Somewhere far above me, Stella holds a small plastic bag of blue pills in her hand. The fentanyl I’d procured as a weapon, long ago in a land far, far away. “Looking for these?”
I grasp the comforter and drag my unwieldy body precariously up to her level, vaguely realizing I’ve forgotten to cover my eye, but the cotton candy in my brain prevents me from caring. Stella stares, her head tilting. Or maybe I’m tilting. “Did you give me those?” I manage.
“No. I wasn’t trying to kill you like you were me. You’ve just had some of my S-pills, Phoenix.” She smiles beatifically. “You’ll be all right after you take a long nap.”
Phoenix, that’s my name. How does she know my name? Sleeping pills. I swing around and careen into the bathroom, banging into the door and landing on my knees on the cold tile before the toilet, where I jam my finger down my throat until I wretch into the bowl. I do it again and again until nothing comes up.
She hovers over me, her arms crossed. “It’s already in your system.”
I sit on the cold floor with my back against the vanity, staring at the rain lashing the windows. The gray day has turned to the blackest night, leaving us blind to the storm outside. “Not all of it.”
“When were you going to kill me?” she asks, tossing the bag of pills onto the counter.
“I wasn’t,” I croak.
“I trusted you and you lied to me and used me.” She looks genuinely hurt. “Has anything you’ve told me been true?”
“I’m sorry.” I rest my cheek on the cabinet, warm in comparison to the floor. “I had to know what happened to my mother.”
“I would’ve told you if you’d asked.”
I shake my head, fighting to keep my eyes open. “I had to lie…to get to you. I thought you killed her.”
“I loved her,” she protests. “I would never have hurt her.”
I allow my eyelids to close. “I didn’t know. I wanted to tell you last night, but you were too drunk. You might’ve told Cole…” An idea pushes its way through the fog. “It was him, wasn’t it?”
She sits next to me and takes my hand in hers. “No one killed your mother.” The anger has drained from her voice. “She just overdosed.”
“No.” I desperately want to share the details of what I remember and the reasons I believe Cole murdered her, but I’m too drugged. “She hated heroin,” I get out. “She was happy.”
“That’s the thing about heroin,” Stella says. “Even when you hate it and think you’re past it, it can come back and bite you.”
I curl into a ball atop the soft bath mat, allowing my eyes to close. I can hear the ocean sloshing against the underside of the floor, rising higher and higher. “I was there that night.” I force my mouth to continue pushing the words out. “I saw Cole come home. I was worried you would find them—I told Jackson to warn them.”
“Have you talked about it with Jackson?” Her voice is tentative.
“This afternoon.” It’s becoming more and more difficult to speak.
“Why did you choose me?” she asks. “Why not him or Cole?”
“You said…a book. In an interview. You talked about coming clean. I thought you were ready to stop…”
She inhales sharply. I feel her move and hear her walking away, the cloud of sleep finally settling over me like a fuzzy blanket, melting my worries into oblivion. Sudden cold and wet. My eyes flutter open to see her standing above me with an empty glass. She pulls me up to sitting and pours a warm Red Bull down my throat. “What the hell?” I splutter.
“I’m sorry.” She jams her knee into my back to keep me sitting. “You can’t go to sleep.”
I wipe the water from my eyes to see she’s crying. But then she’s always crying. The woman cries more than anyone I’ve ever met. “You shouldn’t have drugged me if you didn’t want me to sleep,” I grumble. “I have caffeine pills in my purse.”
I allow my eyes to close again while she rummages in my purse, coming up with the bottle of seven-hour Zing pills. She places one on my tongue, then puts the Red Bull to my lips to wash it down.
“It was Cole’s idea to drug you,” she admits. “He wanted me to kill you, but I refused.”
The news would be more upsetting if I weren’t so damn tired. “Why?”
She extracts a picture from her back pocket and thrusts it into my hands. It’s the picture of Iris and me that I keep in my wallet. “You went in my wallet?” I ask, surprised. I never should have brought the picture with me, but it gave me strength, reminded me of why I was here. And I never thought anyone would be rummaging around in my wallet.
“Madison did. She broke in wanting to get dirt on you so you wouldn’t take her role. She showed Cole, and he brought it to me.” She shoves the Red Bull in my mouth again before I can respond. The effervescence is sharp on my throat. “You didn’t let Mimi go, did you? Cole said—”
“God no. I adore her. That much is true,” I swear.
Outside, the wind howls. “I’d wanted to meet you,” Stella says. “But Iris was protective of you. She wouldn’t introduce me until she was sure I’d stay in your life. Then after she died, I tried to find you—”
“You did?” Even in my diminished state, the irony of our situation does not escape me.
She nods. “But you’d disappeared. Your grandparents didn’t want you to have anything to do with your former life.”
I finish the Red Bull and wipe my chin on my shirt, feeling ever so slightly more alert. “I wish you’d found me. Things would be different.” I yearn to talk more with her about all of this, but there’s no time now. “What’s Cole’s plan with me?”
“He wanted me to kill you before you killed me, but I insisted we just put you to sleep until we could get the police to arrest you.”
“For what?”
“Stalking, lying, attempted murder,” she rattles off. “I don’t know. Were you going to kill me?”
I shake my head. “I’d thought of it, in the beginning. But I decided not to, once I got to know you.”
“Thanks, I guess,” she says.
I feel hot tears on my cheeks, a sinking sensation in my chest. “I don’t want to kill anyone,” I whisper. “I just want to be normal.”
Stella sits next to me on the bath mat and rests a hand on my back, gently patting me like I’m a child. “That stupid interview when I announced the memoir…” She closes her eyes. “Cole’s call to do this movie came soon after. I didn’t put the two together at the time, but now it seems obvious his offering me the part was more about bribing me than anything else—to make sure I kept my mouth shut. Not that I ever would have published anything about Cole’s fetish—or Iris, no matter how desperate I was for cash. How would that have made me look? And it didn’t matter anyway—as you know, no one wanted the damn thing. He mentioned it the night we hooked up though. I tried to set him straight about it, but then we were having sex and…” She sighs. “The next day he fed me this story about Jackson blackmailing him to hire me and do this film, so I didn’t think about the interview again. I’m an idiot.”
I rest my head on my knees, wishing my brain were working better. “Jackson did mention something about Cole bribing him too.” I gasp. “Jackson! You gave him the lemonade too. We have to go get him.”
I grip the counter with my free hand, and between the two of us, we manage to heave me to standing. “We have to get you both somewhere safe to hide so Cole still thinks I’m on his side,” Stella says. “Otherwise he might kill us all.”
I wish I thought she was only being dramatic. “I don’t know how far I can go. Are you supposed to meet him somewhere?”
She nods. “In the wine cellar—once I drugged you.”
I squint at her. “Leaving me here?”
“I didn’t realize how high the water was going to get,” she insists. “I made him promise he’d put you somewhere safe once you were asleep.”
“Yeah, right.” I snort.
“I’m sorry. I’m an idiot for listening
to him.” Her bloodshot green eyes plead with me to forgive her. “There’s a storage closet and janitor’s office next to the wine cellar—”
“Too close.” I shake my head. “I won’t be able to get down there without him seeing me.”
She thinks. “There’s an office off of reception. Apparently the walls up there are concrete, and at least you could lock the door.”
The idea that a locked door is going to do anything for me is laughable, but with the sleeping pills smoothing the grooves of my brain, I can’t come up with anything better. It’ll have to do for now. I splash my face with cold water from the sink and discard my remaining brown contact, unexpectedly buoyed by the act.
Stella’s breath suddenly catches. “He has guns. I just remembered. In the wine cellar.”
Of course he does.
“Let’s try to get to them before he does,” I say.
I follow her into the living room, where she shoves bottles of water, flashlights, nutrition bars, and a towel into a backpack. “You ready?” she asks.
And then the lights go out.
Stella
The darkness was so complete, I couldn’t remember which way I’d been facing in the room. It was like I was back in the womb. I fumbled for the power switch on the flashlight, and a bright beam cut through the black before Felicity snatched it and shut it off, sending us plummeting back into the inky void.
“We can’t risk him seeing the light once we’re outside, if he’s out there.” She grasped my hand in hers. “We need to let our eyes adjust.”
We stood hand in hand, unmoving, while the wind roared around the eaves and the rain pounded the roof. Something crashed outside. The darkness remained.
“We have to go.” Felicity pulled me toward the door.
“I still can’t see,” I protested.
“He won’t be able to either,” she pointed out.
She turned the handle and the door flew open with a thunk. “Ow,” she cried.
“Was that your head?”
“My shoulder.” She stepped out into the billowing rain, tugging me behind her.
Outdoors, the coal-black lessened to a dusky gloom punctuated by a gale so strong, I immediately lost my footing and had to grab on to the door frame to brace myself. A deck chair hurtled past, absorbed into the chaos before I could make out where it landed.
Felicity linked her arm through mine, and we steeled ourselves against the storm as we stepped onto the saturated pier. The sea rolled mere inches beneath the boards, pushing through the slats and surging over the sides as it seethed. When we reached Jackson’s bungalow, Felicity banged on the door and rang the bell, shouting over the wind, but it was useless. “He’s asleep,” she cried, her voice edged with desperation. “We have to break in.”
Water washed over our ankles as we assessed his bungalow. Like all the cabins, his had extensive decking on the front that faced the sea, but no windows on the back, and the windows on the sides were obscured by wooden slats, designed for privacy. A foot-wide ledge ran halfway around the outside of the bungalow, ending beneath the slatted windows, a good ten feet from the front deck. Felicity reared back and kicked the door with all her might, but it didn’t budge.
She groaned and leaned her head against the door, her energy flagging.
“We have to go,” I said. “I’ll come back for him.”
“No,” she insisted, shaking her head to wake herself up. “These bungalows could go underwater at any minute. I’m not leaving him here to drown.”
And with that, she lurched toward the side ledge.
“Felicity!” I called. “What are you doing?”
But she wasn’t listening to me. I watched in sheer terror as she inched her way around the building, her fingers gripping the horizontal wooden slats. This was all my fault. I should never have listened to Cole. What was I thinking?
Felicity braced herself as a rogue wave slammed into her back, then continued her scrabble toward the window. It was so dark, I could hardly make out what she was doing, but I could tell she’d reached the end of the ledge and was climbing higher up the slats. Finally her body jerked inward, and she disappeared into the window. I breathed a sigh of relief.
A few seconds later, she flung open the front door. “What did you do?” I asked. “That was terrifying.”
“There’s a latch that opens the slats for airflow,” she said. “I unhooked it and went through his bedroom window.”
I felt terrible when I saw Jackson sprawled across the couch in his living room, still wearing the muddied clothes he’d had on when he left our bungalow. This was all my fault. How could I have trusted Cole? I knew better.
Felicity bent over his face, slapping his cheeks, to no avail. She put her ear to his chest.
“Oh God, he’s not dead, is he?” I cried.
She shook her head. “Get me some water.”
I extracted one of the bottles of water from my backpack, and she splashed it in his face the same way I’d done to her. He gurgled, but didn’t wake up. “Jackson!” she shouted into his face.
I grabbed the water and dumped it over his head as she pushed him up to sitting, finally eliciting a gasp and splutter. “It’s me,” Felicity said. “You have to wake up. Stella drugged you with that lemonade.” Disoriented, he looked from her to me and back. “It’s okay. We worked it out. I’ll explain everything later. But we have to go. The water’s rising.”
He rested his head on Felicity’s shoulder. “Nope,” she cajoled him. “You have to get up. The hurricane is here, and your father’s trying to kill me.” She turned to me. “Give me a caffeine pill.”
I extracted one of the caffeine pills from the backpack and handed it to her.
“This should wake you up a little.” Felicity placed it on his tongue and helped him wash it down with water. “We have to go now,” she said, sliding her arm around him. I did the same on the other side, and we rose together, standing him precariously on his feet.
“Where are we going?” he asked, groggy.
“There’s an office off of reception where you guys can sleep and wait for the storm to pass,” I said, proud of myself for having a plan. “Cole will be in the wine cellar with me. I’ll make sure he stays away.” No part of me was excited about being stuck in a wine cellar with Cole for however long it took for this storm to pass; nor was I looking forward to the backlash when he discovered Felicity and Jackson were not, in fact, sleeping in their bungalows, but that was the way it had to be. Felicity was probably right that he wouldn’t risk his own life to check on them during the storm or move them to safety, and if he decided to, I’d just have to stop him somehow. I’d gotten us into this mess, and I would have to get us out.
Outside, visibility was so low we could hardly see five feet in front of us. We stumbled down the flooded pier and onto the beach, where the storm surge had buried most of the sand underwater. Palm trees bent under the strain of the wind; the path that led to the main building had turned into a muddy river. As we mounted the stairs that ascended to the pool and lobby, I noticed one of the railings had been pried off, leaving a mess of twisted wood and nails behind.
Lightning flashed as we skirted the pool, illuminating a table and a number of loungers floating among the greenery that blanketed the surface. Somewhere a door banged; something rough and sharp scraped my leg. We moved past the restaurant, around the outside of the building toward the entrance to reception, where I groped desperately along the wall for the door handle until finally I felt something give.
“Got it.” I exhaled, and the door swung in. “If I don’t come back, hide somewhere else.”
Felicity gave me a thumbs-up, and she and Jackson flattened themselves against the outside wall as I stepped inside. The darkness of the lobby was like a blindfold, but at least there was less danger of being swept out to sea or impaled by flying debris. I stood still, listening, straining my eyes to see. But I could make out very little definition in the shadows, and all I could hear was t
he scratching of a branch against the roof and the wailing wind.
The coast seemed to be clear, but I took a few tentative steps over the tiles to be sure, wincing at the loud squelching of my tennis shoes as I crept toward the wide hallway that led to the restaurant. I gasped as my hips collided with something solid and smooth—a leather couch, I determined, feeling along it with my fingers. Which meant I wasn’t moving in the direction I thought I was. Without a wall to guide me, I was completely lost in the dark. I tried to picture the couch in the room to orient myself, but the room was full of furniture arranged into different sitting areas. It was hopeless.
I inched backward in the effort of retracing my steps to the door to find my bearings, but quickly slammed into a heavy table, sending a vase crashing to the floor. I flinched. Even the noise of the storm wouldn’t drown that out. Somewhere a door banged open, and heavy footsteps trod over the tiles. My heart sank. I thought of Felicity and Jackson waiting outside, barely able to keep their eyes open, all because of me.
After a moment, the arc of a flashlight pierced the darkness.
“Hello?” I called out.
“What are you doing?”
The voice was Cole’s. I made my way toward him, praying he hadn’t seen Felicity and Jackson. “I was coming to meet you, but I couldn’t find my flashlight in my bag. I bumped into a table.” I gestured to the shattered vase.
“Did you do it?”
He shined his flashlight in my face, leaving me blinking and half-blind. “Jesus,” I complained, shading my eyes. “Yeah, I did it. Crushed the pills up in lemonade.”
“Where are they?”
“Felicity’s passed out in her bed in our bungalow,” I lied. “Jackson’s in his. I watched him drink the whole thing, so I know he can’t be awake. I’m worried about the water rising, though.” This, I thought, was a good touch.
His eyes were in dark shadow, but his mouth twisted into a hard line. “Why are you lying to me?”
The Siren Page 33
