Chapter 46
Evie
The Backlot
My knives were missing. I could feel the empty space in my boots from where they’d been.
I raised my aching head and stared into the darkness.
The air was chilly, and it smelled of dirt and rain.
I tried to move, but I found myself tied to a chair with thick rope.
I glanced around, trying to focus my vision in the low light.
I was near water, and a single streetlight lit up the area.
“You used it wrong,” I groaned, closing my eyes again. I racked my brain. The last thing I remembered was—
“What?”
Charles—the realtor, my mother’s ex-lover, and one of her murderers—stepped out of the darkness with Skye in tow.
He was different in person from the man in the photos.
He’d obviously aged, gaining a beer belly and a grayed beard, but up close, he wasn’t as attractive as the photos made him appear.
His eyes were beady, and he was shorter than I realized.
He was stocky, like an elderly lumberjack.
He appeared calm and collected under the streetlight.
“You said ‘Beep beep, Ritchie’ before hitting me over the head. That’s not some catchphrase. It means shut the fuck up.”
“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
My head drifted backward into nothing, and I righted myself again. Maybe he had used it correctly. I didn’t know. Had he given me a concussion?
“You’re lucky my date thought to move you off the property. I’m showing it in the morning. Wouldn’t look good to have two dead bodies in the foyer.”
My eyes drifted to Skye.
She stood behind him, eyes wide with fear.
“Who are you?” I asked, keeping her cover.
“Don’t worry about her,” Charles muttered. “She’s gonna be rewarded after this is over, and that’s all that needs to be said. Riley, sweetie, go back to the car. I’ll be there in a bit. Twenty minutes, tops.”
I fought back a snicker. She’d used her character name from the movie. Locking eyes with me, she backed away, into the shadows.
A groan came from beside me, and I turned my head to see Sebastian, looking like I felt. His head hung low, his shoulders were slumped, and he too had been tied and bound to a chair. I wiggled my arms, but I wasn’t going anywhere.
“You used it wrong,” he muttered. “The quote.”
“This again? Jesus, you guys are like one brain. No wonder it was so easy to hit you over the head.”
“Where did you bring us? I know this place…” Sebastian groaned.
“I’m sure you do, Mr. Hollywood. I took you to one of my favorite places to toss garbage.”
“I know this set…” Sebastian turned his head from side to side.
I did too, and that’s when I noticed a plane, a cabin, a lake…
“Are we at Falls Lake?” I blurted. Dread pooled in my belly as I remembered stories my mom had told me about the lake.
“Stay far, far away from there, Evie Reyes.”
“Good job. You know your movie trivia.”
He’d taken us to the studio lot where some of the most famous movies were filmed…but why?
“After I’m done with you, I’m just gonna throw your bodies in the water. I own some shares in the lake. They won’t be changing the water for another month or so,” he said, as if reading my mind.
“Just fucking do it, then,” Sebastian muttered. “Get it over with.”
“I can’t. Elliott wants information.”
“So do I,” I piped up. “You were in love with my mom. Why did you help kill her?”
He paused, his brows furrowing, face contorting in pain. Eventually, he just shook his head.
“She hurt me long before I ever hurt her. If she hadn’t broken my heart, I probably could have saved her.”
“You could have saved her at any time,” I snapped. “What you and the rest of your friends did was a choice. Every step of the way, you could have pulled back and helped her, but you didn’t. You murdered her.”
“That we did. I’d say I regret it, but I’m not entirely sure I do. I finally got sleep after she was gone.”
That bastard.
I yanked at my restraints. I no longer cared if I didn’t have my knives. I was going to strangle him with my bare hands.
Charles reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out a worn, leather-bound journal.
“I keep records. I used to say that if I wasn’t into real estate, I would have liked to be a writer.
Your mother always encouraged that. She got me my first journal.
This one. Thought it was only right to bury it with her daughter. ”
I stared at it, then at him. He really was going to kill me.
“How many people have you put at the bottom of this lake?” I asked, interrupting his ramblings.
“You’ll be my first,” he admitted. “But not the lake’s first.”
My blood chilled. He was so calm about all of this. It was deeply unsettling. For the first time since I’d started my revenge tour, the danger felt real.
Suddenly, he pivoted the conversation. “What’s your favorite horror movie with a lake, Evelyn?”
I licked my lips and darted my gaze around, looking for something that could help me escape this. I was realizing this man liked to play with his food before eating it. I’d have to play with him.
“Cabin Fever,” I answered.
“Never heard of it. I can’t remember the title of my favorite, but it was about an author who would bring women to his cabin.
After he was done with them, he tied bricks to their feet and took them out on his boat, dropping them into a lake to create his own little garden under the water. You ever see that one?”
It was then that I spotted the boat just offshore and the cinderblocks beside it about twenty feet behind him. My stomach dropped. He wasn’t going to shoot us and toss us overboard. He was going to drown us.
“No, I haven’t.” I answered.
“I’d forgotten about it until I found this journal and started to reread it.” Charles opened the book and began flipping through the pages. “Lots of interesting stuff in here.”
“Sebastian,” I whispered when Charles stuffed the journal back into his pocket and headed to get the cinderblocks.
“It’s okay, Final Girl,” he whispered. “Don’t panic.”
It would have been the perfect time to panic.
“I had to cut my date short for this,” Charles grumbled, bringing one of the concrete blocks over, dropping it in front of me. “She’s a cutie, very eager to please. Blonde, young, stupid. After Lita, I couldn’t be with brunettes.”
“Why did you break up?” I wanted to keep him talking, but I was also genuinely curious. Sebastian had brought up a good point the other night. Charles was the man most likely to be my biological father out of the six. He paused, squatting down near my feet.
“She cheated on me. Right after I took her to Paris.”
Silence followed his confession. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask when that was.
Had it been nine months before I was born?
I searched his face, looking for signs of myself.
Did we share a nose, dimples, maybe a special freckle?
I saw nothing that would indicate blood relation, and it made me a little sad. He was the one who’d loved her.
“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure why, but I felt bad for the man who’d tied us up and was planning on tossing our bodies into the lake.
My apology seemed to pull him back from his memories. He’d gone quiet. He wrapped a rope around my ankle and tightened the knots. I winced. Sebastian and I shared a look, and I shrank in my seat.
“Elliott told me. He’s the only true friend I’ve ever had. She deserved what she got in the end. And you will too.”
Did he really consider an affair deserving of rape and murder?
“Wait, did she cheat on you with Elliott?” I blurted. I wasn’t entirely sure where it came from, but something about the way he spoke of his friend made me curious.
He shot me a look that said to stop asking—but also, yes. Charles bent down in front of me, pushing the cinderblock under my feet.
“You said Elliott wants information. What information does he want?” Sebastian asked as Charles tied a rope around my other ankle and then again attached it to the concrete block.
“He wants to know your plans,” he muttered.
“I don’t have any,” I finally admitted. “I did some digging, found out she’d had dinner plans with some important men that night, and I knew it was them that had killed her.
” I glanced at Sebastian. “I paid some internet sleuths to help me figure out who they were, and you guys came up. So, I packed my bags and came out here to start with Thornton. That’s it. That’s the plan.”
Shame filled my belly as I felt Sebastian’s presence beside me. I’d tried to pretend I had plans or some semblance of organized thought, but there were none. My brain didn’t work that way. I had too many ideas and nuggets of information and no clue how to use them to execute things.
“Hm. Guess I don’t need to wait, then. Let’s do this,” Charles said. His face was blank, and my blood ran cold. He wasn’t lying, I realized. He was going to drown us in that lake.
He stood and walked over to Sebastian, tying cinderblocks to him as well.
“Wait! I—I have to know. Did you guys kill Antoinette, my agent?”
Charles cocked his head. “I don’t know anything about that. See, you’re just like her. Digging into things you shouldn’t. If it hadn’t been us that night, it would have been another group of men. Lita was no stranger to getting herself into trouble,” Charles told us as he worked.
“What trouble?” I pushed.
Charles looked up, raising an eyebrow. “She threatened to expose us, to lie about us. She was going to tell everyone we raped her. She was going to ruin us.”
“So you killed her because she was going to tell the truth?” I gaped. When he didn’t immediately reply, I began to wiggle in my seat, attempting to loosen my restraints.
“Because she was going to ruin our lives. We had wives, kids, important jobs. She didn’t care. She was just upset that no one was interested in sharing those things with her. She was a deeply unhappy woman. We had to protect ourselves.”
I shook my head. He was a liar. My mother was happy with her life. She’d had it all. They took that from her.
“You’re pathetic,” Sebastian snarled. “Your friends don’t care about you. You think Elliott Bradley will care if you die?”
Charles didn’t respond, but his jaw ticked, and I could see in his eyes that Sebastian had struck a nerve. Just then, we saw a shadow move. Sebastian’s head shot up, and my attention flicked to it. Hope washed over me.
Skye.
She was creeping up slowly. Arms raised. My heart soared as the knives—my knives—caught the light as she clenched them high in the air.
“We were told to put an end to all of this. Elliott doesn’t like to be played with. Picking us off one by one has only pissed him off.” He stood, shaking his head and rubbing his jawline. Was he having second thoughts? Could we stop this?
“Are you my father?” I blurted.
He did a double take. “What?”
“My dad. One of you is my biological father. Which one is it?”
Charles took in my words—then laughed. It started as a chuckle and turned into a full, wholehearted belly laugh.
“You really think she’d have wanted me to father her child?
Lita Reyes, the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, creating a child with someone less than her?
Sorry, sweetie, I’m not the guy you’re looking for.
I wasn’t good enough. Now let me go get Riley so we can haul your asses onto the boat. She’s such a good girl.”
“I’m not your good girl.”
Charles turned and gasped as Skye swung her arms down, plunging both knives into the sides of his neck.
The blades pierced his flesh, making the sound of a juice box being punctured.
Blood sprayed everywhere as she pulled them back out.
She leaped back as he fell forward, almost landing on her shoes.
The gurgling sound of him choking on his blood filled the silence, and only when he stopped breathing did we look away. It all happened so fast, it didn’t feel satisfying at all. In fact, I felt a little bad. He wasn’t innocent by any means. He had plans to murder me and Sebastian. I just…
What a way to go.
Skye inhaled rapidly, her face sprayed with blood, a smile slowly formed on her lips. “Did I do good?”