They’re both still in shock. But Darby is surprisingly composed, considering. Scarlett is totally rattled, screaming inside, has been since they’d been standing at the apartment door, face to face with the yoga power couple, realizing Peyton wasn’t living there anymore.
Peyton lied. He lied to them. He lied to her. He might as well have shoved a knife into her heart.
She texts him again.
Where are you? The police are here. They are taking things from your bathroom to test. Tell me you didn’t do this. Tell me this is just a big misunderstanding.
A text, almost immediately…but it’s not from Peyton. It’s from Chastain.
I always knew he was a creep, this is why you have no friends. Your brother is a murderer.
Check your socials, freak.
She does, already cringing at what she will see. It is as bad, and worse, as she can expect. She has been tagged in a number of posts, but the entry, from the school’s darling, Chastain, her former friend, her former confidante, is the one that breaks her. The post is long, and detailed, but the part that leaps out makes Scarlett want to crawl into a hole and die.
…so after that, I went to a sleepover at their house once. Once. Her creepy brother showed up and was all slick and charming, offered to get us some beer later if we wanted. That was cool and everything, but later that night, when I went to the bathroom, I saw him sitting in the hallway outside her room with his hand down his pants. He was listening to all of us in there, sleeping, breathing, and getting off to it. The way he looked at me, I was sure he was going to leap off the floor and attack me, but he just smiled and patted the floor next to him, like, an invitation or something. He said “why don’t you come here and let’s chat.”
I was totally weirded out and went to the bathroom. I locked the door but I didn’t realize that it was a Jack and Jill, so he came in the other door. I was trapped in there. He came up beside me and started playing with my hair. I was so scared I couldn’t even scream. I just wanted him to go away. He leaned over and smelled my neck and kissed my cheek. “Don’t you want to come back to my room and have some fun?” he asked and when I shook my head, he shoved me, hard, against the bathroom counter. I thought he was going to hurt me but he left then. There was something in his eyes, something terrifying. I practically ran back to the bedroom and I made sure to lock the door but I couldn’t sleep knowing he was out there. I stayed awake all night to make sure we were all safe. And didn’t EVER go back. I knew something was wrong in that house. Very wrong.
I feel sorry for Scarlett, I really do. I can only imagine what was happening behind closed doors when people weren’t around, if you know what I mean.
Scarlett swallows down her tears. God, that’s why they’d all abandoned her? Because of Peyton? And what was Chastain insinuating, that Peyton would lay hands on Scarlett? That he had done something to her?
She gets through five more horrific comments before she logs out. The girls of Bromley West, piling on. It seems everyone has a Peyton story. All are similar. So similar Scarlett thinks she might legitimately be sick. My God, how could she have been so blind?
And now the most traitorous thought. Could he have killed that woman? And kidnapped another?
None of this jibes with the brother she knows, who’s always been chivalrous and kind, but now, she is confused enough to worry if it might be true. She feels terrible and disloyal at the thought, but if the schoolgirls she’s friends with are leading the way into this fray, and the police themselves are pretty convinced Peyton did something wrong, something very, very bad. What else is she supposed to think?
They’re all arranged in the living room—her shattered mom, the disapproving cops. The man is grilling her mom.
“Does your son have any history of violence?”
Darby shakes her head. “No. I mean…”
“Mrs. Flynn—”
“Ms.,” Darby snaps. “I am not married.”
The detective doesn’t miss a beat. “Ms. Flynn, I get the sense you are holding something back. Trust me, we only want to find him. There’s probably an explanation, like you said, for why his DNA was in Beverly Cooke’s car. Maybe even an innocent thing.”
His voice hardens, and Scarlett is suddenly afraid.
“But if there is any chance at all that Peyton did hurt Beverly, and if he has taken Jillian Kemp, both women you know, both women you have a very intimate tie to, then we need to find him. We need to know everything we can about him. I get how hard this is. He’s your baby. If I was in your position, I would be torn to pieces right now. But if he didn’t do it, that will also come out. If he’s just a bystander, and it’s circumstantial, we will not press any kind of charges against him. We aren’t in the business of railroading suspects. That’s not how Detective Moore and I work. We are only interested in one thing—making sure Jillian doesn’t end up like Beverly. With Peyton’s background, we have to look at this very seriously. Obviously, we can get a warrant for the records, but it would be much easier if you’d just tell us what happened.”
Peyton’s background? Records? What in the world?
Scarlett’s confusion must show on her face, because Darby nods once, twice, almost to herself, then sighs. Scarlett senses the shift in her mother, as if she’s come to terms with a horrible, inevitable truth. When she speaks, Scarlett is transfixed.
“Your brother spent some time in a facility in Maryland when he was a boy. He was exhibiting aggressive behavior after your birth. It started when he was five and continued until he was twelve. Medications didn’t help, only seemed to make everything worse. We went through a number of diagnoses, doctors, and numerous medications until I was forced to place him into a hospital that specialized in his behavioral issues. They suspected he was having a rare side effect to the psychotropic medications, which were causing him to have hallucinations, delusions, and manic behavior. They diagnosed him with drug-induced schizoaffective disorder. They immediately took him off the medications other various doctors we’d visited put him on. He was better within weeks, and exhibited no more signs of anger, delusions, or dysfunction in any way. I brought him home when he was thirteen, administering a single antidepressant med for a year, and then weaned him off everything. He’s been fine ever since. He was basically having an allergic reaction to the heavy-duty medication the doctors kept throwing at him, none of which he needed. He was simply adjusting poorly to a new presence in the home. He wanted more attention than I could give for a while there.”
Scarlett is staring. She knows this because the woman detective is ignoring her mother and watching Scarlett’s reaction instead. Scarlett doesn’t care. She feels betrayed that she’s just now finding out about this side of her beloved brother.
“He resented me? He had to be hospitalized because he hated me so much? You never told me that,” she said, and Darby shakes her head vigorously.
“Hey, that wasn’t the case, not at all. He was a little boy. Sometimes, kids don’t act like adults want them to all the time, and we rush to fix them when they aren’t broken in the first place. It was a time when doctors misdiagnosed any sort of negative behavior and put children on medications their bodies and brains weren’t capable of handling. Peyton was a little jealous of you when you first came. That’s totally normal. But his pediatrician convinced me it was something more. That he was sick. The medications caused the problems. Once we took him off of them, he was fine.”