It’s not that I thought Edie was lying to me. I’d seen the look in her eyes. She absolutely believed that Lo was a murderer.
But I… didn’t.
The night after I’d confronted Edie, I’d finally gone back to Mom’s box of clippings, staying up way too late reading every piece, poring over every word.
It didn’t do much good.
Some were fawning tabloid puff pieces about what a babe Lo was, basically, and some were poison-pen “burn the witch”–style takedowns, but there wasn’t much in terms of actual truth in them. In fact, I realized as I went through all of it that it was mostly old tabloids or magazines, hardly any newspapers, and nothing about the trial itself.
She had more pieces about the Fitzroys than I’d realized, too, including aSouthern Livingarticle about Landon’s wife, Alison, from years after he died. I studied her pale oval face, her soft brown hair, and thought how different she was from Lo, almost like the negative of a photograph.
But nothing in that whole box felt like a smoking gun, like a clear sign ofYep, she did that shit.
Still, Edie has her own reasons for distrusting Lo, and I can’t blame her for those. And her insistence that Lo needs the spotlight to be on her is making me wonder why Lo has suddenly chosen to publish this booknow.
August is waiting by the back door that leads to the beach when I come out of the office, and I’m glad I paid a bit more attention when I got dressed this morning, pulling out a coraltank top and long white skirt, pairing it with my favorite pair of sandals.
I slip those sandals off as we step onto the porch, nodding down the beach.
“There’s actually a place we can walk to,” I tell him, and he slides off his own boat shoes, following my lead.
It’s still punishingly hot, but the breeze keeps us cool as we walk the quarter mile or so down the sand toward Shrimpy’s. It’s only a few steps above The Line in terms of classiness, but it’s got great boiled shrimp and fried grouper, and you can walk right up to one of the tables on the deck from the beach, something that seems to delight August.
“Oh, this is the dream for a kid from a landlocked state,” he says as we take a seat near the railing, as close to the ocean as we can get.
We both order beers, and then he takes his phone out of his pocket, pulling up something on the screen before laying it on the table between us. “So I’ll record this via an app, and I’ll send you a copy tonight. If there’s anything you realize you’ve said that you don’t want put in the book, let me know and it’s gone.”
I raise my eyebrows as the waiter drops off our sweating bottles of Corona. “What if I say something really juicy? Something that would make this book aguaranteed bestseller? Would you deletethat?”
“Oh, fuck no, ethics thrown out the windowimmediately,” he replies, and I laugh.
“No worries on that front,” I say before taking a sip of my beer. “I honestly don’t think I know anything that could be all that useful, but I’ll give it a shot.”
August folds his arms on the table, muscles in his forearms bunching, and leans in. “Can you tell me why Frieda Mason is now going by Edie Vargas?”
I almost choke on my next sip of beer, the bottle wobbling clumsily on the picnic table as I set it down just a little too hard. “Oh. Um. Wow.”
His hand shoots out, hovering over the phone. “Want me to start over?”
I shake my head. “No. No, I just… how did you know about Edie?”
“Lo told me,” he says matter-of-factly. “But she also said you didn’t know, until she mentioned it. About Edie, how she grew up here with Lo and your mom.”
“I didn’t, but Edie had her reasons for not sharing that with me, and I’m fine with it.”
Mostly true.
“Anyway,” I continue, trying to regain my composure, “I don’t really see what any of that has to do with Lo or the book. I mean, they were friends when they were kids, so I guess there’s history—”
“Frieda—or Edie, as you know her—was one of the prosecution’s star witnesses in Lo’s trial,” August says, pushing his sunglasses on top of his head and squinting slightly in the glare off the water. “She was, in fact, theonlyperson who confirmed seeing Lo and Landon together in the hours before Marie hit. She said she had gone by the bungalow, looking for Lo, and instead saw her and Landon, and it was clear they’d been fighting. She also said that in the weeks prior, she’d heard Lo remark that she’d kill Landon before she’d let him… ‘throw me away like a fucking gum wrapper,’ I think the phrasing was.”
I trace a water ring on the table, trying not to show how shaken I am by this news. But August picks up on it anyway, and he presses a button on his phone’s screen and sits back in his chair. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You thought we’d just be talkingabout the inn or the town’s history, and I throw something like this at you.”
“It’s fine,” I say, even though it definitely isn’t, and based on his probing expression, I suspect that he also isn’t sorry. That he very much intended to put me on the spot. Why didn’t Edie tell me this part? Or, for that matter, why didn’tLo? She acted so nonchalant about Edie, like whatever beef there was between them was just silly girlhood stuff, back from when they were kids, not from the trial.
Edie had been one of Lo’s closest friends. What would it have felt like, seeing her up on the witness stand, telling everyone that you were a murderer?
Obviously, August wouldn’t have an answer for that question, but I ask him another one I hope hecanshed some light on.
