Jackson flushes with embarrassment. “He used to call my mom ‘Bunnybaby.’ She hated it, but he did it anyway, sometimes just to piss her off, I guess.”
“To denigrate her,” Annalise corrects. “If he knew your mom hated it, then he called her that to make her feel small. To dominate her.”
Jackson turns around to look at Annalise, examining her mismatched eyes before nodding that she’s probably right. He goes back to Quentin, pointing at the laptop.
“Try Bunnybaby1984,” he repeats more quietly. “Nickname plus her birth year. I saw my dad use it once on a release form he had to fill out online after I got arrested.”
“I swear, if that’s his password then—” Quentin clicks enter, and the screen immediately unlocks. He flashes a look at Jackson before starting on a document search. “We should check if he’s saved any bank records,” Quentin says. “If not, we’ll get into his password keys and go directly to the sites. Might take a while, though.”
Now that we have time, I look sideways at Annalise. Her beauty still astounds me, her scars cutting through her flawless skin, her green and brown eyes able to pin you in place. I suddenly need to know everything about what she’s done since I saw her last. I scoot closer to her on the bed.
“What exactly happened when you went back to the academy?” I ask. “What was it like? What did you see?” I’m filled with a combination of dread and morbid curiosity. The subject, however, seems to perk up Annalise’s mood.
“Honestly, it was like walking through a graveyard,” she says. “Eerie, deathly quiet. Even before I burned it down, you could smell smoke—bodies burned in the incinerator.”
My eyes widen. “You think she burned them all?” The idea is horrific, even though Leandrahadburned the body of the Guardian as part of our escape plan. But the thought of her dragging those men down the stairs, one by one… It’s too much.
I catch Jackson listening, and he meets my eyes for a moment before turning away. Although the professors at the academy were horrible, true monsters, it’s disconcerting to hear a casual discussion of the manner of their deaths.
“I don’t know who burned them,” Annalise answers me. “But judging by the lack of blood and piles of bile and white foam in the rooms, my guess is they were poisoned first, which is kind of Leandra’s signature. An herb from the garden, perhaps.”
I can’t help but picture the scene: the academy lights dim, the air stagnant and tinged with death and flowers—a haunted house still filled with corpses. And then Leandra walking down the hall, a vision in a red power suit, her stiletto heels clacking on the floor while a group of girls follows obediently behind her.
“Even so,” Annalise continues, “I can’t imagine her sticking around to cover her tracks. To stop and actually burn them? Unlikely and fairly time-consuming.”
“Someone was cleaning up after her,” I say, thinking it over.“Maybe the same person who tried to clean up the town.”
She hums out that it could certainly be the same person. She’s quiet for a moment before she looks sideways at me. “I went to Anton’s room,” Annalise says. “He was gone, of course, no signs of illness or death. And then I went to his office.”
“Were there any files in there?” I ask. “Anything we can use?”
“The file cabinets and desk drawers were completely empty,” she says. “There was one thing, though…” My heart skips with anticipation. “On his desk, next to his coffee cup, were his glasses.”
“He forgot them?”
“I tried them on. I don’t know why, but I did. And here’s the thing—they were completely clear lenses. His eyesight was fine; he didn’t need glasses.”
“They were part of a costume,” I say, feeling sick. “Glasses, comfy sweater. Unassuming and welcoming. Another lie.”
Although this manipulation is so tiny in comparison to all the other atrocities the men at Innovations committed, added up, these little details create an avalanche of deceit.
“I checked the other rooms, all empty,” Annalise continues, “before going down to the lab to meet Quentin. The smell was stronger down there, but still no bodies. They were, however, growing a new garden,” she says. “Another garden of girls.”
From the desk, Quentin cracks his neck, seeming uncomfortable as he hears the words. He must have seen the garden of body parts the school had grown, the start of us, the start of new girls. I’m sure he’s a bit traumatized by the whole experience.
“After I found the bill of sale for Valentine,” Annalise says, “Iwas ready to get out of there and never, ever go back. So Q and I—”
“Wait,” I say, holding up my hand. “They didn’t destroy the body parts, and they left the bill of sale. Whoever cleaned it up left the lab intact?”
“For the most part, yeah.”
“What does that mean?” I ask. “Why dispose of the professors and an entire town but leave the biggest evidence of all behind?”
“Oh,” Annalise says, furrowing her brow. “I don’t know. Good question.”
The boys look over from the computer, all of us quiet, but no one offers a theory. It doesn’t fit the narrative we were building. It doesn’t fit into anything.
“Well,” Annalise says with a shrug, “it’s all gone now. Once I got that bill of sale, Q and I burned it all down. Watched the fire myself. It was very cathartic.”
