Chapter 26

26

"Do you like it, Alice?"

I raise my eyes to look up at the man sitting beside me in the Armani suit, with the dark-blond hair and blue eyes and the tiny mole near his right ear. He looks exactly the same as he did a moment earlier, but something in his voice has changed.

"What is this?" I whisper.

"It's a dress, silly," he says. "And I got it in your favorite colors. Blue and black." He cocks his head to the side. "You do like blue and black, don't you, Alice? Or would you have preferred something in white and gold?"

Fear grips my chest like a vise. "Who are you?"

"Or perhaps yellow and purple, if we're talking about ridiculous combinations," he goes on. "Or why not green and light green? Anything goes!"

"Grant?" I manage.

He arches one of his light-brown eyebrows. "How could I be Grant? Grant is dead, isn't he? You killed him, didn't you?"

I let out an anguished cry, cowering on the sofa. "What's going on? What are you talking about, Brant?"

The man sitting beside me licks the tip of his index finger. Then he rubs against the side of his face until that tiny mole vanishes. Now that he is wearing that expensive suit, with the telltale mole apparently gone, there is no longer any doubt in my mind.

The man in front of me is Grant Lockwood.

"My twin brother was a good-for-nothing leech," he spits. "Always has been, always will be. He came to me a few weeks ago, trying to get me to give him some money for his ridiculously large family. If you can't support eight children, then don't have eight children! What a loser."

I don't know what to say. The words have flown out of my head, and all that remains is paralyzing fear.

"So I said to Brant that I couldn't give him any money," he continues, "but I told him I would give him my Mercedes. It was worth a lot of money, I told him, and he knew he could sell it. He was thrilled. Of course, I had already seen you messing around under my car. I knew the brakes would fail." A smile touches his lips. "After years of being a thorn in my side, my brother finally went down in a blaze of glory."

I scramble off the sofa, even though I'm not sure my legs will support me. I can't believe what I'm hearing. The man that I identified in the morgue was Brant , not Grant. I had noticed he was wearing different clothing from what Grant usually wears, but his shirt and pants were covered in blood, so I hadn't put much thought into it at the time.

"Did you really think you could get rid of me, Alice?" He grabs the blue-and-black dress that I left behind in the box. "Did you really think you could kill me and get away with it?"

Yes. Obviously, I did. But I can only mutely shake my head.

"Well, you were wrong." He rises to his feet and starts moving toward me. I take a step back, wondering if I could make a run for it. "Now, I want you to put on this dress."

"No," I squeak out. "I won't do it."

"You will do it!" he snaps. "And now that you're having my child, there are going to be some changes around here. First of all, I'm going to order you this dress in maternity sizes. Perhaps a pair of matching pants with an adjustable waistband."

"No!" I cry. "I won't wear it!"

"You will, though." He continues to move toward me as I back away. "You will do whatever I tell you to do."

"And if I don't?"

"I'm going to tell the police that you're the one responsible for my brother's accident. You'll go to jail for the rest of your life." He winks at me. "I already tipped off Detective Mancini."

Grant was the one who tipped off Mancini that the brakes in the car had been cut. I should have guessed.

He tilts his head thoughtfully. "Or perhaps I'll do the kinder thing and end your pathetic little life."

"No…" I take another step back and stumble against the wall. There is nowhere else to go. He has quite literally backed me into a corner. "You wouldn't do that. You wouldn't really kill someone."

"Maybe I would…" He holds each end of the blue-and-black dress in his fists so that the fabric forms the shape of a rope. "After all, I did it once. Nobody ever suspected that Rebertha's drowning at sea wasn't just a tragic accident."

I gasp. Grant killed his first wife too? I am stunned. When he told me about how they sailed out to the middle of the sea on his private yacht on the night of their third wedding anniversary and she slipped and fell off the deck with no witnesses, leaving him her vast fortune, it sounded so innocent.

"I can go to Marnie," he continues, "and tell her the real Grant is dead, and I can take over my brother's life. And with you out of the picture, Brant will be the next of kin and inherit all my money." He smiles proudly. "We will never have to listen to Nickelback again."

Tears well in my eyes, threatening to spill over. "You're a monster."

His eyes twinkle under the skylights. "Am I?"

"You're going to go to hell…"

He grins at me. "I'll see you there, then, won't I?"

I can't stop him. He's coming toward me with the blue-and-black dress fashioned into a noose. I imagine him wrapping it around my neck, squeezing and squeezing…

"Just think, Alice," he says. "Soon your face will be blue. And when they put you in the ground, it will turn black."

I squirm against the wall, wondering if I can make a run for it, but I don't think I can. Grant is too close, and if I make any sudden moves, he will pounce. He's been planning this moment from the day we saw that striped dress on his computer screen. Soon, it will all be over. And nobody will ever suspect that Grant killed me, because as far as anyone knows, he is dead.

I place a hand on my belly. I'm so sorry, little baby. I'm sorry I couldn't save you from this monster.

Grant reaches out with the fabric of the dress taut between his fists, moving toward my neck, but before he can get there, a loud thump echoes through the room. And just like that, Grant goes limp and drops to the ground, unconscious.

I look up, confused. And when I see who is standing in front of me, my mouth drops open.

It's Poppy. And she's holding a shovel.