8
“What happened to you?” Jasper asked when I got back to August House twenty minutes later. He was lying on the couch in the den in a still-wet pair of swim trunks, balancing a bowl of cereal on his stomach while he looked at his phone. “I thought you died.” Then, both of us grimacing at his choice of words: “Uh. Just…kidding?”
“Sorry,” I said, blinking in the mausoleum dimness. “I should have texted. Just got some food with a friend.”
“Ms. Singh?” Jasper asked with a grin.
“Ms. Singh,” I agreed, though I felt a little bad about calling her that now that we’d spent some time together. “I actually told her to come by and hang out later tonight, if that’s cool?”
“Yeah, dude,” Jasper said distractedly, shrugging into the throw pillows. “Whatever.”
“What’s going on here?” I asked, sinking down into an overstuffed lounge chair.
“Not much,” he reported. “Meredith’s at the hospital still. Eliza’s outside reading Proust or whatever the fuck. And I don’tknow where Wells is.” He lifted his cereal bowl. “Really the most important news of the day is that Birdie bought Cookie Crisp.”
I felt myself brighten. “Fuck yeah she did!” I exclaimed, then frowned as I was immediately hit with that same uncomfortable, slightly sick sensation from this morning—the grim suspicion that it was somehow fundamentally wrong to be doing something as mundane as eating junk cereal after everything that had happened here the night before.
On the other hand: I was starving. The sandwiches at the coffee shop had been expensive but tiny, their filling more microgreens than anything else. Not to mention the fact that Cookie Crisp is fucking delicious, so I went to the kitchen and poured myself a giant bowl, and Jasper and I spent the next hour in comfortable silence watching shows we’d both already seen, just like we’d spent any number of lazy afternoons back in the dorms at Bartley.
We were just starting a new episode ofThe Simpsonswhen Eliza came in from the yard in denim shorts and a breezy white button-down, her hair tied back in a brightly colored scarf. “Gentlemen,” she said with a nod. She was looking at me in the same cool, canny way she had this morning, all held tongue and sharp cheekbones. I wondered if she was mad at me for sneaking out of her room last night. I wondered if there was a tiny part of her that suspected me of something too. She turned to Jasper. “Mom wants you to get your shit off the kitchen counter so Birdie can make dinner.”
Jasper made no move to get up. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Because I think it sounds like Mom wantsyouto getyourshit off the kitchen counter so Birdie can make dinner.”
Eliza opened her mouth to answer just as the front door opened and Meredith walked in. She looked pale and drawn, the color leached from her cheeks and hair and eyebrows; even her clothes, the same pajama pants and borrowed hoodie she’d been wearing at five this morning, somehow looked threadbare and washed out. “Hey!” Eliza said, scurrying across the room and wrapping her in a tight, fierce hug. “What’s the latest?”
Jasper heaved himself off the couch as they disappeared up the stairs, the creaky treads shrieking. “Not to be a total douche,” he muttered as he shuffled off in the direction of the kitchen, “but I’mprettysure we pay Birdie a salary to do literally this exact thing herself.” He was gone before I could figure out how to reply.
I stayed where I was in the den for a moment, listening with some interest to the muffled hum of voices coming from the second floor, then the sound of a door shutting and the shower turning on. Eliza reappeared in the den a few minutes later, sinking down on the sofa beside me with a quiet exhale. “How’s she doing?” I asked, nodding in the direction of the stairs.
Eliza shook her head. “Not great,” she reported, reaching back and pulling the scarf out of her ponytail, raking her hands through her hair. “He’s in a coma. And it sounds like his brain function is…” She made a face.
I winced. When I’d been trading pet theories with Holiday this afternoon, it had been easy to think of this entire situation as almost theoretical, like back when she and I were ten and spent every Saturday night in her living room eating Bugles and playing Clue. I’d imagined making my various accusations with atheatrical flourish:Wells, in the backyard, with the swimming pool.But Greg—obnoxious or not—was a flesh-and-blood person. And none of this was actually a game.
“Did they say anything else about what they thought happened?” I couldn’t resist asking. “The police or the doctors, I mean?”
Eliza looked at me a little strangely. “Besides what we already know?” she asked, tucking her long, smooth legs up underneath her on the sofa. “Not really. Meredith said he probably wasn’t in the water more than an hour or so, which was good because otherwise he could have gotten hypothermia.”
“I thought the pool was heated,” I said, and Eliza nodded.
“It is, but it’s on a timer, so the temperature drops at night.” She smiled wryly. “I think you’ll find we’re very serious about the environment here at August House.”
I grinned. Holiday would like that, I knew; it gave us a neat, compact timeline to work with. It also, of course, meant Eliza’s supposedly airtight alibi didn’t quite track—after all, I hadn’t actually been with her in the hours just before dawn—but I pushed that thought out of my mind. There were plenty of people with way more motive to hurt Greg than Eliza had, I reminded myself. There was no reason to think…anything.
I took a deep breath. “Listen,” I said—moving a little bit closer, taking a little bit of a chance. “About last night.”
Eliza tipped her head to the side, pale eyebrows barely arcing. “I’m sorry,” she said, “what about it, exactly?”
“I just wanted to say that I had fun,” I told her. “You know, like…before the terrible part.”
“Oh, Linden, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Eliza said cheerfully. “Your kissing isn’tthatbad.”
That made me smile. “Oh, you think you’re very cute.”
“I do, thank you.”
“What are you two whispering about?” Mrs. Kendrick asked, coming into the den in a tailored dress and cardigan, her blond hair clipped back with a tortoiseshell barrette.
“Linden was just asking what I thought he should get you as a hostess gift,” Eliza replied without missing a stitch. “Don’t worry, I told him how much you like gerbera daisies. The brighter the better, I said.”
