I sit quietly, pulse throbbing in my neck, these next few seconds the most important of my life.
“He was told at the time that there was no evidence to support his claim, so it’s possible he had been trying to get close to Lucy on his own to find some answers,” he says, sighing, and I continue to nod, thinking back on what Lucy told me in the shed: Levi being drunk and angry, yelling at her in the woods about not wanting to pretend.
“We believe he may have confronted her about it on the island, which is what led to their argument.”
Maybe he really was calling her out, flinging her arm off his leg like that. Sick of coddling up to a girl he suspected was a killer solely for justice, a quest for answers.
Maybe that’s why his death barely even fazed her: another happy coincidence, another barrier eliminated in her brand-new life.
“Margot, we found some things in Lucy’s bedroom that support all this,” Frank finishes as a single tear slips silently down Mr. Jefferson’s cheek. “Some things that will probably disturb you.”
CHAPTER 65
BEFORE
“Lucy?” I ask, my voice trembling as I take a step closer.
I don’t understand what’s happening, even as her hands clutch at her belly. Even as the blood gushes from her stomach, suddenly everywhere, her eyes wide and afraid as it leaks through her fingers.
Her face suddenly a shade too pale, glowing white in the light of the moon.
“Lucy!” I yell, rushing closer. I can’t figure out what happened, where it’s all coming from, but before I can reach her, she slouches down, falls to her knees, and I register another body standing behind her, the knife from the living room red in her hand.
“I had to do it,” Sloane says quietly, her voice shaking and a look of pure shock carved across her face. “I couldn’t let her leave.”
I run to Lucy’s body, now crumpled on the ground, noticing the way her blood trickles dutifully into the floor grate beneath us, the very spot where that deer once hung.
The very spot where so many other things have bled out before her, dying slowly, their lives leaking out of them in one great pool of iron red.
“Lucy,” I repeat, shaking her shoulders, clutching her stomach, though I can already tell that she’s gone. Those ice-blue eyes are already dulling into a weak slate gray as the blood continues to seep from her wound and I push my fingers into the side of her neck, searching for a pulse I know isn’t there.
“What did you do?” I scream at Sloane, looking up at her from the floor.
“She figured it out,” she says, still standing at a distance, though her voice is already morphing back into that calm, controlled state. The way it always is. “It was the only way.”
“Figured what out?” I ask, choking out a sob, suddenly thinking about the way Lucy’s eyes had bulged just before she was stabbed; the way she had started to say something, that moment of knowing as she backed up toward the door.
“I’m not going down for this. I’m going to turn them in.”
“It was you?” I ask, my mind hanging in some strange limbo between adrenaline and shock as I stare down at the body below me, my eyes following the single line of blood slowly leaking out of her mouth. Even in death, they’re so much the same: Lucy, Eliza, their light extinguished as quick and violent as a shooting star. “You killed Levi?”
And then, like somebody simply snapped their fingers, flicked on the light, I see it all so clearly: the way Sloane’s arm shot out to the side when Lucy appeared with the knife from the kitchen; the way she had begged me to talk to her that day in her room, folding that T-shirt again and again on the floor. The need in her eyes as she asked me about Halloween, what could have happened that night that made everything change.
“Margot,” she had said. “She’s my best friend. Please.”
Sloane isn’t protecting herself right now, that bloody knife still clutched in her hand. She’s protecting the person she always protects.
“Nicole,” I say, and I watch as she steps into view now, too. The two of them must have been just off to the side, behind the open shed doors, listening to Lucy and me talk in the dark. Absorbing our confessions, our secrets, all of them pouring out of us like water escaping two broken dams.
“I thought it was Trevor,” Nicole says, her eyes wet with tears as her lower lip shakes. Her thin arms snaked around her waist like she’s still trying to keep the pain inside. “It was so dark, and he was wearing Trevor’s shirt.”