“How did it happen?” I said quietly. I was still praying even then that maybe it had been an accident, even though every instinct I had was telling me it was something so much worse. Adrienne was a mess—she would need several hours and a nap before I could expect any answers from her—but Dwayne wasn’t stoned at all, and the expression on his face was pure horror: a grown-up version of the way he’d looked all those years ago, on the day he killed Rags. He kept flicking his eyes toward the bedroom, and it occurred to me that he must have helped Adrienne inject the drugs before preparing his own. Ladies first.
“I fucked up,” he said. His eyes were red, and he kept pushing his hands into his hair, gripping the sides of his skull like he was trying to keep it from coming apart. I stepped forward to peer more closely at Ethan’s body. Even from high above, twenty feet away, I could see a discoloration on the curve of his jaw, the barest beginnings of a bruise. There was a matching one on Dwayne’s cheek.
“He hit me first,” Dwayne said. I whirled to face him.
“So you pushed him down the fucking stairs?”
“No, I—” he began, then shook his head furiously. “I didn’t mean it. I was defending myself. I just wanted him to back off. I didn’t think he’d die.”
“But why? Why were you fighting in the first place?”
Dwayne’s eyes slid sideways, and Adrienne’s syrupy voice answered instead.
“Ethan doesn’t like it when I try new things,” she cooed. She’d managed to get off the bed and was leaning against the frame of the sliding door that opened onto the deck, one bare knee tucked behind the other. “He wasn’t supposed to know. He was supposed to be in the boat. He likes the boat.” She lifted a hand in slow motion, raised a finger to point at Dwayne, the most languid of accusations. “You said he was in the boat.”
“He was,” Dwayne said, and looked at me helplessly. “I was splitting wood when they got here. I let them in like you asked, and he said to bring in the suitcases because he wanted to go out in the kayak right away, while it was still sunny. I saw him putting it in, but I guess . . . he changed his mind, maybe. He walked in right when—but she wanted to. It was her idea!”
Adrienne’s eyelids were drooping again.
“I need to lie down,” she said. “I don’t feel right. It feels different this time. My arms are so heavy.”
I stared at Dwayne. “This time?” I said through gritted teeth. “How many times has she done this?”
“I don’t know. A few.” He was whining now.
“Since when?”
“This summer,” he said. “She asked.”
“She asks for lots of things,” I hissed.
Adrienne made a croaking noise, somewhere between a retch and a belch. I turned just in time to see her cheeks bulge, then hollow out as she swallowed her own vomit. She grimaced and took a few tentative steps out, bracing two hands against the railing to gaze down at the body on the stairs below. The trees creaked. The lake glimmered. Ethan Richards stayed dead.
“You killed him,” she said, in the same slow, sleepy voice. And then, almost as an afterthought: “Wow.”
It was the “wow” that did it. I crammed my own fist into my mouth to stifle the shriek of hysterical laughter. My father had built those stairs with his bare hands. Now Ethan Richards was sprawled out on them with a broken neck, and his wife was too stoned to do anything but barf in her own mouth and say “wow.”
Adrienne stumbled back inside.
“We need to call the police,” I said.
Dwayne blanched. “But—”
“We have to. Right now. It already looks bad that you didn’t call them right away, and when she comes down, she’s going to figure that out. If she’s not calling them herself—”
“She was already nodding off when it happened,” he interrupted. “You saw her. She’s gonna be in and out like that for another hour at least. And anyway, I unplugged the phone after I called you. Just in case.”
I stared at him in disbelief. He sounded almost proud of himself, but the worse part was the expression on his face: haunted, scared, and guilty, yes, but also hopeful. My husband had called me and then unplugged the phone, knowing that I would come running, so sure that I’d fix what couldn’t be undone. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to scream. Why had he had to bring his addiction here—to Adrienne, to the lake, to the house that I’d actually thought could be a path to a better life? The house my father had deeded to me, to me alone, so that no matter what else happened, I would have at least one thing, one place, that was mine.