Corinne looked at Natasha warily, then shrugged and handed over the keys. Natasha pocketed them and sauntered to the car. There was a ping, and she opened her phone to answer an incoming text, her fingers flying across the screen.
Aster stiffened. After all that had just happened, all they’d just confessed and argued over, Natasha was texting? “Who are you talking to?” she snapped.
Natasha stopped typing. “A client. Since we’re leaving, I figured I could fit in a few private sessions tomorrow. Is that okay?”
Aster shot daggers at Natasha’s back. After Corinne had been nice enough to invite her, she’d caused so much trouble that now they were leaving. And even worse, all of them had unburdened themselves . . . and yet Natasha had just sat there, Buddha-like, absorbing all of it, not revealing a thing.
Aster settled into the back seat with Corinne next to her, while Rowan climbed into the front. Aster looked longingly at the property as they pulled away. She hadn’t even gotten to go upstairs and visit her old bedroom. Her gaze drifted to the caretaker’s house across the lawn. It looked vacant, all the windows dark. She wondered if Danielle’s dad still lived there; Danielle’s mom Julia had moved away the summer Aster spent in Europe. Aster had always wondered if it was because she’d discovered Danielle and Mason’s affair, or because her marriage had just finally ended.
The SUV rolled down the long driveway, which circled the shore, passed the tennis courts, and, finally, offered a view of the family’s private dock. The Edith Marie, the family’s sailboat, was the only vessel bobbing on the water, its masts bare and a large canvas tarp covering the hull. The rest of the dock was empty, the water lapping despondently at the shore. Aster stared at that strip of sand. She knew the others were too. It was where Steven Barnett’s body had been discovered five years ago.
Natasha stopped the car for a moment. She didn’t say a word, and neither did the other cousins, but it was clear what they were thinking. After a few beats, she faced forward again and drove on.
The only way to the main island was over the steel bridge that spanned the narrow sound. The bridge was empty as Natasha rolled up to it. The sky seemed to grow even darker. The tall grasses on either side of the road swayed back and forth. Trees whispered noisily. Mist rolled in off the water, shrouding the car in wispy clouds.
“Turn on the lights,” Aster called out uneasily.
Natasha found the switch for the lights and pulled onto the bridge. “Listen, I wasn’t entirely truthful in there,” she started to say, her voice strangely high and breathy. “There’s something you need to know.”
Aha! Aster thought, triumphant. “What is it?”
Natasha’s throat bobbed. The car engine chugged. “It’s about Poppy. And it’s about—”
“Watch out!” Corinne yelled urgently, pointing at something in the windshield.
Headlights shone in front of them, suddenly very close. A car was driving right for them from the other direction, taking up the whole bridge. Aster’s vision went white as the oncoming car careened closer. Before she knew what was happening, Natasha had yanked the steering wheel to the right, slamming on the brakes and laying on the horn.
Their car skidded, then fishtailed. There was a crash, something hitting them, and then a crunch. Aster felt her body hurtling forward; her cheek slammed against the back of Natasha’s seat. Someone screamed. Aster felt momentarily and unexpectedly weightless, and all at once, there was a loud boom and she jolted backward. Finally the car stopped, and everything was eerily quiet.
Aster came to on the floor of the back seat, her legs splayed above her. The interior of the car was eerily dark. When she looked out the window, Aster saw . . . bubbles. She shot up, horrified.
They were in the water, and sinking fast.
“Hey!” she yelled. It was so dark inside the car that all she could see were gray shadows. “Is everyone okay?”
No one answered. When Aster reached out, she thought she felt bone. Her heart hammered fast, but she tried not to panic. “Rowan?” she cried. “Corinne?”
There was rustling in the front seat. “What happened?” came Rowan’s voice.
“Oh my God,” Corinne said, next to Aster. And then, more sharply, “Oh my God!”
“Where’s Natasha?” Aster screamed, fumbling around in the darkness.
Leather squeaked as Rowan moved over. “She’s right here,” Rowan called from the front seat. “Natasha?” she yelled. “Natasha!”
No answer.
“Is she . . .” Corinne trailed off shakily.
Aster groped around more, then found the hard, flat glass of the windows. She pounded on them, but they didn’t give. She felt water pooling around her feet. The car was filling up, water seeping through a break in the floor.
“Shit!” Corinne screamed.
Aster tried the door handles, but they didn’t budge. She spun around—or at least what she thought was around—climbed over the back seat, and scrambled for the cargo area, her fingers searching blindly along the carpet. Finally she touched something hard, metal, and heavy, A tire iron.
“Everyone get back here!” she called out. “We need to break this window.”
There were thuds from the front as her sister and cousin climbed over the seats. Rowan grunted loudly, dragging Natasha with her. Even in the dim light, Aster could see that Natasha’s head hung back on her neck, limp.
Once everyone was in the back, Aster wordlessly handed the tire iron to Rowan, who was the strongest. Rowan heaved the thing over her head and thrust it at the back cargo door. It cracked against the glass. She took a deep breath, and struck the glass again. This time it broke.
Ice-cold water flooded into the car, forcing them heavily back. Aster gritted her teeth and strained against the flood, struggling to get through that window and out into the sound.
“Come on!” she screamed at her cousins, reaching to pull them with her toward the hole.
Together, they grabbed Natasha’s limp form under her arms and clumsily hefted her into the dark water. Aster held tight to her cousin’s calf with one hand and paddled furiously with the other. Her lungs instantly begged for air. She tried to open her eyes underwater, but all she saw was darkness. She felt Natasha slip from her grasp and grabbed her as tightly as she could around her waist. Rowan and Corinne were kicking below her, each of them holding one of Natasha’s arms.
Finally, her lungs burning, Aster burst to the surface with a sputtering gasp.
The air was warm on her face. Waves lapped around them. Coughing, Aster looked up through the moonlit night at the bridge above. There was a large gash where the car had broken through the side rails. The bridge was empty.
Rowan popped up a moment later, Natasha dead weight in her arms. The three of them struggled to drag their cousin to shore and lay her down in the sand. She flopped on her back, her arms outstretched. There was an eerie gray pallor to her skin, and her lips were blue. “Is she alive?” Corinne asked hysterically.
Rowan straddled Natasha’s body and listened to her chest. “I think so.” Her eyes were full of fear. “But we need an ambulance.”
Corinne patted her pockets. “My phone’s still in . . . there.” She pointed at the bubbles rising on the surface of the water. The SUV was probably at the bottom of the sound by then.
“Mine is too,” Aster whispered.
“Same here.” Rowan looked like she was going to burst into tears. “Natasha!” she shouted at her. “Natasha, please wake up!”
“Natasha.” Tears were streaming down Aster’s cheeks. “Natasha, please.” The last moments with Natasha swarmed back to her. How she’d started to tell them something about Poppy.
“Please wake up,” Aster whispered.
But no matter how loudly they yelled, their cousin’s eyes remained tightly shut.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
....................................
15
When Rowan opened her eyes, she was sitting on an orange vinyl chair. A rerun of Friends played on a television hanging on the wall across the room. Next to it a clock read 11:30—p.m., presumably, as it was dark outside. Her cousins leaned against each other on a couch, wearing scrubs that read “Property of Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.”
Then she noticed a woman in a hospital bed a few feet away, with tubes up her nose and a breathing apparatus over her mouth. Her eyes were shut, her hands lay peacefully at her sides, and a monitor recorded her steady heartbeat.
Natasha.
Rowan swallowed hard. After they’d climbed ashore, another car had finally passed on the bridge, and they’d flagged it down and called for an ambulance. All of their clothes were soaked, so the EMTs had lent them scrubs.
Corinne rubbed her eyes and reached for a water bottle. “Did anything happen?” she said groggily, glancing at Natasha. “Is she . . .”
“No. She’s still unconscious,” Rowan told her robotically, peering at her unmoving cousin. She looked peaceful, almost as though she was just asleep. Still, Rowan couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong here. What were the odds that the moment Natasha said she had something to confess, a car hit them? Had there even been a car? It had all happened so fast, Rowan wasn’t quite sure. She thought she’d seen headlights. She was pretty sure she’d heard a horn. Only, was it their horn?
The door swung open, and Katherine Foley rushed toward them, dressed in a gray FBI T-shirt and khaki pants. Rowan shot up and shoved her phone in her pocket.
“I came as soon as I heard.” Foley stopped in the doorway. “My contact at the police station told me your car went over a bridge?”
Rowan glanced at her cousins. “That’s right.”
Foley glanced at Natasha and winced. “Was she the driver?”
“Yes.” Corinne nodded.
“What happened?”
Rowan stared at the tiles on the floor. “I think another car was in our lane. Natasha tried to turn, but she skidded and lost control.”
“What happened to the other driver?”
Rowan looked at the others. “We have no idea,” Aster said.
“Did you recognize the vehicle?”
“It’s all kind of a blur,” Rowan admitted, realizing how pathetic that sounded.
Foley looked conflicted. Her gaze traveled back to Natasha. Aster cleared her throat. “Do you know where she was the morning of Poppy’s death?”
Foley shoved her hands in her pockets. “I don’t, actually. And now . . .” She broke off and curled her hands over the rails on Natasha’s bed. “Well, I wish she had cleared that up.”
Rowan’s stomach churned at Foley’s implication.
Foley looked at the cousins. “Where were you heading tonight?”
Rowan stood, careful not to get tangled in the wires that snaked from Natasha’s body into the machines. “To the airport. We were at the house for Corinne’s bachelorette party, but then we decided to go back to the city.”
“Why did you cut the party short?”
There was a pregnant pause. “We don’t—” Corinne started.
“I’m not—” Aster said.
All at once, Rowan couldn’t hold it in any longer. “What do you know about Steven Barnett?”
Foley flinched as a machine started to noisily beep. A small heart icon indicated that Natasha’s heart rate had dipped below sixty beats per minutes. After a moment, it regulated and quieted down.
“What about Steven Barnett?” Foley asked, fiddling with a button on her jacket. “I thought he was dead.”
“He is, but he wanted Poppy’s job,” Rowan said. “Steven was our grandfather’s protégé. They were close, and he was very ambitious. There had been talk of him, not Poppy, becoming president.”
Foley leaned against the wall. “That was five years ago, though. It doesn’t seem likely that someone close to Steven would kill Poppy five years later over a missed promotion.”
“We would have thought so too,” Rowan said, looking at her both of her cousins. Aster and Corinne nodded at her to go on. After what had just happened, they couldn’t keep what Elizabeth had said a secret. “Until we found out Poppy might have killed him.”
Foley’s expression stilled. She didn’t say anything, just blinked at them.
Aster recounted what Elizabeth had told her. With every word, Foley’s face grew redder and redder. “Are you sure about that?” she blustered.
“We’re not sure about anything,” Rowan admitted. “And we’d rather you not make it public—both for Poppy’s sake and for ours. Practically seconds after we started talking about it, a car hits us. Like someone wanted to keep us quiet.” She swallowed hard. “I’m a little worried about even confessing this to you.”
Foley frowned. “So you think someone was listening at the house? Who knew you were coming to Meriweather this weekend?”
Aster shrugged. “Everyone.”
Foley shut her eyes and just stood there for a while, almost as though she too had gone catatonic. Rowan exchanged a worried glance with the others. Maybe it was wrong to have said something.
Finally the agent looked up. “Well, thanks for that theory. It’s definitely . . . interesting.”
“Interesting?” Aster repeated, seeming confused. “What about scary? Or dangerous? Or plausible?”
“You’re going to look into it, right?” Rowan protested. “What if this is why someone hit us?”
“We still aren’t sure someone tried hit you on purpose.” Foley’s gaze was scattered, as if her thoughts were far away. “But I’ll look into it.” She patted the bed rail. “Try to get some rest, okay? I’ll be in touch.”
“Wait!” Rowan cried. Foley turned back. Rowan wanted more—to hear what she was thinking, what conclusions she was drawing, and what she thought about Poppy and Steven—but she didn’t quite know how to ask the questions. “How much will the press know about the crash?” she asked instead.
Foley shoved her hands in her pockets, the dazed look still on her face. “The person you flagged down already called a local reporter. And obviously local authorities will report on the damage to the bridge. It’s shut down right now, and it’s the only way on and off the island.”
Rowan shut her eyes. If there was such a thing as a Saybrook curse, it was the press. “Is there anything you can do to keep the reporters away?”
Foley tapped her nails against Natasha’s bed rail. “Just don’t comment.”
And then she was gone. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the Friends theme song as the credits rolled. Finally Rowan exchanged a bewildered look with the others. “Is it me, or did Foley just act like a zombie?”
Corinne’s eyes were round. “It was like she fell asleep halfway through the conversation.”
“I guess she doesn’t believe us about Steven,” Aster muttered.
Rowan poked her finger through a small hole in her scrubs. “Then again, maybe we are jumping to conclusions a little quickly. This is Poppy we’re talking about.”
“So you think Elizabeth is making things up?” Aster bit a thumbnail. “I don’t know. What if Steven threatened Poppy, and she fought back?”
“But I don’t even remember seeing them together that night,” Corinne argued. “Except at the very start of the party, when Steven congratulated her.”
Rowan squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn’t sure she’d even seen Steven that night, either—but she’d seen Poppy plenty. Though she’d hung out with her brothers and a bunch of other guys that night, playing lawn bocce and poker, she seemed to have a keen radar for whenever Poppy and James swam into her peripheral vision.
Then she looked at Aster. “You were . . . with
Steven that night,” she said delicately. After Steven’s funeral, Aster had confessed that she’d hooked up with him. It was sort of in the manner of I hooked up with that guy, and then he turned up dead. How weird is that? “Was he acting strangely? Did he make a comment about Poppy?”
Aster’s cheeks bloomed red. “We didn’t exactly talk much.”
Rowan stared at a fluorescent bulb in the ceiling. “Okay. If Poppy did it, and if this has something to do with her murder, who was close to Steven? Who could have done this to her—and to us?”
Corinne gazed blankly ahead. “I don’t know. A girlfriend?”
“When I talked to Elizabeth, she did tell me that I was one of many. Maybe someone else he had been with really cared about him. Maybe she was at the party too,” Aster suggested.
“What about what Natasha wanted to tell us?” Rowan whispered, glancing at Natasha’s silent shape beneath the blankets. Mist formed on the inside of the breathing mask whenever she exhaled. “What do you think she knew?”
“And where do you think she was that morning Poppy died?” Aster whispered.
Corinne gulped. “Maybe we’ll never know.”
Rowan leaned her head against the wall. “Or maybe there’s a way to figure this out for ourselves.”
“Figure what out for ourselves?” Corinne asked.
“Well, at least whether Poppy killing Steven is even plausible. I mean, there could be people who saw her somewhere else when Steven died. And we could try to find out who else cared about Steven. If she did it, maybe she told someone else. Like your dad. Or Evan.” Or James, Rowan thought to herself with a pang.
The others looked skeptical. “Dad might know,” Aster said aloud.
Rowan nodded. “And I’ll talk to James.”
Corinne stood and stretched. “I suppose I could ask Evan—I’ll be seeing her this week to go over final wedding details.” She turned to the door, her shoulders sagging. “I need coffee.”
The Heiresses Page 15
