Follow Me(87)

For a moment, nothing seemed real. I stared down at her perfect body crumpled at the foot of the stairs, and I thought, She looks just like a beautiful, broken bird.

And then I saw the pool of dark, red blood forming around her head and spreading across Cat’s pristine floor. My stomach twisted at the sight. I clambered down the stairs so fast it was a miracle I didn’t fall myself, and pressed both hands against the wound on Audrey’s head. As her sticky blood seeped through my fingers, I was entranced and sickened by the sensation of having her life pulsing beneath my hands.

“Audrey,” I said gently. “Are you okay?”

Her eyelids didn’t even flutter.

“Audrey,” I said again, more loudly, more desperately. “Audrey, please.”

But she wasn’t waking up.

My body began to cave in upon itself. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be. We were supposed to spend an eternity together; we were supposed to live happily ever after. We were fated.





CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT





CAT


As I climbed the steps to my apartment, holding the extra key I’d left at Priya’s for emergencies, I desperately hoped that Audrey was elsewhere. I hoped she’d followed my advice and called Nick, or that Max’s ill-conceived plan to win her over through surprise flowers had worked. I couldn’t face her after my catastrophic failure in court that morning; I couldn’t handle her faux sympathy and her Oh Kitty-Cats, especially when she was the reason everything had fallen apart. If only she hadn’t distracted me with those texts.

God help me, I thought as I twisted open the front door. Audrey, if you’re here, I might actually kill you.

I stepped into my apartment and stopped short. I blinked, hoping that the gruesome scene before me was just a manifestation of my subconscious.

“Oh my God,” I managed, dropping my suitcase and taking an involuntary step backward. For all the wishing Audrey away I had done that afternoon, I never wanted this.

Max Metcalf was crouched at the base of my narrow, spiral staircase, cradling Audrey’s lifeless, naked body in his blood-streaked arms. Dark red dotted both of them and was smeared on the floor beneath them.

“What happened?”

Max raised his head to look at me, and I shuddered. With a slash of blood on his cheek and almost feral eyes, he looked wild and dangerous.

“She fell,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“She fell?” I repeated dubiously.

He nodded, gazing down at Audrey and stroking her face, leaving a ruby smear along her pale cheek.

“She’d just gotten out of the bath,” he said quietly. “Her feet were wet. She slipped. I tried to catch her, but it happened too fast. She hit her head and . . .”

As he trailed off, my eyes traveled from Audrey’s wan face to the dark blood matting her hair. A memory flashed through my mind: another head wound, another beautiful girl’s hair streaked a sticky red. Spots swam in my vision. This couldn’t be happening. Not again.

I grabbed at the entry table to steady myself and forced myself to think pragmatically. Audrey dying like this, on my floor and at Max’s hand, would lead to questions I didn’t want to answer. I would have to explain how Max had come to have the keys to my apartment, and it would be impossible to explain my connection to Max without Camp Blackwood coming up. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed the parallels between Audrey’s unfortunate demise and what happened that summer. It wasn’t the same, of course, it wasn’t my fault, but would anyone believe that? My future with the firm, already on thin ice after that morning’s dismal performance, would be destroyed. I would be lucky if I escaped with my law license intact. Everything I had worked so hard for, gone. All because of Audrey.

Audrey had ruined too many things for me already; I couldn’t let her take my career, too. I had to do something. Think, Cat, think. How could I prevent the truth about Emily Snow from emerging?

Hiding Audrey’s body was out of the question. I wasn’t a criminal lawyer, but I had watched enough Law & Order to know I would never be able to completely rid my apartment of the evidence. A murder investigation would begin and end at the base of those stairs.

But what if there wasn’t an investigation? What if it was just an accident? It was plausible. Those stairs were a hazard under the best of conditions, and Audrey had been wet. I glanced around the room and noticed a half-empty wine bottle on the kitchen counter. Of course. Audrey had been drinking, she was in the bath, and she had fallen. It was tragic, but sometimes life was.

It would have been a perfect explanation, if not for Max. He couldn’t be here. He was unpredictable, and, more than that, he was the connection to what had happened at camp, the reason that Audrey’s accident would seem like something more sinister. My only shot at salvaging this awful state of affairs hinged on extracting Max from the situation before anyone learned he was there.

“When did this happen?” I asked. “Have you called an ambulance?”

“I just wanted to talk to her,” he said, still stroking Audrey’s face.

“That’s a nonresponsive answer,” I snapped. “Tell me: Have you called 911?”

“No,” he said hollowly. “I was trying to stop the bleeding. My hands were . . . But you. You can call. Now.”