Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
I stepped off the elevator and onto the second floor. In front of me was a huge, windowed terrace overlooking the gardens. Even in the dark of night, the view of the mountains was striking, the moon and stars illuminating the ridges like a backdrop on a film set.
The second floor was surprisingly difficult to navigate, rooms practically running into one another and too many doors to choose from. I was glad that Savilla had shared her to-scale dollhouse with me or I would’ve been completely lost.
I ended up wandering through an art gallery, complete with what appeared to be authentic Monets and Renoirs.
Next, I stumbled across a sitting room with pockets of wingback chairs and massive fireplaces at either end before I hit a dead-end storage room filled with cutlery and china.
I passed signs for a handful of rooms: The Bachelor’s Hall, which ran into both the Billiards Room and the Smoking Lounge, and ended in the simply and aptly named Music Room.
The space was more like a grand hall to host small concerts of fifty or so, and I recognized it from the footage of Brett’s home visit, where he’d played his hit song.
Rows of chairs were arranged in a circular formation around a grand piano, and as I walked into the room, I spotted Lacy in the corner on her knees in front of a tall storage cabinet containing twelve narrow drawers.
Pages of sheet music were spread around her; she was so focused that she didn’t even realize I’d entered.
“What are you doing up here?” I said, quietly enough to try not to startle her.
I failed. Lacy jumped and grabbed her chest. “Oh my God. I’m glad it’s just you.” She puffed her cheeks and bent forward at the waist, shuffling pages again.
“Have you taken up an instrument that I don’t know about?” I knelt beside her and thumbed through one of Bach’s concertos. “Started rehearsing for a debut performance at Carnegie?”
Lacy looked at me with an expression that said she didn’t have time for jokes. “You were right. Brett was such an asshat.”
“Yep,” I confirmed, thinking of our junior year when he’d temporarily broken up with her on her birthday, dated a cheerleader for six weeks, got dumped, and then asked her out again on Valentine’s Day, probably just so he wouldn’t be alone.
Years ago I’d asked Lacy what she saw in Brett, and she’d given the most astounding answer: He’s broken and he doesn’t mind who knows.
He just is who he is. Perhaps that kind of transparency and self-awareness is attractive to some people, but personally, I don’t mind a few repressed feelings, especially if they reek of animosity.
Still, that had been more than a decade ago. We were adults now—and, more importantly, Brett was dead—so why was my friend in an obscure room of the Rose Palace, rifling through a music cabinet?
“Okay, so you were supposed to meet him here at midnight.”
“I’m looking for…” Lacy stopped, dropping one of the pieces of music she’d been holding, and stared into my eyes, trying to tell me something beyond the words she was saying.
“I thought he might’ve… I don’t know… left behind something, anything, to help me hack into his damn email account.
” She was desperate enough that her line of reasoning made sense.
“He said if I met him here and did what he wanted, then he would hand over the login information to the email account that he planned to send the pictures from. It was, like, a twisted game to him—not only did I have to agree to his conditions, I also had to login into his account and delete the email myself. Since I didn’t find anything in his pockets, I thought he might’ve put the password somewhere in here before the reunion party started.
I had to at least look.” Lacy’s face fell and her shoulders rolled forward as she dropped her head into her hands, her voice growing shaky.
“Anton was angry, so I left him downstairs with a drink.”
I’d been so focused on figuring out who might’ve murdered Brett that I’d left my friend to figure out how to save her reputation on her own. “What’s the account name?” I asked, redirecting my full attention to her now.
She hesitated as if she didn’t want to say it out loud.
“Lace, it’s me,” I reminded her.
She took a deep breath. “The account name is allmyladies@.”
My stomach turned.
“I already tried to hack in. It didn’t work, but I did get this.” Lacy held up her phone to show the password hint to the account: diamond numbers, hashtag, lowercase, name of the one that got away.
“That is nonsensical,” I said, before taking a beat to reconsider. “Except, Brett did tell you that the only one who could stop him was the one that got away. Maybe this is what he meant?”
“That’s what I was thinking.” Lacy nodded. “Earlier tonight I asked Presley if she had any idea what it meant. She looked at me with these big eyes and asked if Brett had threatened me.”
I thought of how I’d spoken to Presley in the kitchen earlier that evening. She’d also claimed to have no idea about the identity of the person who’d inspired Brett’s hit single or his email password.
“I didn’t feel comfortable explaining everything to her, but I think she, like, somehow knew about Brett’s threat, but then we got interrupted by the police needing to question her again.
” Lacy’s expression was pained. “I know he stayed at the estate occasionally, even recorded some music here, so I was looking for something by him or about him. This is all I found.” She held up a piece of paper with typed lyrics.
“Ugh. ‘The One That Got Away’ again?”
“Yep.” Lacy handed it over to me. At the bottom was scribbled Brett’s signature, a date, and a message.
“What’s that say? To my…” I was struggling to read his handwriting.
“I’m pretty sure it says, To my dark lady: a rose for the rose that got away.”
“My dark lady?” I asked, recoiling. “He doesn’t mean…”
“It’s not me,” Lacy insisted. “I’m sure of that. I think he meant it as a reference to Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.”
“Which is?” I tried to recall a detail I was pretty sure I’d never paid attention to in the first place.
Lacy had always been the more literary of the two of us. “It’s the mistress who inspired a bunch of his sonnets. We don’t know who she was.”
I studied the words and date right after the dedication: To us & June 2021. “That would’ve been during one of the pageants, right?”
“Probably. Number ninety-six?”
“Do you remember if Brett came back to Aubergine for that one?”
“God, who knows? Maybe. He and Mr. Finch seemed weirdly close, so I guess he could’ve been at any of them.”
I gave it some thought. “And he released his song almost two years later, in early 2023.”
Lacy tapped at her phone to look it up. “It hit the charts and stayed there for a few weeks.”
“Did you see him in between that time at all?”
Lacy shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
I stood and walked to the piano, quietly beginning to play the melody line on the sheet music.
Aunt DeeDee had forced me to take piano from fifth to eighth grade, and while I remembered only the most basic musical terms, I could still pluck out the notes from a score.
I played through the chorus before speaking again.
“So, he came to the 2021 pageant, he recorded the song in early 2023. Then, he made his TV debut on Small Town, Big Romance in fall 2023.”
Lacy narrowed her eyes at me. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that if we can find the person he called his rose, the person he would’ve known in June 2021, then maybe we can figure out his password—and perhaps better understand who might’ve had something to do with his death.”
“Who else would’ve been here at the pageant and here this evening?” Lacy asked.
And as soon as she said the words, we both knew the answer.