How to Kill Your Best Friend

by Lexie Elliott

  Georgie is wiping the seawater from her eyes as her legs work in eggbeater circles. “There’s nothing here—”

  “Get back in the fucking boat.”

  She looks up and locks hold of his gaze, and for a second or two I think she’s going to protest, but then she takes two swift strokes and grabs the arm he’s extending. He yanks her out with one strong pull, her legs scrambling to get purchase. I turn to find her a towel and hear him bite out, “What the hell was that?” Turning back with the towel, I see her close her eyes briefly. The misery on her face is a kick to my gut. Then she opens her eyes and takes the fluffy blue-and-white hotel towel I’m offering, wiping it across her face, and when she emerges from behind it again, she’s entirely expressionless.

  “Nothing,” she says to the boat at large. “I just wanted to cool off.”

  SIX

  GEORGIE

  Steve makes no allowances for the comfort of his passengers on the journey to the resort. When we finally reach the pier, I’m stiff from bracing myself against the bone-shuddering thumps of the boat over the waves, which seem to have become more substantial over the course of the afternoon, along with the wind. I climb awkwardly onto solid ground, still feeling the sway from the boat in my body and a scratchy tightness on my skin where I’ve had too much sun. Nobody had anything to say on the boat—in any case it would have been snatched away by the wind—but now that we’re on dry land, wearily tramping up the path from the bay, it seems that nobody has anything to say anyway; and none more so than Adam. He’s rigid with all the things he isn’t saying.

  “Bar at seven?” says Duncan, when we reach the split in the path that leads to his villa, and to Bron’s.

  “Sure,” Adam says, and Bron and I nod.

  Adam and I continue along the path. It takes me a moment to realize we’ve passed his own turnoff. He cuts me off as I start to point it out. “Yeah, I know. We need to talk.”

  Even if I was actually willing to discuss my impromptu dip, the bite in his tone would have made me bristle. “Do we, though? What if I don’t want to talk?”

  He barks out a short, utterly mirthless laugh. “Georgie, you never want to talk. That’s a given.” We’ve reached my villa door now. I scrabble in my beach bag for the key and then freeze. The manila envelope isn’t there. I rummage through again. How can I be overlooking something so substantial? But how can it be gone?

  “Looking for this?” I look up at Adam’s words. He’s leaning against the wall beside the doorframe, one hand holding up the sheaf of papers. The manila envelope is half shredded around them.

  “You—you went into my bag?” I’m too astonished to be indignant.

  “No—well, technically yes, but not how you think.”

  “How, then?”

  “Your bag was getting soaked from the spray. I moved it to a better position, and this envelope fell out. The paper was so wet it pretty much disintegrated—I honestly wasn’t prying, but I couldn’t avoid seeing . . .” He opens and closes the fingers of the hand that isn’t holding the envelope, as if he might grasp the right words. “Whatever this is.” He’s holding my gaze. “What is this, Georgie?” I break contact and hunt for the key again, successfully this time, and unlock the door. Adam follows me in uninvited and repeats his question. “What is this?”

  “I don’t know.” I walk quickly through the living area of the suite to the minibar. Adam is right behind me.

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “I don’t know.” I take a Coca-Cola can from the minibar and pull the ring. It’s cold and sweet and not at all what I’m craving to drink.

  “What does it mean?”

  “I. Don’t. Know.” Suddenly my frustration spills over. “Jesus, Adam, you were there when I received it. It came from reception. I have no idea who sent it.”

  Adam swears quietly under his breath, then reaches past me to open the minibar himself and take a sparkling water. “Please, help yourself,” I say with faux sweetness. He raises an eyebrow, his expression loaded with exasperation, and I feel myself redden at my childishness. I take another drink of the cold Coke and turn to face the room, leaning my bottom against the beautiful wooden sideboard. “I was thinking I’d go and ask at reception about it,” I offer. It’s the closest thing to an apology that I can muster.

  He nods. “There was nothing else inside?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Someone is trying to tell you something.”

  “No kidding. It would be helpful if they were a little less obtuse about it.”

  “Mmm.” He turns to copy my own position, resting against the waist-height sideboard less than a meter away. He lifts the bottle to his lips again. A triangular hollow forms at the base of his throat as he drinks. I look away. It’s too strange, having him in here, in my own suite. Just the two of us, in daylight hours, with no blanket of darkness to shelter under—it’s too intimate. “You know,” he says thoughtfully, “that’s a fair point. Why are they being so obtuse? It seems like it’s important to them that you discover whatever it is for yourself.”

  “Or it’s a game.”

  He turns his head to look at me oddly. “A game? You think someone is having fun?”

  I shrug. “Maybe. Though not everyone plays games for fun. Some just play to win.”

  “You don’t have to play. You could just . . . not engage.” He looks at my face. “Yeah, okay, I get it. So. First action point: ask at reception. What’s next?”

  I twist to point at the papers that he’s dumped behind us on the sideboard. “Take the bait. Figure out how to follow the money.”

  “Whose money? Lissa’s?”

  “I suppose. Though it all went into this place. And everything is Jem’s now anyway.”

  “So we’re looking at Jem?”

  “I guess. I can’t think what else would fit.”

  “Did she have life insurance?” he asks.

  Jesus. We really are looking at Jem if we’re considering that angle. “I don’t know.”

  He’s silent for a minute, thinking. “I suppose there’s no way this could really be connected with your work instead?”

  “None that I can think of. And before you say it, there’s no point in going to the police, because I literally have nothing I can tell them except I received some utterly inoffensive sheets of paper.”

  He’s nodding. “Yeah, I came to the same conclusion.” He takes another drink from his water. I look out through the French doors to the plunge pool, and beyond it, the sea, peppered with white tops; the wind must be growing even stronger. Inside the room, the silence grows, too. There’s a weight to it; it has substance. It’s heavy with all the things that neither of us dares to say.

  I have to speak. He will reach for me if I don’t speak, and I know I won’t stop him. “I thought you were mad at me for going in the water again.”

  “Believe me, I’ll get to that.” There may be a trace of humor lurking among the dry delivery. I risk a glance at him. His head is cocked toward me, and his eyes are warm. He reaches out his arm to put his bottle of water down very deliberately on the sideboard inches from me, then pivots around that point to bring himself right in front of me, his arms bracketing me. His forehead is almost touching mine.

  “Careful,” I say, not entirely sure if I’m joking. “This is getting to be a habit.”

  His face instantly shutters, and he pulls back a few inches. “Relax, Georgie. I still live in England.” The edge in his voice floors me; I don’t understand what I’m navigating here. I look up at him, at the hard line of his jaw and the tight line of his mouth, and I can’t think of a single thing to say. We are stuck in that moment for a second, for two, and then he breathes out slowly and his edges soften. “Sorry,” he says. “I just—sorry.”

  I still don’t know what to say. I look down to the side and watch my left hand as it lifts to co
ver his where it rests on the sideboard. It could be someone else’s hand. Perhaps it should be someone else’s hand.

  * * *

  —

  Later we walk to the reception. I wonder if Adam might hold my hand, or perhaps that’s too much—and then self-mockery kicks in. We’ve just had sex in daylight hours, but public displays of affection? One step too far! But he doesn’t try to take my hand, and I don’t take his.

  “Why did you never like Lissa?” There’s no thought behind the question; it simply propels itself into being. Why do I care? Why does it matter? But it does matter. I know that it does.

  “I didn’t dislike her.” He laughs softly at my snort of disbelief. “No, really. She was fun to be around; she made every event feel like a party. When she spoke to you, she really spoke to you—and listened, too.” Yes, Lissa had that knack. “And I truly believe she adored Graeme. I was just . . . very wary of her, too.”

  “Why?” The sun, even this late in the day, is so very warm on my skin; it’s like a protective barrier against this conversation that I didn’t mean to have. God, I would love to live somewhere like this, drenched in sun with the ocean mere meters away. Not actually here, though; not with Lissa spinning slowly under the water somewhere off the coast.

  “You know that I knew Lissa a little at school.”

  “Only vaguely, I thought.” They were at different high schools; Duncan was the one who was at school with Lissa. And Adam was still living up in the north of England until he was sixteen or so.

  “Yeah, only vaguely. She dated someone in my year for a while—a guy I knew through cycling. Anyway. They split up, and he got a new girlfriend; it was never clear if there was overlap. He would say not, but . . .” He waggles a hand equivocally. I can feel myself tensing. The rays of the sun may not be sufficient to insulate me against what’s coming. “His brand-new time trial bike, his absolute pride and joy, ended up in the river. Beautiful bike, that.” He shakes his head, as if in mourning. “He thought it was stolen, but when the river level dropped in spring, he saw it there, on the riverbed.” Not theft, then. Malice, or vengeance. “And then, sometime later—maybe a year, I don’t exactly remember—his new girlfriend was the victim of an acid attack.” I take a sharp despairing breath inward: Oh, Lissa. “She flung an arm up to protect her face, so she doesn’t have many scars there, but her whole forearm had to be grafted. Nobody saw who did it; the police never charged anybody. But my friend always thought Lissa was behind it.” He shrugs. “Hence my being . . . wary.”

  Wary. Such a careful choice of word, from a careful man. He’s not telling me this by accident, either. He’d have found a way to weave the tale into conversation no matter what words spilled out of my mouth unbidden. Was it Lissa, though? Probably. Though as soon as I think that, I realize that it hardly matters. The point is that both he and I think it could have been.

  “Did you ever tell Graeme that story?”

  He shakes his head. “No. But he knew about other stuff.” My cheeks are hot; I can’t imagine that I came off very well in any of those tales. In truth, I could barely hold myself together at the time, let alone do more to manage Lissa—but still, I see it differently now. There’s a clarity now that was entirely missing at the time, and that clarity is riddled through with guilt. “He wasn’t under any illusions about her. He just loved her anyway. Like you did.” My throat is impossibly tight, constricted by everything I failed to do. Most of all, I should have come on the last holiday. Such cowardice in delaying; how can I ever live with it? I’m saved from having to say anything by our arrival at the reception, which, like the rest of the resort, is deathly quiet. It’s manned by a young receptionist, who greets us with a gentle smile.

  “I had a delivery of some documents from reception today,” I say. “I wonder if you could tell me how they got here.”

  “Is there a problem?” Her brows have gathered together in instant concern.

  “No, no problem. I just wanted to understand who delivered the documents.”

  “They didn’t reach you?” Her brows are still maximally gathered.

  “No, no; they did. I have them. There’s no problem; I just wanted to understand how they got here. To reception, I mean. Did someone deliver them? Or did they come through the post?”

  “Ah.” Her expression clears, and she turns to rattle off a question in the local tongue to her colleague, who is manning the desk marked Concierge. Their animated exchange seems overlong for what I’m asking. Eventually she turns back, her expression oddly apprehensive. “He thinks that Cristina would know, but she is not here.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “She is . . . ah, she is not coming back. She is gone.”

  Adam suddenly speaks up. “Cristina is gone? Gone where?”

  “She is left. She is . . .” The poor woman is flustered, searching for the right word, and the right grammar. “She is quit.”

  “Who’s Cristina?” I ask. Whoever she is, Adam seems stunned by that news. So does the receptionist, actually.

  “Hey, guys,” calls a voice, and I turn to see Duncan ambling toward us, his sandals shuffling a little with every step. His linen shirt looks like it could use an iron, too. It occurs to me that he’s turning into the sort of mildly bumbling Englishman that his father was. “Evening,” he says, smiling amiably at the receptionist. “Is Cristina about?”

  “She’s quit, apparently,” Adam says baldly.

  “What?” Dunc’s head whips round to Adam. “No! Really?”

  I try again. “Who is Cristina?”

  “Jem’s assistant manager,” says Adam in a quick aside, then he turns back to the receptionist. “When did this happen?”

  She hesitates, and for a moment I think she won’t answer, but then she offers quietly, “Just one hour ago.”

  “I was supposed to be meeting her now,” Dunc says, still sounding shocked by the news. Then he visibly regroups. “Where’s Jem? Is he in his office?”

  She shakes her head. “He went back to the villa.” She bites her lip as if she wants to say more.

  “Perhaps we should go and check up on him. A bit of moral support and all that,” I say casually, watching her reaction. Relief floods her face, and she nods quickly. I surmise Jem must have taken the news rather badly.

  “Wait, we should tell Bron where we’re going,” I say, as Adam and Duncan turn from the reception. “Can you put me through to Mrs. Miller’s room, please?” The receptionist obligingly taps on a computer, and then on the phone before handing me the handset, but there’s no reply. I let it ring through to the answering service and leave a message. Then Duncan leads the way out of the reception, in a direction I haven’t been before. Out of the shelter of the building, the strength of the wind is more apparent, and the sun has set whilst we were occupied in the reception. For the first time since I arrived, I’m in danger of feeling cool.

  “Why were you meeting Cristina anyway?” Adam asks Duncan, a smidgen too casually.

  “Oh. Well, I promised Jem I’d take a look at the figures, and he said it was probably best to start with her, as she was doing a lot of the budget creation work. This way, Georgie,” he says, steering me onto a path marked Private. Ahead of me, a steep staircase ascends into near-total darkness; Jem and Lissa’s villa must surely be at the highest point of the resort.

  “It’s going to be a blow for Jem,” Adam comments.

  “I’ll say,” says Duncan, with feeling. “I don’t know how he’ll manage, with both Lissa and her gone.”

  It sounds utterly heartless, putting the resignation of an employee on the same footing as the death of a wife, but I suppose they both amount to the same thing for a business: a gaping hole. “Why do you think she left?” I ask. “Was there tension before?”

  “Nothing I was aware of,” Duncan tosses over his shoulder, panting a little as he climbs. “I didn’t real
ly see her as the confrontational type, to be honest.”

  The dimly lit villa is well nestled in the foliage. Even as we approach the entrance, I can’t get any sense of the scale of it. It’s built in exactly the same style as the rest of the resort accommodation, but somehow there’s an air of permanence to it. Perhaps it’s the somewhat shabby bikes propped against the wall to the left of the front door, just under the shelter of the roof. One of them is smaller. I wonder who will ride it now.

  The door of the villa is ajar. Dunc raps his knuckles on it in a brief tattoo, then walks in, calling, “Knock knock.”

  “In the lounge,” calls Jem’s voice. His accent is the strongest I’ve ever heard it. Duncan obviously knows this villa well enough; he walks through the hallway with purpose, but I jerk to a halt mid-step, as if caught by a fishing hook, staring at the photos on the console table. Adam follows him, then pauses at a doorway to look back for me.

  “Are you—ah,” he says, catching sight of the same photos. The one in the foreground is Lissa and Jem on their wedding day: a staged shot I remember being taken. Jem, grinning, has hoisted Lissa in the air by way of his hands on her waist, and she’s looking down on him and laughing. The Dirty Dancing shot, the photographer said. A good photo, certainly, but it’s the one behind that has a genuine sense of intimacy. It’s also from Lissa’s wedding, but not to Jem. To Graeme.

  Adam has come to stand beside me, his eyes drawn to the same photo. It’s a group shot, unstaged and unplanned, of us all in the bar very, very late in the evening after the wedding. Lissa, in her wedding dress, is seated on Graeme’s knee, one arm wrapped round his neck and the other holding a champagne flute which she’s using as if a microphone. Bron, her husband Rob, Adam (in his army days, so with noticeably shorter hair) and myself are standing behind, arms slung across one another’s shoulders as we join the happy couple in belting out the song. I remember it distinctly: We can’t go on together with suspicious minds . . . Duncan, a little thinner and with a little more hair, is in an armchair just to one side, Ruby perched on the arm with her shoeless feet in his lap. They’re both looking across and laughing. In fact, everyone has laughter in their eyes. “God, we were young,” Adam says quietly.