13 Gemma
Gemma
The screams had brought her to the sliders on the guesthouse. When she’d seen the murky outlines of people dragging something out of the pool, she’d gone running. Now she wished she had simply stayed in bed. Pretended she’d heard nothing. That the rain and wind had drowned it out.
How was she supposed to explain this to the girls? To Grant, who was still dead asleep under the covers? What was she going to do?
Gemma stood in the middle of the great room while Marshall, Sean, Juliet, and Suzy carried Lincoln inside. Lincoln’s body. The man was dead. Their host. The person who had invited them all here. The person who was supposed to save her husband’s career and her family’s future. Dead.
His hands, strangely covered by the sort of yellow gloves Gemma associated with washing dishes, trailed along the floor, heavy like blocks, the rubber squeaking on the hardwood.
They laid him down on the floor, just behind the rug that surrounded the couch, and each of them stepped back.
Sean turned around to slam and lock the door against the raging storm.
Gemma stumbled sideways a few steps. She’d never seen a dead body before.
Marshall, still wearing his clothes from last night, was crying nonstop silent tears.
Now that his brother was inside, he sat down heavily next to the body and drew his knees up under his chin like a child, rocking.
It was too quiet inside altogether. A total contrast to the tempest behind the windows.
Candice, who had been hovering with Trevor, already in their uniforms, at the edge of the room, let out a strangled wail and ran into the kitchen. Trevor quickly followed.
At least Hazel wasn’t here to see her husband all bloated and gray, spread out on the floor like a starfish.
She had been the one to find Lincoln, to pull him half out of the pool in the rain and wind and try to revive him.
When the others had found her, Suzy had explained, she’d been kneeling over him with her forehead against his, wailing and sobbing.
One of the house staff had helped her to her first-floor bedroom and given her a couple of Xanax. Hopefully, she was passed out by now.
“What happened to him?” Marley asked.
She stood on the far side of the long wooden dining table, clutching the sleeves of her light sweater.
There was something fidgety about her stance that made it clear she wanted to keep this giant piece of furniture between her and the body, as if it might protect her.
Her skin was sallow and dry, and her eyes were horribly bloodshot and puffy.
Gemma wondered what she had gotten up to last night.
She hadn’t taken Marley for a party animal, but she sure looked like she’d had too much fun.
“I mean . . . Hazel said that when she tried CPR, a lot of water came up,” Sean said, visibly shaking as he stood over his friend. He’d put on a rain parka that now sluiced water onto the floor around him in a ring. “Could he have passed out, fallen in, and drowned?”
“I’m gonna be sick.” Marshall scrambled to his feet, but he didn’t leave. He simply turned away from the body and covered his mouth.
“There were hundreds of people here last night,” Gemma said. “How did nobody notice and help him? Where was everyone?”
“Maybe it happened after he sent everyone home?” Juliet suggested.
Pale and fidgety, in nothing but an oversize T-shirt and a lace thong that flashed every time she moved, she could have been a slightly older friend of the girls’.
Her long hair was pulled into two low ponytails over her shoulders, and every bit of her was soaked through. She was not wearing a bra.
Juliet’s comment made Marley sit up a bit straighter. “Wait. He sent everyone home?”
Marshall nodded, his back still to the body. “Around midnight. He made an announcement and shut it all down so that people could get home before the storm got too bad.”
“That does not sound like Lincoln,” Marley commented.
From what Gemma knew of the man, she had to agree.
He was more the type to keep the festivities going all night and call it a hurricane party or something.
In an alternate universe, everyone from the Hollywood A-listers she’d seen sharing a bong by the hot tub to Coco P.
herself would be passed out on the furniture right now, awaiting whatever breakfast Hazel and her staff could provide.
There was a sudden itching at the back of her neck, and Gemma felt as if someone was watching her.
She turned around quickly to look at the open doorway to the massive kitchen, expecting to see Candice or Trevor or the cook, but no one was there.
Thunder rumbled again, this time close enough to rattle the windowpanes.
“But the staff is still here,” Gemma mentioned absently.
“Just three of them. The ones that live here,” Marshall told her. Then, off her baffled look, he added, “There are two apartments over the garage. Magdelena has one. Candice and Trevor share the other.”
Gemma blinked. She knew that Lincoln was rich and that this place was vast, but she’d had no clue he had live-in staff.
Imagine being trapped with your boss’s friends and family during a weather disaster and then your boss turning up dead.
Gemma would be in her room hiding under the covers right now.
“He has a cut on his head. Maybe he slipped and knocked himself out, and that’s why he didn’t wake up in the water?” Juliet suggested, chewing on the side of her thumb.
“That cut is from Josh,” Marley said.
Juliet stared at Marley. “What?”
“They fought last night,” Sean told her.
He touched his temple, and Gemma noticed that a yellow-and-purple bruise had bloomed there.
Probably also thanks to Josh. These people were a dumpster fire.
And she was stuck with them at least until the storm passed.
Thank God they at least had their own house.
The buffer of the yard and the pool and the patio. “Didn’t you hear?”
“Wait . . . you were also arguing with Lincoln,” Marley said to Juliet, speaking slowly as if a memory was just coming back to her. “Out by the tent. I saw you going at him. What was that all about?”
“I . . . we were talking. I wasn’t going at him. I just asked him about what was in my note. You’re saying they fought?”
Juliet’s bottom lip trembled. She looked confused and, suddenly, scared. She gripped her fingers in front of her, tugging on one after the other after the other. Gemma looked around. She knew where Grant was. She knew where Hazel was. Every other member of their little social group was here. But—
“Where is Josh?” Marley said.