Page 54 of High Season

FORTY-ONE

“Imogen,” Josie says. “Did you bring the case file?”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Nina to get here?” Hannah asks.

Josie glances at her watch. Nina is thirty minutes late.

“Actually,” says Imogen gently. “It might be better this way. You might want to see this first, Hannah.”

She lifts her bag up on the table and pulls out a sheaf of papers. They aren’t in the hard cardboard case that Josie recognizes.

“Copies,” Imogen says, almost apologetically. “The documentary crew—they’re not letting this shit out of their sight. I managed to take photos on my phone and get them printed out when everyone was on lunch.”

She spreads them out on the table. They’re grainy, not quite what Josie had hoped for. But they’re enough. She feels, strongly now, that the truth is within these pages.

“Hannah,” Imogen says. “This might be hard for you to see.”

Photographs, blown up and in black-and-white. The quality is bad, an early aughts mobile phone camera, blurred again by Imogen’s secondhand photography. The images are difficult to make out, at first. You have to look at them for a moment, allow the pixels to recalibrate into an image.

Then, the jut of a hip bone. The fade of light skin into the dark bruise of a nipple. An eye, half-closed, an expression that Josie had initially interpreted as lust, a head tilted back as if the body it belongs to is in the throes of an orgasm.

An expression that could be desire, or could be distance. That could be someone out of their mind with passion, or simply out of their mind. Someone who is not wholly within themselves.

“It’s me,” Hannah says, blankly.

She picks one of the pictures up, holds it between her thumb and forefinger, as if it’s something contaminated.

“These are all of me.”

“After Nina came forward and the investigation became criminal, the police took the cell phones of people close to Tamara,” Imogen says quietly.

“Cell phone technology was much less advanced then, so there wasn’t as much that could be recovered.

They were primarily looking for messages between family members and Tamara that Tamara might have removed from her own device, and that they were unable to recover.

The police obviously thought these were interesting enough to keep on file. ”

“These were on Blake’s phone?”

The piece of paper that Hannah holds has begun to crease beneath her grip.

“They’d been deleted, but the police were able to access them,” Imogen says. “Evidently, Blake didn’t know his phone had a recently deleted folder. They were timestamped on the day Tamara died.”

“But… if the police had these images… I mean… nobody’s ever shown me these before.”

“I don’t think the police ever looked into who the pictures were of.

In fact, I don’t think they looked into them much at all, or if Blake was ever asked about them.

There’s a ton of other stuff in here that isn’t really pertinent to the case—messages between Evelyn and her party planner, texts between Blake and Barnaby van Beek. ”

“When I first saw these, I assumed they were consensual,” Josie says. “That you and Blake had taken these together when you were hooking up, or even that you’d taken them for him.”

Gently, she reaches over and takes the picture from Hannah’s hand. Lays it out on the table in front of her again.

“But Hannah,” Josie says. “These are from the night that Tamara died. And you don’t remember them being taken?”

Hannah shakes her head. She is still looking down at the pictures.

“I was drunk,” she says. “I don’t remember the night well. But… I don’t understand.”

“There’s something else you should see.”

Imogen is sliding another piece of paper out of the pack. She pushes it toward Hannah.

“The toxicology report.” Hannah sounds dazed. “I’ve seen this before. Online.”

“Yeah,” says Imogen. “A lot of people have said a lot of things about it, including me. High blood alcohol levels and a complete cocktail of drugs in Tamara’s system. Cocaine, antidepressants, painkillers…”

“Right,” says Hannah. “Tamara had a pretty relaxed attitude to… stimulants.”

“Exactly. In fact, basically everyone that the police spoke to said that this was totally normal for Tamara. That she took this kind of stuff all the time. Other than alcohol, there wasn’t a concerningly large amount of anything in her system—certainly not enough to make her wander off and fall into a pool and drown. ”

Hannah nodded. “Wasn’t one of the arguments for accidental death that drugs were a potential factor, but the court ruled that out?”

“Yes,” says Imogen. “Which made sense. At least, it made sense without those pictures. But look at this.”

Imogen runs her fingers down the list of drugs, stopping close to the bottom.

“Benzodiazepines: flunitrazepam,” Hannah reads. “Benzos are sleeping pills, right?”

“Exactly,” says Imogen. “In fact, these were apparently Evelyn’s sleeping pills.

Evelyn said that she got them under the counter, for insomnia.

Said that she wasn’t sleeping because of everything that was going on with her cheating scumbag husband.

And when the toxicology report is released, she completely sweeps this under the rug.

Tells the police that it’s no biggie. That she actually gave Tamara some of her pills pretty regularly, because Tamara didn’t sleep well.

She said that Tamara wanted to nap before the party so could have taken them then, or maybe even shortly before she died, if she was done with the party and wanted to get some sleep without the noise disturbing her.

Evelyn actually got investigated, since the pills weren’t prescription, but the police decided that it wasn’t in the public interest to prosecute. ”

“So… what are you saying?”

“Hannah.” Imogen leans in close. “You said that you were drunk that night. But were you surprised by how drunk you got? Did it seem strange to you?”

“I mean…” Hannah looks flustered. “Yeah, I guess. I’d never been like that before. Passing out, and not remembering stuff. But then, I’d hardly ever drank champagne before. I wasn’t used to it. And Blake kept giving me drinks…”

“Flunitrazepam,” Imogen says, “also has another name.”

“It does?”

Imogen nods. Josie can see something of truecrimefangirl_2002 in her then. Something of that dramatic flair.

“Flunitrazepam,” she says, “is also known as Rohypnol.”

“Rohypnol?” Hannah looks between Josie and Imogen. “As in roofies? The date rape drug?”

Imogen nods.

“In small doses, it’s a treatment for insomnia. But in larger doses… well.”

“We think you were roofied that night,” Josie says. “And we think that whoever roofied you also roofied Tamara.”

“But that’s…” Hannah is frowning. “Wouldn’t the police have figured that out? Or the coroner?”

“One of the reasons why roofies are a drug of choice for people up to no good is because it leaves your system really fast,” Imogen says.

“ Really fast for some people, and a little bit slower for others, depending on what it’s interacting with, and your size, and how much you’ve eaten, and a ton of other stuff.

And Tamara didn’t die until almost eight hours after she was found.

There were minimal traces of it detected in her toxicology results.

Not enough to draw any conclusions. And certainly not enough to disprove Evelyn’s sleeping pill story.

It was impossible to tell when Tamara had taken them, and whether she’d taken enough to help her have a quick nap, or to totally incapacitate her. ”

“And toxicology results take a long time,” says Josie.

“Months. By the time they were released, nobody was paying much attention. Nina had already come out with her story, and that had completely taken everyone’s eyes off the toxicology report.

The investigators had basically made their minds up.

They had their theory, and Tamara being on drugs didn’t prove or disprove anything. Nina’s story still held up.”

“But…” Hannah closes her eyes and presses her palms down against them. She shakes her head. When she speaks, her voice is quiet. “You think that Blake roofied me, and that he roofied Tamara, too?”

Neither of them speak. Hannah pulls her hands away from her face. She can see, from their silence, their pained expressions, that this is exactly what they think.

“But why would he have taken those photos?” She hears the pleading note in her voice.

Imogen looks at Josie, who gives her a small nod.

“Hannah, I know it’s hard to hear this, even now, but…

Blake was still seeing Cordelia at the time of the party.

In fact, he was still seeing her for about a year after the party, until she dumped him when she went to university the next autumn.

My guess? Blake wanted to have something on you, some form of blackmail, in case you threatened to expose him for what he was: a cheating asshole who had been unfaithful to his wealthy, connected girlfriend all summer. ”

“He was… he was still with Cordelia?”

Even twenty years later, the betrayal is a knife. Imogen’s and Josie’s faces swim in front of Hannah’s eyes, and she has to duck her head, taking a deep, gasping breath of the sharp, salty air.

“But I wasn’t the only one who knew,” she says, her voice tight, fighting for something to undo what Imogen is telling her. “Josie, you knew. And Tamara. Tamara knew—”

She breaks off, the logic of Imogen’s argument smacking her full in the chest. Tamara knew. And Tamara ended up dead.

Neither Josie nor Imogen speak. They don’t need to. The facts are there, laid out before them all for the first time. Hannah closes her eyes.

From what feels like very far away, she can hear her family. The distinctive sound of Eric’s laugh. Isla’s childish babble. The sound of Mason and Noah calling out to each other as they paddle in the sea. Just like her and Josie, when they were girls.

When she finally regains her composure, she’s made a decision.

“Actually,” she says. “There’s something else you don’t know about that night.”

And then, Hannah tells them everything.