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“Oh, my God, were you with him? At Red Rocks?”
“No.”
“Thank goodness,” she said. Goodness. It was strange to hear Betsy use that word. It sounded so innocent. So rehearsed. Which was when, for the first time, the idea came to me, inchoate at first, but coalescing fast: if I had gone to Red Rocks with Yevgeny that afternoon, I might very well be dead, too.
I’d seen Betsy nervous. But I also knew she could be a hardass. She seemed way tougher than Crissy.
But when she heard that Crissy’s boyfriend—or whatever he was—had died out at Red Rocks? She was scared. That was the first time I ever got that vibe.
And when I did a deep dive into who the Morleys were—I’d heard that name a bunch—and saw they were dead, too?
I knew she was right to be scared. I would have been shitting my pants.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Betsy
“Thank goodness,” Betsy said, but she felt as if she were in an elevator that was in freefall, and feared that her voice had cracked. She thought she might be sick right then and there.
“Thank goodness?” her sister repeated, turning the two words into a question, and stretching out the second and third syllables of her response as if she were belittling even the tone of Betsy’s brief statement. Had Crissy been closer to this man than she had let on?
“I mean,” Betsy continued, trying to gather herself, “I’m glad you didn’t witness someone falling off a cliff. That would have been horrifying. Scarring.”
“Well, you would know about horrifying and scarring.”
Betsy let that go, her mind racing as she struggled to gain purchase on something else—anything else—and sat down on the bed. She told herself this was all a wild coincidence, but she didn’t believe that. She’d made a mistake. She’d gone too far. She had let Frankie push her too far. “That’s morbid and mean,” she replied in a low voice. She was striving to regain control and still hoping to keep this civilized. Survival instinct. And control was critical. “Look, I’m very sorry about your friend.”
“Where were you this afternoon? May I ask?”
“I wasn’t at Red Rocks,” she lied.
“Were you with Frankie?”
“No. I was at the natural history museum with Marisa. I was there with her and one of her classmates, a girl I hope will become her friend. We saw lizards. Sharks. Dinosaur bones. It was all very wholesome.” This was, of course, after she had been at Red Rocks. And she had met the two girls at the museum: they were already there with the other child’s mother.
“Nothing we do is ever what it seems, is it?”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at. But no one died with me at the museum,” she answered. There was silence at the other end, and Betsy knew her sister well enough to know that her eyes were narrowing. She had regained the upper hand, and she needed to retain it if she was going to get through this conversation without succumbing to panic and revealing something stupid. “For a second I thought you might have been calling because you were sad,” she continued.
“I am sad.”
“You were just accusing me of…of I don’t know what.”
“Where was Frankie?”
“Today? I believe he was playing golf.”
“You believe or you know?”
She looked at a photo of their mother on the dresser. It was a little over two years old. The woman was sitting on the coaster swing that Betsy had had installed on the sunniest porch of the old Victorian, a birthday present for her that she couldn’t afford. Their mother was sipping a glass of white wine. The porch faced the street, and from there a person could see both the general store and the town clerk’s office. When the two sisters had been little girls, they would crouch behind the banister and spy on the activity across the road. The comings and goings at the town clerk were less interesting to them than at the store, but it was watching the town clerk’s office where they first heard men speak like pigs—the road crew, for instance, referring to a woman as a cunt because earlier that day she had passed a tractor on Battery Hill—and it was there that they saw one of their elementary school teachers and her husband squabbling as they went in to pay their property taxes. At the store, they witnessed the young mom slapping her toddler when she thought that no one was watching, the child in full-on tantrum mode because he was being denied an ice pop. But they also saw the pride a parent might have when their teenage son or daughter shot their first buck and brought it to the outdoor scale at the store to be weighed, as well as the way teenagers might hold hands when they reconnected after emerging from opposite sides of a car and started into the store for sandwiches or soda or bottles of water and gorp if they were planning to hike the Appalachian Trail.
Betsy never minded watching the dead animals weighed during hunting season. Crissy did. That was another difference between the two of them. Neither their mother nor stepfather had hunted, and so there was never a rifle in their house when they were little girls, but in high school Betsy had dated a boy named Garland, and wound up learning how to shoot.
“I know he was playing golf,” Betsy said now. “He was at the country club.”
“Frankie ever tell you about his friend, Cleo Dionne?”
“No,” she answered. Again, she was lying, and her instinct was to leave it at that. No. But it dawned on her that Frankie needed to know what her sister knew—and how. She probably did, too. Because this was bad. Someone was dead right here in Nevada, not in a bathtub on a Caribbean island, and it wasn’t that Frankie and his friends weren’t telling her everything; they were telling her almost nothing. She was about to say more, but already Crissy was speaking again, and Betsy was relieved to learn that her sister knew even less than she did about Cleo. She’d discovered the usual innuendo about murder or suicide, that was it. “Where did you hear all that?” Betsy asked, hoping she sounded surprised.
