Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(88)

“I think I’ll go back,” she said. “I have lecture notes to go over and a project to work on. And I’ll go over and clean Angela’s flat and feed Doorknob. She left it a mess. I might stay there until she gets back.”

“Good idea,” Sebastian said.

“I have a stupid question,” Stevie said. “I wanted to get something for my dad. He loves whisky, and I can buy it here legally . . .”

This immediately caught the attention of all her friends, who knew that there was basically no way in hell Stevie was bringing her parents home a bottle of whisky. A magnet, maybe.

“And . . . this is weird, but . . . in the statements, I was reading about this amazing bottle of whisky? You drank something, you know . . . and I know you know whisky . . .”

“Oh, that whisky,” Sebastian said, nodding. “I don’t think you’re going to find that one at duty-free, and if you did, you wouldn’t buy it.”

“Why?”

“Because it cost ten thousand pounds,” Sebastian said, slicing himself a large chunk of sausage. “In the nineties. It would probably be about forty thousand pounds today.”

“You drank a ten-thousand-pound bottle of whisky?” Stevie said.

“Oh yes. Every drop.”

“You were obsessed about that whisky,” Peter said.

“I wasn’t obsessed with it. My father was. He sought rare bottles, and that one was the rarest of the lot. He seemed to value that bottle of whisky more than me. I was determined that we should drink it as a symbolic gesture.”

“Except you almost knocked the house over getting it out of the cabinet,” Yash said.

“I remember approaching the cabinet elegantly.”

“You crawled,” Theo said.

“With a candle in your hand,” Yash added. “Which I took. Then you banged and scratched that cabinet door until Peter got on his hands and knees and helped you open it.”

“I was testing the soundness of the wood.”

“It’s still got the scratches,” Yash said. “I looked. Someone’s tried to cover them, but I saw them.”

“Must have been the cat.”

“You don’t have a cat,” Sooz said.

“I have you,” Sebastian replied. “That’s close enough.”

Julian appeared in the dining room doorway, making an entrance as usual.

“The eggs are cold, darling,” Sebastian said. “I hope your constituents know the pains you go to on their behalf.”

Julian did not respond. He looked out over the table at his friends and the strangers he had just met. His shy, come-hither glance was more deliberate. He couldn’t quite look up. The table came to nervous attention. Stevie stiffened and put down her fork.

“They found her,” Julian said quietly.

“Where?” Izzy said. “Where is she?”

“Is she all right?” Yash added.

Mumbled versions of these questions came from almost everyone. But not Theo. Theo looked down at her plate.

“They found her,” Julian said with an obvious effort to keep his voice clear and steady. “In the river.”





26


SHE HAD SURFACED NEAR A PLACE CALLED LIMEHOUSE, WHICH WAS A section of the Thames on the east side of London, where the river bends. This was all there was to know. The breakfast broke up. Izzy got up and left the room. David went after her. Janelle, Vi, and Nate immediately made quiet exits. Stevie wanted to do the same but found she could not move. Angela had been her case, her charge, her person to protect. She had known something was very wrong, but now it was final.

“Let’s go and sit in the other room,” Theo said gently, putting her hand on Yash’s arm as he wept. “It’s more comfortable.”

Sooz and Peter supported each other. Sebastian sat at the table, stoic, for several more moments, looking at Julian.

“Thank you,” he finally said. “For . . . making the calls.”

Julian nodded grimly.

“Come on, Seb,” he said. “Let’s go with the others.”

They all left, and Stevie sat at a long, empty breakfast table, dotted with squares of weak sunlight and bowls of beans and sausages.

Stevie felt the overwhelming need to get out of this house.

It wasn’t raining yet, but there was a taste of it in the air. She put in her earbuds and listened to a podcast, mostly to drown out everything around her. She had failed. Failed utterly and totally. She had not saved Angela, not found Angela, not figured out what happened that night in 1995. Sure, she had gotten partway, but to something that wasn’t murder, not even close.

Merryweather was a good place to get lost. Its twisting paths and walls of green invited you inside, to wander, to be absorbed and never look back. The house vanished behind the curtain of trees, the walls, the high yew hedges. Here, there were only the calls of birds, the giggle of the slender brook that wriggled through the grounds. She found herself in the room of topiary with the burbling fountain. The meditation spot. When she had first been diagnosed with anxiety, she had to take a meditation class. She kept forgetting to do it, even though she knew it helped and that it worked better as a practice. It changed the brain. She turned off her podcast and closed her eyes, trying to settle herself. She listened to the birds complaining overhead, the sound of the fountain.