Page 59 of The Last House Guest
Faith continued inside, the sound of her footsteps echoing on the wooden steps out of view.
I tried to think who had worn a blue skirt that night. Most people were in jeans, khaki shorts, a few sundresses with jackets over the top. It was impossible to remember what clothing people had worn. I could barely remember my own. There was only one person I knew by heart.
I closed my eyes and saw Sadie spinning in the entrance of my room.What do we think of this?Her blue dress, shimmering.You know you’ll freeze, right?Pulling on my brown sweater over the top.
Goose bumps rose in a rush.
From behind, from where Faith had stood, it would’ve looked like Sadie was wearing a skirt.
And suddenly, I saw Sadie take out her phone, seeing the message I sent:Where are you?And then:???
I saw her with the clarity of a memory instead of my imagination. Saw it with a fervor that made it perfectly true. Frowning at her phone, sending me that message—the last one, the one I never received. The dots lighting up my phone:
I’m already here.
CHAPTER 26
Iwas standing outside thebed-and-breakfast after Faith disappeared inside. I was glued to my spot, trying to process what she’d just told me. Another car had turned up the night of the party—and Sadie had been inside.
Sadie had beenright herea year earlier, stepping out of a car in the parking lot of the B&B, walking the path to the party. I looked into the trees down the path, imagining her ghost.
I DROVE BACK TOWARDthe Sea Rose, needing to be alone, to think. Everything I’d believed about that night was wrong. Could everything I’d thought about Sadie be wrong, too?
Over the years, our lives had become so tangled, pieces of each other indecipherable. The details blurring and overlapping. My home was her home, keys on each other’s rings, her thumb pressed to the front of my phone, the same tattoos—or was it a brand?
And yet how had I missed that she wasthere? She had arrived at the party. But somehow she’d ended up back on the cliffs behind her house, washing up on Breaker Beach. How?
I edged the car away from downtown, looping around the side roads to avoid the traffic, before cutting back toward the coast and the Sea Rose. All along, the night played over in my mind. The things I had told the police and the things I hadn’t.
Faith taking a swing at Parker outside, breaking the window. Connor arguing with Faith in the shadows after, by the time Luce came to find me. The bedroom door had been locked. I’d wanted to find the tape in the bathroom to secure the window, but someone else had been in there. I’d slammed my hand on the bedroom door, but no one answered.
Had Sadie been in that room when I’d pounded on the door? I’d found her phone in the house—in that very room. Maybe no one had moved it there. Maybe it was Sadie all along who had lost it. Placed it. Hidden it.
But that didn’t make sense. How had no one seen her leaving? No one had seen her at all, not that they were saying. Someone would’ve noticed her—how could you not? Greg Randolph, surely. And we would’ve seen her if she’d left through the back patio, walking down the path, heading toward the B&B parking lot.
But. The lights had gone out, the commotion on the patio. Ellie Arnold falling—or pushed—into the pool. She insisted she was pushed. She was adamant about it, furious that we didn’t believe her.
We had all moved to the back of the house then. Had been drawn to the scream, the chaos, like moths to a flame.
Had Sadie sneaked out the front while we were distracted?
I tried to picture it. Someone needing to get her out of the house. Looking frantically for the best option. The back door, no longer a choice. The car at the B&B, too far. What would they do? A faceless person looking through the bathroom cabinets, the dresser drawers—for anything. Looking through her purse, seeing the keys there. Finding mine instead.
The tire tracks in the grass I’d seen the next day when Faith’s father dropped me off—because my car had been blocked in.
I sucked in a breath. She had been there. What if she’d been in this very car.
I pulled over abruptly, at the curve of the road heading back into town, staring at the passenger seat. Looking for signs of injury. I ran my hands over the beige upholstery—worn and weary. I jerked up the emergency brake and looked under the seat. There was nothing but dirt, sand, debris—a year of memories.
But I remembered the next morning, when I’d returned for the car. How I’d sat in the seat, feeling a vague unfamiliarity to it. I’d thought, at the time, that it was my entire world, my perspective shifting at the loss of Sadie. But now...
My head spun, and I turned the car off. I walked around back, hands trembling, and slipped the key into the trunk lock. A dim light flicked on, and I peered into the empty space.
It smelled faintly of fabric, of gasoline, of the sea.
My hands shook as I ran my fingers across the material. The dark felt was slightly matted, covered with fragments of fibers. It had pulled away from the edges, peeling at the corners, from both time and use.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. Maybe this was just my imagination going three steps too far—forward and back.
