Beautiful Forever

by Geneva Lee

  As we approach the threesome, we’re joined by Hugo and Leighton. My pulse speeds up and I clutch Jameson’s hand. I’d once considered them the Belle Mere axis of evil. Circumstances had torn them apart this summer, which means there’s no way to know how ugly this argument could get.

  “You weren’t invited.” Monroe delivers her dismissal in a lowered voice, but Sabine only laughs at her.

  “I know every staff member of this hotel. I’m always invited.” Sabine has eschewed the traditional uniform of pink I usually see her in. Instead, she’s rocking an electric blue number and a silver, Venetian carnival mask. Next to her Levi shifts on his heels.

  Jameson doesn’t bother to tell his former friend that he’s unwelcome. He handed down that edict when he first learned that Levi planned to play him in a damning biopic. The role would have made Levi’s career. Now the movie was dead in the water along with their friendship.

  The tilt of Jameson’s head is hardly perceptible but a few moments later, Maddox appears behind our small group.

  “Mr. Stone, please follow me.”

  Levi shoots Jameson a pleading look, but it’s too little too late. Sabine stays frozen in place even as her boyfriend follows our hulking private muscle toward the elevator.

  “Monroe,” Sabine begins, but Monroe holds up her palm.

  “Leave,” she commands.

  “What’s going on with you two?” Leighton interjects. She doesn’t bother to keep her voice quiet, and all around us, heads turn. Apparently, she’s still a little hazy on what’s happened in her absence. I glare at Hugo accusatorily. He brought her here knowing full well that their little friendship circle is broken forever.

  “Tell her,” Sabine says, stamping her heel on the tile. Now the whole party is watching. “Tell her what’s going on with us, Monroe.”

  “It’s best you go.” Monroe turns but not before Sabine moves closer.

  “Tell her who pushed her out the window.”

  A low buzz breaks out around us as people figure out what she’s saying.

  “Get her out of here,” Monroe shouts to the security guards who are standing by hesitantly.

  “No.” Hugo steps in. “I want to hear what she has to say.”

  “Tell them,” Sabine sneers. She might lose the war but she’s going to win this battle and it seems there will be casualties.

  “It was a misunderstanding,” Monroe begins, her eyes flash to each of us. No doubt she’s hoping one of us will save her. The trouble is that none of us have reason to.

  “You pushed her through the window,” Hugo screams, and I’m reminded of how swiftly he’d turned on someone he considers his best friend. It doesn’t matter if Monroe did it so long as Hugo believes she did.

  Before I can nudge Jameson to intervene, Jonas steps out from the crowd. More than anyone, he doesn’t owe Monroe any favors. But when Hugo takes a purposeful step toward her, Jonas grabs him from behind.

  “Let’s cool off,” he coaxes his best friend.

  “Why? Because I can’t hit a girl?” Hugo asks. “Because she’s no lady. She’s a cold-blooded bitch. You know that.”

  “Drop it,” Jonas urges, struggling to keep his hold as Hugo thrashes. After a few moments, Hugo goes limp. But before we can breathe a collective sigh of relief. He casts a scornful glare at Monroe. “Assault. Prostitution. What else are you capable of, Madam West?”

  The accusation goes off like a bomb and the low murmurs of gossip die down as everyone strains to hear her response. Looking around, I realize more than a few people have been filming this encounter. Within hours, Monroe West’s private life will be subject to an online smear campaign.

  Monroe raises her chin in defiance and then she does the last thing any of us expects: she shrugs.

  “Caught me,” she says with a wicked smirk. Next to me Jameson doesn’t move. I’d wondered before if he knew what she was up to, and now I know. He had no clue.

  Security finally does their job and escorts Sabine to the elevator. Hugo begins to follow but Leighton just stands there staring. Monroe doesn’t meet her minion’s eyes until Leighton’s soft voice calls for her attention.

  “It was you. Emma told me I saw someone that night and that I smiled at them before we went through the window.” She repeats the story I told her as if she’s finally remembering. “You tried to kill me.”

  “I overreacted,” Monroe admits, and more than a few people around us boo her. When this news leaks, she’ll be the talk of the town. The question is whether or not her temper flared up so dramatically on the night her father was murdered. I can’t be the only one wondering that now.

  But despite the demonstration of what she’s capable of, somehow I know it wasn’t her. Monroe and Jameson didn’t hate their father regardless of his faults. Rational or not, Monroe had a reason for why she’d pushed us out the window that night. What would make her hurt her father? All these people surrounding us now were there as well. The room is full of opportunity, but I still can’t find the motive?

  Monroe seems to realize that she’s playing to a crowd that’s turned on her, so she beats a hasty retreat.

  “I need to talk to my sister,” Jameson says, his voice so frigid that a chill runs down my spine. He follows her away from the crowd and I contemplate stepping in. Monroe certainly owes me an apology, although I don’t want her explanations. The reasons behind her actions are quite clear to me. In the end, I stay put, watching as most of my top suspects take the elevator. They’d all been hiding something, but if they aren’t the ones behind the murder, who is?

  As the crowd begins to disperse, waiting for whatever unexpected entertainment comes next, Jonas steps beside me.

  “We have a problem.”

  It’s the last thing I want to hear. He gestures for me to follow him. As soon as we’re in an empty corridor, he levels with me.

  “It’s gone,” he says.

  “What’s gone?” I ask even as dread floods through me. I don’t wait for him to say it before I rushing down the hall to Nathaniel West’s office.

  The FBI had unsealed the room weeks ago, but I hadn’t bothered to come in here. Not even when I arrived to prepare for the party this morning. That had been Jonas’s job. I considered it remuneration for the emotional distress he caused me when he posted photos of me online.

  The office is as Spartan as ever, but I ransack the drawers anyway. “Maybe a maid came along and put it away.”

  “Emma, it’s not there,” he insists. “I checked.”

  “Then where could it possibly be?” Stress seizes my chest, making me feel as though I’m in a choke hold. Without that file, we have nothing.

  “As soon as I got here, I checked to make sure you’d left it where you were supposed to,” he explains. “But when I came back a few minutes ago, it was gone.”

  “Did you get the picture? Did you post it?”

  He shakes his head and my heart sinks, drowning my hopes along with it. “Without the bait…”

  “Emma,” Jonas says slowly, his brown eyes nearly black in the dark, “could someone have known it was here?”

  “No. I didn’t tell anyone else.” Panic gets the better of me and I kick the desk chair. Most of my suspects just walked out of the casino lobby, and, like it or not, none of them seemed capable of murder. They were all too caught up in their problems. “We’re missing something.”

  I think for a moment before I hold out my hand. “Let me see your phone.”

  Jonas unlocks the screen and hands it to me. He already has The Dealer account pulled up. So much for the best laid plans. I scroll through, studying each picture.

  “Why these people?” I ask him. There’d been dozens of party-goers there the night that Nathaniel was murdered, but Jonas had only focused his attention on a handful.

  “Hunches. Weird behavior. Bias,” he admits.

  As I look at the stream, I notice something that hadn’t occurred to me before. Naturally, I’d gravitated toward analyzing photos of
myself and Jameson. People I didn’t trust were already suspects in my book. That left one person whose presence in the stream I’d hardly questioned.

  “You said you wanted to deal out some karma.” It was a desire I understood. I’d been the victim of Monroe and her posse’s bullying, and I’d fallen prey to Hugo Roth’s playboy antics. That didn’t explain everyone who’d caught The Dealer’s attention. “What did Josie do to deserve such a prominent feature on your thread?”

  “It’s not only about karma,” he says slowly. “I guess I wanted to expose what people try to keep hidden.”

  So, he knew Josie’s secret, or one of them. He’d posted pictures of her with older men. Since he’d followed her to the family planning clinic, Jonas had probably guessed the other item Josie wanted to keep undercover.

  “That wasn’t your right,” I say through gritted teeth. “Josie has issues…”

  I feel like a turncoat for even speaking the words, but it’s the truth. I don’t understand how Jonas can’t see that. His own parents had rejected who he was. Josie didn’t even have a father to reject her.

  “I wanted to figure out who killed Nathaniel West, so I couldn’t ignore her.”

  “She was barely at the party.” I’m really losing my cool now.

  Why? the tiny voice in my head asks, but I ignore it.

  “I saw her late that night,” he corrects me. “Nearly everyone had gone home or passed out, but she was running. She looked totally wrecked. I tried to go after her but Monroe stopped me. I knew you two hadn’t been invited, so I distracted Monroe so there wouldn’t be a scene.”

  I can feel my heart slowing down as his words sink in. “Are you saying that Josie—”

  “Knows who killed Nathaniel West?” he finishes my thought. “I’m sure she does.”

  Chapter 19

  There’s no time to consider any of the questions flooding through me as I run out of the office. But despite telling myself there is rational explanation, I can’t help but wonder how I’ve been so blind. Rushing into the party, I search for Josie’s red mask in the crowd. Following Monroe’s exit, the drinking has begun in earnest. More than a few champagne bottles lie empty on their sides, and as I stand there I jump when more corks are popped. The hired waiters have given up in the face of mob mentality.

  They’re celebrating Monroe’s overthrow. I don’t miss the irony that she provided the champagne they’re using to toast her demise. It will take all the West’s people to clean up this mess. I can only guess that Jameson is still addressing the debacle privately. But right now I need him at my side.

  I’ve fucked this up royally, and he’s the only person I trust to know what to do.

  Jonas appears at my side, and I resist the urge to strangle him. Why hadn’t he told me about seeing Josie at the party? Why hadn’t he told anyone?

  Because he’d been scared like she is now. He’d misunderstood that fear. We both had.

  Without knowing where Jameson is, he’ll do—but only in a pinch.

  “I need to find Josie. She’s wearing a red dress and a red mask.” I leave him to search through the crowd while I go to find Jameson. I’m halfway to the family bedrooms when I hear raised voices. I pause. They’re coming from the room across the hall from his.

  I don’t bother to knock.

  Monroe looks up with tear-stained eyes and runny mascara when I enter. She opens her mouth to order me out, but I cut her off.

  “I need you now,” I tell Jameson.

  “Can this wait?” he asks as we step into the hall. “I’m not done crucifying my sister.”

  “Nail her to the cross in the morning. I need you. I fucked up.”

  Jameson’s face goes blank and he doesn’t speak, which is probably a good thing since it’s all pouring out now.

  “I made a mistake. I thought I could smoke out the murderer, but I was wrong. And now, I can’t take it back.”

  Jameson grabs me by the shoulders and looks me dead in the eye. “What’s going on?”

  “We were wrong,” I continue, the first hysterical sob breaking loose. “It wasn’t murder. It couldn’t be.”

  “Emma, you aren’t making sense.”

  I force my mouth closed then I inhale deeply. When I speak again, I keep it simple. “We have to find Josie.”

  He doesn’t ask questions, although I’m certain he has as many as I do. Maybe he’s responding to my panic or perhaps he has simply kicked into crisis mode. Grabbing my hand, we join the crush of people partying. He doesn’t let go as we weave in and out.

  When I see a red mask, I yank it off without looking. But none of the red masks are hers. When we make it to the other side of the crowd, we huddle together.

  “Did you see her?” he asks.

  I shake my head as my breathing speeds up.

  “Calm down,” he orders me. “What is going on?”

  “I don’t have time to explain!”

  “Then give me the CliffsNotes,” he recommends.

  “I might have gotten ahold of the police file for your dad’s murder.” I don’t stop to see how he reacts to this information. “I convinced Jonas to use The Dealer to bait the murderer.”

  “You did what?”

  “It was reckless. I realize that now, but I thought it was the only way.” I’m screwing up this whole explanation thing, but I’m too distracted by the possible consequences of what I’ve done to care.

  “What does this have to do with Josie?”

  “I think she has the file.” I can’t bring myself to admit why I think she took it.

  Jameson seems to understand though. “We’ll find her. She’s going to be okay.”

  How can he say that? How can anything ever be okay again? But I’m reminded of the inscription on the ring I wear. If ever I need to take a leap of faith, it’s now. He leads me around the bar and past a security guard stationed to prevent unauthorized guests from entering the private spaces of his home. The guard is busy flirting with a few drunk girls I recognize as a year younger than me.

  “Has anyone been through here?” Jameson demands as the guard jumps to his feet.

  “Only our people.”

  “Who?” I press. I no longer know who to count as our people. The distinctions between friends and strangers feels more acute than ever before.

  “Steve and your guy, Maddox. But they took off.” I can see the gears whirring in his head as he searches his memory. “And your friend.”

  My blood turns to ice and it takes all the strength I have to respond. “The one in the red dress?”

  He nods.

  She’d been here before the party. She had been in Jameson’s bedroom. We’d snacked in the kitchen. Of course, the guards would see her as an authorized friend of the family.

  “Where was she going?”

  As soon as he points in the direction of the kitchen, I take off running with Jameson at my heels. A few members of the wait staff stare when we round the corner. She isn’t here. Whipping around, I consider where she might have gone.

  “If she came for the file, would she leave?” Jameson asks.

  “I don’t know.” Taking it wouldn’t destroy the evidence that it contains. After all, it’s only a copy. But she’d come. I’d been wrong earlier when I told Jonas that no one else knew about our plan. Josie knew.

  Because I had told her.

  She knew it was a trap and she’d walked into it. The realization nearly knocks me off my feet. Jameson catches me as I stumble and that’s when I spot the black and white photo caught in the track of the sliding door.

  Forcing myself forward, I open it and step onto the patio. The night is unusually still. This high up I might expect a breeze, but nothing disturbs the scene I find. Photos and affidavits litter the concrete as if they’ve been strewn along like breadcrumbs.

  She’s leading me straight to her. I spot a dot of red in the pool and I run toward the water. I fall before I reach it, scraping my knees on the pavement.

  Jameson makes i
t all the way, but he stops at the edge. “It’s just a mask.”

  I cry out with relief and then force myself to stand. I have to find her. When my gaze falls on her, I freeze. She’s perched on the rail of the balcony with her back to us as she looks out over the strip below.

  “Josie,” I call out tentatively.

  She glances over her shoulder and gives me a sad smile. It’s all the encouragement I need to step closer.

  “You came,” she says. “I knew you would.”

  “Whatever happened, everything is going to be okay.”

  Her laughter comes out as a harsh bark. “Tell me, Jameson”—she moves, twisting on the slippery metal railing and my heart stops until she’s turned herself around to face us—“is it okay? I killed your father. Is that okay?”

  I can’t bring myself to look at him, so I stand there between the two people I love most in the world while the truth slowly tears us apart.

  “I think I understand. He was your father, too, wasn’t he?” Jameson’s voice is steady and sympathetic, and for the first time since the horrible realization dawned on me, I believe it can be okay.

  “You need to know...I didn’t know that,” she says as a tear streaks down her cheek. “I didn’t plan this.”

  “We know that,” I tell her. “Let’s talk about this.” I beckon for her to come down, but her hands tighten on the railing.

  “No one knows the truth but us. It can stay that way,” Jameson promises her.

  “You really are the brother I never had.” She sniffles, hesitating for a moment as if to consider his offer. “But you don’t know the truth.”

  “I do,” I say. I’ve pieced it together in fragments.

  “I was looking for you.” She turns her attention to me. “We got separated and…I didn’t mean to wind up in his office. But when I did he was nothing like I expected. He wanted me there. I knew why. I’ve had enough older men try to take me home.”