“I want to do a song and dance,” Holiday said immediately, but before I could reply, her shoulders dropped. She took a deep breath, crossing the room and sitting down on the edge of the green velvet couch. “I have to tell you something, and you’re not going to like it.” Then, without so much as a pause for me to brace myself: “I’ve been doing a little research on Eliza.”
I felt my skin go cold inside my hoodie. “What?” I asked.“Why?”
“Easy,” Holiday said immediately. “I just, something about her alibi didn’t sit right—”
“Her alibi?” My eyes widened. “Her alibi is literally me, Holiday. I told you she was with me the night of the party.”
“For the entire night?”
“For enough of it,” I insisted stubbornly. “She didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“I mean, okay, Michael.” Holiday huffed like I was an unruly child. “Do you want to hear what I found, or not?”
I didn’t, not really. Still, I shrugged, sitting down in a delicate antique chair that was almost certainly not built to hold me, or anyone else; it creaked in protest as I leaned all the way backward, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “I mean, you’re going to tell me either way, aren’t you?”
In fact, for a second Holiday looked like she was considering keeping the information to herself after all; then she sighed. “Remember how we figured out that first night I came over here that Eliza and I had a couple of friends in common?” she asked. “I messaged one of them a few days ago, just to see if anything pinged.”
I snorted. “What, to spy on her?”
“Oh, please, Michael, we’ve been spying on everybody!” Holiday rolled her eyes. “I hadn’t heard back, and I figured it was a dead end, but she wrote to me this afternoon.”
“And said what?” I asked. “That Eliza is a seasoned assassin who secretly walks around with a dozen knives tucked into herbra?”
“I mean, you’d know a lot more about what’s in her bra than I would,” Holiday shot back immediately, then blushed. “That’s not what I—” She broke off, blowing out a noisy breath. “Whatever,” she continued a moment later, straightening her shoulders. “Look. This is a rumor, that’s all. I haven’t had a chance to look into it for real yet, and I’m not even saying it’s anything we should act on. But Eliza told you she used to board at Walden, right?”
“Yeah,” I said cautiously, “for a little while.”
“Did she tell you why she left?”
I was silent, the chair squealing as I slouched backward and stretched my legs out like some slacker in detention back at Bartley. I wanted to be a little intimidating, all of a sudden. I wanted to take up space.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Holiday decided. “Well, supposedly there was a girl that she used to ride with at school who she had some kind of extremely dramatic rivalry with, and this other girl was the favorite to win the USEF medal, which is, I guess, the big national tournament?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m emphatically not a horse person; I think they’re weird and unnatural creatures. But anyway, last year, two days before the qualifying meet…apparently, this girl had like, a catastrophic fall.”
I laughed out loud, darkly tickled by the utter absurdity of it. “Oh my god,” I said. “I was right—thisisa knives-in-the-bra situation. Are you actually going to sit here right now and tell me you think Eliza somehow pushed this girl off her horse and magically nobody noticed? Who the fuck do you think she is, Matilda?”
Holiday looked at me like I was being stupid on purpose. “Of course not,” she said. “But first of all, nice reference, and second of all, Idothink it’s possible Eliza might have had something to do with the horse getting spooked to begin with. And it sounds like the disciplinary board at Walden thought so too, because she got called into the headmaster’s office for a meeting right after it happened, and two days afterthat,she was gone.”
Well. I had to admit that as far as circumstantial evidence went, it didn’t sound great. But there had to be some benign explanation. After all, hadn’t all our other supposedly solid leads turned out tobe nothing but delusional conjecture? I shook my head, though in truth my brain was firing in a million different directions. “You’re reaching,” I insisted, setting my jaw. “You haven’t liked Eliza from the very beginning—”
Holiday’s eyes widened, visibly stung. “Are you kidding me?” she asked, jumping to her feet. “I’ve been nothing but totally cool with Eliza!”
“Okay,” I said, as obnoxiously as I possibly could. “I mean, if you say so.”
“Are you seriously—I mean, are you honestly about to—” Holiday sputtered, then stopped herself and took a deep breath. “Look,” she tried, sitting back down on the arm of the sofa. “All I’m saying is that we can’t rule out the possibility that she’s capable of violence. And we can’t rule out the possibility that she had something to do with what happened to Greg.”
“We also can’t rule out the possibility that nothing even happened to Greg in the first place!” I hissed. “I never asked you to go digging into Eliza’s private business, Holiday. I never asked you to do any of the crazy shit you’ve done.”
“Are youkiddingme?” Holiday countered, her lipsticked mouth dropping open. “You’re the one who asked me to get involved in the first place! Literally this whole entire investigation was your idea!”
“Yeah, I know, you love to keep reminding me, except for the part where Iactuallycame to you so that you could talk me out of it!” I exploded. “And instead you just completely took over and dragged me down a million different rabbit holes, and now, whenit’s become abundantly clear that whatever happened to Greg was just an unfortunate fucking accident, you’re grasping at straws trying to—what, even? Sabotage things between Eliza and me?”
“Sabotageyou?” Holiday repeated. “Michael, whatever is or is not happening between you and Eliza is so far down on the list of things I give two shits about that I—I—” She broke off, apparently at a loss for an appropriate conclusion.
I took advantage of the opening. “Is it really?” I asked. “Because you realize it sounds like you’re jealous.”
Right away, I knew it was the wrong thing to say to her. Holiday’s eyes narrowed; she stood up slowly, drawing herself to her full height. She looked like Joan of Arc about to ride into battle. She looked like a queen about to declare a total war. But under that she mostly just looked…hurt.
“You know what, Michael?” she said to me. “Enough. You think I’m inlovewith you, or something? I don’t even like you that much anymore! You’re obsessed with money and prestige and power and this idea that the universe owes you something that you haven’t gotten. You’ve spent the last week projecting every weird Daisy Buchanan fantasy you have onto this girl and now you can’t even consider the fact that you might be wrong about her, because your entire worldview will come crashing down like some sad house of cards and you’ll have to shoot yourself in the head to cope with it. I’ve read that book already, in ninth-grade Honors English. It was boring then too.”
