“Meanwhile,” Corrine continues, “back at the colleges, a secondary tragedy is unfolding. Twenty-two-year-old Emma King has overdosed and left a suicide note, confessing to her crime of passion. Campbell tried to break up with her at the lake and she lost it. She didn’t mean to hurt him. One second that ceremonial rock was on the ground and the next it was in her hands and she does not know how to live with herself after what she’s done. She threw it in the lake, thinking she would try to cover up her crime—those are your prints taken care of, Faye—but then she couldn’t figure out what to do with the body, and she just went back to the cabin and sort of disassociated for the next twelve hours.” Corrine clucks tragically. “The police will find Campbell’s car at the train station, CCTV footage will show thatEmma was the one to park it there within twelve hours of Campbell’s time of death, that she purchased a ticket for the R-10 local, exiting at the Geneva station and taking an Uber back to the colleges, where she bought some real bad shit to put up her nose with the intent to lay her head down and never wake up.”
“Your second staged suicide,” I remark. “You should start charging for your services.”
“I basically have,” Corrine agrees with a laugh. “And my brother will be handsomely compensated, of course.”
I stare at her. “Your brother?”
Corrine gazes out the window, at the sky bruised with dusk. “Right about now, my brother is on his way over there with the merchandise and some sad-sack story about missing her and begging her to give him another chance and an offer to get fucked up on his dime. You met my brother, so you will understand when I say that I have all the faith in the world that he will pull this off.”
What was his name again? Loafers without socks. Wet douche hair.Win. Yes. I too have faith. “And you think I’m going along with this?”
Corrine’s laugh is a harsh one syllable. “That’s what Henry keeps promising. You have too much to lose to be snarled in scandal, so you’ll just keep your head down and make your movie and go on with your life. But I am not convinced. You two seem pretty cozy. I mean, you’re wearing his wife’s jewelry for fuck’s sake, and it is so not your style.”
My hand flies to the heart at my chest, covering it reflexively.
“What I am saying,” Corrine continues, “is that I feel that we are still lacking… collateral… from you.”
“And my career-suicide post is not collateral enough?”
“While you’re here, yeah. But once you’re off this island, you’ll log in and change your password and we’ll lose the upper hand. And inthis day and age, women can pretty much make a case of anything. You’re just gonna say you were abducted, you’re just gonna say you weretraumatizedand acting in self-defense.”
I was gonna say that, if it came to it. “What is it you think you’re going to make me do?”
Corrine sweeps an arm in Henry’s direction, rather grandly. “Hen? I think it will be far more poetic coming from you.”
I turn back to Henry to find him looking at me with those cold blue eyes, sorry and not sorry, remorseless and full of remorse. “It needs to look like you came here willingly,” he says. There is tension at the corners of his mouth. Not a smile, but an acknowledgment of the absurdity of the situation, that this is how it would end for us. “It needs to look like you love me.”
Chapter 31
The three of us pile into the runabout and chug back to Henry’s side of the lake. Between the fallen tree that looks like a Revolutionary War cannon and the one that rears out of the water like a mutant shrimp, Corrine puts the engine in neutral and upturns the knapsack over the side of the boat, hailing the surface of the lake with Sarah’s vertebrae and ribs. The sound is utterly heinous, and I tip my face upward to override my sense of hearing with sight. Darkness has fallen, and the night sky is strung loosely with stars, some brighter and stronger than others, like a wire of Christmas-tree lights plugged in for the first time after a cold year in storage. Corrine puts the engine in gear and turns the wheel toward Henry’s shore.
I step out of the boat before anyone can tell me what to do, brushing past Henry tying up the bowline. Corrine marshals me down the dock with the pistol at my back. “No,” she barks from behind. I turn and see her flick the pistol away from the main house. “Cabin.” I veer left on the stone path.
I go inside and stand stoically by the edge of the bed with my arms folded across my chest. It is dark as a movie theater in here, and the picture outside the windows shows Henry’s incredible Viking form skulking down the dock. He disappears from sight, and I hear hisboots crunch close, then farther away, close and far. When he appears in the doorframe, he is carrying an armful of kindling. He steps around Corrine and kneels before the fireplace. We wait wordlessly while he crosshatches a base, then strikes the long wooden match that startles his profile in an abrupt burst of flame. He returns the screen and stands. Corrine holds out her hand like Henry owes her money, and he drops the key to the cabin into her palm. She curls her fingers into a fist with an evil landlord’s smile.
“Well,” Corrine says cheerfully, “I’m going to make my way to the clubhouse so I can give my brother a call and see where we’re at with things. You kids have fun.”
She walks out, careful not to give us her back, and locks us inside. We face each other, avoiding eye contact, and listen to her clomp down the dock and start the engine to the boat. When the chug-chug-chugging fades, Henry takes a small inhalation, the kind you take before you say something big, and I pull my shoulders back and ready myself.
“Faye,” Henry starts. He looks at me with haunted eyes, his body silhouetted orange by the fire. “All of that, back there, was to protect you.”
I laugh in disbelief. Not what I was expecting him to say. I’ll give him that.
“I know how it sounds, but Corrine is convinced we are plotting against her and she hates you and she has a gun.”
“This has all been about protecting me, right?”
Henry is quiet a moment. “No,” he admits. “I need this money.”
I smirk. “Points for honesty,” I say. “But if you even think about touching me right now, I will really, properly, fight you. You will be raping me for real.” We are supposed to use Henry’s phone to film ourselvesmaking love. A lot of women my age are repulsed by that expression, but when I hear it, all I feel is a terrible two-year-old’s rage.
A sex tape, amaking lovetape, is the ultimate form of collateral. I will not be able to use any of the excuses Corrine enumerated earlier. That I was brought here against my will, traumatized and acting in self-defense. It will look like I killed Campbell because he discovered I was having an affair. Fuck worrying about casting my movie; I’ll be bleeding dry my bank account to afford hot power-lady lawyers to defend me in a murder trial thatHouse in Habitatwill cover in a vicious series for all her hippie, tin-fedora-wearing followers.
Henry lowers himself onto the edge of the bed, halving his hugeness in response to that. “I need to tell you something. Can you just hear me out?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Yes.” Henry glances up at me sharply. “You always have a choice with me.”