“Oh, jeez, Sam, you’re going to have to give me a better explanation than that.”
I did, starting with the memory I had at prom and the one later that night, leaving out most of what had happened with Carson. According to my version of events, I fell asleep talking to him.
When I finished, Scott shook his head. “He’ll get over it, Sam.”
“No, he won’t.” Because seriously, who gets over being accused of murder?
“Yeah, he will. He understands you’ve been through a lot. You’ve just got to give him some time.”
I raised my arms helplessly. “I’m such an idiot.”
“I’m going to have to agree with that.” Scott stood. “Look, go take a shower. Julie and I are going to see a movie. You should come with us.”
A little bit of interest stirred, but I shook my head. I needed more time to wallow in my lameness. Scott left, and I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling. How could I be so stupid? It was a talent, I decided.
By the time I got up, it was late in the afternoon. Scott was still at the movies with Julie, Mom had left to attend a charity fund-raising meeting or something, and I had no idea where Dad was or whether he was even home. I dragged myself into the shower. At some point, the tears mingled with the water, and even after I’d dried off and changed, my face was still damp.
I had to make it up to Carson, but I wasn’t sure I could. No one could blame him for not getting over this.
Sitting down on my bed, I glanced at the music box. The tingling, burning sensation shot up my spine, and I was tossed headfirst into a memory.
I stomped down Del’s driveway, face full of tears. How could he do this? How could she? I was her best friend, the only person who put up with her crap, and she’d slept with my boyfriend.
I hated her—hated him.
Del caught up to me. “Sammy, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I was drunk. So was she.”
“Is that supposed to make it okay?” I spun on him, hands shaking. “It doesn’t! You slept with my best friend!”
He glanced over his shoulders anxiously. “Keep it down. My parents are going—”
“I don’t care!” My voice was shrill. “Did you guys wait until I passed out? Did you have fun ringing in the New Year with her?”
“No! It wasn’t like that. I swear.”
I laughed harshly and reached up, my fingers curling around the necklace. With a vicious tug, the delicate chain gave and snapped. I flung it back at him. “We’re over. For real this time.”
Del’s mouth dropped open. “You can’t be serious.”
Oh, I was completely serious. I didn’t care what my parents thought or wanted. And it suddenly made sense why Cassie wanted to meet me at the summerhouse later tonight. She was going to fess up to sleeping with my boyfriend. Nice. “I’m so sick of her doing stuff like this!”
He reached for me, but I stepped out of the way. “Sammy, you need to calm down.”
I shook my head. “I’m so going to kill her.”
When I snapped out of the memory, I was standing in my bedroom, staring at my reflection. The girl’s face in the mirror was devoid of any blood, hazel eyes diluted to the point her eyes almost looked black. A tremor ran through her body, and her chest rose sharply.
She was me.
Taking a step back, I placed my fingers against my mouth. Del had cheated on me with Cassie. Was that why I’d been so drawn to the picture of them taken on New Year’s Eve? Another part of my subconscious trying to wiggle itself free, demanding that I acknowledge what that photo had meant to me? Again, Del had lied to me. I hadn’t taken the necklace off because I wanted to take a shower. I’d thrown it in his face. I’d grown a pair and broken up with him. That small triumph was lost in the shadow of everything else, though.
The anger simmered through my veins still, like a poison infecting bone and tissue with a sickness. When I’d said I was going to kill Cassie, I thought I’d meant it.
Cassie had wanted to meet at the lake house, and according to Carson, I’d gone home first. And the reason why I’d been crying and had kissed Carson kind of made sense now.
I laughed and then cringed at the high-pitched sound.
No wonder Del thought I owed him. And he’d been right. He had been protecting me. Only he knew how upset I’d been at Cassie the night she died. Del had known the truth. There probably hadn’t been a third person on the cliff, not in the literal sense, but just another way my subconscious was trying to tell me that someone else knew the truth, knew what I’d done.
The notes didn’t make sense, or how Cassie and I had ended up on the cliff, but did it matter now?
A floodgate of emotions broke open, ripping through me as if I were made of tissue paper. All those moments when I’d suspected everyone—Del, Scott, Carson—and when I’d entertained the idea that it had been a stranger danced before me.
My knees were knocking together, my breath coming out in short rasps. It had to be me—it had always been me. I had reason to hurt Cassie, more than anyone else, and that anger—that terrible surge of raw destruction—was still in me. Would I have really killed her over Del?
God, I’d never hated myself more.
I spun around, tears blurring my vision as I grabbed the music box off the bedside table and threw the box straight at the mirror. A disjointed note squeaked from the box. Glass shattered in dozens of pieces, falling and falling. I was that mirror—that box—destroyed, broken into a bunch of jagged sections.
The box hit the floor. The little dancer in her tutu shattered, but the base remained. It made another weak sound, like a tiny mewl.
Light flashed behind my eyes, followed by a slicing pain shooting between my temples as if someone had shoved a screwdriver behind them. I doubled over, clutching my head, wondering whether I’d somehow been cut by a sadistic piece of glass.
And then it happened.
Dizziness swept through me like tumultuous waves crashing and eroding the shoreline. With each lap, a new memory popped free. Jumping from halfway up the grand stairs, into Scott’s waiting arms, giggling as he yelled at me. Mom replaced him, holding me tight as the doctor checked my broken wrist, her soothing words lost in my tears. Another came of me sitting cross-legged in the tree house, across from an impish ten-year-old Carson.
“Truth or dare!” I yelled.
“Dare.” He grinned. “I dare you to kiss me.”
That was caught and swept away, replaced by the first time I met Cassie. How I’d been so drawn to her, like I was looking into my own reflection. The two of us running away from the boys, giggling when we tripped, dressed up in her mother’s shoes and jewelry. On and on they came, going back in time and then fast-forwarding to when we were fifteen, sitting in her bedroom.
“You’re so lucky,” she said softly. “You have everything.”
I didn’t understand that then, but I’d watched her slide a folded-up piece of parchment into the bottom of her music box, securing the hidden slot.
And then that was gone, lost in a rising tide of memories. My life—the things I’d done and said to people. In a rush, all of it had come back to me. The childhood spent trailing my brother and Carson around—Carson. An entire wealth of emotion brought me to my knees. The almost obsessive friendship that I’d had with Cassie and how it had swallowed my entire life. Memories of being introduced to Del at a company holiday party, practically shoved together by our parents, pricked at my skin and heart. So much pressure to be perfect, to be better than everyone else. Anger swirled like ticked-off wasps in my chest. I’d been so angry, so bitter under the facade. So desperate to run my own life that I turned into the person who struck out, hurting others to make myself feel better, to have some kind of control.
But I was mean…because I could be. Because no one dared to stop me. There was no real excuse for my behavior, for what I let Del do, for how I let Cassie run my life. I’d made so, so many bad mistakes, but that night…
I’d gone to the cabin, caught in a stormy mix of emotions. I’d just broken up with Del and kissed Carson, and my best friend was a traitorous bitch. Another text from her had led me up to the cliff. I’d thrown my phone at a nearby tree before picking it up and slipping it in the back pocket of my jeans. I’d been so angry, even more irritated by the fact that I had to find my way through the woods in the dark without killing myself. I hadn’t known what I was going to do when I got my hands on her, but like with Del, our friendship was over. Stealing my clothes and jewelry was one thing, but my boyfriend? That was it. I was done with her.
What I saw when I neared the edge of the woods and the cliff came into view wasn’t something I expected or could really comprehend, but most important, I remembered.
I saw the face of Cassie’s killer.
Chapter twenty-seven
My heart thundered in my chest, pounding the blood through my veins so fast that my stomach lurched and my bedroom walls seemed to spin crazily.
I remembered everything.
I’d gone there because Cassie had wanted me there. She wanted me to see, and I saw. I understood. Why her mother had wanted her to stay away from me. Why Cassie went after Del and constantly pushed me—constantly took from me—why our friendship was a bitter, vengeful, sad little monster underneath its complex, shattering layers.
Most of all, as I struggled to my feet, sorrow coursed through me, tightening my throat, squeezing my heart until it splintered into a million messy pieces.
I could barely breathe, think around the raw hurt.
Cassie…poor Cassie…
I knew who killed her.
Shards of glass crunched under my flip-flops as I stumbled over to my desk, grabbed my cell phone, and pressed down on the contact. The phone rang. Once. Twice. Five times. Tears blurred my vision. He wasn’t going to answer. Of course not. I’d accused him of terrible things, and now that I remembered what a wretched beast I’d been to him, he shouldn’t have been the one I called, but I had to tell someone. I had to get the words out of my mouth because they made it real. They changed everything.
Carson’s voice mail picked up.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “It’s me. I remember everything. I know—I know who killed Cassie. I don’t know what to do. Please—”
My bedroom door groaned as it swung open, and I lifted my gaze. My heart leaped into my throat as my fingers dug into the slim phone. The figure filled the door—the same figure I’d seen in all those memories, looking down on me as I lay on the cliff, touching and checking for a pulse. The shadow man who haunted my steps was real. Maybe not in the backseat of the car, but I knew without a doubt that he’d been in the woods, watching me, grabbing my purse and the note from the car after I’d wrecked. Had he left me for dead twice?
My heart ached at the betrayal.
“Dad?” I croaked, dizzy.
“Hang up the phone, Samantha.”
Hanging up the phone would be bad. Standing there was stupid, but I was shell-shocked. I shook as Dad stalked toward me, sparing a brief glance at the broken mirror and music box. He pried the phone from my tight grasp and disconnected the call.
“Who did you call, Samantha?” he asked, placing the phone in his back pocket.
I backed up. “No one.”
He grimaced. “Don’t lie to me. I know you were on the phone with someone. Who was it?”
There was no way I’d tell him. I clamped my mouth shut, praying that Carson decided to listen to my message and knew to call the police. Long shot, considering he’d probably delete my message without listening to it, and even if he did, he’d call back and Dad had my phone.
“It was Carson, wasn’t it? Why, princess, why did you have to involve him?” He rubbed his brow, sounding disappointed, as if I’d stayed out too late and broken curfew. “This…we will have to work through this. I can deal with him.”
Fear spiked through me. “Deal with him?”
Dad shot me a dark look, and I shrank back. “I did not pull myself out of the gutters and become who I am today to lose it all. Sacrifices…they have to be made along the way.”
Crazy—he sounded crazy. “Sacrifices? Was Cassie a sacrifice? Was I?”
“Samantha—”
“Why did you kill her? She was…”
“Kill her?” He shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
“I remember!” The pain and panic in my own voice shocked me. “I saw you. You pushed her away and—”
“And she slipped and fell! She hit her head on the damn rocks! It was an accident, Samantha. I never meant for her to get hurt. She just wouldn’t listen to me!” He stepped back, moving his hands over his head, tugging on the ends of his hair. “From the day you brought her home from school, I knew she was going to be a problem. And I did everything to keep you two apart.”
Besides the few moments he’d mentioned not liking my friendship, I remembered now. How turned off he’d been by my new friend. Not allowing her to sleep over, arguing with Mom—poor, naive Mom—when she went behind him and let Cassie stay. How standoffish he’d been to Cassie over the years, outright avoiding her whenever she was in the house or any talk of her.
I was going to hurl.
“Sit down.”
My body locked up, and my eyes darted around the room frantically.
“Sit down, Samantha.” His voice brooked no room for argument, and I sat on the edge of my bed, trembling. “You need to listen to me. What happened to Cassie was an accident. You have to believe me, princess. I never wanted anyone to get hurt.”