Meredith nodded. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” sheconfessed, sinking back down onto the suitcase and rubbing a hand over her puffy, tear-streaked face. “I just want to go home.”
“That makes sense.” Holiday smiled sympathetically. “It’s been a brutal week. And I guess there’s nothing to be gained at this point by hanging around the scene of the crime.”
I sucked in a jagged breath even as Meredith looked at her blankly. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
Holiday looked slightly disappointed, like she’d been hoping for something a little more clever. “I mean, we can obviously go through this whole one-act play about how I’m a crazy lunatic if you want to,” she offered agreeably, “but like you said, you’re waiting for an Uber, so it seems like a waste of everyone’s time.” She grinned. “I’ve gotta tell you, one gifted fake-crier to another? That’s a really impressive performance you’ve been putting on.”
Meredith’s expression was icy. “I have no idea what the hell you think you’re talking about,” she announced, then looked back at me with open contempt. “Although, speaking of performances, Eliza told me about the little show you put on last night. Really classy, taking advantage of your rich friends’ hospitality and then turning around and accusing them of all kinds of crazy, hateful shit.”
The screen door creaked open just then, Wells stepping barefoot out onto the porch looking decidedly hungover, his hair sticking up in a million different directions. “Why the fuck are you talking so loud right now?” he asked Meredith beseechingly, then noticed Holiday and me. “And why the fuck are you two carnies still here?”
I sputtered for a moment, caught up short by the same hot rush of humiliation that I’d felt last night after I’d delivered my little address to everyone at August House. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that Meredith wasn’t making a move to go anywhere. Instead she was watching Holiday carefully: one lion considering another from across the savanna, trying to decide if it was dangerous or not.
Holiday ignored both of them for a moment. “You asked me earlier who would have had access to Greg’s cash,” she reminded me. “We know Wells did—infact,” she said, turning to look at him with one eyebrow arched, “we know that Wells had access to a lot more than that over at the Hollimans’. But we also know that he left August House after the party and didn’t come back again until right before Greg’s body was found. So who does that leave?” She turned back to Meredith then, her tone almost conversational. “Your parents used to have a place out here, right? But they soldit?”
“Thank god,” Meredith replied, her sharp jaw set. “This island is so basic.”
“I tend to agree with you,” Holiday admitted with a wink, “but I don’t think that’s why they sold the house. Your mom was a big investor in that women’s coworking start-up, wasn’t she? The one that imploded when it came out that the founder was a total perv?”
I whipped my head around to look at her, surprised. “How did you know that?” I asked.
Holiday smiled.“Perfunctory,”she reminded me,“Google.”Sheturned back to Meredith, looking at her with something like compassion. “Your parents lost everything last year,” she said quietly. “That’s why they sold the Vineyard house, and the one in Westport.”
“Your parents sold the Westport house?” Eliza asked, stepping out onto the porch. “You didn’t tell me anything about that.” She looked from Wells to me to Holiday, her eyes darkening with confusion and displeasure at the sight of us. “What’s going on?”
“It needed a total gut job,” Meredith explained hastily. “They’re just renting until they find something they like better.”
“The Georgette McKeown being yours made sense to me,” Holiday continued thoughtfully. “Those necklaces are expensive, but the anchor was part of a line that came out a couple of years ago. That Oak and Thunder raincoat you were wearing when you came home last night, though—that’s brand-new this season.” She glanced at me. “We saw it the other day at the boutique in town—do you remember, Michael? And it retails for close to seven hundred dollars.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, “I remember.”
“It was agift,” Meredith protested, her eyes cutting from Holiday to Eliza to the raincoat itself, which was draped over the porch railing like a forgotten beach towel at the end of the season. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
But Holiday shook her head. “Nice try,” she said. “I went over there this morning when they opened and talked to the salesgirl. I said you were my sister, that you’d jumped on the raincoat before I had a chance to and I wanted something similar. Lucky for me, she remembered you.” Holiday nodded at the slicker. “You only bought it a couple of weeks ago. And you paid cash.”
“First of all, who in the fuck would ever believeyouwere my sister?” Meredith exploded, looking outraged by the very notion of it. “Second of all, what does it even matter how I paid?” Her expression was haughty, but I didn’t have to be rolling in money myself to understand what Holiday was getting at. People like Meredith and the Kendricks—people like Holiday herself—always used plastic. There was no way Meredith was just randomly taking seven hundred dollars in cash out of the ATM for a day of retail therapy.
Which meant there was only one logical place for her to have gotten it.
“I actually think it’s a pretty easy case to make to say that Meredith killed Greg,” Holiday continued thoughtfully. “You stole the money after you guys got back together—either because you sincerely needed it or because you were trying to jam him up with Topher to get back at him for cheating on you, or some combination of both. He confronted you the night of the party, things got out of hand, and you pushed him. It’s neat, right? It’s tidy. But I don’t actually think that’s what happened.”
“Whatdoyou think happened?” That was Jasper, stepping cautiously outside with Aidy following closely at his heels. We were all gathered on the porch by this point, drawn to the careful unfolding of Holiday’s story like moths flinging themselves helplessly at a screen door in the middle of the night.
“Why are you all standing around listening to this bullshit?” Meredith demanded. She’d gotten up and was pacing across the creaking floorboards like a zoo animal; so far there was no sign of the Uber, though I couldn’t help but wonder what would happenwhen it finally showed up. “It’s absurd. It’s insane! It’s like, the deranged rambling of a lonely person who listens to too many true crime podcasts instead of having an active social life.”
“My social life is pretty full, actually,” Holiday said mildly. She wasenjoyingherself, I realized with a start. She’d worked it all out in her mind and was glad to finally be sharing the information, like a physicist who’d made some exciting discovery in the world of quantum mechanics. There was a part of me that wondered if it wasn’t a tiny bit cold-blooded—after all, was Holiday taking pleasure in solving the puzzle of Greg’s murder really that much different from the Kendricks yukking it up at the thought of his bad fortune?—but the rest of me was too transfixed by her reasoning to care.
“I kept thinking about those scratches on your neck,” she told Meredith now, tugging speculatively on one dark strand of hair. “You told Linden and me that you and Aidy got into a fight the night of the party, and she pulled off your necklace and scratched you.” She paused. “But Aidy bites her nails.”
Well, shit. I turned to Aidy—all of us did, like something out of a cartoon—and sure enough, she was gnawing away at her thumbnail as she listened, the rest of them all chewed down to the bloody quicks. She took a startled step back at our sudden scrutiny, jamming her hands into her pockets; Holiday shot me a look like,See what I mean?
“I noticed the other day when we were getting lunch at Red’s,” she explained quietly. “They’re way too short to cause that kind ofdamage.”
“I never saidshescratched me,” Meredith snapped. “The necklace scratched me when she pulled it off.”
“In three different spots?” Wells asked, leaning over and peering at the faint pink marks still visible on the side of Meredith’s throat. “Fat chance.”
“Oh, now you’re a detective too?” Meredith demanded. “I don’t have to listen to this.” She reached for the handle of her suitcase, but Wells stuck one foot in front of the wheels.
