“She would have told Frank,” she says quietly. “She would have turned Nicole in.”
“We don’t know that,” I argue, but Sloane interrupts me, shaking her head.
“Yes, we do,” she says, pragmatic and even. Our voice of reason. “Lucy would have saved herself and you know it.”
“But she didn’t actually hurt anyone—”
“Are you kidding me?” Sloane snaps back. “She hurt all of us. Every single one of us.”
We’re all quiet, this familiar shed transporting us somewhere new now. Somewhere foreign and uncharted, though I’ve seen a glimpse of this place before: standing on the edge of that charred-black building, looking down, Eliza’s body bent and broken beyond recognition or repair. Swaying slightly with the breeze and the realization that I could just turn around, walk back home, and nobody would be the wiser.
Lucy’s voice in the wind like a whisper from the grave.
“If you knew you could get away with murder, would you do it?”
“All of this happened because of her,” Sloane says. “She started it all when she walked into our lives.”
I picture Lucy alone on the dock, her body the silhouette that kicked my fear into motion. My unease and my envy, all of it directed at the wrong person. If she hadn’t been there, if she hadn’t done that, maybe Eliza wouldn’t have felt the need to hide it all from me. Maybe she would have talked to me, told me the truth about Levi and the envelope she found. Maybe we never would have gotten into that fight: the missing picture still on her wall, the things we had said never escaping our lips. The resentment that built up between us still flimsy enough to tear back down, not the concrete barrier Lucy erected from afar.
I turn to Nicole next, still nuzzled into my neck, the gentlest soul I’ve ever known. Lucy led her to Trevor like a cat chasing a mouse into the jaws of a fox. She used Nicole’s kindness, her heart, her inability to let people down.
She maneuvered us all like chess pieces and people got hurt, people died.
“It was her or us,” Sloane says at last. “She could get me expelled. She could send Nicole to jail, Margot. This is the best for you, too.”
I feel myself nodding, agreeing, because I know she’s right. Lucy saw what happened between Eliza and me. She could have placed me at the party; she could have come clean about everything. None of our secrets would have been safe with her alive, dangling them over us the way she always did. Playing with us like another one of her games, her entire life an illusion she simply created and pretended to be true. The irony of it is that Lucy is the one who helped me see it, the necessity of her death: talking about murder with such indifference, one scale rising while the other one falls.
“Once you find the right person, the right reason.”
It is possible to both love her and hate her; to trust and mistrust her. To feel so radically on both sides of the coin.
It is possible to want my friend back more than anything and to also want her to stay gone for good.
CHAPTER 66
We work quickly, quietly, wrapping Lucy’s body in layers of game bags we found stored in the corner of the shed. We’ve seen the boys use them before, lugging fresh kill back to bleed out, the very thing created to keep a carcass fresh. Everything we need is right here, right in this very room, the perfect place to bring something to die: a hose to rinse the remaining blood from the floor, a brush to scrub all traces of her clean.
The smell of death already there, ever-present. Just another body to add to the count.
“I’m sorry,” Nicole says for the hundredth time, practically shivering from shock as she stands off to the side. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault—”
“No, it’s not,” Sloane says, crossing her arms, her anger toward Lucy hardened into a scab, crusted over, protecting her from feeling a single ounce of regret. “I already told you. It’s hers.”
“Where are we going to put her?” Nicole asks, the two of them staring down at Lucy in her makeshift coffin, long and lean and wrapped in twine. “How are we going to get her out of here?”
“We’re not,” I say, the plan that’s started to formulate in my mind finally clear enough to communicate. “We’re going to put her in the cave.”
The cave, the basement. That little crawl space nobody knows is there. It’s risky, I know, keeping her in the house like this, but it feels even riskier to move her somewhere new. We could be seen; she could be found. Plus, it’s cool down there, so much cooler than the rest of the house, that draft that’s always creeping into my bedroom and chilling the floor. It might become a problem once it gets hot, in the heat of the summer, but that’s what the game bags are for and we’ll be gone by then, anyway. Everyone will be gone. Kappa Nu is suspended; it’s only a matter of time before they’re disbanded for good. We won’t be able to live here without them and they won’t be hazing anyone anymore. They won’t be using that space at all.