Where is Johnnie?
They find him passed out on the sofa, deep in a drugged stupor, and Mari understands how it has to happen now. Understands why Johnnie was here.
She’s inevitable, Pierce had thought in his dream, and she was.
So was this.
Once Johnnie has been smeared with Pierce’s blood, once she has smashed the statue into even more pieces and left them, bloody and broken at Johnnie’s feet, she and Lara go up the stairs.
Mari’s hand is still streaked with red, but Lara takes it anyway, the two of them silent as they make their way into the bathroom.
She turns on the tap in the bathtub, and Lara takes her dress, the black one with the red flowers on it, the one she’d bought the last time they were in Italy.
Pierce teased her that those flowers looked like splashes of blood, but he was wrong. She knows now because his blood is all over this dress, and it’s dark and thick and nothing like those bright red poppies at all.
Mari showers, making sure there’s not a single drop of blood left behind.
She’s not worried, oddly. She has Lara, and Lara has her. Johnnie and Pierce had fought just a few days before. Johnnie is passed out, Johnnie is covered in blood, Johnnie has the broken statue beside him.
Mari is going to get away with this, she knows.
What she doesn’t know, what she can’t know then, is that even if you’re never suspected, there’s no such thing as getting away with it.
Not really.
But that night, she puts on clean clothes, and she goes back into her room, and shuts the door. The rain gets louder, but Mari can’t hear it as inside Somerton House, Victoria wreaks her bloody revenge.
She finishes just as the sun rises. Outside her window, the first rays of the new day brighten the sky, chasing off the storm from the night before.
The End, Mari writes, and downstairs the front door opens, and after a moment, Noel begins to scream.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I don’t come out of my room the next day. I tell Chess I’m not feeling well, and she seems willing to accept that.
But my body feels fine. It’s my soul that is suddenly a little ragged. I don’t know if it’s from reading what Chess wrote about me, or from her lies, or if I’m still reeling from Mari’s last chapter, but I don’t feel capable of sitting across from Chess and pretending everything is normal.
So, I lay in bed instead, listening to Aestas on my phone and rereading Mari’s confession over and over again.
It was stupid, not thinking about the album like I had the novel. Maybe I just felt more drawn to Mari because I’m a writer, too, or maybe, when I’d briefly googled Lara, there was something about her that felt a little off-putting.
Something in that bright smile of hers that made me think of Chess.
But that’s not fair to Lara. Or to Mari. They came to the villa that summer as muses at best, hangers-on at worst, because that’s how the men in their lives saw them. The only way they could see them.
And look at what they’d become.
So Aestas—and Lara—are just as important to this story, and that means I need to read, and listen. I’m hungry for further clues, any hint of the truth of that summer in Lara’s lyrics.
It’s harder with music, the language more metaphorical and flowery, the links not quite as clear, but I find—or think I find—a few.
There’s the opening track, “Golden Chain,” that’s clearly about Pierce, Mari, and Lara’s twisted relationship, and it seems obvious “Night Owl” is about Mari herself. Chess already identified that “Sunset” is about Noel or Pierce or both.
But I want more than that. In Lilith Rising, there’s the horror, the blood, Victoria with Colin’s literal heart in her hand, and now, it all makes so much sense to me. Mari couldn’t tell the truth about what happened to Pierce, what she did, so she had Victoria do it for her.
Did Lara do the same in her songs? Or would she have? All I have is Mari’s story, how Mari saw it. Stories change depending on who’s telling them.
Look at how Chess saw me. I didn’t recognize that version of me in her manuscript, but that didn’t make it wrong in the end, did it? It was just Chess’s side of the story. Didn’t she look different through my eyes than she did to the rest of the world?
When the album ends, I start it over, then eventually hit the Repeat All button on my music app to keep Aestas playing on a constant loop.
I think there might be something in “Last at the Party,” a line that goes, I watch you drift out the door/the music so loud, but your eyes so sad/and do you ever miss me, too?/Do the ghosts we knew come looking for you?
As I scratch that lyric down on a notepad, I flex the fingers of my free hand, my pulse jumpy. I want to tell someone about this, I realize. I want to compare notes, I want to share what I found in Mari’s papers, explain how the story of the murder at Villa Rosato is so much bigger than anyone ever knew.
And the fucked-up thing is, I don’t just want to tell someone.
I want to tell a particular person.
I want to tell Chess.
Even after everything.
She’s the only one who will get this, who will get why it’s so significant. And she’ll make these other connections, find different ways of looking at the story.
She’ll take it, another part of my brain reminds me. This is yours. With these papers, if you can get them verified, you don’t just have a measly $10,000 payment for a cozy mystery, you get a chunk of a seven-figure advance. You pay your lawyer. You get even better, scarier lawyers, and you keep every dime of your money, forever.
So I shove down that stupid, childish impulse, that desire to run to my best friend, to confide all my secrets. Instead, I keep listening to Aestas, keep making notes, and later, I sleep and I dream, but all my dreams are of bloodshed and screams, and Chess is there—she’s always there, somehow.
I can’t avoid her forever and, after hiding Mari’s pages even better than I did before, I make my way downstairs the next morning.
I’ll confront her, I’ve decided. Tell her what I found, what I read. She can’t be mad given that she did the same damn thing to me, and her betrayal is now a lot fucking bigger than mine.
Chess is on the phone when I get downstairs, standing in the kitchen, and I’m just about to interrupt her when something makes me pull up short.
It’s the way she’s standing.
The late morning light is making a halo around her, and Chess could be sixteen again. She has one foot crossed in front of the other, her head tilted down as she talks into her cell phone, and her free hand is playing with the neckline of her shirt.
“Well, if you didn’t miss me, I’d be worried,” she says, and whatever the person on the other end says makes her laugh.
“Baby, you know this stuff takes time,” she all but purrs, her voice rich with promise, and I back out of the kitchen before she’s seen me.
Chess isn’t dating anyone as far as I know, but it’s not totally unthinkable that there might be a guy she just hadn’t mentioned. Chess hasn’t been serious about anyone in a long time, but there are always men around. This must just be one of them.
But she was almost whispering, keeping her voice low. Like she was hiding from me.
Why?
And it’s more than that. It’s completely crazy, but there’s something about the furtive way she was talking that reminds me of those times I’d walk in on Matt, speaking in that low voice to whoever was on the other end of the line. An illicit intimacy that I wasn’t part of.