Chapter 7
SEVEN
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Lacy said, a hiccup in her voice as if she might cry.
“How did you mean it?”
Seconds passed as she looked at me, trying to find words that didn’t come.
“If you won’t tell me…” My voice trailed.
I didn’t know how to finish the statement, so I decided to go a different route, throwing out something I’d noticed earlier to see if she’d meet me in the middle.
“Joe called Brett a ‘son of a bitch’ when he served me a drink earlier.” A tiny flag, not quite red but blush-colored, started to rise in my mind.
“Do you know if the two of them are—or were—still friends?”
“Sure, I guess,” Lacy answered.
“They were inseparable in high school,” I prompted.
Lacy thought for a minute, seeming to soften as we reached steadier conversational ground. “Yeah. If one of them played offense, so did the other. If one of them dated a girl, the other better find a friend.”
With a jolt I realized that even though Lacy likely hadn’t meant to imply it, this was probably the reason that Joe had asked me on a handful of dates in high school. Out of pity, plain and simple.
“If one of them did a kegger, the other one held their ankles,” Lacy continued, sounding more like herself the longer she spoke.
“If one of them stole a goat and left it in the principal’s office,” I added, “the other took the blame.”
“I’d forgotten about that.” Lacy’s face relaxed only a second before the pinched look returned. “Gross. There were those tiny turds all down the senior hallway, remember?”
“All too well,” I answered, before trying one last time to break through whatever shell my friend had been hiding inside. I sighed. “I have to ask again—are you sure that you should listen to Anton?”
Lacy frowned. “About what?”
“About not speaking to Charlie. He’s…” I tried to find the words. “He’s good at his job, and any little detail could help.”
Lacy stared at me, reconsidering before something loosened inside of her. “Tonight at halftime, during the game, Brett spotted me when I was coming back from the restroom and pulled me under the bleachers.”
I made a yuck face.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said, heading off my concerns. “Well, not at first. He said he needed to ask me something. Then, he told me that he wanted a few shots of me flirting with him, said he wanted to create drama for his new reality show.”
“What? Why?”
“He said that he wanted to make Presley jealous. I thought it was stupid, but I also wasn’t that surprised. I always figured that’s how those kinds of shows work. You know, almost everything is staged and scripted. I tried to laugh it off and get back to the game, but he wouldn’t let me go.”
“Exactly what does that mean?” My voice was husky with fatigue, but I was also deeply concerned.
“He blocked my way, told me that he wanted me and Presley to have a big fight over him on camera at the reunion party tonight.” Lacy huffed out a breath.
“He was so serious, so intense, but when I actually started getting nervous about his request, it was like he flipped a switch and went back to his old self. You know how charming Brett can be.”
Um, I must’ve had a different definition of “charming” because Brett had never been it for me, not even in that god-awful Small Town, Big Romance.
“I thought it was over until…”
“Until?”
Lacy shivered, which I suspected had nothing to do with the chill in the room. “Brett kissed me.”
“Noooo,” I said. “Did you kiss him back?” I tried to sound neither disgusted nor judgmental.
“Of course not.” She hesitated. “Or, maybe, for, like, a second, I don’t know. It just caught me off guard, and it’s… it’s Brett, you know? He was my first everything. My first love, the first guy I slept with, my high school sweetheart.”
I remembered that fact all too well, mainly because it was the only substantial thing we’d ever disagreed on. Finally I’d had to accept that the heart wants what the heart wants, but I’d been ecstatic when she’d finally moved on and started dating other guys in college.
“Tonight, when Brett grabbed me, I felt a kind of rush. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I also wasn’t exactly expecting him to… to try something under the bleachers at tonight’s game. We’re not kids anymore. When I pulled away, Brett was smiling, started talking about how much he’d missed me.”
“Basically the exact same thing he wanted you to say to him on camera.”
“Right.” Lacy rubbed at her forehead as if she was getting a headache.
“Did you tell Anton?”
“Not about the kiss, no, but it took me a while to get back to him, so when Anton asked where I’d been, I did mention what Brett had asked me to do. I mean, who cares about harmless flirting, especially with a high school sweetheart?”
“Um, maybe your boyfriend?”
“I know.” Lacy’s face fell. “I had no idea how much it would bother him.”
I thought of Anton at the reunion party in the ballroom, of how he’d teased her for dancing with Brett but then backed off. He hadn’t seemed angry, but something had obviously bothered him.
“I decided I would tell Brett no, and after that I wasn’t even planning to talk to him at the party tonight,” Lacy continued.
“Then, he practically pulled me onto the dance floor as soon as I arrived and whispered in my ear that I had to meet him in the Music Room at midnight. When I told him I didn’t feel comfortable leaving Anton alone at the reunion, he held me tighter, said that if I didn’t meet him, if I didn’t dance with him, if I didn’t act like everything was fine, if I didn’t…
” Lacy was crying now, struggling to let out words that seemed to cause her shame even though none of this was her doing, “Brett said that if I didn’t sleep with him tonight, then he had something on me. ”
Heat rushed up my throat. This was only getting worse. “He wanted you to sleep with him?”
Lacy raised her head up and down as if on autopilot, as if she could hardly believe what she was saying. “I don’t know if he planned to go through with it, but I…” She swallowed, obviously disturbed by the thought. “I think he wanted the two of us on camera, wanted Presley to catch us in the act.”
“So he didn’t just want you to flirt?”
Lacy hung her head. “He said he’d scanned the photos, and if I didn’t ‘play nice,’ he would send them to my clients. Those were his exact words: ‘Play nice or your career will be over.’”
Lacy had built her event planning business into something impressive, handling everything from school galas to political extravaganzas.
The pageant’s success—murder and all—had only increased her reputation as a reliable and ethical person who could operate in the most challenging of situations.
Her brand was her reputation, and these photos—whatever they were—could destroy all that.
The force of the threat struck me like a slap. Brett Brinkley had been blackmailing my best friend to sleep with him this weekend, threatening her career if she didn’t agree. I wanted to yell and scream, and if Brett wasn’t dead already, I might’ve been tempted to take care of him myself.
“How did Brett’s ‘ask’ go from ‘Will you flirt with me?’ to ‘Will you sleep with me?’”
“I have no idea,” Lacy answered. “But he seemed almost manic right before he started choking.”
“Like he was on drugs?” I asked, thinking this would explain so much.
“I don’t think so. More like he was on a power trip.”
The two of us were quiet as we considered next steps.
“It’s like he doesn’t—or didn’t—know you at all,” I added, thinking out loud. “You would never do something like that.”
Lacy didn’t speak immediately and I looked at her like I was questioning her sanity.
She quickly clarified. “No, I wouldn’t sleep with him, but… I was planning to meet him. I needed to get what he has—or had. That’s what I was telling him right before he started coughing.”
That would be why she’d been so close to him when he’d started choking and why she’d been rifling through his pockets after he’d died. Relief uncoiled in me even though I’d known she wasn’t guilty of anything. She couldn’t be.
“So… these photos. What could he possibly have on you?” I asked.
“He has pictures of me, photos I gave him on his eighteenth birthday.”
“Like glamour shots?” I guessed but then felt bad because her face told me it was so much worse.
She closed her eyes as if to block out what she had to say. “Like, nudes.”
At first words stuck in my throat, and when they emerged, they sounded almost like a groan. “Oh, Lacy, you didn’t.”
But even as I spoke, I knew she’d done just that.
Perhaps even worse, she hadn’t told me years ago or tonight, when we’d found her backstage with the body.
I’ve never been one to “slut-shame” – if a woman chooses to use her body as art or a thirst trap or otherwise, that’s up to her. But nudes? To Brett?
“I was young and impulsive. I figured it was our last few months together, so I wanted to give him a gift that was… memorable. I set up the old film camera I used the year I took darkroom photography, and I even developed them myself. I gave him three photos, each with a little note from me on the back. Back then I thought I was being smart by not texting the pictures.” Lacy’s eyes swelled with tears.
“When we broke up, I figured he threw them away or burned them or something, but he didn’t. ”
Lacy was growing more and more flustered.
“He told me…” She sniffed, blinking several times, as if she couldn’t believe the next few words were true, “he told me that he would send them to all of my clients on Saturday at midnight, that he would anonymously send them to TMZ and tell them that I was a former girlfriend of Brett Brinkley. He said I had until midnight tonight to decide if I would be a part of his… charade.”
“What an asshat,” I muttered, imagining him whispering threats to my friend. “What a dickhead, creep-o, dysfunctional… asshat!”
Lacy’s anxiety and anger were becoming my own, and the urge to protect her pulsed through me.
“How was he planning to send the photos?” I asked. “Email?”
Lacy nodded. “He said it is already scheduled to send. The last thing he whispered to me was, and I quote, ‘If you don’t do as you’re told, then the only person who can stop me is the one who got away.’”
“What does that even mean?”
“At first, I thought he was talking about me. Like…” Lacy pointed a finger and imitated Brett. “‘Only you can stop this.’ But now, I’m not so sure.”
“So when you were going through his pockets, you weren’t just looking for the photos?”
“I was looking for anything that might give me a clue to this elusive person who broke his heart, or damaged him so much that he would consider such a thing. A long shot, maybe, to think that there might be evidence on his person, but I couldn’t think of where else to start.
” Lacy’s face crumpled as she began to cry again.
I hated Brett, even if he was dead, for making her feel ashamed and anything less than an amazing human being. My heart pounded in my chest, but I tried to steady my own breathing so I could approach things reasonably. For her.
I wrapped my arms around Lacy, pulling her close. “This isn’t your fault,” I whispered, wishing I could shield her from whatever was coming next.
“But I’m the one who took the photos and gave them to—” Lacy cried harder, choking out the words.
“—to someone you trusted,” I reminded her. “He’s the one who was using them in the wrong way.”
Lacy settled a bit at that realization and wiped her nose, still sniffling as she said, “This weekend was not supposed to go like this.”
“Definitely not,” I agreed, checking my phone again for a signal. Nothing. As I reminded myself not to panic, we heard steps outside the door.
I didn’t even take a second to think about who would know about these stairs and why anyone would attempt them when there was another hundred thousand feet or so of the mansion to explore. “Hello?” I yelled. “Is someone there? We’re stuck in here.”
“Help!” Lacy said, jumping to her feet and overlaying my words with her shouts. “We can’t open the door.”
More steps. We heard someone try one door and then, blessedly, our own.
The door was flung open and there stood Savilla. I’d never been so glad to see her face, which was almost as surprised as our own.
“Thank God,” Lacy breathed.
“How did you know we were here?” I asked.
“I was looking for you,” Savilla said, before realizing that didn’t really answer the question. “And I use these back stairs as a shortcut around the house. I thought I heard voices. How did you two get up here?”
“We needed a quiet place to talk,” I said, deciding not to give away any of the confidences that Lacy had entrusted to me.
“I guess you found one,” Savilla said, flipping on a light switch that was three-quarters of the way up the wall.
The room was suddenly bathed in yellow light from a lamp that hung from the ceiling in the corner near the chest. “I used to play dress-up in here, so Daddy had a light fixture installed.” Savilla gestured at the dresses flung over our shoulders for warmth.
“I guess you found the pageant extras. My grandmother had a stash of accetrements.”
I narrowed my eyes, trying to decipher her actual meaning. Accessories? Accoutrements?
Savilla didn’t miss a beat. “She kept that trunk full in case anyone got a last-minute stain or tear, and when I eventually inherited the vintage pieces, Nanny Kate suggested I keep them in here. It was our hideout for a couple of years.”
Savilla’s face softened with the memory as she looked around the room. My guilt at keeping our sisterly connection a secret twisted inside me. That, combined with worry about Lacy and frustration over Charlie’s distance, wasn’t a good mix. But my emotional state didn’t matter right then.
Someone in this house could be a murderer, and that had to come first.