by Meli Raine
“Oh, God, yes. Except it’s not as bad for me as it is for you. I wasn’t pulled back in like you were.” She reaches for me in a hug. Her entire body vibrates, shaking with fear. It unnerves me, but I hug her, marveling at how cold and thin she is.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers in my ear.
“It’s okay.”
“No. It’s not. But thank you for meeting me. Ever since I saw your mom died, that you were exonerated, and the news story about your car being bombed–that made me finally reach out.” She looks around the bar, nervous as a rabbit.
She doesn’t want to be seen with me.
Seen by whom?
“Let’s sit,” I suggest, gesturing to a dark corner where the light won’t shine on us. Her expression changes to relief. I take a moment to look at her. On the surface, she and Lindsay look alike. California cool, all legs and blonde hair. That’s where the similarities end, though. Tara could be mean, and she’s ruthlessly ambitious. She and Lindsay used to be so tight. In high school, I was jealous. Ashamed of my jealousy, but still–I felt it. I wanted to have a true best friend like Lindsay and Tara seemed to be for each other.
I had to settle for being second best. I knew it, too. Lindsay turned to Tara first, and if she wasn’t free, then I got attention. That was all in the past, though.
Right? Now I’m the one who has Tara’s full attention, and Lindsay is nowhere to be seen.
We slide into a booth. Silas sits at one next to us. A waitress comes over, wiping her hands on a towel, and gives us a weary smile.
“Two cosmos,” I order.
“You remember?” Tara perks up.
“Lindsay got me drinking those,” I say with a laugh.
“It’s good to just talk to a friend,” she says, worrying the corner of a cocktail napkin. She looks behind me, nudging her chin up toward the booth where Silas sits. “What’s his deal?”
“Private security. Too many people are trying to kill me, so...”
“He’s hot. He have a brother?”
“I have no idea.”
“Sister,” says Silas, his deep voice amused. “I have one sister, and sorry, Tara–she’s taken.”
“You’re supposed to be seen and not heard,” I correct him.
“You have me confused with children. Bodyguards should be seen and avoided by bad guys.”
“Silas, can you move a few booths away? This really is private.”
Just then, the waitress delivers our drinks, winking at Silas as he makes huffing sounds of disapproval but moves one booth away, just out of earshot.
Tara drinks half hers in one long elegant series of swallows. I sip mine.
“So,” she says, giving me a strange smile. “How do we start?”
“We?”
“Okay. Me. How do I start?”
“How about at the beginning? Why are we here? Why now? Why reach out to me, Tara?”
“Because this is all going to hell in a handbasket, and I need your help.”
“My help? My help? Are you kidding me? I can’t help anyone! I can’t even help myself.”
“I know, Jane, and I’m sorry.” Her words come spilling out, tripping over each other.
“But why?”
She chugs the rest of her drink and waves at the waitress, who nods.
“It all goes back to the party.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“Look, we had no idea John, Stellan, and Blaine were like that. None. Lindsay had dated Blaine. We’d all taken them to dances as dates. You know. All but you, I guess.”
“I never went out with any of them, but sure. I liked Stellan. Crushed on him, even.” I shudder.
“Oh, trust me. We all want bleach showers now to wash off their corrosive stink. Those fuckers.”
I stay silent.
“There was no way to predict what they did, right? I just know that John asked Mandy to take us all out for dinner and leave you and Lindsay.”
“Me and Lindsay? Leave us there for what?”
My drink roils in my stomach. I’m glad I only sipped.
“What do you think?”
“No,” I rasp.
“Yes. I’m sorry. That’s our best guess. They said Drew wanted to have some fun and that Blaine thought you were hot, so they wanted time alone with you two.”
“I’ve never heard this before.”
“Because we’ve been ordered never to say it. Never, ever. They’ll kill us. Or worse.”
“Tara, you have to tell the police!”
“God, no. Are you crazy, Jane?” She looks around in terror, her head moving closer to her shoulders, like a turtle pulling back into a shell. “Even saying it now makes me want to throw up.” Her neck tightens, a dry click coming as she swallows. “I don’t have a choice.”
“Slow down. Tell me the entire story. All the way back to the party.”
“We were all there having fun for hours. Water polo was fun, and Mandy was flirting like crazy with Stellan. We decided we were starving and wanted to go get tacos. That’s when one of them–I think it was Stellan, but I’m not sure–pulled Mandy aside and told her the three of us should just go and give them an hour or so with you and Lindsay.”
“And then?”
“Then you came running out suddenly. We tried to tell you to go back in and get everyone else’s order, remember? Mandy was going to ditch you, but you insisted.” The judgment in her voice makes me irrationally pissed.
“And then at the taco place, Stellan texted and said we shouldn’t come back. To just go home. Party over. We told you, but you insisted on going back, because you’d left something there. So we dropped you off. Your car was there. And then we went to Mandy’s.
“Right after we went home, we knew something was wrong because this guy showed up at Mandy’s house, where we were crashing for the night. He had a briefcase and a folder with each of our names on it. And one with your name, but it stayed in the briefcase.”
“What was his name?”
“No idea. Just a guy with a slight accent.”
My arms go numb. “What kind of accent?”
She squinches her face as she remembers. “I don’t know. Scottish? Irish? It was like an English accent but different.”
“What did he want?”
“To pay us off.”
“But your dad has plenty of money,” I say. Tara’s dad is something like the ninth richest man in the United States.
“To pay us off to go along with pretending Lindsay asked for it, or else.”
“Or else what?”
“He’d expose our family secrets.”
“That’s not paying you off–that’s blackmail!”
“Yes.”
“And all three of you did it.”
“Jane, if you understood–those folders. They had records of horrible things about our parents. Our families. We’d have been ruined.”
“So you destroyed Lindsay because you would have been ruined?” I can’t keep the disgust out of my voice. “What were the secrets? That someone had an affair? Or your grandfather was a murderer?”
“They threatened to create fake scandals about our families.”
“Fake?”
“They–they–” Her voice goes shaky and she swallows the other half of her drink, then sighs loudly. Her voice is tinged with unbridled fury. “They showed us alleged records of downloads from my father’s computer, claiming he was downloading child pornography.”
“WHAT?”
“He wasn’t. He didn’t. He didn’t!” Tara’s face flushes a horrible red. “They said they could make it look real. All they had to do was show us that and Mandy and Jenna fell in line.”
“Whoa.”
“It killed me to do that to Lindsay. Killed me. Mandy wasn’t as bothered, but Jenna and I were devastated. We got all kinds of unasked-for help after that. Their pay-off wasn’t money. It was doors being opened. Mandy got into a competitive master’s degree program. Jenna was chosen for a big modeling contract. You know.�
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“Just like John, Stellan, and Blaine rose up the ranks.” Within four years of Lindsay’s attack, Blaine was a rising California politician, Stellan a well-known actor, and John a major league baseball player. Their success was meteoric. Astronomical.
Statistically impossible.
“Who has this kind of power?” I asked her, pain radiating out of both of us.
“Someone very powerful and very rich. Someone you don’t want to piss off.”
The waitress brings Tara’s second drink, plus glasses of water for us both. Tara downs her cosmo and sips half the glass of water, running her fingers through her loose curls, sighing.
“What the hell do you expect from me?” I ask, knowing my voice is shrill and not caring. “I can’t help you! Besides, John, Stellan, and Blaine are dead. Really dead. I watched them die,” I add, putting voice to the fact for the first time in a long while.
“But the people controlling them aren’t.”
The man with the accent.
“You said the man with the accent was your contact?”
“He was the enforcer. Calm, cool, and so cold, he was creepy. I felt like any minute he’d pull a gun out of his pocket and just shoot me between the eyes.”
“He was violent?”
“Not physically. But there was a tension to him. He was devoid of emotion. Chilling.” She shudders.
“How did Mandy and Jenna handle it?”
“Mandy was the first to lock it down. She said we had to be united and take all the shit that came our way. This guy was threatening. He wasn’t bluffing.”
“And all this time, you’ve never said a word. Why now?”
“Because after Drew and Lindsay killed John, Stellan, and Blaine, the threats started up again. And this time, they were specific.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re planning to kill you first, then me, Jenna, and Mandy.”
“I know people are after me, but it’s because I’m blamed for what happened to Lindsay. Internet shitlords and trolls want me dead. You’re saying more people than that are in line to kill me?”
“What if it wasn’t shitlords and trolls who firebombed your car, Jane?” she asks bluntly.
“What information do we have that makes people so evil? What do they have to lose that is so great they’re willing to kill for it? I never hurt anyone.”
The waitress turns up the lights just then, the dim atmosphere growing brighter as she rolls the dimmer switch slightly.
Tara doesn’t answer my question, eyes the color of a pale amber ale studying me, her head tilting. I can tell she’s taking in my features–but why?
“You don’t have a wild guess?” she asks, clearly knowing more than she’s letting on.
“No. I don’t.” I pause. “But you do, don’t you? It’s why you’re here.”
“And because you’re the only person in the world who can help,” she says, scooching out of the seat. “Listen, I need to pee. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Reflexively, I start to scooch with her, then stop myself. We used to go to the bathroom in bars in packs. My muscles remember. I don’t need to use the facilities and frankly, I could use some alone time to process what she’s just said. She waves and walks to the neon restroom sign, her chunky cork heels making her seem taller, more slender, less real and more like a doll, dressed up to be looked at but having no innate function.
Just a toy you play with until it’s no fun anymore.
“Reliving old times?” Silas asks, walking toward me, his body a shadow as a bright, low-hanging lamp wreaks havoc with how he looks. As his face comes into focus, I can see he’s assessing everything.
“You heard all that?”
“I heard some, and I–”
Bzzz.
He looks at his phone, answering it. “Sir?” he says.
Ah. It’s Drew.
Silas moves a safe distance away so he can keep an eye on me but also talk business. As I wait for two different people, I finish off my drink, willing my stomach to stop letting stress get to me. The alcohol needs time to loosen me up, so I don’t order a second drink.
The song on the radio changes to a more upbeat tempo, the next four minutes all about bass and clapping. Finally an old rock ballad comes on, and I check my phone.
Tara’s been in the bathroom for ten minutes.
I look at Silas, who glances at me and frowns, then says something about “implants” into the phone. I don’t really need to pee, but I might as well. If the next conversation with Tara is half as intense as this last one, I’ll need to be as comfortable as possible.
I walk past Silas, whose frown keeps deepening. I feel the green neon from the restroom sign change my skin, and I wonder how different life would have been if none of this had ever happened.
Chapter 17
The first detail I notice is the strange pattern in the floor tile.
Uneven, a deep red line like a giant tear drop, fat and thick, cuts into the boring tan linoleum. For a crappy bar, it’s a sophisticated touch. As I step on the rounded edge of the red, I slip.
Wait a minute.
That’s not decorative tile.
It’s blood.
My foot slips forward, my other knee bending and slamming hard against the ceramic floor. I scream, sliding a few inches forward, my purse flying out of my hands and turning upside down, showering me with the contents. A tiny tampon lands in the blood, followed by assorted coins, my lipstick, a few receipts, and a breath mint.
My phone slams into the bathroom counter and pings my cheek, the crack of the corner of the phone against my eye socket making me gasp in pain.
My foot hits something big but yielding. Not a toilet.
I look down as I struggle to sit up.
To find Tara laying on the floor, up against the wall, both wrists slit from hand to elbow, blood pouring out of her like someone is pumping it.
“Tara!” I scream, looking at her eyes as she twitches. They’re vacant but open, her head at such an odd angle, I’d think someone had snapped it if she weren’t moving.
The blood is viscous, unforgiving as I move toward her, half sliding, crawling through it to grab her arm. I press my hand against her wrist, then start screaming “HELP!”
The door to the bathroom opens so fast, I hear it slam into the wall, making a strange cracking sound. “Jane!” Silas comes running into the bathroom but stops cold at the blood on the floor.
“Help me! She’s slit her arms!”
He speaks into his earpiece, ordering an ambulance and backup, then drops to his knees, heedless of the blood. “Get pressure on those wounds. Now.” Stripping off his suit coat, he lays it along the length of one of Tara’s arms and presses, hard.
I take my sweater off from around my waist and do the same. As I press into her, I feel a fast beat coming, slamming hard.
“I feel her pulse,” I whisper, relieved, looking at Silas for confirmation, for approval, for salvation.
For everything.
“That’s your pulse,” he says quietly. “I’m not finding hers.”
“What do we do? CPR?”
“We do what we’re doing now, Jane. Medics will be here any minute.”
“Medics?”
“I mean paramedics. They’re coming.”
I’m frantic, blood in my hair, Silas’s coat and legs covered in it, our bodies thrown wholly into pushing against Tara’s arms, trying to stem the tide. A five-alarm bell is going off in my head.
“Why would she do this? We were just talking a few minutes ago! She was fine! Scared, but fine.”
“Shhhh. Focus on the pressure.”
“I can’t feel a pulse!” Panic rushes in like a swarm of bees. “Oh my God, Silas, she can’t bleed out! Tara! Tara!” I straddle her arm, my hurt knee not functioning, screaming with pure, bone-shredding pain. I say her name over and over, as if shouting it will magically stop the bleeding, as if she just needs some common sense to get through.
As if she’s not dying beneath me.
Footsteps clack on the tile and stop as Silas barks orders. Then he’s standing, pulling at my shoulders, lifting me up under my arms, carefully navigating the crowded restroom. Silas gets me to the main doorway and gives me a stern look, opening his mouth to say something.
Flash!
A bright light makes us both turn as white pinpoints crowd my vision, but I know what just happened.
Paparazzi. Bottom feeders looking for the next sale.
Silas charges the guy, but it’s too late. He tosses his camera to someone behind him, who takes off at full speed. Silas plows into the original picture taker, who doesn’t even bother fighting back. He goes limp but shouts for someone to take pictures.
Untangling himself from the jerk, Silas quickly stands, then looks at me, his expression changing to dismay.
“Come on,” he says, pulling my hand, quickly snaking through the bar to the back. We rush past offices and storerooms filled with kegs and brightly colored liquor boxes. The smell of rotting garbage fills my nose as we burst into the sunlight outside.
We’re in an alley, next to the dumpsters.
The black SUV screeches to a halt. Duff appears out of nowhere. “Get in,” he snaps. Silas physically lifts me and throws me in, climbing in behind me, the car ripping out of there backwards, Silas’s door still open. We’re barreling down the alley in reverse, and all I can do is scream.
And scream
Really scream, Silas on the phone shushing me, talking to Drew in a loud voice over my hoarse, nonsensical sounds.
I can’t stop, even if I’m ripping my vocal cords to shreds. Once I stop, the reality sets in.
Tara killed herself.
While I sat there in the booth drinking my cocktail, Tara was despondent, pulling out a sharp blade inside that bathroom and ending her life.
What kind of friend am I? Ex friend, but still. How did I not find her in time? How could she do something so grisly so quickly? What if–
“Jane. Jane. JANE!” Silas shouts, his hand on my throat, pressing lightly.
I stop making sounds and stare at him, wide-eyed, not really seeing what was in front of me but instead seeing Tara’s body.
“That was Drew. He was calling because the lab courier just died in a single-car accident.”
