Good Girls Lie(104)
“Fine.”
The dean turns over the engine and shifts through the gears, drives us to the back of the school. The symbolism of the two crime scenes is not lost on me. The roommate dead out back, the lover dead out front.
Ashlyn is making sure I know I’m surrounded.
The dean parks in a slot right by the back door of Main, at the security office, and we filter inside, one after the other. The tension in her shoulders is palpable. I realize her hair is down; she’s not wearing makeup. She’s in jeans and a sweater and sneakers. She could be a student if it weren’t for the paper-thin lines above her mouth and the incipient creases around those wide-set gray eyes.
She’s not her usual Chanel-suited self. She’s been pulled from her bed.
He was with me.
She spent the night with Rumi.
Holy mother. The dean and Rumi. I would have never guessed.
My first instinct is wait until Becca finds out and the arrow of sorrow that pierces my heart makes me gasp aloud. I’ve killed her. I’ve killed Camille. I’ve killed them all. It is my fault. If I had only been brave, if I had only said no. They would still be alive.
Inside the dean’s office, I expect her to sit me down and force out the truth, but instead, she excuses herself, moves to her bathroom. I can hear the faint sounds of screaming, recognizable because I used to do the same thing when frustrated, fold a washcloth in half, bite it, and scream myself hoarse in fury at the injustices of the world. Then the toilet flushes and she emerges looking a little more clear-eyed.
“Tea,” she says. “Then you can tell me everything. But before anyone else gets here...why did you send the photographs? Were you planning to blackmail me?”
“I didn’t. Piper told me you found a phone in my room. It wasn’t mine. It had to be Ashlyn’s. She’s behind all of this.”
“How do you know?”
“Because technically, the email you showed me came from one of my accounts. We have a couple set up for emergencies. She must have logged into it from the phone, had the message sitting in the draft folder. When I opened the email to check it, something sent. I couldn’t see what it was, and that made me nervous, so I destructed the email address.”
“The message with the photos, it’s not retrieveable?”
“No. It’s completely gone.”
The dean blows out a breath and goes about making tea.
I see what she’s thinking.
“I won’t mention it,” I say and she nods, not meeting my eyes.
My soul hurts, so badly I want to bend in half and hold on for dear life. But I can’t. We have to catch Ashlyn. We have to stop her. She has to be punished.
This momentary reprieve allows me to gather my thoughts, decide where to start the story.
The sheriff comes in, blustery and furious, his niece fast on his heels.
“What the hell is going on?”
“We’re making a cup of tea,” the dean says, sounding almost calm. But when she turns to hand me the cup, she looks terrified, and the sheriff is staring at me like I have an ax in my hand.
“Talk,” he says.
I talk.
JULY
Oxford, England
80
THE PLOT
From the front window of the shop, I see Ashlyn coming down the street, swinging her bag, her Dr. Martens covered in mud. She’s hiked across their fields to town again.
Oxford is busy today, packed with tourists come to see the colleges, to wander in the footsteps of C.S. Lewis, walk in the spots featured in the Harry Potter movies and the Discovery of Witches show, and otherwise soak up the cultural and architectural goodness the city has to offer. And they all want a proper British tea; the shop’s been hopping since breakfast.
Ashlyn looks haunted today, hollowed out, as if she’s been getting high and forgetting to eat again. I recognize the look: my mum, Gertie, spends all her downtime on the couch in our flat above the shop, smoking, snorting, popping, and otherwise ingesting any escape from the drudgery of our life she can steal or trick. The two of them probably have the same dealer—a right arsehole named Kevin, red hair sprouting from his chin but bald as an egg otherwise, who hangs around the tea shop passing out glassine packs to the area addicts.
I can’t help the sigh. Ashlyn has been more and more erratic lately, bursting with grandiose plans and hidden conspiracies. Does her father pound on her a bit, absolutely. Do I feel sorry for her? Maybe, sometimes. Mum’s drug-addled but loves me, though I don’t know what it would be like to live in anything but perpetual squalor.
Ashlyn has everything, the whole world at her feet. Money. Beauty. Intelligence—when she’s not high, that is. Parents who stay out of her way. If she would just shut up and put up with it, go to school, stop getting in her father’s face all the time, provoking him, she could have the world. Twenty-five is the magical age for Ashlyn. She’ll come into her substantial inheritance and can bugger off and never look back. Why she doesn’t keep her head down is beyond me. If I were in her place, I’d do everything they asked. I’d love to go to school, to get a real education, not be stuck in this fucking chip shop with an addict mother and absent father.
Instead, Ashlyn sticks it to Damien every chance she gets. Which is why she needs me.
It’s a good thing I have a knack for computers. The money’s all right, I’ve been able to hide some from Mum and start thinking about what I want to do in the inevitable time to come—as much as I hate to admit it, Mum will overdo it one day, no doubt. I’ll be stuck with the flat, scraping to make the rent with my shifts in the shop and wallowing in the irony that I stand outside the walls of the colleges, watching the students term in and term out, and I will never have a chance to attend. Oxford is bloody expensive, too expensive for my blood.