His nostrils flared then unflared. Flared, unflared. His jaw clenched and unclenched. His nostrils flared anew.
Brady said.
Hunt said.
We all looked at Layla. She leaned forward, yanked out the hunting knife. A spurt of blood erupted from the wound, getting on her hand, on the body’s neck and chest.
She grinned evilly.
She wiped her blade on the body’s thigh, flicked the jackknife closed, shoved it in her pocket, and stood.
I asked.
She looked from the Griffin lookalike staining my carpet to me. Her evil grin spread.
20
Tangled in an Inescapable Conundrum
In the scant hours until daybreak, my friends and I put aside our shock and outrage to dispose of the body and clean up all traces that the man who so precisely resembled Griffin, but definitely wasn’t him, had been here at all.
However, we quickly found ourselves tangled in an inescapable conundrum. We were trapped in a town we couldn’t escape. Furthermore, everyone who shared Ridgemore with us was likely in on the plot against us. Maybe there were some outliers, some who resisted Magnum’s insane orders, but we couldn’t guess at who they were, or if they’d actually help us. After all, they presumably agreed to dupe us,The Truman Showstyle, in the first place. That choice didn’t exactly imply any of them had hearts of gold, just waiting for us to give them an opportunity to rescue us.
Since Brady and Layla’s not-mom had warned us so intently in her latest hypno not to trust Sheriff Xander Jones, we considered going to him. But on his own, he didn’t seem force enough to stand up to Magnum’s might. And our only reason to trust him was not-Celia telling usnotto. Too risky.
We debated driving out toward Raven’s Lagoon and dumping the body off the side of a cliff. A poetic option, truly, since Magnum had surely ordered Clyde’s brake line be cut, sending Griffin to his first death. But then we’d have all sorts of biological material up in one of our Mustangs, ripe for a forensics team to find—assuming any would come looking for evidence of a crime in this inescapable town. It wasn’t as if we had large plastic sheets lying around tagged for future corpse disposal, or flesh-dissolving acid and its attendant accoutrements, for that matter, which Layla suggested.
Plus, there was no cleaning the blood from the carpet. After I stabbed the impersonator, I shoved him off me and the bed before I could consider the importance of containing a crime scene. The blood on me, my sheets, and the knife, not a big problem. But the richly dark blood had soaked deep into the carpet fibers. There was no point in even attempting to scrub it out. The best we could come up with was to use Bobo’s bed, which he rarely used in favor of mine, to conceal the spot, and then arrange for fresh carpet in my room—while somehow avoiding all the informants who would tattle the very instant we strolled into a flooring store casually inquiring about new carpet.
Besides,myDNA would be all up on the body. As much as I wished I could deny it, the Griffin impostor had been a little bit inside me. He’d kissed me, touched me, licked me, rubbed all up on me. Even hacking the body up into little pieces—another of Layla’s suggestions—wouldn’t help if they ever were to be found and analyzed by real professionals who weren’t Magnum’s lackeys. And where exactly were we supposed to do something like that, anyway? How would we contain such a gruesome scene?
After the more violent disposal methods, which held a punishing appeal, we also considered the obvious option of simply burying the body somewhere in the woods out back behind our houses. Between all our lie-rents, they owned all the property.Unless someone went looking for a cadaver, it would probably never be found.
But that was when we landed on the most limiting predicament of them all: We were being surveilled. Constantly.
No matter where we went or when, the lie-rents—possibly even Tracy, akanot-Mitzi, and the rest of the team of scientists Magnum employed to analyze every little thing about us—would know. When we’d hacked their system, we’d discovered camera feeds with vantage points every-fucking-where, stopping just short of aiming for a good view up our rectums.
If we moved a body, no matter what precautions we took, the lie-rents would know it come morning.
We were still grasping at better alternatives—and failing to find them—when the dead man on my bedroom floor shifted from an identical image of the man I loved to the one I most despised.
The complete transition took only a minute at most, but all five of us caught it, staring, mesmerized, as Griffin’s familiar features stretched, strained, and morphed, until a bare-naked Magnum was what remained.
Seeing him, we made our decision.
Hunt, Brady, and Layla kept eagle eyes on the corpse—not that it was going anywhere—and on a still-snoring Bobo while I cleaned up. Griffin insisted on following me into the shower to help scrub off the blood and Magnum’s touch. The memories, regrettably, wouldn’t be quite so easy to erase.
I brushed my teeth aggressively three times while Griffin, naked under the spray with me, washed my hair and body with such tender care I couldn’t believe it had taken me as long as it had to figure out the man who’d entered my bedroom without my invitation wasn’t him.
As scoured clean as I was going to get, Griffin hesitated before eventually wrapping his arms around my waist and pulling myback against his chest. He rested his chin on the top of my head, kissing me there over and over while the hot water streamed down on us.
he asked into our private chat, which our friends in the other room would be able to hear plainly. It was either that or have the lie-rents later listen to a recording of us instead.
I leaned my head back onto his shoulder.
