“But he didn’t believe me.”
“I knew it!” Scout leapt to her feet. “I knew he killed her because she told him no.”
“Youidiot,” Dakota snapped. “Georgia told him she was seeing someone else. She had a boyfriend.”
“A boyfriend?” My thoughts swam. “Is that—was that your big new lead?”
“I knew my sister,” Scout insisted. “If she had a boyfriend, she would’ve told us. Alden was lying.”
“She broke my brother’s heart that night,” Dakota said. “He actually loved her, the idiot.” Her voice cracked. “He wasn’t like the rest of my family. Alden was sensitive. My parents hated that about him.”
“Dakota, I’m really sorry,” I said, “but you’re sure Alden never left?”
Her expression turned defiant. “He was still asleep in my bed when you found Georgia. Ask Gia Thomas, that horror actress, or Ridley Reed, that blogger, if you don’t believe me. They overheard her rejecting Alden. They’re the ones who walked him to my room.”
There were additional witnesses. I stood there, stunned. Even Scout was quiet.
Our silence seemed to embolden Dakota. “You know what else I was going to tell Rosie? That Alden might not have killed your sister, but you sure as hell killed him.”
It was the first time anyone had ever connected us to his death. My chest seized.
“You’re insane if you believe that,” Scout said coolly.
But she wasn’t wrong, wasn’t she?
“I know you were here that night,” Dakota said. “I found a pocketknife with your initials, SOS. Next to him, in the pool house.”
My hands started to shake. How had she found the knife? We’d taken it with us, hadn’t we? Sweat beaded on my forehead.
“You know what, Dakota?” Scout’s tone was pitying. “You were always a miserable person. All of this”—she waved a hand around the trapped-in-amber mansion—“everything bad that’s happened to your family, you brought it on yourselves.”
“Get out!” Dakota lunged. “Out!”
“We’re going,” I promised, grabbing Scout by the arm. “Right now.”
We sped out of the sitting room and through the maze of the house, bursting out of the first door we saw. Outside, the sunny tranquility of the day felt like a joke.
“Fuckinginsane,” Scout swore. “To think—to say—”
But I turned, searching for a way out of the backyard, and stopped in my tracks. The pool house. Scout walked into me, yelped, then fell silent.
It looked exactly the same. Here in the daylight, you would never know it was a house of horrors, that inside those four walls, two people had met gruesome ends. But that didn’t matter: What mattered was that it was the last place Georgia had ever been alive. The pool house glowed with her presence. I could’ve looked forever. It held me in a spell.
“Getout!” Dakota screamed, emerging suddenly out the side door, her streaked mascara like a mask, melting away. Scout and I gasped and jerked into a run.
“You don’t know what it was like,” Dakota screamed at our backs, voice edging on a sob. “You haven’t even gottencloseto the truth.”
Chapter 24Dakota, the Nepo Baby
TEN YEARS EARLIER, THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
“Look at them down there, laughing at everything she says.” Dakota took a long pull of her father’s whiskey. “Scout’s not even funny.”
“She’s pretty, though,” said Emmy with a touch of wistfulness. “She didn’t say anything about us wearing the same dress. I thought she’d be excited. Do you think she’s mad?”
Emmy was lying next to Dakota on her stomach, looking down through the slats at the party below. They were holed up in Dakota’s favorite hiding spot, a coat closet on the second floor with decorative grates in the wall that revealed a bird’s-eye view of what her mother called thegrand ballroom. Her mother had lofty words for everything in their house: thevestibule, thegrounds, theservants. Their old, sprawling estate had been in her family for generations, which was ironic, since most of Hollywood associated the house with Dakota’s father and his lavish parties.
Whenever Dakota’s mother instructed her to “fetch the servants,” Dakota knew it meant she wanted help administering the drugs she’d come to rely on for a host of maladies, including a mood disorder, anxiety, depression, and more serious things her mother refused to name. The drugs left her vacant, a state she seemed to prefer to real life. Like clockwork, her mother had asked for the servants tonight—anytime Dakota’s father had people over, she was in a hurry to escape. It had been years since they’d even argued about it. These days, he simply let her live in another world.
