Chapter 32
I sprint along the hallway towards my room. I plan to hole up there for the rest of the night, stick a chair under my door handle and lock myself in. I can bank up the fire and wait out the night. I doubt I’ll sleep, but I’ll be safe.
Tomorrow, everything will seem clearer.
Hopefully.
And whether it does or not, I’ll get out of here. I’ll walk to the village myself, early. Get a head start on them and get help.
Whatever might come of that.
I’ll let the authorities decide what happened here, and what happened on West Sands, if they want to go back and probe that death too.
My mind is all over the place. Who killed Gen and Alex?
Me? Becca? After all she was the first one to trip out that lie. She hated Gen and wouldn’t have wanted Alex ruining her blissful new life.
Leo and Kimmy? Taking turns to protect each other. They claim to have been together all last night, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Any one of them – Leo, Kimmy, Becca – could be setting me up.
For the first time Jameson’s face comes to mind. No. Absolutely not.
I believe in Jameson’s innocence more strongly than I believe in my own.
He adored Alex.
But he admitted to hating Gen.
And he was gutted that Alex had slipped off the wagon, let himself down, turned on me.
I hate this climate of fear and suspicion. That’s the trouble with amnesia: it slices into the mind, creates holes into which the memories can slide, hide and be lost. It makes you unable to fully trust yourself.
And that sort of self-doubt makes the mind a scary place to dwell.
When I arrive at my door, there’s a quiver of fear that I’m going to open it and find yet more evidence stacked against me – whether indication of my guilt, or more planted clues to trip me up, hardly matters.
My hand hesitates on the door handle.
I hate the thought that Alex died thinking I might have killed Gen. Even if I’m able to prove – to myself and the world – that I didn’t, he’ll never know the truth.
I think back to the night he died. The way he shadowed me, always trying to get me on my own. The way he kept looking at me so intensely, like there was something he wanted to say, or something he wanted me to work out.
Before I open my door I make up my mind. Everyone else is downstairs; if I’m going to do it, it must be now. I turn and walk quickly in the opposite direction. I’m going to search Alex’s room for clues.
Becca said Alex was treating this like a real-life murder mystery.
If he came here invested in uncovering what happened to Genevieve maybe there’s something in his room that will give me insight into his thinking: notes, some document that outlines his ideas about Gen’s death? That might be too much to hope for.
Perhaps it’s a waste of time, but I have to try. Alex died after voicing the opinion that I killed Gen. Maybe I’ll find something in his room that explains how he arrived at that conclusion, something beyond circumstantial.
God, I hope not.
I hang on to the belief that I’ll find something to point in a different direction. If he was playing detective maybe Alex was just getting started that night, accusing me – perhaps I wasn’t his prime suspect, just the first play in a complicated game.
Alex’s room is at the end of the corridor. My anxiety ramps up as I get closer. When I reach the door, I screw up my courage and turn the handle.
My senses are assaulted by him: his hoodie chucked on the bedpost; a self-help book splayed on the floor by the bed, the smell of his aftershave lingering in the air.
The room is a mess – bedcovers tossed, suitcase upturned, and clothes scattered.
I can’t tell if Alex was just horrendously untidy, or if someone has been in here already, searching for something.
Both are distinct possibilities, and the fact that I can’t rule out the latter makes me increasingly nervous.
I have a poke around, but there’s no sign of anything I can use – no helpful notebook outlining Alex’s ruminations about Gen’s death and neatly exonerating me.
I’m worried about leaving traces of myself here, and also about being discovered. If I’m right, and I’m not responsible for hurting him, then there’s a killer in our midst, an individual who might go to extreme lengths to cover up what they’ve done.
Framing me is their chosen approach, which actually keeps me safe for now, buying me time.
Hopefully, that individual isn’t currently creeping through Tarnmore looking for me, or lying in wait to see what I might do next.
What might they do to silence me – a push down the stairs, something slipped in my drink …?
Another ‘accident’ is going to look increasingly unbelievable. There’s no way that two – or more – of us could die at one house party without arousing suspicion. But that fact doesn’t eradicate my fear. If anything, it exacerbates it.
Maybe this perpetrator doesn’t care anymore. Maybe they have glimpsed a way out. And maybe they’re deranged enough to believe their own invulnerability.
But who?
There are compelling cases for Becca, Kimmy and Leo. Circumstantial, of course, but no weaker than the case against me.
Except for the very physical – possibly planted – evidence currently hidden in the corner of my room.
Please, not Jameson.
Euan, maybe? Could he have somehow glimpsed Leo sneaking out of Becca’s bedroom the other night, dressed in Alex’s hoodie, jumped to the same conclusion as me that it was Alex she was dallying with, and lured him up to the falls to take revenge?
But there’d be no reason for him to try to frame me – if Euan pushed Alex into that ravine, it would’ve been in his best interests to make it seem like an accident. Plus, he didn’t know us before this week. He has no idea of our history, no link to Gen and West Sands.
And I just can’t shake the conviction that Alex’s death has to come back to her.
Without the deliberately sabotaged phones there’d be no reason for anyone to think it wasn’t an accident. Someone wants Alex’s death linked to Gen’s drowning, which means that the same person who drowned Gen, pushed Alex and is now trying to make me take the fall for it.
Unless it was me.
Back to that then.
I leave Alex’s room as I found it, close the door gently behind me. I creep back along the corridor to my bedroom, holding my breath. I only let it out once I am in the room with the chair jammed beneath the handle.
I’m fucking terrified.
I sink to the floor and wrap my arms around my knees, my hands starting to shake as the adrenaline that’s been hurtling through my body starts to ebb away.
I consult the carriage clock on the mantle and am shocked to realise that it’s only 7 p.m. It feels much later, but then it’s been dark for hours and so much has happened today.
I take a quick shower, but put my clothes back on. I need to be ready for anything. In need of distraction, I blow-dry my hair, then I eye my choices of reading material, wondering if I have the concentration to read.
Looking for Alaska. Perhaps this is the moment to finally read it. I want to feel close to Gen tonight, for all her faults.
Close to my old self, too.
I turn to my nightstand, but of course the book isn’t there.
I remember hurling it at the wall, the thud of its spine snapping as it tumbled.
Feeling horrible now for maiming Gen’s book, I hasten to the corner of the room where I flung it.
My suitcase sits there, along with a wastepaper bin filled with cotton pads from when I removed my make-up the other night.
I know the book isn’t in my case – I know exactly what’s in there, though I’d rather not think about the contents.
I grope around on the floor for the book, but I can’t find it.
Has someone taken it? But why would anyone do that – it’s just an old paperback.
On impulse – driven by the certainty that the book must be somewhere – I rifle through the layer of cotton pads in the bin and there, underneath, feel the papery corners of the book.
It must have tumbled into the bin when I threw it at the wall.
I extricate the book, wipe it carefully on my jumper, although there’s nothing in the bin that could really have contaminated it.
I carry the book over to my bed, smoothing out the cover.
Sitting on my bed, legs crossed, I finally open it.
I don’t know where to start – the beginning, or the place marked with Gen’s tasselled bookmark?
But the book falls open, like hair falling into a natural parting.
There’s a piece of paper tucked between the pages.
I slide it out, my heart in my mouth, a premonition of something portentous to come—
What am I about to find?
A shopping list scribed in Genevieve’s hand …? A bus ticket, a receipt? She always did fill her books with the detritus of daily life.
Or something that mattered to her, something she cared to preserve, tucking it between these pages for later. The prospect of reading Gen’s own words one more time – one of her funny, lyrical notes, perhaps – is overwhelming. I’d love it to be that.
I turn over the page. The paper is worn soft from being pressed inside the book all these years.
It’s a newspaper article.