Page 108 of Good Girls Lie

My box is always empty outside of schoolwork. The other girls get things all the time—care packages from their parents, boxes shipped with cookies and sweatshirts and new shoes. I only receive school-related material. I haven’t received any mail from the outside since I arrived. I rarely check it, only when I’m expecting graded work.

But after I grab Becca’s mail, something compels me to move to the other side of the room, to my own box.

The note is folded lengthwise, like a paper.

I pull it out, open it. There is only one sentence, in the middle of the page. The words are typed, all caps. I read it. Sweat breaks out on my forehead, and my vision goes spotty.

Six words. Six words and my entire world unravels.

SHE IS GOING TO EXPOSE YOU

64

THE INVESTIGATION

Kate and Tony are sharing a pizza and a couple of beers. Kate has been running him through everything she’s managed to dig up, the photo, the case file from New Scotland Yard.

“Who do you think this girl is?” Tony asks.

“Everything about Ashlyn Carr, aka Ash Carlisle, feels odd to me. It could be my imagination. I’m going off a single photograph of a painting that’s who knows how old. I can’t find any other pictures of the whole family online, not of Ash herself. You always told me not to ignore my instincts. Well, they’re on fire.”

“She’s a kid. Could a kid pull off a scam of this magnitude?”

“I don’t know. I may be totally off base. But I think there is more to this story than we’re seeing. A known teetotaler suddenly overdoses, and the wife, who has been publicly humiliated by the recent exposure of an affair, is so grief stricken upon finding him dead that she shoots herself? I’m not knocking the Met’s investigation. The circumstances would raise red flags for me regardless. At the very least, it looks like a murder-suicide. At worst...”

“You think their daughter did it? Kate. Maybe this suspension is the vacation you didn’t know you needed.”

She laughs. “It’s seriously screwed up, I know.”

“No kidding. Okay. Let me play devil’s advocate. Say you’re right. Say the girl’s an impostor. That she has a dark past. How could she fool all these people? And more important, if she’s an impostor, what happened to the real Ashlyn Carlisle?”

“After Scotland Yard talked to her, and the funerals? That’s one hell of a good question. Everything we have says she came to America, enrolled at The Goode School, and is living quietly in Marchburg under the watchful eye of Dean Westhaven.”

“Except she’s not living so quietly.”

“Right. Her roommate is dead, and things are hinky with that. A teacher died, too. Westhaven hasn’t brought it up, has she?”

Tony sets down his beer. “I knew a teacher died the first week of classes. Anaphylaxis. She had a tree nut allergy. How is that relevant?”

“She was supposed to be Ashlyn Carr’s piano teacher. The girl is apparently a prodigy.”

“All right, you have my attention,” Tony says, and Kate tips her bottle his direction in a toast.

“Now what?”

She grins. “Now we talk to the dean. She’s the one who interviewed Ash originally, correct? Let’s see if she noticed any differences between the girl she talked to and the one in this photo. I’ll have my guy in Scotland Yard start looking at passports and identification, plane tickets, credit cards, any activity we can find there. I’ve asked for the full files on the parents’ deaths. Not sure if they’ll let me see them, the coroner’s inquest ruled them ‘misadventure,’ which essentially means they agree that the father died from an overdose and the mother shot herself in her grief. The case is closed.”

“Convenient.”

“Now you see where my head’s at.”

“Kate, I gotta ask...is Scotland Yard all good with you looking over their shoulder on this? The family is well-known, and from what you’re telling me, private. The estate might not think kindly of you poking the bear.”

“Oliver is totally on board with me doing some extraneous digging. I’m not concerned with the estate. There’s no family left to piss off. The son and titular heir died young. The parents are dead. Ashlyn is the only one left.”

“So, you think this girl we talked to is not only an impostor, she murdered this very respectable family to take the place of their daughter?”

“When you say it aloud... I know it sounds far-fetched, but I can’t shake the feeling, Uncle Tony. Something is rotten in Marchburg. If it’s not the same girl, someone in England will surely be able to confirm that for us.”