The Writing Retreat(75)

“My aunt.” Zoe dropped her chin on her knees, looking exhausted. “Roza killed my aunt.”

“Roza killed your aunt,” I repeated. The words sounded absurd. “What? Why?”

“My aunt Lucy wrote Lion’s Rose,” Zoe said. “Roza stole it and published it as her own.”

This stunned me. Lion’s Rose: the novel about the gardener whose HIV had progressed into AIDS, and whose garden was keeping her alive.

“I knew about the book because Lucy had been working on it for years,” Zoe went on. “Her good friend died of AIDs in the eighties; she got HIV from her husband, who was secretly sleeping with other men. Anyway, Lucy and I were really close, and I was a writer too, so she’d give me parts to read. She didn’t show anyone else, just me. So when she died and her famous friend’s new novel came out less than a year later and it was Lucy’s book, I was the only one who even knew what had happened.”

There were so many questions, but I managed to pin one down. “How did they know each other? Lucy and Roza.”

“Lucy was the assistant of Roza’s editor. I guess they just hit it off and Lucy showed Roza around when she was in New York. They were both in their twenties. At some point Lucy must’ve showed Roza her own work, and it was good enough to kill her for it.”

I swallowed, my throat tight. “How did she kill her?”

“Roza made it look like she overdosed.” Zoe’s face was expressionless. “People believed it because she’d been an addict. But she’d been clean for years at that point. Sure, she got depressed sometimes. But she never would’ve used again.”

“But how did Roza do that?” I asked. “Fake an overdose?”

“I don’t know for sure.” Zoe shrugged. “I assume Roza stayed over with her and just stuck a needle into her when she was sleeping. They found her alone in her apartment.”

“Oh my god.” It felt like we were talking about a TV show. This couldn’t be real.

“When the book came out I had a complete meltdown, as you can imagine. But I didn’t have any proof. Lucy would always print out excerpts and I’d edit them and give them back to her. So when I went to my dad—Lucy was his sister—he acted like I was unhinged with grief. My friends believed me, but of course there was nothing they could do about it. We were freshmen in high school. Even my favorite teacher thought I was delusional. And then”—Zoe smiled, humorless—“I started emailing reporters. When they found out how old I was, they disappeared. Just some crazy teenager from Bumfuck, New York, trying to get attention.”

“That’s awful.” My brain shuffled through this new information. Could Roza have actually murdered someone? It felt like too much. And who knew… Maybe Lucy had actually overdosed, and Zoe hadn’t been able to accept it?

Then again, Zoe and I were trapped in Roza’s dungeon right now. So perhaps I was the one having trouble accepting things.

“So I waited,” Zoe went on. “I knew Roza would mess up at some point. Lucy had told me some weird things about her, especially towards the end, when she was starting to realize what kind of person Roza really was. She told me Roza had a personal assistant who was in love with her, obsessed with her.” She shrugged. “Yana.”

“Yana?” It was hard to imagine her, cold as she was, obsessed with anyone.

“And she told me about this too.” Zoe waved an arm around. “Lucy visited when Roza bought Blackbriar. She didn’t remodel it for a long time, but Roza showed her around the old mansion. She was really excited about the secret passage and the secret room. Apparently she joked about using it as a secret writing factory, forcing young girls to churn out her stories.”

The words, shared in Zoe’s flat voice, made me shiver.

“And so even though no one believed me, I didn’t give up. I kept track of Roza, reading all her magazine interviews and articles at the library. There were a lot after Lion’s Rose came out. No one had liked Lady X, but people loved Lion’s Rose. And as she came out with more books—Polar Star and Maiden Pink—I knew there was no way she’d written them. I kept waiting for something, some news to break. But she kept getting away with it.” Zoe sighed. “Ten years after Lucy died, Roza poured all this money into remodeling Blackbriar. I read all those articles too. And none of them mentioned the secret passage or room. Wouldn’t that be something cool you’d want to show journalists? Roza kept it to herself.” She picked at the duvet, her eyes faraway. “But it didn’t matter. At that point I realized I had to move on. I could follow Roza’s every move, but it wasn’t going to change anything. I was in my mid-twenties, living at home with my dad. I’d squandered all this energy and focus for years. So I went back to school, got my degree, and tried to live a normal life. Got a job, got married, got divorced. That last one was rough, but overall things were pretty good. I never even thought about Roza anymore. Until…” The corners of her lips lifted. “I’ve never been a spiritual person. Not after Lucy died. But when I got that text, it made me reconsider. It was too much of a coincidence.”

“What text?” I was fully immersed, picturing Zoe standing in a sun-filled kitchen picking up her phone.

“My friend’s daughter, who was going to school in Atlanta, got into the retreat.” Zoe stared at me, her eyes wide, as if she were learning the news again. “Can you believe it? And this was my close friend from high school. She knew all about Roza. And she wasn’t about to let her daughter go. She wasn’t going to let her daughter spend a month with a murderer. So then I had to decide what to do with this information. I knew an opportunity like this would never come up again. I had to go. If I could fool them into thinking I was Poppy, I would have a way into Blackbriar. I could snoop around, and I could find the secret room. I would find something, some evidence to show people who she really is: a con artist who has murdered at least one person and has been stealing people’s books her entire career. I knew that if I could just get in, I’d be able to take her down.”