“I love you,” she said.
My phone trembled softly.
I looked at it. A text from Grandmother Elizabeth.
Change ofplan.
Part 4
Not-Me
40
I slipped through the dark—swift and unseen—following the hand-painted signposts to Cabin Sixteen.
The Aston Martin sat outside the cabin, the porch light casting long shadows through the trees. For a moment I stood there alone, humming with adrenaline. Then Arabella slipped from the shadows, a black duffel bag over her shoulder.
“Is it clean?” she asked.
“It’s perfect. Make the call.”
“The police are on their way.” She walked around me, inspecting my torn clothes, my scratched face and hands. “Upper Falls has great confidence in you, Aunt Jessica.”
She pulled towels and a spray bottle from the duffel bag, and started to wipe me down.
Aunt Jessica.
I was blooded now—not in some furtive ceremony in Peter’s old room, but for the whole family to see. Red at funerals, a vote on cullings, the last of my name. The first of my decimated generation.
Arabella scraped away the dried blood, the fresh. She spritzed the towels with rubbing alcohol that stung my scratches. No blood on the seats of Orrin’s ragtop.
“Where’s your car?” I asked.
“Down the hill.”
“We should go. They’ll seal off the resort.”
“There are back roads.” She stepped back to regard her work. “But yes, get in.”
The back roads were bumpy. Every lurch of the car made my senses flicker and buzz.
The valets hadn’t put up the convertible’s top. The night flowed like cool water over my freshly cleaned face, the marks of thorns and brambles. Trees rushed past overhead, showing glimpses of the ecstatic stars.
As we came off the mountain, the second-guessing hit, the feeling that I’d left something behind in that room. But nothing remained of me there—just a few useless fingerprints and strands of DNA.
And my knife, wiped clean, carefully arranged.
I closed my eyes and repeated Veronica’s mantra. “Coronary, carotid, vertebral, iliac, femoral, subclavian…”
Everything in its place.
Orrin and Cyrus were waiting for us at Arabella’s car. They’d driven down from the estate in an old Cadillac land yacht, its trunk full of more duffel bags, stuffed with tools and strategies.
But on this flawless night, most of those tools weren’t needed. I stood there and emptied Cyrus’s water bottle while they divvied up what remained to be done.
Orrin would take the Aston Martin somewhere far away and hide it. The cops would be looking for a vintage convertible, so it needed a paint job, a new top and license plates.
Arabella was headed back to the city. Along the way she’d burn the bloody towels, my family phone, my party clothes. Cyrus had brought jeans and a T-shirt from my closet at Upper Falls, an old sweater of Veronica’s.
