“Or her own. Abby’s a good kid, but I’m not ruling her out. Or maybe it wasn’t financial, for once; maybe Lexie was just plain driving someone nuts. People share a house, they get on each other’s tits. And remember, there’s a very good chance she was shagging one of the lads, and we all know how nasty that can turn. If you’re renting, no big deal: some yelling, a few tears, a house meeting, one of you moves out. But what do you do if it’s a co-owner? They can’t throw her out, I doubt any of them can afford to buy her out-”
“Sure,” I said, “except I haven’t got one single whiff of any kind of major tension aimed at me. Rafe was pissed off with me at first for not realizing how shaken up they all were, but that’s it. If Lexie had been getting up someone’s nose to the point of murder, there’s no way I could have missed it. These people like each other, Frank. They may be weird, but they like being weird together.”
“So why didn’t they tell us they all own the place? Why are they being so fucking secretive, unless they’re hiding something?”
“They didn’t tell you because you never asked them. If you were in their place, even if you were innocent as a baby, would you give the cops anything you didn’t have to? Would you even spend hours answering questions, the way they have?”
“You know what you’re talking like?” Frank said, after a pause. He had stopped pacing. “You’re talking like a defense attorney.”
I twisted round the other way again, swung my feet up against a branch. I was having a hard time staying still. “Oh, come on, Frank. I’m talking like a detective. And you’re talking like a fucking obsessive. If you don’t like these four, that’s fine. If they twang your antennae, that’s fine too. But it doesn’t mean that every single thing you find is automatically evidence that they’re stone-cold killers.”
“I don’t think you’re in any position to question my objectivity, babe,” Frank said. That lazy drawl had come back into his voice, and it made my back tense up against the tree trunk.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m on the outside, keeping my perspective, while you’re neck-deep in all the action, and I’d like you to keep that in mind. It also means I think there’s a limit to how far ‘Oh, they’re just charmingly eccentric’ will go as an excuse for acting downright bloody squirrely.”
“What brought this on, Frank? You’ve counted them out since the beginning, two days ago you were all over Naylor like a rash-”
“And I still am, or I will be as soon as we find the little bastard again. But I like spreading my bets. I’m not dropping anyone, anyone at all, until they’re definitively ruled out. And these four haven’t been. Don’t forget that.”
It was way past time for me to back off. “Fair enough,” I said. “Until Naylor turns up again, I’ll focus on them.”
“You do that. So will I. And keep watching yourself, Cassie. Not just outside that house; inside, too. Talk tomorrow.” And he was gone.
The fourth big L: love. I thought, suddenly, of the phone videos: a picnic on Bray Head, the summer before, all of them lying on the grass drinking wine out of plastic cups and eating strawberries and arguing lazily over whether Elvis was overrated. Daniel had gone into a long absorbed monologue about sociocultural context, until Rafe and Lexie decided everything was overrated except Elvis and chocolate and started throwing strawberries at him. They had been passing the camera phone around; the clips were disjointed and shaky. Lexie with her head in Justin’s lap and him tucking a daisy behind her ear; Lexie and Abby sitting back to back and looking out at the sea, hair blowing, shoulders lifting in long matching breaths; Lexie laughing up into Daniel’s face as she picked a ladybug out of his hair and held it out, him bending his head over her hand and smiling. I had seen the video so many times that it felt like my own memory, flickering and sweet. They had been happy, that day, all five of them.
There had been love there. It had looked solid and simple as bread; real. And it felt real to live in, a warm element through which we moved easily and which we breathed in with every breath. But Lexie had been ready and willing to blow all that sky-high. More than willing; hell-bent on it-that furious scrawl in the date book, while the phone video showed her climbing down from the attic laughing and covered in dust. If she had lived a couple of weeks longer, the others would have woken up one morning and found her gone, not a note, not a good-bye, not a second thought. It slid through a back corner of my mind that Lexie Madison had been dangerous, under that bright surface, and that maybe she still was.
I slid off my branch, hanging by my hands, dropped and landed in the lane with a thump. I dug my hands into my pockets and started walking-moving helps me think. The wind pulled at my cap and shoved into the small of my back, almost taking me off my feet.
