Until the Day I Die(56)

Even in the rain and dark I can see her face is grim, jaw set firmly. “No.”

“All right, then, we’ll try for Shorie.”

The rain slows us down, and we walk for another half hour, tromping through the wet foliage, our feet sucking in the mud. I don’t see any sign of any building, much less a house. Maybe we should rethink our plan. I don’t say anything, but I know Jess is thinking the same thing, because when we come to a huge spreading kapok tree with thick branches and high, ridged roots like buttresses, she stops.

“We can try again in the morning,” she shouts through the downpour and snags a broad leaf from a nearby banana tree.

We scramble underneath the kapok, then take turns funneling rainwater from the broad leaf into our mouths. After scurrying out into the rain to pee, we settle in for the night, huddling in the space between two sheltering roots. We press close, not so much for warmth, but more from some deep, primal instinct for survival. I don’t think I’ve ever so keenly felt the comfort of another human body against my own.

“I just don’t understand it.” Jessalyn’s head is against the massive trunk of the tree. “If we could just break it down . . .”

I shake my head. It’s a simple question, just too horrifying to attempt to answer out loud.

A setup.

An execution.

My conversation with Antonia has come into unbearably sharp focus in the time we’ve been walking in the dark. Someone hired her, paid her, to have the four of us killed. But because I’m the CEO of a successful company, she saw an opportunity and offered me a better deal—L’élu II, for a couple of thousand dollars more and the possibility of some kind of business partnership. Basically she was double-crossing whomever she’d done business with and didn’t seem to be all that worried about it. But who was that person?

Ben? Sabine? Layton? Perry’s parents?

Jess interrupts my thoughts. “So let me get this straight. There are three L’élus—the real one, the fun one, and the one where you die.”

“That’s the long and short of it.”

“What the Sam fuck . . .” She sniffs. “We sure drew the short straw, didn’t we?”

“We’re going to figure our way out of this, I promise you.”

She doesn’t answer. We both know I’m cheerleading, that words mean nothing in comparison to Lach and his gun, so I vow to keep my mouth shut until I have a real plan. The only sound now is the rain, and although I have a fleeting thought that one of us should keep watch, I don’t say anything. Both of us will need sleep to keep going.

“Why are you here?” Jess says, out of the darkness. “Really?”

“I blacked out and stole a friend’s car, then drove it to a college frat party where I passed out on the lawn.”

Jessalyn shifts beside me. “You were drinking?”

“I had one drink.”

“That’s bullshit. Nobody blacks out after one drink.”

“They said it could’ve happened because of stress. The next morning, my friends and family have miraculously organized an intervention where they tell me I’m going to Hidden Sands.”

“Who led this discussion? Who found the resort?”

I shrug. “I don’t remember. Who told you about Hidden Sands?”

“My father.” She leaves it at that.

“The thing I can’t get over,” I say, “is I’m not a big drinker. I mean, yes, I may have had one or two more drinks than normal at a dinner or a party since Perry died. But nothing at all outrageous. It just seems so . . .”

“So what?”

“Convenient, I guess. The way it happened . . .” My voice trails off.

In the dark, I can feel her eyes on me. “You know what happened, don’t you? You think somebody drugged you.”

I inhale then blow the breath out slowly. “The night before I left, I was googling like crazy. GHB is the big thing now. Liquid ecstasy. It’s really easy to get your hands on. I know it sounds ridiculous. But I do think that. I think somebody roofied me.”

“That’s interesting,” Jess says. “Because before I came here, I think someone roofied me too.”





31

ERIN

Jessalyn’s body shifts against me, and I wake. The rainforest is transforming from inky black to grayish green. It’s morning—Tuesday, I think. I didn’t really sleep, just dozed a bit all night long, drifting in and out of wakefulness, like I was traveling through a horrible half dream. And now I feel like I’ve awoken in a nightmare.

I run my hands down my legs. They’re covered in stubbly hair and streaked with mud. Mosquito bites pock the rest of me, even up in my most tender parts. But there are some positives: The rubber band is still holding back my hair. It stopped raining in the night, and under the spreading branches of the kapok tree where we slept, my shirt and hiking shorts dried out almost completely.

My only question is why Lach hasn’t found us yet. Surely he knows every inch of this island. Is he waiting on something?

We crawl out from our hiding place to find the forest floor teeming with horned beetles and stick insects and narrow green lizards. Emerging from their hiding places, I guess, just like us, after the downpour. Some kind of birds—parrots maybe—whistle in the trees overhead. I look back at our tree. It’s festooned with orchids, bright pink and white and dotted with dark-wine markings like a native warrior around pollen-yellow centers, sprouting out of every crevice. A fairy tree. A sight that would take my breath away, if I weren’t being chased by a man with a gun.