Lies That Bind Us(89)

Almost. They will serve multiple life sentences for what they did to us and, most damningly, what they did to a boy-waiter who had been fascinated by the shine about them, and whose life they had thrown away like leftover food pushed to the side of the plate as they left the table and got on with their lives.

Kristen and I promised to stay in touch, but I don’t know if the group of six we had been can function as a foursome. Gretchen remained friendly through the trial, but if I thought her a third wheel before the events of that awful night, she embraced that role even more completely after it. She was, I think, more saddened by Simon and Melissa’s betrayal of her than she was outraged, and though I tried to convince her otherwise, she seemed to feel guilty.

“I don’t think it was my fault,” she said when we had gone for coffee in a Heraklion café-bar during the first week, when all the important information was already out in public. “Not really, but I wonder if I forced their hand, you know? After that stuff with Brad, when I freaked out but couldn’t get out of the country. If I’d just not said anything. If I’d just gotten my passport without talking to them, without agreeing to come back and stay one more night, I might have left and there wouldn’t have been any point in them going after you.”

“But Melissa switched your purses on purpose,” I said. “So you couldn’t leave.”

Gretchen sipped from her cup, leaving a ring of rose-colored lipstick on the ceramic.

“Probably,” she said, still looking to give her shiny friends the smallest of outs. “Those purses were exactly—”

“She switched them, Gretchen. She admitted it. You were a target for them before the trip even began. It’s why they invited you. And once they figured out it wasn’t you sending the messages with Manos’s name in them, that it was one of us, they were going to get rid of us all no matter what you did or said.”

I thought back to the trial, as I had done constantly since it ended. At first, Simon said virtually nothing under cross-examination, offering mere shrugs, denials, and claims that he couldn’t remember. He implied the whole thing had been a mistake, the result of a faulty generator and our—mainly my—paranoia and deception. Melissa, by contrast, had been defiant, denying everything but somehow managing to blame everyone else, as if everything that had happened was due to the stupidity and mean-spiritedness of other people and a hostile universe. This impulse toward self-justification was bizarre and, in some ways, more frightening than anything she had said or done the night she set out to kill us all. For someone who had always seemed so composed, so attentive to the way others viewed her, this careless dropping of the veil was shocking and contemptuous, as if no one had the right to judge her so she didn’t care what they thought. That included the jury, whom she frequently sneered at in ways that made for newspaper headlines. I was reminded of the look in her eyes when, after she had been yelled at by the dead boy’s mother that day at the restaurant, Brad had refused to play along with Melissa’s pity party. There had been a feral rage in her face at the thought that someone had the audacity to disrupt what she felt she deserved. It had been the same look she had had that night in the foyer, when she had attacked me for exposing what she and Simon had done.

But she continued to deny everything, even as she scornfully remarked that it was absurd that she might lose her liberty over the death of “some Greek waiter.” The court translator hesitated over the statement, barely keeping her fury in check, and the prosecution repeated the statement several times in his closing remarks. Each time, Melissa just rolled her eyes and sighed. I was surprised no one from the public gallery went for her, the tension, the hatred was so thick in the courtroom. I felt ashamed to have been her friend.

Though the evidence remained open to interpretation, the process of laying out who Melissa had become was excruciating, her beauty and charisma peeled back to show a heart so hard and shriveled that it was painful to look at. I felt the eyes of the jury on the rest of us too, all of them silently, fiercely asking the same question: How did you not know?

I couldn’t answer that. Simon had turned out to be shallow, selfish, and ruthless in a bland, predictable, and petty sort of way, but it didn’t shock me—maybe because he was a man. I’m used to the way men, suitably draped with respectability, with money and status, are absolved and dressed with things that, if squinted at without your glasses, look like virtues: strength, confidence, and ambition. Melissa was more of an enigma, her sense of sneering superiority to all around her—including, I would say, Simon—less easy to explain and harder to swallow. A double standard, perhaps.

Even so, the evidence against them was largely circumstantial, and it was still possible that, however much the jury hated them, they might still get away with it. The turning point came when Simon abruptly changed his plea to guilty. It was clear that the trial was going badly, and everyone in court—and, for that matter, in the papers—figured he was cutting his losses, but I felt that there was more to it than that. I think I saw the moment he made his decision. Melissa was on the stand. From time to time she had tried to play the radiant and misunderstood goddess, but her furious contempt kept showing through, and the mood of the room was solidly against her. The prosecutor asked her whose idea it had been to go scuba diving and, when the question had been translated to her satisfaction, she rolled her eyes.

“Si,” she said. “Of course.”