Page 36

Eleven Years Ago, August

The skies opened just as I shouldered my purse to leave Rosa’s apartment.

“Damn it,” I said, peering out the window at the pouring rain.

“Do you have to go?” Rosa asked.

“I wish I didn’t.”

But I needed to take advantage of the time I had while Rosa’s mom was with mine tonight.

It had been two weeks since Cody’s arrest. He was out on bail, his ankle bracelet confining him to his and Tyson’s parents’ house, but I had yet to see him because their parents had returned to oversee preparation for his trial and had been watching over their sons like hawks.

They’d spoken to their offspring so little during the summer that they didn’t even know Tyson and I had been dating again—much less that we had broken up again—and we thought it was better if I stayed out of the picture completely.

Tonight, though, Mr. and Mrs. Dale had gone to a charity ball in Miami, so Tyson and Cody had invited me over to catch me up on everything and make sure we were all on the same page before Tyson returned to school in Boston next week. Of course I couldn’t tell Rosa any of this.

“You better not be seeing Tyson again,” she said.

I shook my head. “I just have errands to run.”

“At night?”

Thunder cracked overhead. “It’s only eight.”

“Okay,” she said, pulling me in for a tight hug.

I drove to Tyson’s parents’ at a snail’s pace with the windshield wipers on high, but still it was hard to see through the sheets of water that poured from the sky.

Which was probably why I didn’t spot Ian’s black pickup truck until I was parking next to it in front of the house.

I groaned, staring at it while the rain pounded the roof of my car, considering whether to leave.

I wanted to see Ian even less than I wanted to see Tyson, but I needed to talk to Cody, so it looked like I was going to be seeing all of them.

I cut the engine, again hugging my purse to my body as I dashed up the steps to the front door and pressed the doorbell.

I could hear it ringing throughout the house as I waited under the narrow overhang that did little to protect me from the wind and rain.

It wasn’t long before Tyson jerked the door open a crack, poking his head out and looking around before opening it just wide enough to let me in.

“Something bad happened,” he whispered urgently as I stepped inside.

My pulse quickened and I focused on his face as he shut the door behind me, noting that while he was dry, he looked worse than I did, the color drained from his skin, his eyes haunted.

“I can’t fucking find it!” came Cody’s voice from somewhere in the house.

“What happened?” I asked.

His gaze shifted to a point behind me, and I turned.

I gasped, one hand flying to my mouth as the other gripped Tyson’s arm for support, my knees buckling beneath me.

Ian’s body lay crumpled at the base of the sweeping marble staircase, his limbs at unnatural angles, a pool of blood seeping from beneath his head onto the gleaming beige floor.

“What the fuck, Tyson?” Cody demanded as he strode from the back of the house, his eyes flitting to me before fixing on his brother. “I told you not to let her in.”

“We need her help,” Tyson said. “You can’t leave the house.”

Cody shook his head, glowering at him. “She shouldn’t be involved in this.”

“Is he…?” I asked, staring at Ian’s unmoving form.

Cody nodded slightly, his mouth in a grim line.

My mouth watered as nausea curdled my stomach.

I released Tyson’s arm and ran on wobbling knees, the slick floor tilting beneath me as I careened into the kitchen and hurled into the sink.

I gripped the counter to steady myself as my body convulsed again and again until I’d emptied my stomach, leaving me shaking and unnaturally cold.

Mechanically, I washed out the sink and slid to the kitchen floor, wrapping my arms around my legs and dropping my head between my knees.

Ian was dead.

Cody was at my side in a flash, his hand on my shoulder. “You should go,” he said, squatting on his heels beside me. “He should never have let you in. You didn’t see this.”

“What happened?” I managed, raising my gaze to his.

“He fell down the stairs.”

“Which one of you pushed him?” I asked, my voice trembling.

His jaw tightened, and I caught a glimpse of the chasm of despair inside him.

“He wanted more money and there is no more money,” Tyson said, striding over to hover above us. “He was high as a kite. We got in a fight, and he fell. That’s all.”

“Have you called the police?” I asked, looking at them in turn.

They glanced at each other. “Not yet,” Cody said.

“They’re gonna think the same thing you did,” Tyson said. “The guy who turned Cody in dies at the bottom of our stairs two weeks after he’s arrested? It doesn’t look good.”

“But he was high,” I protested. “They’ll test his blood and see how inebriated he was—”

“It doesn’t matter. People get high all the time, and they don’t fall down stairs and die. Cody will go to jail for murder,” Tyson said. “Or we both will. We can’t call the police.”

“Then what do you plan to do?” I asked.

“We have to get rid of his body,” Tyson said.

I looked at Cody. “Do you agree with this?”

“I don’t like it,” Cody grumbled, collapsing to the floor with his back against the kitchen island.

It was then that I noticed the bottle of bleach and box of rubber gloves resting on the counter above him. “This isn’t a discussion,” I said, realizing. “You guys have already decided.”

“Tyson’s right,” Cody said. “It looks like we killed him. And since he turned me in…they’ll have a motive, even without knowing about the extortion.”

“Did you kill him?” I asked. I knew Tyson would lie, so I focused on Cody, fixing him with my unrelenting gaze.

“He slipped and fell,” Cody repeated hollowly.

“We should have let him burn in the fire,” Tyson growled. “But what’s done is done. Now we have to get rid of the body before Mom and Dad come home and find him ruining their marble floor.”

“I don’t want any part of this,” I said, wiping the tears I didn’t realize had fallen from my eyes.

“I need your help,” Tyson said, dropping to his knees beside me.

“Cody’s on house arrest, he can’t leave.

I have to load Ian into his truck and dump him in a canal somewhere in the Everglades, then park the truck at a lot in a different part of the park.

I need you to dispose of his phone somewhere in Miami and come back to get me. ”

I stared at him. It was a good plan, but I wanted nothing to do with it. “Are you crazy? No.”

“Audrey, you’re already entangled in this, and not just because you’ve been here and seen his body,” he said, his eyes pleading.

“Ian knew you and I were involved in what he got Cody arrested for. I’m sure the only reason he didn’t narc on us too was so he could continue to extort us.

There’s no telling what he has on us. If we call the cops now, there will be an investigation into his death regardless of what we say.

They’ll search his apartment and find whatever evidence he has against us, and all three of us will go to jail, even if Cody and I manage to somehow not get convicted of his murder. ”

I evaluated him. “What makes you think Andie won’t turn us in anyway?”

“She’ll never know we had anything to do with his death. She’ll think he OD’d somewhere, or got himself killed in a shady drug deal. He’s involved in some bad shit. There are lots of ways he could die that don’t involve us.”

That, at least, was true.

“You can walk away now,” Tyson went on, holding up his hands. “But we have a lot better chance of not getting caught if you’ll help me get rid of the phone and the truck.”

I took a shaky breath as darkness settled over my heart. I knew it would haunt me for years to come, but I saw the accuracy of Tyson’s logic, and I didn’t want to go to jail. “We’ll need a tarp. And something to weigh the body down with when you throw it into the canal.”