Page 12 of The Getaway

“Wait, wait, wait!” Marley said, grabbing after him.

He ignored her and jogged away, off toward the stairs. Marley tugged Suzy back inside the sliding doors, glancing furtively out at the patio as everyone else sat. Magdelena delivered her dishes and smiled as everyone oohed and aahed.

“Are you okay?” Suzy whispered.

“No. You?” Marley asked.

“No.”

“What did your note say?” Marley asked her.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Suzy said. She couldn’t. Not without exposing her own crimes, as well as Lincoln’s, to Marley. “Was yours bad?”

“It wasn’t good.”

“Was it about Lincoln too?”

Marley’s eyes widened a bit. “Yes! What the hell is going on?”

“No idea.”

Suzy had to talk to Lincoln. But she knew there was no pulling him away now. He, Sean, Hazel, the burly dude, and what had to be his wife were already settling in at the table, backlit by the pristine blue sky, while kids shrieked and splashed in the pool nearby. Juliet’s nanny, Tini, played with Beckham in her lap on a lounge chair while Hazel’s almost-one-year-old, Thomas, slept in a port-a-crib. Vienna was busy snapping more photos of Wintour while Florence joined the group at the table, eyes on her phone as she sat, reached for food, sipped lemonade. Teens today were already living in a VR world; they just didn’t know it yet.

“Who are these new people?” Suzy said with a sneer.

“No idea. I guess we should go find out,” Marley replied.

Marley reached for her hand, and Suzy took it gratefully. “Is Juliet coming?”

Juliet’s reaction to her own note had been so extreme. Her screaming the words Suzy had been thinking silently. Is this a joke? If her note was also about Lincoln . . .

“She disappeared right when you did.”

So Juliet was freaking out about her own note somewhere. Marley had tried to stop Marshall on his way up the stairs. Probably to tell him about what hers said. This was all so bizarre. And mildly terrifying. Suzy felt like she was being stalked. Like they all were.

She had to find out who had written the notes and why. Someone at this house party had a lot of explaining to do.

6

Gemma

“So, Juliet, how’s climate change coming? You kill it yet?” Lincoln asked, lifting his Arnold Palmer from the table as he sat back in his chair.

Juliet startled and clipped her own glass against the side of her plate. She had joined the lunch late and hadn’t touched anything other than what appeared to be a gin and tonic, light on the tonic.

“Still working on it,” she said shortly. Her lipstick left a deep-red stain on the side of the otherwise pristine glass.

Gemma took a deep breath. No one had spoken to her since Lincoln had introduced her and Grant and the girls. They all seemed a bit preoccupied, the women especially, and it wasn’t like she was aching to be besties. She did feel kind of awkward, though, while the guys talked golf and the girls scrolled on their phones, Vienna with that odd little dog in her lap now. What she wouldn’t give for a book to bury her nose in. She did want to put her best foot forward. If these people liked her—or at least found her tolerable—it would only help Grant’s cause. Time to be a functional member of the party.

“Do you work on environmental causes?” she asked Juliet, even though she already knew the answer. She’d studied up on everyone before she got here.

“Oh, I’m the founder and CEO of Green Warriors,” Juliet told her. “It’s an up-and-coming environmental nonprofit that focuses mostly on global warming. We lobby governments around the world to change their emissions policies.”

Vienna’s attention was piqued by this, and she shifted in her seat, sitting up taller, forcing the dog to shift positions and resettle. While Vienna’s eyes were still trained on her phone, Gemma knew her girls well enough to know that Vienna was tuning in while trying to look uninterested. Florence, meanwhile, snorted quietly at some random video playing on her screen and in her earbuds. Sometimes Gemma wondered if there was anything that could pique her interest other than makeup and boys. And cuddly animal memes. She’d had the dog first before Vienna had lobbied to take her turn.

“She just got back from a trip to East Asia,” Lincoln piped up. “You were gone for what? Four weeks?”

“That must have been rough,” Gemma said, spearing a bit of salad with her fork.