The Writing Retreat(76)

Zoe was gripping the duvet tightly in her left fist, and now she released it. “So I convinced Poppy to let me go in her place. I paid her more than I could afford. I dyed my hair and tried to figure out how to dress and do my makeup like a twenty-eight-year-old PR girl from Atlanta. I got an unpublished book I could copy, from a friend who works in a bookstore. And I showed up.” Zoe shrugged. “It worked. It was easier than I expected. Wren—all of you—believed me. I mean, who would turn down a chance to meet with the great Roza Vallo?”

We were both quiet. The story had left my head spinning.

“So Roza hasn’t written any of her books,” I finally said, my lips feeling numb.

“No. Except for Lady X.”

“But…” The idea wouldn’t compute. “That can’t be true. She wrote…”

“The only book she wrote was Lady X,” Zoe repeated. “The one that bombed. Everything else was from someone else. At one point I hired a forensic writing analyst, who confirmed it. Roza edited the books to make them sound more similar. But they were all written by different people.”

“Even Devil’s Tongue?” A sudden indignation swelled inside me. An outrage, a bait-and-switch at the heart of my very own writerly passion.

Zoe stared at me, confused. “It was written by Mila. Her friend who supposedly got sick. Roza poisoned her.”

“Oh my god.” I lowered my head into my hands, feeling suddenly nauseous.

“I thought you knew.” Zoe sounded surprised. “Or at least had an inkling. You told that ghost story the first night. About the girl who killed her friend.”

“I did?” I didn’t remember, but then words started coming back to me distantly, as if from a dream. Once upon a time there was a girl who had a best friend. They did everything together. They played together, they went to bookstores, they played pranks on their family. And then one day one of the girls was kind of a bitch to the other girl, and so the first girl decided to kill her…

“I thought you had to at least be suspicious. And that you were pushing Roza to see how she’d react.” Zoe blinked. “That’s why I tried to drag you down to the basement with me when she drugged us. I know I wasn’t being too articulate at the time.”

“No. I had no idea.” I hadn’t even thought about the story afterwards; I’d been too upset after my scare in the basement. Had an unconscious part of me guessed? Had it been trying to send me a message I was too dull to hear?

“So the sleepwalking…that was faked?” It felt urgent to pin everything down.

“I thought it was a good excuse if anyone found me looking around.” She smiled wanly. “I almost spilled everything to you right then. But I couldn’t totally trust you. I thought maybe you were a friend of Roza’s that she’d snuck into the retreat. But when Roza drugged us, my guard went down. I wasn’t really in my right mind.”

“Because of the LSD.”

“Well, yes. And the Rohypnol.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “We were roofied?”

“I’m almost certain.” She rubbed her forehead. “I’ve done LSD before and it wasn’t like that. I barely remember bringing you down here. I think I was alone when I found the keypad. I don’t know how I remembered the code in that state.”

“How did you know the code?” I asked.

“Lucy told me the password to Roza’s safe in her New York apartment. She thought it was touching at first. It was the day Mila died.” Her lips twisted. “Now we know how fucked-up it is.”

“So it was the same password. And you got in.”

“Yes. There.” She pointed at the basement door. “I got in, walked past the cell, and went into the control room. I vaguely remember sitting on a chair and watching the monitors. Then I passed out. Woke up in here.” She shivered, then wrapped her arms around each other. I slipped an arm around her shoulders.

“I’m going to die in here.” She said the words in a flat monotone.

“No you’re not.” I responded automatically; my brain was still sifting through all these new facts.

She wiped at the tears that began running down her face.

“Zoe,” I said. “Roza doesn’t just kill people for no reason.”

“She’s a psychopath.” Zoe sniffled. “And she must know who I am by now.”

“She doesn’t. We found your ID, true, but we didn’t tell her.”

“She was watching,” Zoe said firmly.

“Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she missed it.”

“She’s always watching,” Zoe insisted. “Plus, she saw me get in here. How else would I know the code?”

“I don’t know.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a second. The questions felt too complex. “Maybe she didn’t see that either. Maybe she thought they left the door open and you wandered in.”

“She saw it. She saw everything. What do you think she’s doing?” Zoe pulled back to look at me, incredulous. “She’s not writing, Alex. This whole retreat was just a scheme to trap you all here and steal your books.”

Horror ignited in my chest. The sentences broke apart and the words zinged around like a pinball machine: Scheme. Trap. Steal.