by JA Huss
“What?” I say. “What was I supposed to do? There’s nothing incriminating on there, for fuck’s sake. I just wanted to cooperate so they can figure out why Camille and—”
“Just… shut up, Connor. I’m at the end of my rope tonight.”
Which is a pretty dickish thing to say since, you know, two of my oldest friends just fucking killed themselves last night. So I say, “You know what? I’m not going to the Hamptons. I’m meeting Kiera up at her place in Vermont. There’s a helicopter waiting for me downtown and—”
But that’s the last word I get out.
Because someone hits me over the head and I drop to the floor.
“For fuck’s sake, Steven!”
“Here,” someone says. Some familiar voice I know I recognize, but can’t place.
And then there’s a hot, burning sensation traveling up the vein in my arm and…
And everything goes dark.
I wake up in a room. Tied to a bed. Head pounding. People yelling beyond the door underneath which a glowing line of light leaks through.
I try to yell, but my voice won’t work.
I squirm and thrash and the only thing I get for my trouble is a nurse appearing with a needle. This time it doesn’t go into my arm, it goes into an IV.
Then the darkness is back.
I dream again. That same dream, I think. I’m short and looking for my friends among all the strangers. I can hear Louise, but then I wonder… maybe that’s the real Louise. Because this is her house, I’m sure of it.
Then Emily is there again. She says, “Shhhhhhh. Don’t let them know you know.”
“What do I know?” I whisper back.
And she says, “Everything, Connor. You know everything. They just made you forget.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - KIERA
“He’s not answering,” I say. “Why isn’t he answering?”
I look at Hayes and Sofia sitting close together in my small cottage couch. Hayes is trying to play this cool but I can tell he’s worried.
Connor didn’t meet the helicopter and we can’t get a hold of him.
“Just…” Hayes sighs. Like he’s more than tired. More than frustrated. That sigh says something else. I don’t know why I think it sounds like giving up, but it does. “Just,” he repeats, “relax, OK? We’ll figure it out.”
“We’re so stupid,” Sofia says. “We forgot the first fucking Dirty Ones rule. Buddy system. Why did we let Connor go home alone?”
“Because he needed to talk to his father and make him think all those fucking plans he has are still on track.”
“I think he failed,” I whisper. “I don’t know what you’re doing, Hayes, but it didn’t work. He’s in trouble. We need to go back to the city and find out where he is and what’s happening.”
“No,” Hayes breathes out. And yup. That’s defeat in his voice. It scares me because Hayes isn’t the kind of guy who gets defeated. “We can’t go back now. We’re here.” He looks at me from across the sitting area. I’m in a chair, legs tucked up to my chest. “We need to just… do this without him.”
“Do what?” Sofia asks. “Why are you being so cagey? Just tell us why we’re out here in the middle of buttfuck Vermont when we need to be in the city tomorrow.”
Hayes stands, buttons his suit coat, and extends his hand to her. She takes it without comment and lets him pull her up.
They make a beautiful couple. Hayes and his dark, mysterious good looks. Sofia in her equally dark, mysterious beauty. And I wonder why they haven’t gotten together like this before now?
He smiles at her. Trying to make everything OK, I think. But she only gives him half a smile back. I just sit in my chair frowning, unable to force even a quarter smile.
Hayes turns to me. “Come on, Kiera. We gotta go see something.”
“See what?” I ask. He extends his hand for me too and I take it, reluctantly getting to my feet.
“You’ll see.”
“Why can’t you just tell us?” Sofia asks.
We’ve both been asking this question the entire evening but Hayes just says, “You need to see it. Dress warm, we gotta go into the woods.”
“We’re going to the tower, aren’t we?” Sofia asks. “I don’t want to go.”
“Me either,” I say. “I’ve lived across the lake from it for ten years and never had an urge to go see it again.”
“We have to,” Hayes says. “I have to show you something.”
“Hayes—” Sofia starts.
But he cuts her off. “Believe me. You want to see this. It’s not a bad thing, I promise.”
Both of us sigh with frustration and defeat.
“Go put on something warm. Kiera, do you have extra boots for Sofia? And a pair of pants she can wear? Because we have to walk through the snow.”
“Sure,” I say. “One sec.”
I go into my bedroom and start looking for some warmer clothes for Sofia to change into. But the whole time I’m picturing the tower. That walk into the woods. The gate, the thick underbrush we’ll have to fight our way through.
It’s probably worse now. A decade of new growth is a lot of wild brambles to deal with.
I find some warm clothes for Sofia and go back into the living room, then feel awkward because they’re in the middle of an embrace. “Um,” I say. “Here you go.”
Sofia breaks away from Hayes, focuses her sad eyes on my handful of clothes, then takes a deep breath and nods. Disappears down the hall to change.
Hayes puts on his coat, then holds mine out to me. Helps me into it.
I want to ask him all the questions but we’ve tried. This whole time we’ve been waiting for Connor Sofia and I have been on repeat and Hayes just finds a new way to say, “You’ll see.”
So I don’t say anything. I just put on my gloves and scarf and stand in front of the door, sweating like crazy until Sofia appears.
We leave the house and get into the car Hayes had waiting for us at the local airstrip when we landed. It takes almost an hour to get across the lake and the only thing interesting that happens is Hayes produces a pair of boots and a thick winter coat from the trunk and puts all that on. We’re the only ones on the ferry. And how Hayes managed to get a late evening crossing is something I don’t even bother thinking about. His kind of money can buy almost everything.
When we reach New York on the other side we drive south to the Essex College campus. Which is quiet and mostly dark because almost everyone is on winter break. You’re not allowed to stay in the dorms over break so all those buildings look lifeless. Only the theater building has any lights on tonight. Probably a Christmas play. They do those every year for the local townspeople.
But our car takes us past the theatre building to the very south edge of campus. I get a sick, sick feeling in my stomach as we grow closer to the woods and when we stop in an empty, snow-covered parking lot it’s all I can do to stop myself from hurling.
Hayes presses a button to make the divider window go down. “Stay here and wait for us,” he tells the driver. “Keep the heat on high back here. We’re gonna be freezing when we get back.”
Sofia and I share a worried look.
“Come on,” Hayes says, getting out and pulling Sofia along with him. I scoot over, take his hand and let him pull me out as well. We walk in silence to a slight break in the trees where the path to the tower is and hands me a flashlight.
He has one too, but Sofia doesn’t. We talked this over earlier. We will hold hands the entire time. Hayes will have a light. I will have a light. And Sofia will not let go of us.
I turn on my light and look at him.
He doesn’t give us a chance to turn back, just pushes aside the bare branches with one hand, making creepy shadows with his flashlight, and drags Sofia into the woods with him. I have her hand, so she drags me along behind her.
“What the fuck are we doing?” Sofia whispers into the silence.
“Just relax,” Hayes says. “I told you, it’s no
t bad.”
“I don’t like this,” I say. “It’s so fucking creepy. I feel like I’m in a horror movie where the stupid teenagers do everything wrong. We’re gonna get killed tonight.”
Hayes stops so abruptly Sofia bumps into him and I bump into her. “Stop it, Kiera. We’re fine. There’s nothing out here but us. I promise you.”
“He’s the creepy outsider who lures the stupid girls into his diabolical plan,” Sofia says.
“Yeah. He’s got like… a lair out here. Some shabby cabin filled with doll heads and shit.”
Sofia laughs. “And he wants to dress us up like dolls.”
“Jesus Christ,” Hayes says. “Stop writing a story. Nothing’s gonna happen, but this is serious.”
Sofia shoots me a look over her shoulder, but then trips over something and goes back to paying attention.
“Where’s the fucking gate?” I huff a few seconds later. “It should be here already, right?”
“There is no gate,” Hayes says. “At least not out here.”
“Hmmm,” Sofia says. “They took it down?”
“Just come on.”
We keep going. My feet are freezing because my knee-high shearling boots are really more for looks and not made for winter trekking, so they’re soaking wet now. The snow is very deep in some places and by the time Hayes pulls us through the last of the trees into a clearing, my pants are covered in those annoying ice balls.
“Where are we?” Sofia asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “None of this looks right. Things sure have changed in ten years.”
Hayes turns to us and I flash my light at his chest, trying to see his face, but not wanting to blind him in the eyes. “I just want you to look around, OK?”
“What are we looking for?” I pan my light around and realize exactly where we are.
“Oh, my God,” Sofia says. “We’re in a cemetery?”
“When did they put this in?” I ask. So weird.
“It’s always been here,” Hayes says. “Look.” He pans his light onto a nearby headstone. “The date.”
“Eighteen seventy-nine?” Sofia asks. “What the hell?” She looks around. I look around. “Where’s the tower?”
“There is no tower, Sofia. There never was a tower.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, thoroughly confused. “We came here all the time. Hell, I came here every fucking week all of senior year. Of course there’s a tower. It’s where we… did that stuff and I… wrote the book.”
Hayes swallows hard, looking at me intently. “You did write a book that year, Kiera. But not the one you think. And it didn’t happen in a tower. It happened in the top floor of the theatre.”
“What?” Sofia says, letting go of our hands and spinning around. She grabs my flashlight and begins walking away.
“Sofia!” I say. “Where are you going?” I run through the deep snow to catch up. Hayes right behind me.
“There’s no tower, Sofia,” he says.
“It’s here. Or we’re in the wrong place. It’s got to be here. I remember it.”
“Sofia,” he says, his long legs taking him past me so he can grab her wrist and make her stop. “It’s not here. It was a fucking lie, OK? The whole thing was a fucking cover-up.”
“A cover-up for what?” I ask.
“Think hard, Kiera,” Hayes says, staring into my eyes. “Think very hard about what really happened that night. You were here, remember? In the cemetery. We were all here. Bennett and I were here with Emily. You were here with Camille and Sofia. And Connor… Connor was here with his father.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sofia asks. Loudly now. “No. That’s not how it happened. We were…” But she stops and looks at me. “We were…”
“We were all here,” Hayes says. “But not for the reasons we thought. There is no tower, you guys. There never was a fucking tower. That’s not what happened that night.”
“But the book,” I say. “My notebook.”
Hayes has a pained, sad look on his face.
“I have a scar, Hayes. Emily shot me in the fucking shoulder. I was in the hospital for a week. No one made that up.”
“You did get shot that night, Kiera. But it wasn’t Emily who shot you. It was Mr. Arlington.”
Memory is an unreliable thing.
My mother said that to me when I was lying in the hospital after I was shot.
“That’s not what happened,” she said. “You don’t understand what you saw.”
And I was on a lot of drugs, but not enough drugs to erase that memory of her and what she said. Certainly not enough to erase what I witnessed at the Legacy Alumni Party that night I moved into the dorms at Essex senior year.
She was there that night. She had been baking for days. Something she did only once a year for this party.
She is an alumna and I was her legacy, so every year I was at Essex we attended the party together. She wore a long, gold gown with several layers of cream chiffon in her skirt so the gold was more of a pale yellow to the eye. Her lips were the most beautiful shade of pink and her long, blonde hair was pinned up, but little bits and wisps escaped in flowing tendrils in all the right places. She was very soft and sexy. Looked every bit the erotica author part, if you knew who she really was.
And I did. So she did.
I was in black. I wanted to be different than her. I wanted my stories to be different, I wanted my life to be different, I wanted to be the opposite of Antoinette Bonnaire in every way imaginable.
So I wore black and my dress was short and tight. My eyes were lined, my lashes were fake and thick, and my lips were red. I was dark and hard. A creature of the night.
I think that’s why they noticed me that night.
Connor Arlington and Hayes Fitzgerald.
Sofia Astor and Camille DuPont.
It was the dress, but not the dress. It was me, but not me.
So I caught their eye while I was watching my mother flirt with Christopher Arlington at her pastry table.
I saw Connor and Hayes watching me watch her from across the room as I leaned against a doorjamb, firm scowl on my face. And then I was approached. Not by Connor and Hayes, but Sofia and Camille.
Sofia, always in a red dress at these kind of things, was wearing something professional and appropriate for a job interview at Victoria’s Secret. Meaning extremely sexy and seductive, but in a way that said, “I have power, don’t fuck with me.” Which caught my eye and I remember thinking, So. She wants to be different tonight too. Because it was a skirt suit with a tight, cropped jacket that accentuated her pushed-up breasts. She wore diamonds around her throat and four-inch heels on her feet.
Camille was in blue. A column silhouette dress embellished with glittery things and a tulle overskirt to soften up her tall, thin frame. This was Camille as I’d seen her the past three years. Not that we spent much time together, but we were in the same classes and fashion was something Camille took seriously. She brought her Fifth Avenue life to upstate New York with her.
It was hard to look away and be aloof, so I failed at that. I watched them carefully as they approached me, smiling like she-wolves with an agenda.
“You look lovely tonight, Kiera,” Sofia said.
“Thank you. You two as well.”
“Where’s your book?” Camille asked. “You don’t go anywhere without a book.”
She didn’t mean a book for reading. She meant my notebooks. Of which I have many. But the one I had tonight was small, a little bigger than my palm, and I had it clutched in my hand behind my back.
“This book?” I said, revealing my secret.
Sofia looked at it with longing. The cover was real. Some hundred-year-old erotica book with gold-gilded lettering I found on my mother’s shelves this past summer. But all the pages had been ripped out so I could make new pages and sew them in. It felt good to do that. Rip apart a story and remake it into something new. Something mine. “What do you write in there?” Sofia aske
d.
“Everything.”
“What’s that mean?” Camille asked.
I shrugged. “What I see.”
“So you write about us?”
“I leave out the names. Only use initials. It’s mostly just a character study.”
“Can I read it?” Sofia asked.
“No,” I said.
She pouted a little. And even though I already had an opinion about who Sofia Astor was, I put it on hold. Because I knew she was a writer, like me. Like Camille. We’ve been taking classes together for the past three years. And she intrigued me with the few stories she shared in class. Camille as well. Though for different reasons. Sofia had an impressive grasp of the English language. Her words were poetic and rhythmic and I enjoyed them. She was going to be published soon. I knew that. Was a little jealous of it, to be honest. Because she had New York connections and really, that’s all that matters when you’re an aspiring author.
“No,” I said again. “But if you want, we could write something together.” It was a loaded offer. I was going to use her and I knew that the moment the words came out of my mouth.
She took in a deep breath, tried to hide a smile and failed. “When?”
“I don’t care.”
“Now?” Camille asked.
I hadn’t included her in the invitation. Camille’s words were sharp and her sentences short. They were nice. Very readable. But very different than Sofia.
I considered this as my gaze wandered back to my mother and Christopher Arlington.
Camille caught that and said, “Your mother is very…”
“Flirty?” I finished for her.
Sofia laughed. “He does that every year. Not just with her, either.”
I nodded. “I know. I’ve written about him a lot.”
“Oooooo,” came out both their mouths.
Then Camille laughed. “Well, if you want to know what happens next, we can show you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. Too sharply.
Sofia leaned in, cupping a hand to her mouth, and whispered, “We know where he takes them.”
