Good Girls Lie(85)
“I appreciate your concern.”
“I wanted to be here for you when you saw this. It’s going to be difficult, Ash.”
She actually sounds legitimately worried now. Worried, but also gleeful. She takes a piece of paper from the folder.
The headline is lurid, pulled from one of our most sensational rags, the one that finds alien babies in Buckingham Palace and exposes cross-dressing politicians.
Bombshell Report: Hidden Will Splits Carr Estate
With Unnamed Heir
Becca watches me, waiting to see how I will respond. If I hadn’t just spent half an hour with the solicitor from my father’s estate, I would have reacted, but now, I’m numb.
I crumple the paper into a ball and throw it on the ground. “I’m aware. I appreciate your concern, Becca, I do.”
A flash of stormy green. “Mistress.”
“I appreciate your concern. Mistress.”
“That’s better.” She picks up the printout, smooths the wrinkles, puts it back in the folder. Smiles and hangs an arm around my shoulder. Whispers in my ear, fire in her hissing, fingers digging into my bones: “Don’t think this changes anything, Swallow. Your little melodrama means nothing to me. Now go get my mail and have it back to my room within five minutes or you’ll regret you were ever born and never get to meet the other Carr baby.”
She saunters off. So silly of me to think she actually cares. Becca is cruelty personified. She is the paper’s edge that slices open unsuspecting fingers, the pin buried in a shirt’s collar, the tiny triangle of glass you step on crossing the kitchen floor.
Cruel. Bloodthirsty. But an annoyance.
I have bigger issues.
* * *
The mail room is actually a place I like. It’s in the basement of Old East, and there’s a small, private courtyard outside the glass doors with a bronze sundial in the middle of a circular garden. It’s a pleasant spot. Many of the girls read their mail there, complain about the grades they’ve received. The teachers also put their graded papers and homework in the slots, folded lengthwise so they’ll fit the narrow berths. They have no locks on the front—this school runs on the honor system, there’s no reason to try to keep the mail under lock and key.
My box is always empty outside of schoolwork. The other girls get things all the time—care packages from their parents, boxes shipped with cookies and sweatshirts and new shoes. I only receive school-related material. I haven’t received any mail from the outside since I arrived. I rarely check it, only when I’m expecting graded work.
But after I grab Becca’s mail, something compels me to move to the other side of the room, to my own box.
The note is folded lengthwise, like a paper.
I pull it out, open it. There is only one sentence, in the middle of the page. The words are typed, all caps. I read it. Sweat breaks out on my forehead, and my vision goes spotty.
Six words. Six words and my entire world unravels.
SHE IS GOING TO EXPOSE YOU
64
THE INVESTIGATION
Kate and Tony are sharing a pizza and a couple of beers. Kate has been running him through everything she’s managed to dig up, the photo, the case file from New Scotland Yard.
“Who do you think this girl is?” Tony asks.
“Everything about Ashlyn Carr, aka Ash Carlisle, feels odd to me. It could be my imagination. I’m going off a single photograph of a painting that’s who knows how old. I can’t find any other pictures of the whole family online, not of Ash herself. You always told me not to ignore my instincts. Well, they’re on fire.”
“She’s a kid. Could a kid pull off a scam of this magnitude?”
“I don’t know. I may be totally off base. But I think there is more to this story than we’re seeing. A known teetotaler suddenly overdoses, and the wife, who has been publicly humiliated by the recent exposure of an affair, is so grief stricken upon finding him dead that she shoots herself? I’m not knocking the Met’s investigation. The circumstances would raise red flags for me regardless. At the very least, it looks like a murder-suicide. At worst...”
“You think their daughter did it? Kate. Maybe this suspension is the vacation you didn’t know you needed.”
She laughs. “It’s seriously screwed up, I know.”
“No kidding. Okay. Let me play devil’s advocate. Say you’re right. Say the girl’s an impostor. That she has a dark past. How could she fool all these people? And more important, if she’s an impostor, what happened to the real Ashlyn Carlisle?”
“After Scotland Yard talked to her, and the funerals? That’s one hell of a good question. Everything we have says she came to America, enrolled at The Goode School, and is living quietly in Marchburg under the watchful eye of Dean Westhaven.”
“Except she’s not living so quietly.”
“Right. Her roommate is dead, and things are hinky with that. A teacher died, too. Westhaven hasn’t brought it up, has she?”
Tony sets down his beer. “I knew a teacher died the first week of classes. Anaphylaxis. She had a tree nut allergy. How is that relevant?”
“She was supposed to be Ashlyn Carr’s piano teacher. The girl is apparently a prodigy.”
“All right, you have my attention,” Tony says, and Kate tips her bottle his direction in a toast.