Chapter 23. Isabel, the Assistant
Isabel, the Assistant
PRESENT DAY
“I can’t believe Dakota still lives in the same house where her brother hung himself,” Scout said as Brooks pulled to a stop across the street from the Banks estate. “Not to mention she’s a grown woman living alone in her childhood home. It’s wildly creepy.”
The Hollywood Hills were beautiful on this sun-dappled morning, trees swaying in the breeze, the street as ornate and showy as it had been ten years ago.
I hated it. Despite the warm breeze, my body was covered in goose bumps, like we’d entered a chilly underworld.
The two worst nights of my life had happened on this street, in that house.
It wasn’t merely creepy—it was a pocket of hell on earth.
“The woman has a clear case of arrested development,” Brooks agreed, cutting the engine.
I didn’t point out that Scout lived only a mile away, on an adjoining hill, her dream of living in the Hollywood Hills realized.
Or had it been my dream? The line between what she’d wanted and what I did were blurry after so many years together.
Either way, I’d always thought Scout’s choice to live so close to the place her sister died was a way of clinging to the past.
Better Brooks say it than me.
He turned in the driver’s seat and gave me a once-over. “Wire comfortable?”
I nodded, feeling the tiny microphone taped under my blouse, trying not to remember how he’d placed it there, his fingers delicately brushing my skin, a mix of professional confidence and personal hesitation.
“Are you sure you can’t come?” Scout asked. “You have interrogation experience.”
“He can’t be seen with us,” I reminded her.
“I met the lead detective on Drake’s case this morning.
Holloway.” Brooks ran a hand through his close-cropped hair.
“She’s sharp. I’d rather she not find out I’m working with you until we have a new suspect to offer.
Plus, if it’s just you, Dakota’s more likely to talk.
” He pulled up his phone. “I’ll be right here, listening.
” He placed a hand on my arm. “If anything goes wrong, I’m a heartbeat away. ”
“You really don’t have to babysit us,” I insisted. “I’m sure you have more important things to do.”
Brooks gave a curt shake of his head. “There’s no way I’m letting you walk into any situation without backup.” He patted the service gun at his waist, and I tried not to think about how good he looked with it, in his thin gray tee and jeans, dark baseball cap pulled low. “What’s the watchword?”
I sighed. “Banana.”
“Real smooth, Brooks.” Scout gave him a thumbs-up. “As always. Guess not even the FBI changes some things.”
News of Rosie’s death was being withheld from the media by the FBI, but Brooks had warned us there was a chance it could hit airwaves any minute, meaning our window of time was short.
Nevertheless, Dakota answered the buzzer on the gate as soon as we pressed it, her voice anxious. “Rosie, is that you?”
“Bad news about the reporter, actually.” Scout leaned in to the intercom. “And even worse news about who’s at your gate.”
Scout and I sat stiffly across from Dakota in her sitting room, which was decorated within an inch of its life in grandma-style florals. Scout cast a discerning eye around the room and I knew what she was thinking immediately, down to the borrowed SoCal slang: Hella Grey Gardens vibes.
Dakota sat rigidly on her pink settee, across a table set for tea.
She’d barely spoken two words since buzzing us in.
Clearly, we’d crashed her tea party. Grown-up Dakota looked in some ways exactly as she had when we were teens: an abundance of long, dark hair, preternaturally pale skin, vivid blue eyes rimmed with black liner.
But she was puffier, deep circles carved under her eyes, the kind that came with permanent sadness.
Perhaps it was the shock of Rosie’s death, but I didn’t think so.
“So…” I searched for a way to start. Brooks had said we should make Dakota feel comfortable.
A maid hurried in with a steaming teapot, dressed in full regalia like she’d come off the set of Downton Abbey, a frilly white apron and everything. She began pouring our tea.
“You have a scullery maid?” There was no masking Scout’s disdain.
Dakota lifted her chin. “The old families in Los Angeles keep the traditions. Not that you wannabe celebrities”—the words dripped with judgment—“know anything about that. All your new money and no manners.”
I’d never thought about celebrities as disruptors of the old-money system before, but I supposed it had to be threatening to the elite, that people from any circumstances could suddenly skyrocket into wealth and influence, infiltrating a world that had once belonged exclusively to them.
Dakota always had such a stick up her ass about the entertainment industry, going around telling everyone she and Alden came from an “original railroad” family.
But instead of asking, I sipped my tea and said, “This is lovely. Thank you.” I looked around. “And the house is as beautiful as ever. Obviously, we never saw much of it…” Risky topic, hard left. “But it’s exactly how I remember.”
It was so identical, in fact, that walking through the front doors into the massive foyer and seeing the grand staircase had nearly given me a panic attack.
Dakota nodded, sipping her own tea. “I haven’t changed a thing.”
It was a haunted house, then, frozen in time. I could sense Scout trying to meet my eyes and share a disbelieving look, but I resisted. We weren’t here to make fun of Dakota, as tempting as it had always been. Besides, some of the darkness this house held—we were responsible for it.
I cleared my throat. “And it’s just you here?”
Dakota placed her teacup in its saucer. “My mother lives on the third floor.”
Scout coughed up her drink.
Dakota glared at her. “She’s unwell. She has been for years. Not that my father or his new wife give a damn. It’s all on me.”
“You know, all these years, and we’ve never seen your mom.” Scout grabbed a napkin, dabbing at her chin. “How do we know this isn’t a Norman Bates situation?”
“Scout,” I hissed, at the same time as Dakota said, “You really haven’t changed either, have you?”
“I’m sorry about your mother,” I said soothingly. “We didn’t mean to offend.”
Scout leaned back in her gilded armchair. “Dakota and I are one for one as far as dead siblings go. I’d say that puts us on equal footing where offense is concerned.”
Dakota glowered. “Why are you here? Other than to tell me the one reporter who was finally going to listen to me went and got herself killed.”
So Dakota was upset about Rosie’s death, but mainly because she wasn’t around to give her a platform anymore.
“Rosie didn’t get herself killed, she was murdered,” I corrected.
“And Scout and I are trying to figure out why. Well, we’re trying to figure out—” Scout kicked me under the table, and I cut myself off.
“Anyway.” I gave Dakota a pleading look.
“We came today to beg you to tell us what you were planning to tell Rosie. Please. We need to know what story she was working on.”
Smug satisfaction spread over Dakota’s face. “What else? She was writing about the Christmas party. And how there was no way Alden could’ve killed your sister.” She glanced at Scout. “Not everyone believes the poison you’ve been whispering for years.”
“I told the truth,” Scout countered. “And I said it loud. I never whispered.”
“Scout,” I admonished. We were doing the opposite of making Dakota comfortable—we were stabbing her with verbal needles.
“And the truth will always be,” Scout continued, ignoring me, “that I brought my little sister into this house, and your family not only murdered her but made sure she never left. And then tried to erase her from the surface of this earth.”
Dakota leapt to her feet, upending her teacup with a clatter. “Liar. I was with my brother all night. He couldn’t have done it!”
What? I tried to navigate past my shock. The cops had never told us why they weren’t moving forward with Alden, just that they weren’t. “Dakota, are you saying Alden had an alibi?”
“She’s his sister,” Scout insisted. “She’d say anything for him.”
“That’s what everyone said,” Dakota hissed. “But thank god the cops were reasonable. They listened to me. They verified it. Were you so convinced it was him you never bothered to ask why he wasn’t charged?”
“Dakota.” I rose slowly, hands out in surrender. The pretense of the tea party was over. “What exactly happened that night? The last we remember seeing you, you were drinking whiskey with Emmy.” I could still picture the crystal tumblers, shiny as the grand chandelier.
Her face twisted. “Emmy got too drunk. And no one was paying attention to me, like usual, so I went to bed.”
“What time?” The police estimated Georgia was killed between midnight and two. The details of her case were burned into my brain.
“Eleven. And I wasn’t in my room for ten minutes before Alden knocked on my door and came in. He was upset and wanted to sleep with me.”
“Upset about what?” I asked at the same time Scout blurted, “Sleep with you?”
“You don’t understand what it was like.” Genuine hatred simmered in Dakota’s eyes.
“With our dad being what he was and our mom dipping out. We had no one else. Alden was my lifeline.” Her voice faltered.
“And then he left me, and I had no one.” She met my gaze.
“Georgia rejected him that night. I’d warned him, said she was using him because of who our family was—”
“As if,” Scout spat.
“But he didn’t believe me.”
“I knew it!” Scout leapt to her feet. “I knew he killed her because she told him no.”
“You idiot,” Dakota snapped. “Georgia told him she was seeing someone else. She had a boyfriend.”
“A boyfriend?” My thoughts swam. “Is that—was that your big new lead?”
“I knew my sister,” Scout insisted. “If she had a boyfriend, she would’ve told us. Alden was lying.”
“She broke my brother’s heart that night,” Dakota said. “He actually loved her, the idiot.” Her voice cracked. “He wasn’t like the rest of my family. Alden was sensitive. My parents hated that about him.”
“Dakota, I’m really sorry,” I said, “but you’re sure Alden never left?”
Her expression turned defiant. “He was still asleep in my bed when you found Georgia. Ask Gia Thomas, that horror actress, or Ridley Reed, that blogger, if you don’t believe me. They overheard her rejecting Alden. They’re the ones who walked him to my room.”
There were additional witnesses. I stood there, stunned. Even Scout was quiet.
Our silence seemed to embolden Dakota. “You know what else I was going to tell Rosie? That Alden might not have killed your sister, but you sure as hell killed him.”
It was the first time anyone had ever connected us to his death. My chest seized.
“You’re insane if you believe that,” Scout said coolly.
But she wasn’t wrong, wasn’t she?
“I know you were here that night,” Dakota said. “I found a pocketknife with your initials, SOS. Next to him, in the pool house.”
My hands started to shake. How had she found the knife? We’d taken it with us, hadn’t we? Sweat beaded on my forehead.
“You know what, Dakota?” Scout’s tone was pitying. “You were always a miserable person. All of this”—she waved a hand around the trapped-in-amber mansion—“everything bad that’s happened to your family, you brought it on yourselves.”
“Get out!” Dakota lunged. “Out!”
“We’re going,” I promised, grabbing Scout by the arm. “Right now.”
We sped out of the sitting room and through the maze of the house, bursting out of the first door we saw. Outside, the sunny tranquility of the day felt like a joke.
“Fucking insane,” Scout swore. “To think—to say—”
But I turned, searching for a way out of the backyard, and stopped in my tracks. The pool house. Scout walked into me, yelped, then fell silent.
It looked exactly the same. Here in the daylight, you would never know it was a house of horrors, that inside those four walls, two people had met gruesome ends.
But that didn’t matter: What mattered was that it was the last place Georgia had ever been alive.
The pool house glowed with her presence.
I could’ve looked forever. It held me in a spell.
“Get out!” Dakota screamed, emerging suddenly out the side door, her streaked mascara like a mask, melting away. Scout and I gasped and jerked into a run.
“You don’t know what it was like,” Dakota screamed at our backs, voice edging on a sob. “You haven’t even gotten close to the truth.”