Page 85 of The Fall of Iris Henley
“I would’ve,” Carter says, sneering. “Your boy liked to slum it sometimes. Loved those white trash girls.” He clenches his fists at his sides. “I didn’t care that he was fucking Lynette Zeiger. But when I pulled up to the cabin, I heard Hayden in there.” He pitches his voice high in a nasty impression of her voice. “‘You’re such a dog, how could you do this to me, why am I not enough for you?’” He stops talking abruptly and looks directly at me. “She didn’t give a shit about me. Or you either. All she wanted was him.”
I try to catch Hayden’s eye, but she won’t look at me. Tellingthe story kept Carter almost calm, at least for a moment, but then his lips curl up in a rictus grin.
“I just lost it. I fucking lost it. I got the gun out of his truck and I went inside, and the second they saw me everyone started freaking out. Like I was some kind of monster.”
“You were waving a gun around, Carter, of course everyone started freaking out,” Hayden mutters.
“I wasn’t even going to use it,” he says. “I wanted to scare them. I just… I don’t know what happened. I was pointing it and then… I don’t know. I don’t know.” He looks down at the gun in his hand, almost wonderingly. “I think… I think it was an accident? It’s so fucking easy to pull a trigger. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
My throat is bone dry. I can picture the scene so clearly. Hayden driven there by a possessive rage so white hot she couldn’t even register the irony of demanding answers from the guy she herself had been cheating with. Rocky, affable fuckboy Rocky, trying to de-escalate, holding his hands up to placate. Carter waving the gun, wild and inconsolable.
“I wasn’t going to shoot, I swear,” Carter says again. “But then she…”
She. Lynette.
“Lynette laughed at us,” Hayden says bluntly. She looks almost resigned as she says it. Like she’s been holding onto it all this time, and it’s almost a relief to set it down. “She laughed. Told us that we were all hypocrites and we all deserved each other.”
Oh, God, I can almost hear it. I can almost see it. Lynette, a blanket wrapped around her nudity, watching the idiotic high school soap opera we were all trapped in. Knowing as she did how delicate social connections could be and watching them squabble over the pieces. She’d opened her mouth and let out that hot, taunting laugh.
And Carter punished her for it.
“That’s why you shot her,” I whisper. “And then you killed Rocky. Because he was a witness. But why have you been catfishing me? Just to, I don’t know, see how far you could go? How much you could hurt me?”
“No,” Hayden says. “I was just trying to figure out what you knew. I didn’t know how else to do it. I swear, I wasn’t trying to hurt you worse.”
Carter starts to laugh again. “I told you it was stupid. She thought for sure she could get something out of you pretending to be that guy in Houston. Such a goofy plan. She thought maybe you’d tell Jonah that you thought your good friend Hayden was a murderer.” Hayden recoils, but for a moment she meets his eyes.
“You’rethe one who’s a murderer,” she hisses.
His movement is quick but awkward. He lunges at her, tries to grapple at her with his left hand, the gun lowered but still clenched in his right. All he gets is a handful of her hair gripped tight in his hand. He tugs it so it’s taut, leaning to sneer in her face.
“You made me kill my best friend,” he snarls.
My body is very still and quiet. It feels like everything—heart and lungs, blood and muscle—shuts down so that my mind has enough energy to understand what’s happening. I am eyes and ears and brain and nothing else.
Hayden is still crying, still shaking, but her eyes flash with hatred. “I didn’t make you do anything, Carter. I didn’t even know Rocky had a gun in his truck. You were the one who knew about it. You were the one who decided to grab it.”
There’s a loud crack. My entire body shudders. I think for a second he’s pulled the trigger. Then my vision clears and I see he’s hit her across the face with the pistol.
“Shut up!” He stands just inches from her, breath heaving.“This is on you. What happened to Rocky and Lynette was on you, and this is too.”
This is too.That’s when I know for sure.
He is planning to kill me out here.
“Look,” I say quickly. “I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m not. All I wanted was for the rumors to stop. I won’t go to the cops.”
He wheels around to face me again. The gun flashes up toward me. Something wet and red clings to one side of it. Hayden’s blood, I realize.
“Too late,” he says. For a second he sounds genuinely regretful. “You already posted your suicide note.”
CHAPTER 49
MONDAY, OCTOBER 24,8:53
KOENIG RANCH
“My… what?”
