Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(97)

Things that keep coming up:

A lock

A button

Samantha Gravis

This was an equation. These three things somehow added up to the answer. What did they have in common?

Not much. The lock was on the door of the woodshed. Samantha Gravis was in Cambridge. And no one knew where or what the button was. There didn’t even seem to be a button.

Doorknob yawned and stretched himself, almost rolling off her lap in the process. She grabbed him before he fell.

She felt that sizzling feeling between her eyes. Doorknob’s purring sounds powered it. She let him wriggle and drop to the floor. She took the steps two at a time, down to the kitchen, where Izzy was washing the disgusting, curry-stained dishes, which were furry with mold. “The text messages,” Stevie said. “Show me her text messages again.”

She tried not to scream with impatience as Izzy peeled off the washing gloves to get the tablet from her bag. Stevie clutched it and scanned down the exchange.

9:46 p.m. ANGELA: She had the button

9:47 p.m. THEO: ?

9:48 p.m. SOOZ: What Theo said.

9:48 p.m. YASH: Button?

9:49 p.m. PETER: what?

9:50 p.m. SOOZ: I have to go back onstage. Please someone explain to me what is happening.

9:51 p.m. SEBASTIAN: Can you ring me?

9:55 p.m. THEO: Ange?

“She got the call at 9:53,” Stevie said. “That’s seven minutes after her last text. That button got someone’s attention. Seven minutes . . .”

Stevie continued saying seven minutes for perhaps seven minutes. She was almost shaking now. She looked around the kitchen in desperation. She had still seen something in this house.

“What the hell did I see?” she yelled.

The answer was all about Angela—what Angela had been doing, what Angela said, what happened that night that made her spring into action moments after Stevie and the others had gone. Perhaps recreating the scene would help.

“Come on,” Stevie said to Izzy, who was watching Stevie’s wild stares and strange proclamations wide-eyed.

“I was sitting here,” Stevie said, finding the spot on the floor she had occupied. “You were over there. Sit there. Exactly as you were. Think back. What were we talking about the other night, before we started talking about the murders?”

“Mostly history. The Tower of London. Guy Fawkes. It was a lot about Anne Boleyn, I think. About her execution, how it was different from a lot of other executions. She had a special swordsman from France, and she had to sit up straight because of it. You put your head down if it’s an axe, but you have to sit up for a sword, and the swordsman pulled some kind of trick to get her head in the right position . . .”

Stevie looked at the two buttons on the coffee table.

Click, click, click. A sequence of things snapped into place. This was how it happened—all the things she had been collecting, all her ruminations and wandering thoughts, all that she had ever absorbed from mysteries and true crime and puzzles, all those times she read Wikipedia articles about gruesome things until three in the morning, all that she had observed without knowing—it brewed in her head. It bubbled. It seethed. It would not be ready until it was ready, but when it was ready it cascaded over like one of those model volcanoes she built in grade school that spat up baking soda and vinegar lava. It was the great hork of realization.

Stevie looked up at Izzy in a kind of wonder.

“There’s no button,” she said.

“We haven’t found it yet, but . . .”

“No,” Stevie said. “There is no button. That’s the point. And if there’s no button . . .”

The thoughts were coming quickly. Stevie had no ability to articulate them. If she tried, she would lose it all.

“Did you take out the trash?” she said.

“It smelled bad,” Izzy replied.

“Oh God,” Stevie said. “Is it gone?”

“I think it’s still in the bins out front.”

Stevie tripped over her own feet in her haste to get up, sending Doorknob flying off in fear. She hurried down the steps and leaned over the little black wrought-iron fence to get at the bins. They were still full of pungent garbage. She pulled out the bags and brought them back into the house. This time, she didn’t even bother to line the kitchen floor with plastic bags before she upturned the contents. She dug in with her bare hands, pushing aside the food wrappers and napkins. Her eyes fell on a small slip of paper stained with curry and dotted with bits of rice. She lifted this out and studied it in silence for several minutes. Then she ran up the steps, to Angela’s bathroom. She examined this for a minute, then slowly returned to the living room and looked at Izzy.

“That friend of your family who works at the London Eye. I need you to call them.”

“Why?”

“Because I know what happened,” Stevie said, clutching the filthy piece of paper, her eyes glowing. “And now I have to prove it.”





30


IT WAS BITTER NOW, WITH AN UNKIND WIND BLOWING OFF THE Thames. It made Stevie’s eyes water as she and Izzy made their determined way along the Embankment and over Hungerford Bridge. She did not turn her head to look at Parliament over to her right, with the glowing face of Big Ben. She was not here to think about the view, to recall being here with David and her friends.