CHAPTER ONE
"Death Screams at the Soul"
Monica sat on the floor of her family's old house, her jeans soaked in blood as she raked her hands through the curly brown locks of Tao-Lee Montgomery's hair just minutes after the girl had passed, humming a sweet lullaby.
The melody had no name. She'd made it up on the spot, or perhaps she had always known it and was only now remembering.
"You're beautiful," Monica had been saying on repeat for the last few minutes, staring into the dead girl's open eyes.
To Monica, Tao had never looked more beautiful than she did in this moment.
And Monica couldn't help but feel a strange and overwhelming pride.
She felt love, too, a version of it she had never felt for anyone living, because the living were always in motion, always just beyond reach, always capable of turning away.
This was different. This was hers completely.
She wasn't crying because she was sad. The feeling of love running through her system was simply overwhelming and she didn't know any other way to express it.
She leaned forward, her face coming close to Tao's, and ran her fingers across her slightly warm cheeks. Tao's body temperature had started to decrease, and in an attempt to warm her up, Monica pulled the dead girl's body closer to her own.
Monica looked down at her dead friend in complete and silent admiration.
Her salty tears dripped onto Tao's pale skin.
She stared into her lifeless eyes, and inching closer, she attached her lips to the dead girl's, kissing her sorrowfully, though receiving no response.
She hadn't expected one. She pulled back slowly.
Getting over herself, Monica began to stand up, brushing the imaginary dust off of her blood-soaked jeans, which only added to their crimson color as the blood on her hands covered the few spots of light blue left on the denim.
She walked over to the nearby bathroom, cleaned herself up, then redressed and put on a plastic suit and gloves to cover her clothes and skin before getting to work.
She cleaned the blood-filled space before her doorway, scrubbing it away with bleach, before getting to the most important task.
She put her hands under the smaller, dead female's armpits, pulling her up and onto the wooden surface of a nearby table, before she got to cleaning Tao's wounds with careful attention.
Monica had been planning this for some time now.
Though she'd hated Tao and how beautiful and successful she was, she had loved her at the same time and wanted all the attention she could give her.
She'd gotten close to Tao, done everything she told her to do in the name of loyalty, and all she had wanted back was a little attention.
Attention Tao had refused to give her. So, she had gone in search of it herself, and Taron had presented the perfect opportunity.
She had slept with him countless times in the hope that someone would catch wind of it. Someone who would pass the news to the heiress. And Priya Masahati had done just that, creating the perfect opportunity for Monica to lure Tao in.
She hadn't planned for Tao to be in so much pain.
She hadn't planned for her to be in any pain at all.
She had planned to thrust the knife into Tao's medulla oblongata, causing sufficient damage and severing the spinal cord: an effectively quick and painless death.
But as Tao's car had pulled into the driveway, Monica had realised she wanted a few more minutes with her before she passed.
So, at the very last moment, she had changed her strategy, and the change had brought consequences she hadn't entirely anticipated.
It had taken Monica four full days to prepare Tao and destroy any evidence of that night. She had driven Tao's Jaguar XJ into a lake a bit out of Hyattsville and had cleaned the house a total of five times, making sure she had left nothing behind.
In between those spaces of time, she'd be spending her hours with the Montgomerys, offering a helping hand, sitting with Taera, fielding calls, being everything they needed. Being indispensable.
As for the queen herself, Monica had embalmed Tao, preserving her carefully before she began to do her makeup and dress her the way she had always dreamt of seeing her.
Tao had been dressed in a formal white ball gown that more resembled a wedding dress, a pair of simple black Louboutins on her feet, and as for her makeup, it was done to the very best of Monica's ability.
She had been pleasantly surprised at how well it had turned out.
Her many years shadowing her parents at their funeral home had finally proven useful.
Monica had planned to put Tao on display.
She wanted everyone to see the beauty she saw in her, the beauty she had been unable to make Tao understand she saw.
So, she made Tao a bed, made purely of lilac roses, her favorite.
Monica had remembered that in the off-hand way Tao mentioned things, never knowing which details were being stored.
Monica knew just the place to lay her body.
At about two in the morning, Monica got up, gathered everything she needed, and set out for her destination, which was the most peaceful and beautiful place she could think of.
St. Benedict's Catholic Church. The garden.
The quiet of it at that hour, the smell of the night air, the way the stars looked above the old stone walls. It felt right.
With her last goodbye, Monica laid Tao to rest, promising to meet her again in the skies as she drove home in silence.
?
"As the authorities continue their search for the missing heiress Tao-Lee Montgomery, the nation continues to be in shock at her disappearance," blared the voice of Channel Six's main news reporter Joyce Higgins.
A disgruntled Taron-Lee Montgomery threw his half-full glass of whiskey at the television, creating a successful crack and sending the screen dark.
He didn't want to hear another word of it.
Not the carefully measured tone of concern, not the stock footage of the campus, not Joyce Higgins' practiced furrow of sympathy.
He sat in the silence he had made and tried to breathe through it.
"Taron!" His weeping mother called out from somewhere upstairs.
It had been a little less than a week since his sister's disappearance, and Taron-Lee Montgomery was officially going insane.
Unlike the rest of his family, who held onto hope that Tao was alive somewhere, Taron believed, or rather knew, that his sister was dead.
He could just feel it. He would never voice that to his parents.
He didn't have the right to take hope from people who were still holding it.
His father was slowly drinking himself to death while his mother had been sleeping in Tao's bed since they had reported her missing, holding onto his sister's pillow as if it were her.
Taron couldn't judge them. He wouldn't dare.
But he was angry. Mad that they were sitting back and watching while his little sister's body and the killer were out there somewhere, and it was eating him alive not being able to do anything about it.
He wanted to be on the front lines of his sister's search, but his parents wouldn't let him, in fear of him not returning. So he sat in their house and threw glasses at televisions and tried to find a shape for his grief that didn't destroy everything around him. He hadn't found it yet.
A soothing hand came down on his shoulder.
"It's going to be okay," came Monica's voice in Taron's ear. Soft and steady and warm. "They're going to find her."
Despite her sins, Monica Blanchard was there for the Montgomery family and they couldn't have been more thankful.
She hadn't been anything but helpful since they had called to inform her of Tao's disappearance.
She arranged meals, handled press inquiries at the door, sat with Taera during the long dark hours when sleep refused to come.
She was the picture of a grieving best friend and she performed it without a single visible seam.
Monica didn't feel a thing. Or rather, she had felt a brief flicker of something when she first saw the state of the family, but that feeling had soon been flushed away when the benefits of the current situation made themselves present to her.
She was practical above all else. She had always been practical.
It was perhaps the thing she and Tao most genuinely had in common.
Still, in the private dark of her own mind, she couldn't help thinking of that night with something close to fondness.
The way the house had gone quiet. The way she had sat on the floor afterward with Tao's hair between her fingers.
The way it had all felt, in the end, like the only honest thing she had ever done.
The embalming. The dressing. The lilac roses.
The careful preparation of the body, the kind of attention Monica had spent years wanting to give Tao in life, the kind of total focus that Tao had never quite turned back in her direction.
She had cleaned and prepared and dressed and arranged everything with such tenderness that she surprised even herself.
She had cleaned the house five times and while she visited the Montgomerys between tasks, she made tea, held Taera's hands and sat with Taron on the stairs and let him talk about his sister. She listened carefully to everything he said, filing it away, looking for edges.
?
Loud cries of sorrow blared through the Montgomery household as Taera Montgomery cried her heart out at the news being relayed to her, her husband, and her son.
She was inconsolable, and Vincent Montgomery knew he couldn't do a thing to ease the pain his wife was feeling. His own heart clenched at the sound of her cries. He stood beside her with his hand on her back and said nothing.
Taron-Lee Montgomery felt nothing.
He had already known she was dead, but hearing it confirmed as a fact only added to the emptiness that had been building in him all week. There was a particular cruelty in being right about something you had desperately wanted to be wrong about.
Tao-Lee Montgomery's embalmed and beautified body had been found in the peaceful pastures of St. Benedict's Catholic Church, just a few kilometres from the Montgomery's Foxhall mansion.
She had been found in the early morning by one of the nuns tending the garden, who had been so shocked by the dead girl's beautiful presence that she hadn't been able to utter a word since.
The police had noted the careful preparation of the body.
The press had noted the lilac roses. The photographs had gotten out within hours and had spread across every platform which would have impressed Tao enormously.
"Hey," came Monica's voice behind Taron as she wrapped her arms around him from behind. "We'll find out who did this," she whispered, rubbing his back slowly. "I promise you that."
He let her hold him. He had no energy left to do anything else. And Monica stood there with her arms around the brother of the woman she had killed and closed her eyes and felt, if not peace, then something adjacent to it.