En masse, the women turned to face us. Outside the open doors, the palm trees in Scout’s backyard bent in the wind; inside, the same breeze lifted strands of our hair, like a cast spell. I concentrated on Miranda and Cybele sitting in the middle of the couch, holding hands. I felt an irrepressible urge to hug them—Cybele, who would push me away, and Miranda, who would hold fast. These two women we could always count on.
“I’m sorry for calling you all last minute.” Scout had no trouble projecting—she could fill a concert hall with her voice. “I know this feels like one of those PTA phone chains our moms had back in the day.” Smiles stretched over some of the women’s faces. “But thank you for coming.” She glanced at me. “We probably should’ve called you sooner. It’s my fault for leaving everyone in the dark.” Murmurs broke out, and Scout sighed. “I thought I could handle it on my own.”
Her voice faltered, so I stepped in. “You probably already know that a woman many of us were close to was arrested today for bombing Knox Aeronautics. Some of you didn’t meet Juliet, but a lot of you were friends with her, and are probably in shock.”
“We need to decide how to respond,” Scout said. “The LAPD’s investigation of me dragged almost everyone here into the spotlight, and Juliet’s will do the same. Should we stand by her or wash our hands?”
“Look,” said Veronica Mable, who ran a podcast empire aimed at millennial women. She’d been leaning against the wall in the back but now stood straighter. “I didn’t know her, but it’s pretty clear from the news that she got radicalized. I know we cross lines sometimes, but none of us would ever condone blowing up a building.”
“It was obviously Luca Clearwater who radicalized her,” said Reiko, standing up from her spot on the floor. “Everyone could see Juliet getting sucked in. I would bet my life savings she either planned the bombing with Luca, or got the idea from her.”
“It doesn’t matter why she did it, or who convinced her,” said Kaitlyn Harrow. Years ago we’d helped Kaitlyn leave her abusive ex, a basketball player for the Lakers. “She made her bed, and she has to sleep in it.” The women beside her, fellow WAGs, nodded.
“Juliet’seighteen.” Cara stood up from the arm of the couch and faced Kaitlyn. “She came to us because her manager was bleeding her dry and her entire family depended on her for support. She had trauma, and she’d only just started to recognize it, let alone deal with it. She was the perfect mark.”
“No one’s arguing that,” said Raven White, a folk singer whose manager had tried to screw her over until we’d gotten involved. “I’m sure Juliet had good intentions. And I’m as anti-Knox as the next girl. But we have to be smart. There’s a chance all of our names could get pulled into an FBI investigation. What if they charge her with terrorism and name us as accomplices?”
“We’re all she has—the least we can do is pay for her lawyers,” Cara insisted. “We can say nice things about her in the press. Give her a fighting chance. What happened to ‘There is no such thing as one woman alone’?”
Full-throated arguing broke out.
“Okay, okay,” Scout shouted over the noise. “Before we vote, Izzy and I have more we need to tell you.” She looked at me. I was up. I took a deep breath and told them everything: how Scout and I had been determined to deal with her murder accusations head-on withthe help of an FBI agent, how it had started to look like whoever was framing Scout might be connected to her sister’s death, how all of it had led us to Easton Banks, and now he was dead, his wife was in custody, and they’d both confessed to killing Georgia.
When I finished, thirty pairs of wide eyes stared back at me.
“There are still loose ends,” I said with a sigh. “Emmy made it clear she wasn’t acting alone.”
To my surprise, Cybele stood from the couch and gave me a withering look. “Did you honestly think you had to figure this out by yourselves?”
Scout and I exchanged glances. “I was the one dragging all of you into the mud,” Scout said. “It was my responsibility.”
Cybele looked around at the assembled women. “In case you forgot, the whole point of this thing you built is that no one has to do anything alone. I know that sounds fucking cheesy, but it’s true. We’ve been doing our best alongside you.”
“What do you mean?” Scout asked, giving voice to my surprise.
“Most of what we’ve done is dig around and collect gossip. But I think every woman here knows that sometimes rumors are a lifesaver.” Cybele waved at a woman in the corner of the room, next to a bookshelf. “Audrey, tell them what you heard.”
A bolt of lightning flashed outside the open doors. Two seconds later, thunder crashed. The storm was growing.
A young, dark-haired woman climbed to her feet. I remembered her—she’d come to us years ago as an agent’s assistant, desperate for help with her boss. “I have a friend from my assistant days,” she said, sounding nervous in front of all the watching eyes. “Andherfriend used to get drinks with that woman who was killed, Elizabeth Drake, back before she worked for the Griffin Company. Back when she was Gabriel Knox’s personal assistant.”
“Drake used to work for Knox?” I raised my brows. “That’s news to me.”
The mention of Griffin and Knox set off a flurry of cross-talking.
“Hold on,” Scout called, quieting everyone. “It’s tragic that Elizabeth Drake had such shitty taste in employers, but I’m not following where you guys are leading.”
Miranda stood up. “About a year ago, after my flagship store inLondon opened, I was working the register and these women came in. They were talking about some director they knew from Chelsea who’d moved to Los Angeles and died right before his big break. It was tragic, so it stuck with me. But I didn’t put two and two together until a week ago.” Her voice hitched higher. “I called my store manager and had her send me all of our old security tapes, and I found the footage.”
“She spent three days poring through security videos,” Cybele said. “Fucking Nancy Drew over here.”
“It was worth it,” said Miranda. “Because I got a phone number from their receipt and called it, and talked to one of the women. My hunch was right—she said they must’ve been talking about Kathryn Burgeon’s husband, Simon Markham, because they knew him from before he moved to the States.”
“Kathryn?” Low-pitched gasps circled the room. Everyone here knew Kathryn Burgeon. She’d been one of us, a brilliant director whose substance issues had taken her away. We’d barely known her husband, Simon, only heard that he’d died, like her, of an overdose. And then theNew York Timesarticle had come out and suggested that Scout had poisoned Simon in revenge for killing Kathryn. Ludicrous.
“Apparently, Simon was about to head up a documentary about Gabriel Knox’s rise from self-made tech genius to politician,” Miranda said. “The whole thing was a vanity project funded by Knox that was supposed to help kick off his presidential campaign. Gerson PR was helping, and the doc had already been bought by Netflix. It was going to be huge.”
Reiko frowned. “So two of the victims the LAPD think Scout killed had connections to Knox, the man whose building Juliet bombed? It’s a weird coincidence; I’ll give you that.”
