Chapter 29
I tiptoe up the staircase for what feels like the eight-hundredth time in the last few days.
I waited until night fell; it was a long day. Trey had decided that with no idea when help might arrive or when the storm would abate enough to get back to the mainland, we should move Carl’s body so we could use the kitchen.
“We have to be able to cook. We can’t leave him out here to…you know… They’ll understand,” he said, and whether he was referring to his private security team or the actual police, I didn’t know.
Trey took the linen and bound it tighter around his friend’s body, hiding him from view completely.
I had gritted my teeth, grabbed one end of a wrapped foot, and helped Viv, Trey, and Rachel carry Carl down to the creepy crew mess.
We gently laid him in the first starboard room and closed the door.
We had excluded Ashley and Fiona from the task for obvious reasons, but I suspect I’ll be having awful dreams about carrying a literal deadweight for years to come.
I didn’t bother fighting Trey. I was too tired, too weighed down with grief for all the people we’ve lost already.
When night finally fell and everyone retired to their rooms, drawn and drained from the day, I slipped out of bed and back into the hall.
Now I quietly approach Piper’s room, knowing it’ll be empty.
The thunderstorm picked up in the last hour or two.
Frequent flashes of light illuminate the dark interior of Empress and thunder growls overhead.
My bare legs prickle with goose bumps. I’ve slipped back into already-worn clothes that passed the Sniff Test—shorts and my sweater layered over a tank top.
My top half is cozy enough, but my lower body is freezing and shaky.
My bare feet move lightly as I creep into Piper’s room, holding my breath as if I’m expecting her to jump out from the bathroom, but no one appears, not even the ghost—which is telling.
There haven’t been any strange occurrences since Piper went into the water.
She never answered my question about her involvement in the haunting, but she could have been facilitating everything.
Making me think Elena was roaming the boat so I’d poke around and get help.
Had Piper filled my vents with rotting fish? Projected an image of a waterlogged, briny body on to the walls? Left the message on my mirror?
Not important, I tell myself. Not now.
I make my way to Piper’s bedside table. It’s gray ash, and a silver-accented lamp sits on top of it, but I don’t dare click it on.
Instead, I reach out and slowly pull open the top drawer.
It slides out on its track smoothly and silently.
The room is dark, but I brought my fully charged phone with me—I tap the button that will awaken the home screen and use the light to examine the inside of the drawer.
There’s a hip flask of vodka. An assortment of hair scrunchies. A very expensive-looking gold chain bracelet that’s discarded at the bottom like an unwanted shoestring. And there, in the middle of all the random detritus, is Piper’s phone. I let out a sigh of surprise and reverently pick it up.
Holding someone else’s phone is like holding a piece of their soul.
Even Sage wasn’t comfortable with me touching hers.
Looking back, maybe that’s because she was being shady, taking notes on my book or drafting on a Google Doc when I thought she was texting, but it had felt normal to me.
What’s on your phone is yours alone. So to be holding Piper’s, in its soft green case, feels wrong.
But at least there’s not a bloody fingerprint on Piper’s phone.
This is clearly what she was directing me to. She told me six digits: a password code. I rack my brain, wishing I listened harder, wrote them down sooner. There was a two, a three, a five. That much I remember. And multiple repeating digits. But in what order?
2-0-0-3-5-5?
I try it, tapping the lock screen. The phone vibrates, shaking its head no at me.
Dammit.
I try 2-2-0-3-3-5 next. The phone waggles a finger at me again, chastising. Wrong again.
I try two more variations, but both times the phone shakes itself and refuses entry.
Fuck, I think. If I don’t get this one, the phone will be disabled.
I sit for a moment, closing my eyes, Piper’s phone hot in my hand. I remember her pressing against me on the deck, her scent, her voice in my ear, murmuring her final goodbye.
“2-0-3-3-5-5.”
Shakily, I tap the numbers in.
Her home screen appears, and I almost drop the phone in relief. I sink to my knees on the floor beside her bed and stare at the screen, wondering why on earth Piper wanted me to be able to get into her phone. It feels wrong to snoop, but that was clearly her intention.
There are surprisingly few apps on Piper’s phone.
The staple social media icons are grouped together in one folder, of course.
But there aren’t the typical data-tracking or face-editing apps I’d expect for an influencer as big as her.
And when I tap into her messages, I’m surprised to see almost every thread has been deleted.
There’s a group chat called “Empress” that I suppose I haven’t been added to yet, and a thread with Viv that has a few short messages about content, but besides that there’s nothing.
Strange.
When I tap into her photo album, it’s even more shocking—she has deleted nearly every single photo or video from her phone.
There are four items in the album: Two are shots of Piper decked out in expensive fashion for future social media posts, one is a grainy image of the storm from what must be her bedroom window, and the fourth is a video from a little over a month ago.
I notice the time stamp at the bottom corner—it’s almost twenty minutes long.
Maybe that’s why Piper deleted everything else; maybe she didn’t have enough room for a video of that length.
I tap on the video and it expands to fill the whole screen.
The frame shakes, dark, blurry, and then it stabilizes as someone sets the phone down and walks away.
Piper. She’s wearing crisp black slacks and a loose maroon crop top with a plunging v-neckline.
She strides away from the phone, which must be propped up.
I can tell from the angle that the phone is on one of the high-top tables on the other side of the kitchen island, next to the wall of windows on the port side of the yacht.
The sun is setting in the video; the time code says 6:46 p.m., and the light bathing the kitchen is molten and tinted orange.
The video’s frame captures the whole kitchen and part of the staircase. The living room is off camera, but Piper has the ratio of the phone set to 0.5x, so everything else is visible, proportions slightly skewed like a fish-eye lens.
Piper walks over to the island, turns, and eyes the camera.
She’s the only one there. She must not be satisfied with the placement, because she picks up a small potted plant from the island and walks back over to the camera, putting it down off to the right.
The plant cuts into the corner of the screen, but the majority of the kitchen is still visible.
Piper’s hiding the phone, I realize. She’s doing what Viv did to me a few days ago—secretly recording the room. Which means the other girls probably don’t know this video exists.
My heart splutters hard against my ribs like a faulty car engine. For a few minutes, nothing happens. Piper stands next to the island, ignoring the camera, but making sure she’s in the center of the frame. Finally, Viv appears.
“You ready?” she asks.
“This is overly aggressive,” Piper responds. “Can’t you talk to her like a normal person?”
“I tried that. You know I tried that. Look how that went. She ignored me. Actually, scratch that, she got even worse afterward. This will show her we’re serious.”
“It’s…intense.”
I’ve never heard Piper like this before. She doesn’t sound like the brash, confident girl I interacted with these past few days. She’s timid, nervous.
“We’re going to talk to her straight. Like an intervention,” Viv assures Piper. “Oh, here are the others.”
The twins and Fiona walk into frame, gathering around the island. Fiona is shifting from side to side and chewing on a cuticle. The twins are very quiet. For a full minute, the girls stand around the island, waiting. Not speaking.
My blood is cold. What am I watching? Why did Piper record this?
Then a new voice chimes from off-screen. “Where are you guys? Kitchen?”
She comes up from the staircase, waltzing on-screen from the left corner.
My heart leaps at the sight of her alive, smiling, breathing.
Her beautiful curls are loose around her cheeks, and she’s wearing a black bodysuit with a leopard-print beach cover-up.
The gold cuff bracelet gleams on her right wrist.
“Elena, come here,” Viv calls her over.
Elena grins to see the girls standing around the island. “Family meeting? Or is this because your little sneak attack last week didn’t work, Viv?”
“Come on, Elena,” Viv says wearily. “Sit. We want to chat.”
Elena laughs, a tinkling, intoxicating sound that burbles through the phone speaker so loudly that I frantically turn the volume down and hunch closer to the floor behind Piper’s bed.
“I’m sorry, Viv, but I’ve made up my mind,” she says. She takes the seat offered to her anyway, one of the clear island stools between Rachel and Ashley. “Don’t take it personally.”
“Don’t take it personally?” Viv says, her voice cold. “How can I not? You’re leaving Empress to go work for my boyfriend.”
“Trey’s not your boyfriend,” Elena points out. “You know his deal. He’s a free agent.”
“No, he’s not,” Viv hisses.