Page 36 of High Season
Now, some of this is pretty well-known stuff, so if you’re new here, and I know that lots of you are, there is just tons of information out there about all the various theories, all the background to the case. These are just some of my faves. And trigger warning on this one for drug use.
So first of all—Harrison Andreas. I mean, jeez, what a scumbag that man was. So, for those of you not in the know, Harrison was Evelyn Drayton’s third or fourth husband, depending on which way you split it. Now, the rumors are that there was trouble in paradise for these two, and Harrison was actually having an affair and planning to leave Evelyn. In fact, Harrison filed for divorce four weeks after Tamara’s death and believe me, that guy got a huge settlement.
But here’s the thing. Harrison and Evelyn’s prenup had an infidelity clause, meaning that Harrison forfeited his right to any of the Drayton fortune if he was unfaithful. And look, Harrison moved in with a new girlfriend the day after the divorce was finalized, so I think we can all speculate that he was indeed unfaithful. But guess what? Some of Tamara’s friends have since come out and said that Tamara actually knew about Harrison’s affairs—in fact, she could have been the only person in the family who had proof that Harrison was cheating. Could Harrison have wanted to unalive Tamara so that he still got a huge divorce settlement without Tamara messing things up for him? Lots of people think so.
And what about Evelyn herself? By all accounts, Evelyn Drayton was a pretty reckless mother. She drank, she partied, and she basically didn’t give a crap about her kids. And we know that Tamara was into partying, too, and lots of people think the so-called drowning might have been a convenient cover-up for Tamara OD’ing. You can totally see it, right? Tamara gets her hands on Evelyn’s stash, gets carried away, and boom. Evelyn’s looking at a manslaughter charge. And we already know that Evelyn was pretty close to the pathologist who carried out the autopsy on her daughter. Is it possible that she persuaded him to play down how intoxicated Tamara was that night?
And don’t even get me started on Rocco Mae. That’s Blake and Tamara’s deadbeat dad. It turns out that he was actually in the area when Tamara died, even though he’d told Evelyn and his kids he was in his home in Italy.Hesays that he’d visited a few weeks previously and added some time onto the end as a holiday, with his wife and youngest children coming out to meet him at a rented villa about a thirty-minute drive away from the Drayton home. He claims thatthere were tensions between him and the twins, and in particular, between the twins and his wife, Flora, which is why he didn’t want Tamara and Blake to know he was still around, but this all just sounds super sus to me. And what were these tensions anyway? Were they enough to be a motive for murder?
Or how about Blake? Everyone says that he and Tamara were close. Like, really, weirdly close. I mean, I’m not saying it’s a reason to suspect him, but I just have a weird feeling about it, you know?
And that’s not to mention all the guests that were there that night. You’ll have heard of Damien Wright, big Hollywood producer who was arrested after fatally shooting his daughter Olivia Wright, actually a friend of Tamara Drayton’s, back in the twenty-tens. Police said it was an accident, but there’s lots of speculation otherwise. Well, guess who was on the guest list at Evelyn’s party that night?
The police said that nobody else had any motive to hurt Tamara Drayton, but I, for one, disagree, and as always, there is so much more to this case than meets the eye.
Please give me a follow if you want to know more, and let me know in the comments. Who’s your number-one suspect?
Crimeathon67: Gotta be Harrison. That pic of him gives me major chills
CathrynJameson: I heard that one of Evelyn’s best friends had had a miscarriage a few days before the party. Could be like a kind of woman gone nuts with grief sitch!?
Justice4JJ: OK, hear me out, Rocco Mae hiring a hitman?
BenJackson__washere: Evelyn Evelyn Evelyn. Always said that woman RADIATES guilt. Also, it’s mad how many people who were at the house had shady shit going on!? Like whatttttt.
Posiegirl: This speculation is WILD. Let a dead girl rest in peace, guys.
THIRTEEN
2024
Gabby shows up at the house that night, the exhaust on her battered car announcing her arrival long before she knocks on the door.
“Have dinner with us,” Calvin says to Josie as he goes to answer it.
But Josie makes her excuses. She says that she’s tired, and that she’ll take a plate up to her bedroom instead. It’s not exactly a lie. The early start and long, hot dayhasexhausted her. But it also wouldn’t have been a lie to say that she can’t stand the thought of dinner with her brother and his girlfriend. Gabby’s kindness, and the inevitable questions about her meeting. Josie does not have the energy to deal with either.
From downstairs, Josie can hear the sound of Gabby and Calvin talking. Laughing. She’s surprised to realize that they’re speaking to each other in French. Calvin used to be so bad at it, when they first moved here, but now he’s fluent. To Josie, everything is stuck in the past. Everything is the way it was twenty years ago.
When Josie wakes the next morning, there are sounds coming from the room next door. A rhythmic tapping of a headboard against the wall. A low, animal moan.
It takes Josie a moment to fully come to consciousness. To understand what she is hearing. When she does, she scrambles to her feet, face burning. She grabs a thin sweater and pulls on a pair of pajama shorts, hurrying down the stairs so quickly that she turns her ankle on the bottom step and has to hop across the kitchen floor, desperately trying not to make a sound, trying not to be there at all.
It’s only when she’s outside that it occurs to her that she has nowhere to go. She hasn’t dressed properly to go down to the village, to kill an hour or two in a coffee shop. She has no friends who she could shelter with until the coast is clear, to laugh off the awkwardness of hearing her brother and his girlfriend having sex. In fact, there’s nobody here who would want to see her at all.
She walks slowly to the edge of the driveway, onto the scrap of a road. There’s a broad stone post inscribed with the house number that she still remembers her dad hammering into the ground, irritated that nobody could ever seem to find them, waiting for letters from home that rarely came. She perches there, her flip-flops grazing the ground.
She’ll tell them she couldn’t sleep, she thinks. That she went out for a walk to clear her head.
She wonders, briefly, how long Calvin will put up with her staying. How long before having his sister hanging around starts to grate on him and he begins to long for his own space again. She pushes her toes into the foam soles of her flip-flops. She’ll find somewhere new to live, as soon as she can save enough for a deposit. Where exactly she’ll go, she isn’t sure. Like always, the future seems to gape in front of Josie, vast and undefined. Sometimes, she imagines her life as a fall from a very high cliff, trying to grab on to the first thing that might stop each inevitable plummet. Sometimes, she finds a safer place to land. Sometimes, she manages to clamber up a few feet. Sometimes, the earth seems to crumble away from beneath her, and she is falling, falling all over again.
She lifts her face up toward the early morning sun, closes her eyes, and waits. She doesn’t open them, even when she hears the sound of a car rolling slowly up the hill. Even when the engine cuts, a handbrake creaking on.
“Not disturbing you, am I?”
She opens her eyes.
The man in front of her is tall. Tousled dark hair and a lean body. A deep voice with a lilt of French beneath a good English accent. Someone who’s been here for a while, who’s used to tourists, and who can spot Josie’s British genes from a mile off.
