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“Have I mentioned how cold the lake is?” Madison says. “The only thing life vests are going to do is keep your body afloat for the rescuers.”
I rumple her hair. “Well, that’s good, because while it’d be cool to frighten the crap out of divers a century from now, proving me legally dead would be a real pain in the ass. You’d be forty before you got your college funds.”
“Can wenottalk about dying out there?” Jayla says, and when I glance over, her face is serious.
I check my watch. “Dawn is in an hour. There’s no chance of getting sleep, but Kit and I should have something to eat. It’s going to be a long paddle.”
TWELVE
Whatever happens, at least we won’t starve. Living on an island means learning to stockpile food, because if you run out of something, you’re not hopping in the boat to get it. In my locked storeroom, I have canned food, dried food, and a rotating stock of nonperishables.
When I’m here writing, I don’t want to leave for anything. That might explain the massive bags of coffee beans and chocolate bars. I keep the kitchen stocked with the basics for guests—everything from flour to tea to spices—though admittedly, I don’t actually use the same stuff myself, being a paranoid bitch. I’d rather switch out the opened jar of cinnamon in the cupboard for the one in my storeroom.
Guests also leave food. If it’s unopened, that’s fine—the next guests can use it—but one of the problems with renting to rich people is that they leaveeverything,sometimes with little notes like “Help yourself!” on a bag with two broken Oreos at the bottom. Surely the cleaner will be happy for those broken Oreos and stale bread, right? Saves the renters from adding to the trash they need to take with them.
This time, there’s a lot of unopened food, because the Abbases understandably didn’t pause to empty the fridge before they fled. I feelterrible about that, but on the other hand, I’m glad they ran when they could. At least they didn’t end up like Nate.
End up like Nate.
I’m trying to wrap my head around that. We jumped on Garrett’s explanation earlier, and that’s partly because that made more sense. If someone wants my island cheap, they might resort to desecrating a corpse. But murdering my cleaner?
“Could the kid have been in on it?” Garrett says as I cook bacon and eggs, and we all pretend it’s just an early morning on the island, and there’s no killer lurking in the forest beyond, no mutilated body stuffed in a crevice.
When we all turn to face him, he raises his hands. “I’m not trying to speak ill of the dead. I’m not even blaming him. If I really needed to escape a shithole town, no matter how much I liked my employer…” He shrugs. “He was still working for rich people, and that’s gotta sting.”
“He was working for Laney,” Madison says. “Not Kit.”
I shake my head. “I understand where you’re coming from, Garrett, and I don’t want to be the clueless boss convinced her employees all love and respect her, but I would like to think if Nate was in trouble, he’d come to me.” I flip the bacon. “And maybe even saying that makes me a clueless boss.”
“He wasn’t like that,” Madison says, her voice low. “He really wasn’t.”
“I don’t know Nate either,” Jayla says, “but that might make me a better judge of the situation. This doesn’t sound like a kid who’d screw Laney over. What if he made a mistake? Agreed to something and regretted it? Or agreed to something without realizing what they were up to? He finds out the truth, they fight, he dies, and they use his body. That’s horrifying, but is it possible?”
“Maybe?” I say.
I take the bacon out, leaving two slices that I keep cooking for Kit. I do it automatically, and then I find myself staring into the pan. AmI ever going to forget how he likes his bacon? His eggs? Toast? How he takes his coffee?
As a newlywed, I’d made a point of remembering all that. We didn’t have years of dating to fall back on, and I wanted to show him that remembering these things mattered to me. Now he’s gone, and the memories stay, and I’m not sure what to do with that.
Well, for starters, I could not think about it right now, when we’re trapped on an island with a killer.
Ah, but it’s so much easier to dwell on bacon, isn’t it? Not to think of what happened to Nate and whether he could have been desperate for money, not feeling like he could come to me, while knowing, even if he did, I might not have been able to help.
I crack eggs beside Kit’s bacon.
“Could you, uh, tell what happened to him?” Jayla asks. “That might help us know what we’re dealing with. Whether it was an accident or… Not that I expect you to have been examining his, uh, body. I just meant whether you saw something.”
“I didn’t,” I say.
“I looked,” Garrett says. “As best I could, while I was down there. The obvious damage was…” He coughs.
“His hand. But that didn’t kill him,” I add quickly, before inserting any horrific images in Madison’s head. “It was removed postmortem.”
“Which means, yes, his death could have been an accident,” Jayla says. “That absolutely does not excuse what those bastards did, but if that’s what happened, then while they might have stuck around to stage his hand, they’re long gone now. Back to civilization, where they’re waiting for Laney to decide she wants to sell.”
Kit takes an unopened loaf of bread and feeds slices into the toaster.
Jayla’s theory makes sense. It would mean there isn’t a killer out there. Everything is fine.
