What the hell?
She pivoted toward Raul, but the CTO bolted around the corner, already retching. No way did he reach the toilet.
“Mine, too,” Other Brian said, holding up his phone. Dismay painted his fair features.
Jackie nodded, her cell snug against her ear. “Nothing.”
“Oh my god, we’reallgoing to get eaten by lions,” Joplin wailed.
“Does this mean we don’t get promotions?” asked Asshole Rick.
It took twenty minutes and half a bottle of Xanax to herd everyone into the living room with the sunken conversation pit. This one, on the second floor, had a stone fireplace with a rifle strapped above the mantel, built-ins stacked with vintage books, and a U-shaped sofa with room for about thirty-seven perched on top of a bear-pelt rug. Cozy. Kind of.
Fletcher’s back stuck to the leather cushions, hot and humid even this early in the day. Or maybe she sweated through her blouse.
That seemed justified. All things considered.
Waylon sat uncomfortably on the live-edge black oak coffee table, facing everyone else. Dyer’s cane was perched against his thigh, and his fingers tapped a nervous rhythm against the ivory. It was theonly sign of his frayed nerves. Everything else was a cold, unaffected shell. The most serious Waylon had ever looked.
“What are we supposed to do?” Joplin asked, wet with snot. She tugged a worried hand through her pink hair.
“How could this happen?Whathappened?” Molly asked. Mildly accusatory.
For a fraction of a second, Waylon’s gaze found Fletcher’s. She’d be lying to herself if she hadn’t wondered the same thing. How had Dyer forgotten to lock his patio door? But it wasn’t just that—the protective fence had been deliberately turned off.
This wasn’t an accident.
And the note. No one wrote a note beforecoincidentallybeing eaten alive. He’d clearly intended for Waylon to be the one to discover his fate. Alone, presumably.
A nerve at Waylon’s jaw twinged, stressed from the force of clenched teeth. As soon as he tore his line of sight away from Fletcher, she remembered how to breathe in a regular cadence. Being near him had her sympathetic nervous system on the fritz.
He tamped his father’s cane against the ground, fingers paling around its handle. The room fell to attention.
“The only thing we know is that he’s gone,” Waylon said. The grit in his tone sent unsolicited shivers down Fletcher’s back. Uncurling his fingers, Waylon cradled the USB drive in his palm, and the team forcibly ejected themselves from their couch cushions to get a better look. “And he left this.”
Deepti frowned. “A flash drive?”
Raul’s eyebrows shot up like he’d been Bat-Signaled. “Let’s plug it in.”
After producing a laptop from his bag, he inserted the drive and tinkered with the computer in chilling quiet. Theclick,click,clickof indented keys.
Waylon smashed a button on a remote, and a projector screen descended from the center of the room, large enough to rival IMAX. Strangely, Fletcher wasn’t in the mood for popcorn.
In a flash, Dyer’s smiling face appeared on-screen. Cheeks round and skin flushed. Living.
“Wow,” Jackie said. A bittersweet laugh parted her lips. “I didn’t even know he knew how to film himself.”
Bertram huffed, leaning back against the couch and adjusting the belt of his pants around his obtrusive stomach. “Always gets the last word, doesn’t he?”
When Raul pressed play, the video started rolling, showing Dyer fiddling with his camera, straightening it so that he would be centered. All the air in the room evaporated. Goose bumps rose over every patch of exposed skin. Fletcher could hardly believe this man was gone, nothing more than a pile of half-eaten flesh. Her stomach Tilt-A-Whirled at the thought.
On-screen, Dyer cleared his throat. “Bit of a funny thing to do, filming a video like this. Is it still called filming these days? There’s no film.”
A laugh went up around the living room, soggy and vaguely mucus-y, but a laugh nonetheless. Dyer chuckled, too, like he’d anticipated the effect of his own charm. He could run a billion-dollar company, but he could barely work an iPhone camera. That was Dyer, for sure.
“By now, you all know what I know: Life is fleeting. Never is that more apparent than on Lydell Island. Time, as we’ve all learned, is precious, so I’ll keep things brief.” His features tightened, and Fletcher heard more than one coworker swallow anxiously. “I’ve been a dead man for months. In February, I started seeing a cardiologist. Dr.Hawks, awful man that he is, found a tumor growing around my heart.”
Fletcher bit down on the inside of her cheek. All those missed appointments—the way Dyer kept asking her to reschedule. This whole time, she’d thought they were routine. Dr.Hawks had been trying tosavehim.
