Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(73)

“What about her phone?” Stevie asked. “They can check where it pinged.”

Julian made a noise that suggested this had not been fruitful.

“The last ping they had was about an hour after that, and fairly close by.”

“So she left her house and went to Waterloo,” Theo said. “She left the station. On her own?”

“Yes, on her own.”

“And nobody saw her hurt,” Peter said.

“Exactly,” Sooz said. “No news is good news in many ways? Ange has gone off on an errand or mission, or maybe she just needed some time to herself. People do.”

She reached over and patted Izzy’s arm.

“I’ll keep working on it,” Julian said. “I’m scheduled to speak to someone again later this evening.”

He drained the rest of his coffee.

Stevie watched Julian for a moment. Despite the liquid ease with which he moved, there was a twitchiness to his movements. Under the shadows of his long eyelashes, the blue-sky eyes clouded with storms.

Unlike everyone else, he was not pretending all was well.





21


A FEW MINUTES LATER, AFTER MAKING HER FAREWELL, STEVIE ascended the creaking steps of Merryweather’s grand staircase on her own, the ticking grandfather clock beneath her, and the eyes of the Holt-Careys of the past boring down on her. The ceilings in here were tall enough that pictures were not at eye height—everything was up.

She had a choice now. Which room to go to? She could knock on Janelle’s door, get this over with. It was nine o’clock, and Quinn still hadn’t called. She had to do this soon. She started walking in that direction, but everything began to swim in her head. Angela and the lock. The text about the button. Samantha Gravis. The power outage and the tree down on the road. The rules of the game and the statements about where everyone was that night.

Too many things. She needed to think. She would talk to Janelle in a minute. She returned to her room and paced around, staring at the silver-lilac walls, the painting of a horse, the detailing on the side of the wardrobe. A moment later, there was a soft knock and David stuck his head in.

“Hey,” he said, coming in and shutting the door quietly behind him.

“Did they seem really . . . calm to you?” Stevie asked. “No one was talking about Angela.”

“They’re English,” David said, sitting on the bed. “That keep calm and carry on thing is real. You know. Don’t talk about stuff that’s bad. Talk about tennis! That’s how they are.”

“It’s more than that,” she said. “There was something weird about the whole conversation, about all of this. They let us come here with Izzy . . . something is off with all of it, and I can’t figure out what it is. It feels . . . claustrophobic.”

“I think it’s just a weird situation,” David said. “And being foreign. Things feel different. You feel out of place a lot.”

“But Angela is gone,” Stevie said.

“What if she doesn’t want to be found? If she thinks one of her friends is a killer, then . . .”

“I thought of that. She sends the texts, realizes she’s made a mistake, then takes off. But . . .” Stevie shook her head. “Did you see how many cat toys were in that house? The pictures? She loves that cat. She’s not going to leave her cat, not without telling anyone. She’s not going to leave that mess. She’s not going to go without mentioning something to Izzy—anything, just to keep her from worrying.

David leaned back against the headboard.

“So what does it mean that her phone last pinged by the river on the night she vanished?”

“What do you mean?” Stevie said. “I thought it was near Waterloo Station?”

“Which is directly on the river. It’s near where we were the other night, close to the Eye.”

See, this was the kind of thing Stevie needed to know to figure out what the hell was going on here.

“Well, that’s not good,” Stevie said. “I think we can say that Angela is not safe right now. If we want to find Angela, we have to figure out what happened here.”

Stevie felt like the answer was dangling nearby, in her peripheral vision. If she turned her head too quickly, it would move. Maybe if she stayed very still, it would float into view. She went over to the window, opened it, and got a face full of cold, autumnal air, loamy and refreshing. It was so dark here. She could see so many stars flecking the sky, and there was a fat moon, glowing white.

Another knock on the door. Even softer. David called for them to come in.

“Sorry,” Izzy said. “Am I disturbing you?”

“No,” David said. “We were just talking.”

Izzy came inside like an embarrassed ghost and shut the door. She took a seat in one of the lavender-colored armchairs in the middle of the room.

“They’re in the sitting room talking about shows they used to do,” Izzy said. “Julian seems to be the only one doing anything. And the thing with her phone . . . should we go back to London right now, to where her phone last was? Why isn’t her phone on?”

“So many things could be going on,” David was saying to Izzy, trying to reassure her. “She could have just dropped her phone. Or gotten rid of it.”