“Did you?” I asked.
“I plead the fifth,” Anton said, starting to… giggle?
I rolled my eyes. That response and that laugh looked great for ruling him out as a suspect.
After we passed the eighth room, I spotted their room name,The Blue for You. How fitting. I knocked several times, practically begging my friend to come to the door. When Lacy didn’t answer, I swiped the key card and turned the handle.
I held the door open with my foot while gesturing for him to walk inside. “In you go.”
He didn’t budge and instead leaned against the doorframe, looking at me owlishly. He spoke softly. “She loves me.”
“I know she does.” I was telling the truth. Though their entire relationship had happened in the window of my mother’s diagnosis, death, and a year of grieving, I could see how Lacy beamed when he entered a room and how she considered his needs when making decisions. Not in amy life is all about Antonkind of way, more in ahe’s a person I love so I’d like to hear his opinionway. That alone told me that she respected his thinking, which meant a lot for a person as intelligent, competent, and capable as my friend.
“Brett is her small romance,” he said, his one open eye drooping. “Anton is her big romance.”
Perfect. We’d moved into the third-person narration stage of drunkenness, and it proved that whether or not Anton showed it, there was jealousy lurking beneath the surface. Regardless, I wasn’t about to hop on the “everyone is a suspect” train that Charlie rode during an investigation. I had my list of suspects: Joe, the caterer; Presley, the girlfriend who seemed to be a bit too cozy with Brett’s former best friend; and maybe even Lee Frank, the quiet camera man watching life through a lens. I refused to add Lacy or Anton.
I took a breath, digging deep for my patience as I used my body weight to shove him toward the bed. He made it a few stepsforward before his legs gave out beneath him and the bed caught his fall.
I positioned his head so that he wouldn’t choke if he threw up, and I made my way out of the room and back toward the elevator. As I waited for it to arrive, I rested my head against the wall and closed my eyes, taking a beat to steel myself for what I might find in the Music Room.
SIXTEEN
I stepped off the elevator and onto the second floor. In front of me was a huge, windowed terrace overlooking the gardens. Even in the dark of night, the view of the mountains was striking, the moon and stars illuminating the ridges like a backdrop on a film set.
The second floor was surprisingly difficult to navigate, rooms practically running into one another and too many doors to choose from. I was glad that Savilla had shared her to-scale dollhouse with me or I would’ve been completely lost.
I ended up wandering through an art gallery, complete with what appeared to be authentic Monets and Renoirs. Next, I stumbled across a sitting room with pockets of wingback chairs and massive fireplaces at either end before I hit a dead-end storage room filled with cutlery and china. I passed signs for a handful of rooms: The Bachelor’s Hall, which ran into both the Billiards Room and the Smoking Lounge, and ended in the simply and aptly named Music Room.
The space was more like a grand hall to host small concerts of fifty or so, and I recognized it from the footage of Brett’s home visit, where he’d played his hit song.
Rows of chairs were arranged in a circular formation around a grand piano, and as I walked into the room, I spotted Lacy in the corner on her knees in front of a tall storage cabinet containing twelve narrow drawers. Pages of sheet music were spread around her; she was so focused that she didn’t even realize I’d entered.
“What are you doing up here?” I said, quietly enough to try not to startle her.
I failed. Lacy jumped and grabbed her chest. “Oh my God. I’m glad it’s just you.” She puffed her cheeks and bent forward at the waist, shuffling pages again.
“Have you taken up an instrument that I don’t know about?” I knelt beside her and thumbed through one of Bach’s concertos. “Started rehearsing for a debut performance at Carnegie?”
Lacy looked at me with an expression that said she didn’t have time for jokes. “You were right. Brett was such an asshat.”
“Yep,” I confirmed, thinking of our junior year when he’d temporarily broken up with her on her birthday, dated a cheerleader for six weeks, got dumped, and then asked her out again on Valentine’s Day, probably just so he wouldn’t be alone. Years ago I’d asked Lacy what she saw in Brett, and she’d given the most astounding answer:He’s broken and he doesn’t mind who knows. He just is who he is. Perhaps that kind of transparency and self-awareness is attractive to some people, but personally, I don’t mind a few repressed feelings, especially if they reek of animosity.
Still, that had been more than a decade ago. We were adults now—and, more importantly, Brett was dead—so why was my friend in an obscure room of the Rose Palace, rifling through a music cabinet?
“Okay, so you were supposed to meet him here at midnight.”
“I’m looking for…” Lacy stopped, dropping one of the pieces of music she’d been holding, and stared into my eyes, trying totell me something beyond the words she was saying. “I thought he might’ve… I don’t know… left behind something, anything, to help me hack into his damn email account.” She was desperate enough that her line of reasoning made sense. “He said if I met him here and did what he wanted, then he would hand over the login information to the email account that he planned to send the pictures from. It was, like, a twisted game to him—not only did I have to agree to his conditions, I also had to login into his account and delete the email myself. Since I didn’t find anything in his pockets, I thought he might’ve put the password somewhere in here before the reunion party started. I had to at least look.” Lacy’s face fell and her shoulders rolled forward as she dropped her head into her hands, her voice growing shaky. “Anton was angry, so I left him downstairs with a drink.”
I’d been so focused on figuring out who might’ve murdered Brett that I’d left my friend to figure out how to save her reputation on her own. “What’s the account name?” I asked, redirecting my full attention to her now.
She hesitated as if she didn’t want to say it out loud.
“Lace, it’s me,” I reminded her.
She took a deep breath. “The account name is [email protected].”
My stomach turned.
