“Wait.”
I rummage around in my pocket and pull out the paper umbrella.
If she thinks it’s strange, she doesn’t say anything. I crouch down, setting it on the blanket, then whisper, low enough so she can’t listen in, “Thanks for being such a good friend.” He’ll never know how lost I felt when he found me on that airplane, how much his kindness meant to me.
I’m about to withdraw when I notice something. It’s the gash splitting the back of his scalp—or rather, not the gash, but somethinginsideit.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
Even though my stomach protests, I prod my fingertips into the wound. The squelching and slickness almost make me heave. I latch onto the object and tug it free. A shard of ceramic. Glazed. Painted. Where did this come from? How the hell did it get inside him?
“Greer?” I call over my shoulder, voice unsteady.
“Yeah?”
I hold up the shard. “Any idea what this could be?”
She snatches it out of my hand, stares at it.
“Fuck me,” she whispers.
There’ve been moments in my life when I’ve wanted nothing more than to be wrong. At the moment, I can think of two of them. This will be the third. That shard broke off from whatever caused the wound. Someone bludgeoned him with—a vase maybe? A plate? Then dumped him in the lake. A familiar numbness sinks into my limbs. I should’ve trusted myself to recognize when something wasn’t right. I should’ve listened to my instincts and insisted on calling the police. Because I knew from the beginning this wasn’t an accident, wasn’t a tragic suicide.
Zach was murdered.
21NICOLA
“MURDERED.”
The three of us—Connor, Greer, and I—are sitting in the upstairs loft. The lodge feels empty, lifeless, all the others having long since gone to bed. Connor reaches for the shard on the table in front of us and inspects the blood embedded in its cracks. “Do you think it was that girl? Steffani?”
“She didn’t know Zach,” Greer argues. “Why would she want him dead?”
He doesn’t volunteer an answer. Steffani hadn’t seemed overly interested in any of the club members; the only thing that mattered to her was bringing her father to justice—her father, the serial killer. “Maybe it was her dad,” I suggest. “She had all that evidence about how he abused her. Who knows what else was in that folder? Did either of you take a look?”
Connor shakes his head. Greer hesitates, then says, “No, we didn’t get that far.”
“You saw the scars he left on her. Does that seem like the kind of man who’d let her just walk away?”
“The tablet’s programmed to alert me if an electronic device comes within range of the lodge,” Connor says, “and no one travelsanywhere without a cell phone nowadays. There were no new notifications last night.”
“Can we check anyway? Just to be sure?” Maybe he accidentally silenced the tablet or fell asleep and missed the alert.
He looks uncomfortable. “No, we can’t.”
“Why not?”
He reaches into his messenger bag, extracts a bundle of white cloth, and slowly unfolds it. There, in its creases, is the tablet. The screen’s shattered; the bottom, where the USB port is, dented beyond repair.
“When did that happen?” Greer asks.
“Sometime after the funeral.”
It looks like someone took a hammer to it, but still I ask, “Could it have been an accident?”
He shoots me a look. “No.”
Greer picks up a splinter of glass that’s come loose. “I’ll bet you anything it was Ros. Remember how twitchy she got when Nic suggested calling the cops? Probably wanted to make sure none of us could change our minds.” She lobs the glass into the nearby wastepaper basket.
