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Unless she wasn’t talking to Logan.
I think of Brooke’s post, how it didn’t just expose me but everyone else on the island. How Logan was so concerned about it.It puts us all at risk. Especially Greta.
I watch as Greta’s eyes follow the path of my own to the yearbook on the coffee table, the smile slowly fading from her face. When she looks back at me, her features are painted with a coldness that tightens my throat.
35
BROOKE
“I saw it from down the beach as I ran toward them,” Alani explains. “By the time I got close enough, I could see that blond woman—Greta—knock Lucy down and…then she wrapped her hands around Lucy’s neck and held her head under the water.”
I think of the blue marks Cass had seen on Lucy’s neck. And then I think of Greta’s thin, sinewy muscles, hardened from years of yoga practice. I don’t doubt she had the strength to kill Lucy. I just never expected she would.
“I wanted to scream. To attack Greta, but it was like I couldn’t move.” Alani turns to me, her eyes filled with tears, her face awash in guilt.
“You were in shock,” I tell her, remembering my inability to remove myself from Eric’s bed three years ago. “It’s not your fault.”
Alani looks away, and I can tell she doesn’t believe me. “By the time I tried to run back to the party and get help, there were more people headed our way. I guess Greta called them. When I realized who they were, I ducked behind a line of trees so they wouldn’t seeme. It was three guys I recognized from our research. Logan, Doug, and…” Alani ticks the names off on her fingers.
“Neil.” I breathe out his name, finishing her thought. The realization that he’s involved in all this drops the ground out from beneath me. I thought he was different, the complete opposite of Eric. But under all the charm, he was just the same.
“Right, the English one,” Alani continues. “Once he figured out what had happened, he jogged back a ways to the dive shop, and he came out a few minutes later with his arms full of scuba equipment. He handed it over to the other two guys, and they put it on. They picked Lucy up, one grabbing her by her feet, the other by her shoulders, and carried her into the water. I don’t know what they were doing down there. I guess hiding her body? But they didn’t resurface for like twenty minutes. The whole time, Neil and Greta kept watch on the beach. Greta kept saying, ‘No, no, no’ over and over, like she couldn’t believe what she’d done. She was pretty loud—I’m surprised no one heard her.
“Eventually the two guys came out of the water, and after a while, all four of them left. But I stayed there for most of the night. I couldn’t believe it. My best friend was dead. Killed by the same people who murdered Jacinta. We should never have come here…” Alani drops her head in her hands.
“Was Cass there?” I ask. “Was she with them?”
Alani looks up, shaking her head. “She wasn’t there. I never saw her that night.”
I exhale sharply. Cass didn’t kill Lucy. And if she didn’t kill Lucy, then she likely didn’t have anything to do with the other deaths either.
“But what about Daniel?” I ask. “Who killed him?”
Alani shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says, dejected. “I was at the Tiki Palms that night, hiding in the back, remember? I talked to him the day after Lucy died. He came and found me after he got released from the medical center.”
“What did he say?” I ask eagerly, hanging on her words.
“He’d been going through his phone and came across the video he had of Lucy from the Full Moon Party. He said he had posted it on Instagram in good fun—to give his followers a taste of what they were missing and to show off all the ‘fit birds’ he’d been meeting.”
Despite everything, I find myself smiling at Alani’s dramatic impersonation of Daniel, including the—quite bad—Cockney accent.
“But he said that when he watched it again, after finding Lucy, he realized that it connected Lucy to the expats. He thought he could use it against them, to make them confess. He told me he’d sort it. But the next thing I knew, he was dead. Another person lost to this goddamn island.”
There’s a flash in Alani’s eyes as she says it, the first time I’ve noticed her anger. “I don’t know for sure who killed him,” she continues, “but it must have been Greta or someone covering for her. It was one of them, that’s for sure.”
I let what she says sink in as I rearrange the pieces of the story in my mind. But there are still some things that don’t make sense.
“Why would Lucy check in under a fake name and write on her scuba form that she was from Australia? And what about you? Why is there no record of you ever staying at the hotel?” I feel bad interrogating this girl after everything she’s gone through, but I need to be sure she’s telling the truth.
“I guess we got a little too into it,” Alani says sheepishly. “Wedidn’t take any chances. Lucy didn’t want anyone on the island to recognize her connection to Jacinta, so she used her mother’s maiden name and pretended she was from a different country. She lied about losing her passport to the receptionist at check-in so they wouldn’t double-check. Lucy’s room was free with the dive course, and we knew that if the resort was aware I was staying there too, they would make me sign up for the course or pay for the room. And I mean”—she shrugs—“we didn’t have that much money to spare.”
“And what was with the burner phones?” I ask, remembering Lucy’s old-school Nokia and Alani’s text messages.
“Lucy’s parents paid her phone bill,” Alani says. “If they saw international charges, they would have suspected what we were up to, and they’d have been on the first plane here to stop us. So we bought burner phones at the local shop before we left New Zealand. We loaded them with prepaid travel minutes and used them when we got here. I don’t know what happened to Lucy’s phone the night she…” Alani trails off, as if she can’t bring herself to say the word. “I tried to find it on the beach, even called it a million times, but it always went straight to voicemail. It must have turned off.” She hesitates, her eyes glazing with concern. “But I had a number call me yesterday. I don’t know who it was.”
“That was me,” I say, remembering the incessant calls I made to that number as soon as I found Lucy’s phone last night.
Suddenly, everything seems to be making sense, all the incongruent puzzle pieces shifting together.
