Chapter 14

14

Friday 11/29/24–Saturday, 11/30/24

I knew from spending three years at Bartley that there were certain words— cabin, cottage, a little place on the Cape —that didn't always mean what they seemed to, but still I was surprised by Margot's family's camp, which was just outside a small beach town in mid-coast Maine. The house looked like a fancy, rustic hotel, all amber light and craftsman architecture, leaded stained-glass windows; the wide front porch was lined with rocking chairs, a dozen of them in a row. It looked like the kind of place Teddy Roosevelt would have come to shoot pheasants.

There were ten of us, all told: Greer and Margot and me, Margot's cousins James and Tanner, plus Tanner's buddy Leo and a girlfriend of indeterminate provenance, a blond with a weirdly deep voice like a radio announcer. Celine and Dagny arrived after midnight, having driven all the way up from New York with Celine's weird boyfriend Henry in tow. In fact, the only one of the suitemates who hadn't joined was Keiko, and I reflexively wondered if there was a reason why before reminding myself it didn't matter. I hadn't come here to play detective—or if I had, that wasn't the main reason. I'd come here to be with Greer. And if there was a tiny part of me that couldn't help but think about what Holiday had said that day by the Charles River, about making the safe and unadventurous choice, I pushed it out of my mind. After all, I told myself as I helped James lift the lid off the enormous hot tub on the back deck overlooking the Atlantic, I'd known Holiday longer than anyone. Didn't that make my friendship with her the safest choice of all?

We spent Friday night getting drunk and playing pool under the warm yellow light in the library, a surprising flash in James's eyes when Tanner's friend Leo, who hadn't said more than three words since he'd gotten out of Tanner's Audi, beat him three times in a row. I didn't love James, his easy smile belying a canny sharpness to his gaze, a hidden hostility in the hang of his shoulders. Not everyone is a suspect, I heard Holiday tell me; still, from the way I heard James complaining to Margot in the butler's pantry that between her and Tanner they'd brought every stray dog in New England, I suspected he didn't love me either. "That dude, right?" I muttered to Leo, handing him a beer out of the fridge as James held forth in the dining room about the redundancy of original art in the age of artificial intelligence. Leo offered a small smile in return.

Saturday morning dawned gray and drizzly. We went on a long, winding hike after breakfast, the fog hanging densely in the air. Birds called to each other high in the bare trees, the trail covered with a thick carpet of half-rotted leaves. I could smell the ocean, though I couldn't see it, the crash of the waves faintly audible against the rocky shore.

Greer started out at the front of the group with Dagny, then gradually slowed her pace; I matched her, both of us falling back until we were far enough behind the group that we could talk in private. It felt like she was working up to something, and eventually she took a breath. "So," she said. "About last night, when I came to pick you up. That was Holiday's voice on the intercom, right?"

For a moment I considered lying, and I didn't want to think about why. "Yeah," I admitted. "She was there."

Greer nodded. "And when you opened the door…it kind of seemed like maybe you weren't that excited to see me."

"That's not true," I said immediately. "Greer, I was dying to see you. All semester, I've been dying to see you. Holiday is a family friend, that's all. I promise, there's nothing like that between us." I thought of that kiss in Hunter's room, then immediately stopped thinking about it. "And as for the other thing…I just get weird about my house, that's all. I wasn't expecting you to show up. You know how you're always supposed to wear clean underwear in case you get in a car accident and the paramedics see it? It's like that."

"Your house is dirty underwear?"

"My house is a two-bedroom apartment in an Eastie triple decker with like, Etsy cross-stitch on the walls," I said. "It's not like this, that's for sure." I shrugged. "I was…surprised."

Surprised wasn't the right word. In fact, I'd been mortified, like she'd caught me masturbating with Jell-O or reading X-rated Harry Styles fan fiction on Wattpad. Greer, like almost everyone else I'd known back at Bartley, came from a ton of money, and I could only imagine what the apartment would have looked like to her: our hand-me-down sofa and dinged-up coffee table, the lopsided afghans my mom liked to crochet while she watched TV at night. The people I'd gone to school with had Hockneys and Basquiats on display in their living rooms, not samplers that said Fuck the Patriarchy in cutesy pink script.

"I mean, for the record, my house isn't like this either," Greer pointed out now, "but I hear what you're saying." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "It's just me, Linden. We dated for like, almost a full year. I definitely wasn't expecting you to live in some giant mansion out in Groton or wherever the fuck. On top of which, I don't know what I've ever said that would make you think I give a shit about stuff like that."

"Nothing," I admitted truthfully. "You never did."

"Well then," she said pointedly. She was wearing a black cashmere sweater under her anorak, her eyes dark and serious behind the round frames of her glasses. "Relax."

"Was Thanksgiving really that bad?"

Greer wrinkled her nose. "My dad was all over me about my grades again," she said. "Which, like, my grades are actually pretty good this semester! I think, barring some kind of disaster, I am in fact going to pull myself out of academic probation purgatory. But it doesn't even matter to him, because I've got the stink on me now. I could finish out my academic career fucking summa cum laude and still all he would want to talk about in the toast at my graduation dinner would be the incomplete I got in biochem my first semester."

I frowned. "That sucks, Greer."

Greer shrugged, her shoulders jerking violently. "I mean, it could have been worse," she admitted after a moment. "My cousin Emily got in a knock-down drag-out fight with her mom during cocktail hour and wound up having her degenerate boyfriend pick her up halfway through dinner, though not before she took an entire tray of rolls off the table and dumped them ostentatiously into her purse, so." She smiled a little wistfully. "Probably nobody will even remember how disappointed my father is in me."

I worked very, very hard not to react. "That was considerate of her," I agreed carefully. I'd been trying to figure out a way to bring up Emily without Greer knowing I was fishing. "Emily, I mean."

"It was," Greer agreed, though she wasn't meeting my eyes. I sensed there was more to the story here, so I tried Holiday's trick of staying silent, and sure enough, after a moment Greer went on. "Em is only like, nine months younger than me," she said, ducking under a low-hanging evergreen branch. "We were like sisters when we were little kids—our moms dressed us the same for every holiday. Our parents would send us to our grandma's for four weeks every August. We called it Cousinland. We were obsessed with each other, basically. We were best friends. And then when we got to high school, all of that just…changed." She shrugged. "When we were sophomores she got this stupid boyfriend who was older—"

"Dinner rolls guy?" I asked, but Greer shook her head.

"Different guy than dinner rolls guy, but—not coincidentally—also a total dirtbag. And by the next time I saw her she was like, sneaking pills out of her parents' medicine cabinet, and the time after that she was fully high off her ass at the Fourth of July."

"Like Bri, you mean?"

Greer looked at me a little strangely. "Bri was a good time," she clarified, as though the difference should have been obvious. "Emily is an addict."

I whoof ed a breath out. "That sucks."

"It does suck."

A thought occurred to me. "The night of the accident—our accident," I said carefully. "When you said you had family stuff to take care of…"

"Yeah." Greer nodded. "She was home from Saint Paul's for spring break and owed some money to some scummy low-level dealer she knew. She called me to bail her out, so I did. She needed cash." She sighed. "It scared me, you know? Seeing her like that."

"It sounds scary," I said, remembering how tense she'd seemed that night, the way her hands had gripped the steering wheel of her car as we'd started to skid. "Greer—"

"I know what you're going to say." She cut me off, holding one manicured hand up to stop me. "That she's probably the one who took my watch, right? Some crummy addict who'd do anything for money? But Emily isn't like that, Linden." Greer's voice was emphatic. "She would never do anything to hurt me, and I don't want you to go back to sniffing around—"

"I wasn't going to say any of that," I said, which was true, though I had a hundred percent been thinking it. More than that, I was thinking that Emily very well might have killed Bri. After all, I'd seen her in Hemlock House the day Greer's room was ransacked. What if she'd come back the night of the Halloween party to see if she'd missed anything, and Bri had caught her in the act? "And I'm not going to—what did you say?— sniff around anybody. I was actually just going to ask why you never told me about her back at Bartley."

Greer shrugged, her body language relaxing a little. "I guess I wasn't sure you were the real deal," she said softly. "Or, like—that we were the real deal."

"And now?"

Greer stopped walking then. She wrapped her arms around my neck and tilted her face up, pressing her mouth against mine while a bird called out somewhere high in the tops of the pine trees. "You tell me."

I kissed her, pulling her even closer; she stumbled a little, her body pressing warmly against mine. All at once I didn't care about Emily, or Bri, or Holiday. All I wanted was to keep on kissing Greer. "Can I tell you something?" I said, even as she curled her hands into my jacket to keep her balance. "I've never really liked hiking that much anyway."

Greer kept her eyes locked on mine. "How about that," she said, the intent in her grin unmistakable. "Me either."

Greer shot a quick text to Margot so she wouldn't worry we were lost in the woods somewhere, and we turned around and hurried back down the trail the same way we'd come, letting ourselves into the dim, quiet house. Empty, the place gave off kind of a haunted vibe, with its stained-glass windows and its antique rugs, but I only had a second to think about it before Greer was pulling me toward the bedroom we were sharing, her dark hair crackling with static electricity in the cold, dry cabin air. "You coming?" she asked, looking back at me over one shoulder. I nodded and followed her upstairs.