Pip opened both of the small bags and pulled out two of the pills from one of them. She dropped one pill into the other bag, five in there now. Then she snapped the last pill in two, dropping one half into each bag. Two and a half milligrams. She didn’t know what she was doing, but that seemed like it would do it.
Pip replaced the baggie with more pills into the paper bag and stuffed it into her rucksack. She’d get rid of them later, along with everything else. Didn’t trust herself to keep them.
But the other bag, with two and a half, she made sure the top was sealed up tight, and then she dropped the bag into the footwell, just in front of the pedals. Pip guided her foot over the bag and pressed down against the pills with her heel, hearing them crack. She ground her heel down hard, working at every lump, pushing and grinding until they were crushed.
She picked up the bag and held it out in front of her eyes. The pills were gone, replaced by a fine green dust. Pip shook it to make sure there were no remaining chunks.
‘Good,’ she said, under her breath, tucking the bag of powder into her pocket and patting it to know it was still there.
Pip started the car, her headlights scaring away the darkness outside, but not the other kind that lived in her head.
It was 8:33 p.m., now 8:34, and still three more houses in Kilton to visit tonight.
The Reynoldses’ house on Cedar Way looked like a face. Pip had always thought so, ever since she was little. It still did now, as she walked up the path towards its toothy front door, windows staring down at her. The steadfast guardian of the family inside. The house shouldn’t let her in, it should turn her away. But the people inside wouldn’t, Pip knew it in her gut.
She knocked, hard, watching the outline of someone approach through the stained-glass of the door.
‘Hell—Oh, hi Pip,’ Jamie said, a wide smile stretching into his face as he pulled the door open. ‘Didn’t know you were coming round. The three of us were just going to order pizza, if you want to join?’
Pip’s voice stalled in her throat. She didn’t know how to begin, but she didn’t have to, because Nat appeared in the hallway behind Jamie, the ceiling lights gliding off her white-blonde hair, making it glow.
‘Pip,’ she said, walking over, slotting in beside Jamie. ‘Are you OK? Ravi called me a while ago and said he couldn’t get hold of you. He said you were coming round to my house to talk to me about something, but you never showed.’ Her eyes narrowed, flicking across Pip’s face. Nat might see behind the mask; she’d had to learn to wear one herself. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked again, confusion making way for concern.
‘Um…’ Pip said, her voice still gravelly and raw in her throat. ‘I –’
‘Oh, hey, Pip,’ said a new voice, one she knew well. Connor had emerged from the kitchen, eyes flicking from the gathering at the door and down to his phone. ‘We were just going to order pizza if –’
‘Connor, shush,’ Jamie cut him off, and Pip could see the same look in his eyes as Nat’s. They knew. They could tell. They could read it on her face. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her. ‘Are you OK?’
Connor sidled in behind, staring at her too.
‘Um.’ Pip took a breath to steady herself. ‘No. No, I’m not OK.’
‘What’s –’ Nat began.
‘Something’s happened. Something bad,’ Pip said, glancing down and noticing that her fingers were shaking. They were clean, but blood was leaking out the ends, and she didn’t know if it was Stanley’s or Jason Bell’s or her own. She hid them inside her pocket, alongside the bag of powder and one burner phone. ‘And… I need to ask you for help. All of you. And you can say no, you can say no to me and I promise I will understand.’
‘Yeah, anything,’ Connor said, his eyes picking up on her fear, darkening with it.
‘No, Connor, wait,’ Pip said, glancing between the three of them. Three of the people she’d thought would look for her if she disappeared. Three people she’d been with through the fire and back. And she realized, then, that those same people, the ones who would look for you when you disappeared, they were the same people you could turn to, if you needed to get away with murder. ‘You can’t say yes yet, because you don’t… you don’t…’ She paused. ‘I need to ask you for your help, but you can never ask me why, or what happened. And I can never tell you.’
They all stared at her.
‘Never,’ Pip reiterated. ‘You have to have plausible deniability. You can never know why. But, it’s… it’s something I think we all want. Make someone pay, get what they deserved all along. But you can never know, you can never…’