The mother hung up. She crouched down and entered what seemed like a tense negotiation with her son, who was now determined to rip open one of the boxes.
“Arrête! Arrête!” the mom repeated, her face reddening.
She gave me an ashamed smile, as if I were judging her. If only she knew how happily I would have swapped places with her. In the few seconds she looked my way, her son bolted out of the aisle with one of the Lego boxes. She went running after him, leaving her shopping cart behind.
She’d left her bag on the baby seat, fully unzipped, her wallet poking out. Not just her wallet, actually. She’d dumped her phone in it too, and it was still lit up.
My heartbeat quickened. The girls and I had agreed we wouldn’t use our phones to search anything about Dorian or Odetta. We had no idea how much the police would look into us, our whereabouts, our messages, our internet searches. We’d keep our digital tracks clean, if nothing else.
But I was dying to know.
I raced to the cart and quickly grabbed the woman’s phone, flicking to the web browser before the phone locked. Then, I waited until I was two aisles over—in the pet food section—to throw all of my burning questions at the internet.
But nothing came up when I searched Dorian’s name, or Odetta’s. Same when I entered the yacht’s name. If Dorian’s body had been found, the news wasn’t out yet. The toddler ran past me, his mom on his tail, but she was too busy to notice that I was holding her phone. Which meant she didn’t know it was gone. A minute later, I closed the web page and put it back in her bag.
It only occurred to me as I was paying for the food that the store would have cameras everywhere. They would have captured me takingsome stranger’s phone. Hey, at least I’d given it back. I couldn’t say the same about the multimillion-dollar necklace I’d accidentally stolen from a dear old friend.
I wanted so badly to text Laila and check how things were going. Did Clapard know she was the employee who’d mistakenly ended up with it? Even if she wasn’t responsible for that piece, she was in charge of the other Clapard jewelry. How much trouble would she be in if they found out she’d left the safe open? That she hadn’t even noticed several pieces going missing?
When I arrived back at Marielle’s shop, Lou and Marnie were both asleep. There was no way I’d be able to stop the tornado of thoughts in my head long enough to do the same.
Instead, I sat on the floor and started going through my loot. I’d already torn through one of the packets of cookies when I decided I needed to do something else with my hands, or else I was going to make myself sick.
I put the cookies down and scrolled through Instagram instead. My screen filled with pictures of Cannes, celebrities getting ready, the red carpet being cleaned up for tonight’s all too important closing ceremony. It was only a couple of hours away now. There were stylists rolling carts full of clothes across hotel suites, makeup artists lining up their tools on vanities with sea views in the distance, hairstylists pinning strands of hair into place. All clues that the ceremony was going ahead as planned, which confirmed that Dorian’s body hadn’t been found yet. But someone must have noticed he was missing. His security guard and his assistant at the minimum. Why weren’t they speaking up?
Cracking open a bottle of orange juice, I flicked through to Odetta Olson’s account. She hadn’t posted in over twenty-four hours, not even at the party. There wasn’t a single clue that she’d been there.
She had to be in hiding, waiting for the police to come knocking, if they hadn’t already. And even if they weren’t already questioning her, she had to know it was coming.
Where was she now? In bed, tucked inside insanely expensive white sheets, sick to the bone over what she did? Maybe she’d fled the country, praying she’d be back home before they pulled Dorian out of the water. Or maybe she’d turned herself in and the news would break any second now. The ceremony would be canceled, Dorian’s death plastered everywhere instead.
So many questions.
And then, right there on my phone, I got an answer.
Marnie
Lou and I emerged to the sound of Constance screaming our names.
“Marnie, wake up! Lou, Lou, Lou!”
Lou had drool dripping down the side of her mouth. She saw the bag of food on the floor and shook herself awake.
“You’re the best,” she said, reaching for it.
Meanwhile, Constance looked like, well, she looked like she’d just seen a man die all over again. She put her phone on the floor in between the three of us.
“You need to see this,” she said.
It was a “Get Ready with Me” video taken by a makeup artist in a suite at Martinez—the kind reserved for the biggest celebrities. There was the hairstylist, pausing to smile for the camera, a large brush in one hand and a hairdryer in the other. To the left, an impressive collection of makeup brushes. To the right, the outfit of the night on a mannequin patiently waiting its turn. The dress was black velvet, off the shoulder, with a bedazzled sash around the waist.
The camera panned to the woman who deserved this level of attention.
Lou gasped. “So that’s what hallucinating feels like.”
My blood had turned to ice. “There’s no way.”
But it really was Odetta Olson, all smiles, in the middle of her glam up. She winked at the camera without saying a word. The makeup artist spoke off-camera, “Getting ready for her biggest night. A perfect French Riviera moment to go for gold.”
