and I dropped Jane’s wrist, looking up at the ceiling.
“What—” she started, but I already knew.
It was a fire alarm.
Without thinking, I ran for the stairs.
You idiot, you fucking idiot, I thought as I ran, because this was another thing that was like Eddie. The panic room didn’t open in case of fire because it was supposed to be a place you could go if there was a fire. Either Eddie didn’t know that, or he was betting that I would come and let him out.
And I was pretty sure it was the latter.
Jane was right behind me, yelling my name.
Upstairs, the smell of smoke was strong, gray wisps already snaking out beneath the door of the closet, and when I grabbed the doorknob, it was hot. So hot it burned, my skin stinging.
I yanked the door open to a blast of heat and smoke and pain, and somewhere behind me, Jane started to scream.