Page 80 of The Getaway

Her stomach flooded with searing-hot dread. Up ahead, she could see the closed door of the storage room. Why would the door be closed if Marley was still in there? She wanted to call out for someone. Didn’t want to do this alone. But she couldn’t find her voice.

She saw Trevor’s limp body, his legs splayed. Saw the blood. The bone. The hair.

She saw Juliet falling, the terror in her eyes, the odd angle of her neck on the stone.

And Lincoln. Drowned? Electrocuted? Had he known what was happening? Had he been scared?

Not Marley. Not Marley. Not Marley.

Please, not Marley too.

Suzy stopped in front of the door, steeled herself as best she could, and opened it.

It took her eyes one, two, three blinks to adjust to the darkness within. It wasn’t until the body on the floor came into focus that she started screaming.

43

Gemma

“Grant, why are you acting so weird?”

Gemma braced her feet against the floor of the rented SUV, her hand gripping the door handle. The sky was still dark and ominous, and the access road was littered with debris. Fallen branches, mostly. But also a table umbrella, gnarled and twisted; a half-crushed plastic toddler car; and a weather vane, which stuck straight up out of the dirt road, having speared itself into the earth. Grant drove around all this like he was in Formula One, accelerating harder after each time he was forced to slow down. It was making Gemma feel nauseous and discombobulated.

“Weird? I’m not acting weird.” Grant flexed his fingers away from the steering wheel, as if he’d been gripping it too hard. “Is it weird to want to get my family out of there and away from those people? They’re all out of their freaking minds. Suzy killed one of her best friends. She probably killed Lincoln and Trevor too. And Sean just freaking shot a gun! Marshall might be dead by now. I wasn’t going to let you and the girls hang around there for one more minute.”

He was red faced and sweating and definitely way too tense to be driving.

“You don’t have to protect us, Dad,” Vienna said, leaning forward from the back seat.

“Put your seat belt on!” Gemma said through her teeth.

She held her breath as they hurtled toward a huge water-filled divot in the road.

“Watch!”

Grant cut the wheel, and the girls squealed. He bumped over something—a rock? A tree limb?—then righted the car again. There was a bark from the back seat.

Gemma stilled. Was that—?

She whirled in her seat. Wintour was sitting at attention on Florence’s lap. “You stole Suzy’s dog?” The girls both stared at her, eyes wide, clearly wondering what she was going to do next. “Girls!”

“Well, what did you want us to do, Mom?” Vienna whined.

“We couldn’t leave her there!” Florence added.

“Suzy is totally unstable. She basically killed her best friend.”

Gemma sat back down in her seat, a wave of car sickness crashing through her. She always felt nauseous when she faced the wrong way in a car or on a train, even for just a second. She closed her eyes and groaned.

“Dad, could you please slow down?” Florence said in a small voice.

“Mom, are you okay?” Vienna added.

They heard a siren in the distance and the whomp, whomp, whomp of a helicopter overhead. Wintour started barking again, a steady, staccato beat, almost in time with the chopper. Gemma tilted her head to try to see the helicopter, but the sky was blocked by low-hanging branches.

“Can you please put a muzzle on that thing?” Grant snapped, which only made her bark louder.

“Dad!” The girls were horrified.