A Lesson in Vengeance(88)

The back of my throat has gone bone-dry. I lick my lips and swallow, but it doesn’t help.

“No. Of course not. Everyone loved Clara.”

Loves. I should have used the present tense. The way Liu and Ashby exchange glances suggests I’m not so lucky that they haven’t noticed.

“You were here last year, weren’t you?” Liu says. “When that girl died?”

“Alex Haywood.” I can’t help myself. Alex wasn’t that girl.

“Alex Haywood,” Liu repeats. “A strange case. I looked it up. A girl falls from a cliff…drowns in the Dalloway lake…then disappears. Never found.”

I feel as if my brain has been clipped free from my body, floating far overhead. I barely feel human at all.

“Yes.”

“You were there. You saw her fall.”

My throat has gone tight; I want to clear it, but I don’t dare make any noise that could seem like discomfort. Or like remorse.

“I was there,” I say. “Alex was my best friend. She fell. It was an accident.”

“An accident.”

“She was drunk.”

“Yes. So you told the police.”

Ashby’s lapel has a tiny mustard stain on it, small enough that I hadn’t noticed at first. Now I want nothing more than to rub at it with a wet dishcloth and wipe it away. I stare until the mark goes blurry.

“Here,” Ashby says, relenting and passing me her handkerchief; I squeeze my eyes shut and dab away the tears. I retain enough presence of mind to be faintly disgusted with myself: these tears are what will buy my safety. No matter what I say, neither Ashby nor Liu will suspect I killed anyone. When they look at me they see my mother’s money and white skin. They don’t see a murderer.

But that’s exactly what I am.

“I don’t know what happened to her,” I whisper. “Maybe she…She could have tried to crawl away for help….Into the woods. And then…”

And then the wooden handle of the shovel was against my palms, splinters catching under skin. I’d stolen the shovel from the janitor’s shed. I couldn’t dig six feet deep—only three, but it was enough.

Her body had looked pale and broken on the dirt when I dragged her out of the lake, less than human, waterlogged and cold. I had been relieved to cover it up—first with soil and then with stones.

I remember thinking it was a sign, that she had died as Cordelia Darling died. That I’d buried her as Margery Lemont had been buried—in the crawl space under Godwin House, built into its stone foundations, where she belonged. I had thought maybe this would be enough to sate Margery’s appetite.

Only Margery Lemont had never existed. Not as a spirit haunting me, anyway. She had just been a too-clever girl living in a time when being clever made you dangerous. And she’d paid for that with her life.

The two officers let me retreat back to my room, clearly considering themselves married to a schedule. I leave my door open and sit on the floor, curled up close enough to overhear the echo of voices up the stairs while remaining hidden from passersby by the angle of the door itself. Ashby invites Ellis into MacDonald’s office next. I can make out the click of the door shutting, but no matter how hard I strain my ears, their voices are silent to me.

I give up on this plan and creep down the stairs on sock feet to the second floor. Ellis’s room is locked, but I can pick the lock; at least there was one skill I’d taught myself during our murder plots that Ellis didn’t know about. And the Godwin House latches are ancient, unfussy; they pop open without a fight.

Ellis said she had a document, a file, collating all the evidence against me. A letter to Clara written in my handwriting. I can’t be sure when I’ll have another chance to search her room.

Ellis has made her bed, folding in the sheets and draping a chunky knitted throw blanket along the foot. A book lies open atop the pillow: Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Her typewriter sits on her desk, closed under a case now that she’s finished her book. I open it, but there’s no letter hidden against the keys.

Ellis’s bookshelves are crammed full of an eclectic mix of titles, everything from mystery to classics to texts in the original Latin. There’s even an odd copy of a Nancy Drew book, dog-eared and with a broken spine. There are no photographs. Not of herself, not of her moms or Quinn or childhood friends—just a framed portrait of Margaret Atwood tilted against the full set of Atwood’s books.

Ellis’s épée hangs from a hook on the wall. Her fencing gear is folded in the dresser. I dig through her sock drawer, shoving aside underwear and a collection of broken fountain pens to find…nothing.

Wherever Ellis has hidden that letter, the one allegedly written in my own hand, it isn’t here.

Downstairs, the office door creaks open. I’ve run out of time.

I flee back to the third floor and shut my door, turn the latch. My heart pounds as I crouch there on the floor, ear pressed to the wall—I’d left Ellis’s bedroom unlocked. But no footsteps ascend. She doesn’t come knocking.

She doesn’t care.

I won’t let Ellis Haley set the terms of my downfall. One way or another, I need to get ahead of her.

At my desk, I take out a sheet of writing paper and uncap a pen I stole from Ellis’s room. I write a letter, painstakingly slow, copying Ellis’s handwriting from the Night Migrations notes as best I can.