Page 122 of High Society

Only for a while, Holly. You’ll have your mom. And your grandparents. He extends his hand to her again. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Once I’ve worked it out.

Young Holly grabs on to his arm and wraps herself tightly around it.

Holly, please! Her dad tries to wriggle his arm free of Young Holly’s, but she hangs on for dear life.

Holly watches in horror as, suddenly, almost simultaneously, both heads inside the vehicle swivel toward the windshield. She spots the hazy outline of a deer on the side of the road. It leaps out in front of the car.

Her father yanks the steering wheel, and the car veers violently to the right.

Holly feels herself cartwheeling, as if she’s trapped inside a huge barrel rolling off a cliff.

The tumbling stops as suddenly as it started. A shower of glass explodes around her, the shards floating as if in slow motion.

Everything goes dark again. It’s unbearably hot. Holly thinks she might gag on dense tendrils of smoke.

Then she feels hands on her, gripping her arms and then her legs. And she feels herself being lifted.

CHAPTER 61

“Dad!” is the first word out of her mouth when Holly comes to.

Disoriented, she sees police cruisers, fire trucks, and ambulances everywhere. People in uniform mill around her. Everything stinks of smoke.

How did I get here?

The last thing she remembers is the heat of the fire threatening the overturned car. Then it all comes back to her. She’s lying on a stretcher on her grandfather’s front lawn. She turns just in time to see a cop protecting the top of Reese’s head with his hand, as he loads her into the back of a cruiser, her wrists cuffed behind her back.

Before the cop shuts the door, Reese locks eyes with Holly. There’s no remorse in her swollen, red eyes. If anything, she looks betrayed. As if Holly should have known that Reese did it all to protect her own sobriety and to validate Holly’s method.

What utter bullshit! Holly wants to scream.

Is Reese a sociopath? she wonders. And if so, why hadn’t she picked up on it before? Holly probes Reese’s face and posture for a hint of shame, but finding none, turns her head away in disgust.

A shadow crosses her face, and Holly sees Detective Rivers standing over her. He wears a suit, as usual, but it has dark patches and stains across it and on his shirt. His tie is crooked. And blood is crusted over his right eye.

Suddenly she remembers. “Papa?”

“He’s going to be all right.” He kneels down to her level. “They took him to the hospital for assessment.”

“What happened?”

“A fire. In that sunroom. The firefighters say it was deliberately set. Reese was trying to burn down the house.”

With me and Papa inside. “How did you know?”

“I traced Dr. Koskinen’s phone records back to some unlisted cell phones, including Reese’s. When we triangulated the cell signals from the night of the group chat—”

“What group chat?” Holly asks, her brain still foggy.

“Among the group members. You weren’t included. Anyway, after Dr. Koskinen was already apparently ‘on the run,’ both phones dinged to the same cell towers. Meaning—”

“They were together! Reese was the one sending the texts under Liisa’s name to her daughter, right? She must have been pretending to be Liisa on that group chat, too.”

“Looks like.”

Holly exhales. “Liisa is dead. Reese told me as much. I think she drugged her and dumped the body in the ocean.”

Rivers doesn’t appear surprised. “Dr. Koskinen’s car was found this morning by the highway patrol. Off the trails near Big Sur.”