Page 35 of Deadly Little Scandals
After that, things got rural, fast. Our drive ended outside a gate. The grating beneath it prepared me for the possibility of cows.
“Sawyer.” Victoria nodded toward the gate. “Would you do the honors?”
She probably expected me to be horrified of the mud or the fact that the headlights on the golf cart couldn’t compensate for how quickly things had gotten dark when the summer night had finally lost its sun.
But darkness I could handle. Mud I could handle. I had a healthy respect for—and accompanying wariness of—cows.
Trespassing I tended to take on a case-by-case basis.
“We have to cut through here to get to the woods.” Victoria took note of my hesitation, however brief. “There’s already a trail from point A to point B. Having second thoughts, Taft?”
“Sawyer doesn’t have second thoughts!” Sadie-Grace insisted from the golf cart behind us, loyal to the bone. “Sometimes, she doesn’t even have first thoughts!”
Thank you, Sadie-Grace.I jumped out of the cart and opened the gate. Mud flicked up onto my lower calves as I walked back to the golf cart. Aunt Olivia was not going to be happy about the state of my sandals.
Once I was situated behind the wheel again, Victoria leaned between Lily and me and waved me forward.
“The Candidates are many,” a White Glove called out behind us. “The Chosen are few!”
Victoria didn’t sit back down. Instead, she braced her hands against the frame on either side of the cart, her arms and legs forming an X that I could only partially see when I glanced back at her in the dark. She angled her face skyward, her long hair waving behind her, lost to shadow, as I gave the golf cart a little more gas.
“Let the games,” Victoria murmured, “begin.”
t became clear pretty quickly that the primary game in question waschase. The woods were vast, uneven, and littered with rocks, trees, and the kind of dense underbrush that a golf cart could only plow through going full speed—and only because these particular golf carts had a lot more horsepower than the kind you’d find on a golf course.
“Truth or dare?” Victoria yelled in my ear as we hit a bump that sent us airborne—and swerving to miss a tree. Behind us, I could hear another cart full of girls shrieking—and closing in.
“Really?” I shouted back, easing off the gas just enough to hang a turn. “You want to play Truth or Darenow?”
Our headlights illuminated the woods for just three or four feet in front of us. I aimed for what I hoped was a bit of a clearing and gave the cart enough gas to tear through the brush.
Victoria may have tightened her hold on the cart, but she didn’t show any signs that her heart rate had ticked up even a beat. “My mother is thirty-five years younger than my father. I’m the family scandalandthe much-beloved baby. It’s called multitasking. Truth or dare, Taft?”
“Truth!” Lily yelled as we picked up speed. The shrieking behind us got louder and our pursuers closed in. “She’ll take truth.”
“Excellent choice,” Victoria commented. I hauled it ninety degrees to the left, hit a clear patch, and managed to circle back behind the other cart, flying past them before they’d registered what was happening.
Victoria chose that moment to let loose her question. “Why did you ask me about Ana?”
“Who’s Ana?” Lily said beside me.
This time, I took a major bump on purpose. Golf carts didn’t come with seat belts, so we all bounced upward, fast enough and far enough to nearly hit our heads on the cart’s roof.
Unfortunately, once we’d righted ourselves, it became clear to me that neither Victoria nor Lily was letting go of the question.
“Ana,” Victoria told Lily, “is my niece—and a friend of Sawyer’s mother, and yes, my father really isthatold.”
Though we’d left our closest pursuers in the dust, I could hear at least two more carts nearby. I steered us away from the noise.
“Your turn,” Victoria told me. “Truth. You don’t have secrets from your cousin, do you?”
She’d boxed me into a corner, and she knew it. If I didn’t answer her question, that would only make Lilymoresuspicious.
“Ana was my mother’s friend,” I reiterated, “and I wanted to know what happened to her, because last anyone heard of her, twenty years ago, she was pregnant.”
I couldn’t risk looking away from the “road” long enough to ascertain which one of them had the more marked reaction to that statement, but Victoria was the one who recovered first.
“That explains some things. Knowing all six of my much-older brothers, not to mention my father, if the family knew she was pregnant, there was probably a lot of blustering about convents—they’re very fond of hypothetical convents.”
