Page 33 of The Getaway

Marley stared at her husband. He had to be joking. Yes, she herself had been worried that Josh and Lincoln might have picked up their fight where they’d left off, but what he was talking about was something different. He was talking about murder. And that was something she refused to contemplate. Not for real.

She swallowed hard. “You don’t think that he actually . . . that Josh could really have . . . killed . . . someone.”

She couldn’t say it. Killed Lincoln. It was too impossible. It couldn’t be true.

“I have no idea. But he’s not here to answer that question, is he?”

Back downstairs, Marshall called 911 while everyone else stood around and watched him. Someone had covered the body with a sheet, for which Marley was eternally grateful. Grant had joined Gemma, and he was the only one in the group who looked like he’d taken a shower—probably before he realized anything was wrong. He stood with his arm around his wife, his eyes wet and wary. Marshall paced as he talked.

Marley couldn’t stop thinking about what Marshall had insinuated upstairs. She had to believe Lincoln’s death was an accident. It was the likeliest possible scenario, right? There was a surprise hurricane raging outside. The tile surrounding the pool was always slippery, even in the best of conditions. He’d almost certainly been drunk and disoriented. If Occam’s razor had any validity, then the most obvious scenario was an accident. The alternative was that either Josh or someone in this room, someone breathing the very same air as she was at this very moment, had committed murder. Taken the life of someone they all loved. Whether or not those notes had been true, they still loved Lincoln . . . didn’t they?

Unless . . . maybe not all the guests had gone home when Lincoln had shut the party down. Was it possible that someone had hidden out here? Someone who had a score to settle with Lincoln? If the notes were true and he’d really done all these things to those nearest and dearest to him, he’s probably screwed over plenty of people. If someone else had hurt him, did that mean they were still here?

“No, I get that you’re dealing with a lot right now, but I’m telling you my brother is dead. Can’t you just—”

There was a pause. Marshall squeezed his eyes shut, and his free hand clenched into a fist. Marley went over to him and held it, coaxing his fingers open and lacing them with hers. He looked at her and said into the phone, “Fine. Yeah, I guess we’ll just have to deal. Yeah. Thanks.”

He hung up and shoved his phone into his pocket.

“They said they’re getting hundreds of calls a minute and that if someone is already confirmed deceased, it’s not a priority.”

“Wow. That’s blunt,” Suzy said, methodically stroking Wintour’s head in her arms. She’d changed into a black velour sweatsuit, pulled her hair back, and washed her face. Even though she looked much more put together, she still didn’t look like herself without all her usual makeup. She looked tired and younger somehow.

“It makes sense, I guess,” Sean said, reaching up to rub his face with one meaty hand. “No one expected the storm to hit out here. No one was prepared. People must be dealing with a lot.”

“Well, I did, but no one listens to me,” Suzy said.

They all looked outside. Something large and heavy flew past the window and crashed into an exterior wall, making them flinch as one. Wintour let out a startled bark and burrowed into the crook of Suzy’s arm.

“They said they’d send someone out after the storm calmed down,” Marshall informed them all. “In the meantime they suggested we find a cool place to . . .”

Everyone stared at him. Marley knew how he was going to finish the sentence but couldn’t believe someone had actually said this to him.

“To store the body,” he said.

15

Marley

“I’m going to call Lily.”

There was no way she was going to help move her brother-in-law’s body. Even breaking the news to Lily was preferable. She still thought they should search the house for Josh. And maybe for other . . . lurkers. But this came first.

The entire room seemed to flinch at the evocation of Lily’s name. There was a suspended moment where Marley felt like she was outside her body, staring at herself along with everyone else. But of course she had to call Lily. She and Lincoln had been together for almost ten years. Their divorce hadn’t even been final for eighteen months.

“Oh my God, Lily,” Suzy said under her breath. Juliet covered her mouth with one hand.

It had been a nasty divorce. Horrible things had been whispered and then implied and then outright said on both sides. Lincoln and Lily had had a prenup, and even though Lincoln had very clearly violated it, he had claimed that Lily had ceased to perform her wifely duties—a.k.a. submit to his every sexual whim—for the last two years, so she had violated it first. Apparently there was a clause in the paperwork having to do with conjugal responsibilities. Lily had come into the marriage with her own money and had left with that, plus her Audi, her jewelry, her clothes, and the wedding china, which Lincoln had always hated and which she had smashed piece by piece in the driveway on her last day in the house back in New Jersey that they’d shared throughout their marriage.

But Lily, despite all this, still loved him. And everyone in this room knew it.

“You know, I thought I saw her last night. At the party,” Suzy said absently.

“What? When?” Marshall asked.

“I don’t know. When Coco P. was playing?” She put the dog down, and Wintour jumped up on the couch, curling into a tiny ball as far away from the windows as she could get. “It wasn’t her, but it was really weird. The woman really looked like her. I was on the dance floor, and I tried to follow her for a bit, but it was chaos, and I lost her in the crowd.”

Marley’s pulse fluttered in her wrists, anxiety pulsing through her. “How do you know it wasn’t her?” she asked.