Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(58)

On the other: limited time in England, every second of which was dripping away. And they had a schedule to follow or else.

On the third hand: missing person who was present at a murder at a country house and thought something was up with that murder.

On the fourth hand (officially too many hands now): it wasn’t that she came here to be with David, but . . . manor house. With David.

Minutes later, Stevie walked back over to the other side of Craven House. She found everyone still awake, sitting in Vi’s room and eating their feast of chips and cookies.

“So,” she said. “Something’s come up. Hear me out.”

She started with the positive approach. Didn’t they all want to go to a manor house? They’d been invited by a viscount, for whatever that was worth. She expected more enthusiasm than the tepid silence she was getting. Vi picked at the dust at the bottom of a bag of pickled-onion-flavored chips and Nate wrinkled his nose as if holding back a sneeze. Janelle met Stevie’s eye.

“Stevie,” she said, “I don’t know if we can, or should, for a bunch of reasons. We only have two more days here. We still have all of Vi’s and Nate’s stuff to do. I mean, a manor house sounds cool, but it’s just a house, and we have things here in London. Vi has an interview with a curator from the British Museum tomorrow. It’s a big deal for them. They need it for their applications.”

“The answer is there,” Stevie said with increasing desperation. “Angela was on to something, or at least she was working on something. We show up, Izzy brings up the fact that Angela was talking about the lock when she was high, Angela sends a text to the others saying she needs to talk to them and they should go to Merryweather, and now she’s gone. Wherever she is, it has something to do with what happened at Merryweather, and the way to find her is to find out what happened.”

“We all get it. It’s important that Izzy finds her aunt. We really do understand that. But her aunt vanished here, right? That’s why we just helped with the posts.”

“Well, she was last seen here . . .”

“But what are the chances she’s at Merryweather?”

Nate and Vi had gone silent and watched this back-and-forth warily.

“Quinn isn’t going to let us go,” Janelle said. “She’s already on edge with us here. We’re supposed to follow the plan. If we say we’re going to some manor house, she will look up that manor house. She will find out there was a murder there once. She will realize what is going on.”

This had already occurred to Stevie. She’d taken a few minutes back in David’s room to look up Merryweather. The first link was to the official site, which was designed to entice couples looking for wedding venues and production crews looking for locations. It had a Wikipedia page, and various mentions of Christmas parties and weddings and gatherings held there. The gardens were apparently famous, and people came to visit them to see the flowers changing over the seasons. Sebastian had done a lot to make sure the murder stuff stayed out of the searches as long as possible. But if you kept looking, it was there, buried in the lines of a few old news articles. If you put in “Merryweather” and “murder,” it came up right away. It wouldn’t be natural to do that, unless you were Dr. Quinn and you knew Stevie and her ways.

The best answer she had come up with was:

“What if we just . . . went? For a little? One night. If we don’t ask . . .”

“Without telling her?” Janelle said. “Oh, she’d kill us. She will get on a plane to come and kill us with her hair.”

She had a point, of course. If Dr. Quinn found out that they had taken off across England to bust into a murder mansion, she would, in fact, kill them all with her hair.

“Stevie . . .” Janelle brushed imaginary lint off her yellow sweater. It was the color of lemons—Janelle’s favorite. “We’re in another country. And . . . we need to graduate.”

“I need to graduate too,” Stevie said.

“I know that. I didn’t say you didn’t.”

“So I can go,” Stevie said. “On my own.”

“So Quinn can expel you? For real, Stevie, have you even started your applications? I haven’t seen you do anything. All that stuff is due soon. You have to make plans. You’re always running after whatever shows up in front of you, but you can’t do that forever.”

This was unexpected. Stevie felt it in her solar plexus. The thing that was never said, the thing she felt over her shoulder but kept telling herself wasn’t there, it was real. Her friends saw her for what she was. Janelle and Vi and Nate—they were doing the work, and Stevie was a free-floating object, pinging around, looking for focus. Looking at garbage.

Janelle was almost shaking with upset. She got up and left the room. Vi followed her. Stevie heard them go to Janelle’s room and shut the door.

“That didn’t go well,” Nate said.

“No.”

“If one of us was missing,” Nate said, “and you were worried, would you invite a bunch of strangers to come to your house when you were freaking out?”

“If one of those strangers solved things like that, I would.”

“I think it’s weird. And Janelle may have a point. Do you really think you can find her by going to Merryweather?”