Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(70)

David hoisted himself up and into the crawl space to join her.

“This is nice,” he said. “What are we doing?”

Stevie scanned through the photos on her phone.

“Look,” she said. “Here’s the photo Sooz took when they arrived on the night of the murder. This window . . .”

She pointed at the window behind them.

“. . . was closed. But then look at this police photo from the next day.”

Stevie had, of course, taken pictures of all the documents on the train. She pulled up the police photo that most clearly showed the outside of the shed.

“It’s open,” she says, pointing at the window. “Sometime between the night they arrived and the time the police were here the next day, this window was opened. Sebastian just said the floor up here was rotted away and there was no access. And look . . .”

She pulled up another crime scene photo, one that showed the blood splatter on the ceiling. It also clearly showed the hole where the rope pull should have been.

“No rope,” she said. “So how does someone come up to this supposedly inaccessible place to open a window a few inches after a murder?”

“Does it matter?” David asked. “Nobody could get through that.”

“Well, not nobody. There are people who can disjoint their collarbones and squeeze through dog doors. Or people who can do certain contortions.”

“So, creepy people. Or circus folk.”

“Also, why? They busted the lock off the door. Why dislocate your collarbones and crawl through an impossible opening when you can go through the door? Which is what happened.”

“Maybe the police opened it?”

Stevie frowned.

“Policing was different then,” she said. “Crime scenes weren’t handled as well. But I feel like they wouldn’t open the crime scene window and then photograph it that way. There’s nothing in these reports about coming up here. I mean, I read them pretty quickly on the train, but I would have seen something about a crawl space above the murder site. That’s kind of critical. No. The police had no idea this space was here. They never looked.”

“What does that mean?” David asked. “Someone came to a place that seems to be inaccessible, to do something that has no point?”

“It means,” she said, “that this matters. This crawl space. That window. This whole woodshed. It’s locked, it’s unlocked. The floor is rotted and there was no way to get up here, yet someone was up here.”

“You make it sound like Sebastian was lying about the rotted floor.”

Stevie was silent for a moment, as the last of the daylight ebbed away.

“Maybe he was,” she said.

“But Sebastian was the one person everyone could see the whole time, right? Up at the folly? So why lie about this? I don’t get it.”

“I don’t either,” she said. “We better get back inside. I think we may have left our friends with a murderer.”





20


DINNER, AS THEY SAY, WAS SERVED.

Merryweather’s dining room was the kind of place that could accommodate eleven people for dinner and have plenty of room to spare. Because it was used for weddings and events, there were multiple tables and chairs folded along one of the sides of the room. There was a massive silver mirror over a marble-tiled fireplace. The walls were papered in a buttery yellow silk with a painted pattern of crawling vines, birds, and flowers.

“Forgive the simplicity,” Sebastian said as everyone was seated. “I just had time to put together a basic menu.”

A woman appeared from a hidden door that blended right in with the rest of the wall. She was short, with close-cropped black hair and an intricate tattoo sleeve of twisted ivy, flowers, and barbed wire.

“This is Debbie,” he said. “She’s the events manager. I asked her to pop round and give me a hand.”

A general round of hellos for Debbie.

The basic menu started with a cauliflower and chive soup, served up in plain white catering china, along with baskets of warm bread. Debbie served these to each person as Sebastian wound around the table with bottles, pouring drinks.

“White or red?” he asked as he got to Stevie. “I have sparkling elderflower as well.”

Stevie had had wine before, but no one with an English accent in a long dining room in a country house had ever approached her before to offer her wine like she was an actual goddamned fancy adult. Because she was not one. An adult. Or fancy. She didn’t come from the kind of family that had wine with dinner. They had Diet Coke, like decent Americans. If her parents had been offered red or white wine with dinner, they’d probably have pulled a gun in surprise.

“Uhhhhhh,” she explained.

Sebastian gracefully turned to Izzy to give Stevie time to compose further remarks.

“I’ll just have the elderflower,” Izzy said. “Not really feeling up to wine tonight.”

The group nodded sympathetically.

Stevie had recovered enough to figure out her drink. She would do what Izzy did—she would have whatever sparkling elderflower was. (It turned out to be sort of like Sprite. Fancy Sprite, for fancy people.) “This dairy-based, Seb?” Sooz asked as the soup was set in front of her.

“No, darling. It’s vegan. I checked.”