Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(75)

She held up the photo of the ceiling, focusing on the little hole where a pull cord had been.

“There’s blood splashed across the ceiling,” Stevie said. “That hatch to the crawl space was closed when Rosie and Noel were killed. So how and why did burglars go up into a space they couldn’t access, with a rotted floor, to open a window? Makes no sense, right? Unless . . .”

This time, Stevie nodded. They had discussed this upstairs. It was time to tip their hand. Izzy shifted to the edge of her seat.

“After my aunt had surgery earlier this year,” she said, “she was on painkillers. I was at her flat helping her, and she started talking about the murders. She kept saying something about the padlock being unlocked, and that something had been planted.”

“Except,” Stevie said, “she probably didn’t say planted. Angela was talking about plants. It’s not that one of you is lying . . .”

Stevie spoke slowly, as the thought assembled itself before her.

“. . . it’s that you all are.”





June 24, 1995

1:00 p.m.

IT WAS THE SMELL THAT THEO REMEMBERED MOST VIVIDLY. SHE would become familiar with it in her career. The metallic smell of blood, the odor of a body. Effluvia. It rolled over her, flooding her nostrils.

Rosie and Noel were partially obscured by the woodpile, some of which had been pushed on top of them. For the rest of their lives, both Theo and Sebastian would be thankful for this small mercy, that they could not see the full extent of the horror. They saw enough, though. A leg. A hand. Some clothing. The dark, wet marks on the floor, and the blood that was all over the handle of the axe that Sebastian had used to pull down the rope hook of the hatch in the ceiling.

They stumbled out of the woodshed and into the strange light of day. The dots and streaks of blood across Sebastian’s face made Theo’s stomach churn. It was the only color on his face at all—he had turned gray and seemed to be unable to move.

The birds chirped and swooped overhead, unaware that anything was wrong at Merryweather.

“We need to call . . . an ambulance . . .”

Theo didn’t have to explain to him that an ambulance was unnecessary at this point. Sebastian was just saying things. Ambulance. Police. Help. Someone. Whoever you called when your friends had been murdered in a shed.

The police . . .

They would come, and they would find the ladder down and a room of cannabis plants and growing materials and two dead students.

They would come to the wrong conclusion.

Theodora had been a medical student for three years now—she had learned to deal with serious things. To save anyone she could. Triage. Rosie and Noel could not be saved, and someone else was in danger.

“The plants,” she said.

“The plants? Who cares about the plants?”

“They’re going to care about the plants, Seb,” she said urgently. “When they find that room full of cannabis plants, they’ll arrest you. They may think you did something to Rosie and Noel, something because of the plants.”

Sebastian seemed to be past understanding or caring. His knees decided it was time to tap out, and he wobbled before sitting heavily in the mud.

“What then?” he asked. “What are we supposed to do?”

A good question. Theo was a director. She was a planner. She took care of people. She was a doctor in training. She could do this. She would do this.

The plan began to assemble itself in her mind. The adrenaline fueled her, made her brain go faster. Fight or flight.

“Here is what we are going to do,” she said, taking long, even breaths. “We need to go back inside. We need to tell everyone what happened. We need to work together. We have to keep calm.”

Sebastian started to laugh, which was fair.

Theo reached out her hand to help him off the ground. She guided him to a remote bit of one of the walled gardens.

“Take off your clothes,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

Sebastian complied, pulling off the boots and his fitted shirt and trousers. He stood in the garden, barefoot and mostly naked aside from his underwear, waiting for Theo to return. She did so promptly, with dry clothes, a towel, a glass of water, a bottle of whisky, and a roll of loo paper. She set to work cleaning him up. She rolled up wads of the paper, moistened them with the water in the glass, and cleaned the blood from his hands and face.

“We can flush it, you see,” she said, mostly to herself. “We don’t want it on the towels or in the bin.”

When the blood was wiped away, she handed him the whisky.

“Drink,” she said. “For the shock.”

He complied, taking a long draw. He let this glide down his esophagus, and when it hit his stomach, he felt a flush come over his face. This provided enough clarity to dry himself off and change into the jeans and T-shirt that Theo had grabbed from his room. She had him lift his feet, which she cleaned before he reinserted them into the boots. She gathered up the bloodied tissues. Sebastian carried the clothes and the towel. As they made their way back to the house, she made them both dunk their booted feet into the stream in the garden, getting rid of blood on the soles.

Relatively clean, they returned to the house, where Theo shoved the clothes and towel into the washing machine along with some used kitchen drying-up towels and set it going. This wasn’t ideal, but they could certainly explain that they needed to clean some clothes and towels after a night spent playing in the rain and mud.