Page 29 of The Getaway

Marley

“Marley! Oh my God! Marley! Wake up! Wake up!”

The bed shook beneath Marley’s back. She sat up straight, and her skull nearly collided with Suzy’s. She felt drool on her chin and quickly swiped it away. Was someone screaming? She blinked toward the window, disoriented, and saw nothing but rain and clouds. The wind howled. Marshall was not in the bed. In fact, his side of the bed looked like it hadn’t been touched.

“Oh my God, Marley!”

Suzy flung her arms around her neck. She was soaking wet, the Nantucket sweatshirt she’d thrown on over her nightgown cold and sloppy on Marley’s neck. A puddle slowly spread beneath her ass on the bedspread. Outside the open door to the hallway, Wintour yapped like mad.

“Suzy. What the hell?” Marley recoiled, shoving her friend off her, the shock of the cold and wet waking her fully. “Why are you soaked?”

“It’s Lincoln.” Suzy was crying so hard she could barely pull in a full breath. She’d clearly passed out in full makeup because her face was like a clown mask of running mascara and eyeliner and lip color.

“What about Lincoln?” Marley asked.

“We found him in the pool. Floating . . . Marley . . . we tried to revive him but—”

Cold dread trickled down Marley’s spine. She glanced at the garbage can on the floor, the oozy bile splatter at the bottom. The untouched glass of ginger ale Marshall had promised had sweat a wet ring on the coaster. A blast of raindrops spattered the window like rapid gunfire.

“But what? Suzy! What?”

“Lincoln’s dead.”

13

Gemma

The screams had brought her to the sliders on the guesthouse. When she’d seen the murky outlines of people dragging something out of the pool, she’d gone running. Now she wished she had simply stayed in bed. Pretended she’d heard nothing. That the rain and wind had drowned it out.

How was she supposed to explain this to the girls? To Grant, who was still dead asleep under the covers? What was she going to do?

Gemma stood in the middle of the great room while Marshall, Sean, Juliet, and Suzy carried Lincoln inside. Lincoln’s body. The man was dead. Their host. The person who had invited them all here. The person who was supposed to save her husband’s career and her family’s future. Dead.

His hands, strangely covered by the sort of yellow gloves Gemma associated with washing dishes, trailed along the floor, heavy like blocks, the rubber squeaking on the hardwood. They laid him down on the floor, just behind the rug that surrounded the couch, and each of them stepped back. Sean turned around to slam and lock the door against the raging storm. Gemma stumbled sideways a few steps. She’d never seen a dead body before. Marshall, still wearing his clothes from last night, was crying nonstop silent tears. Now that his brother was inside, he sat down heavily next to the body and drew his knees up under his chin like a child, rocking. It was too quiet inside altogether. A total contrast to the tempest behind the windows. Candice, who had been hovering with Trevor, already in their uniforms, at the edge of the room, let out a strangled wail and ran into the kitchen. Trevor quickly followed.

At least Hazel wasn’t here to see her husband all bloated and gray, spread out on the floor like a starfish. She had been the one to find Lincoln, to pull him half out of the pool in the rain and wind and try to revive him. When the others had found her, Suzy had explained, she’d been kneeling over him with her forehead against his, wailing and sobbing. One of the house staff had helped her to her first-floor bedroom and given her a couple of Xanax. Hopefully, she was passed out by now.

“What happened to him?” Marley asked.

She stood on the far side of the long wooden dining table, clutching the sleeves of her light sweater. There was something fidgety about her stance that made it clear she wanted to keep this giant piece of furniture between her and the body, as if it might protect her. Her skin was sallow and dry, and her eyes were horribly bloodshot and puffy. Gemma wondered what she had gotten up to last night. She hadn’t taken Marley for a party animal, but she sure looked like she’d had too much fun.

“I mean . . . Hazel said that when she tried CPR, a lot of water came up,” Sean said, visibly shaking as he stood over his friend. He’d put on a rain parka that now sluiced water onto the floor around him in a ring. “Could he have passed out, fallen in, and drowned?”

“I’m gonna be sick.” Marshall scrambled to his feet, but he didn’t leave. He simply turned away from the body and covered his mouth.

“There were hundreds of people here last night,” Gemma said. “How did nobody notice and help him? Where was everyone?”

“Maybe it happened after he sent everyone home?” Juliet suggested. Pale and fidgety, in nothing but an oversize T-shirt and a lace thong that flashed every time she moved, she could have been a slightly older friend of the girls’. Her long hair was pulled into two low ponytails over her shoulders, and every bit of her was soaked through. She was not wearing a bra.

Juliet’s comment made Marley sit up a bit straighter. “Wait. He sent everyone home?”

Marshall nodded, his back still to the body. “Around midnight. He made an announcement and shut it all down so that people could get home before the storm got too bad.”

“That does not sound like Lincoln,” Marley commented.

From what Gemma knew of the man, she had to agree. He was more the type to keep the festivities going all night and call it a hurricane party or something. In an alternate universe, everyone from the Hollywood A-listers she’d seen sharing a bong by the hot tub to Coco P. herself would be passed out on the furniture right now, awaiting whatever breakfast Hazel and her staff could provide.

There was a sudden itching at the back of her neck, and Gemma felt as if someone was watching her. She turned around quickly to look at the open doorway to the massive kitchen, expecting to see Candice or Trevor or the cook, but no one was there. Thunder rumbled again, this time close enough to rattle the windowpanes.