Page 38 of Deadly Little Scandals
For a moment, I thought Victoria would press for answers, but she didn’t. “We need the light.” The White Glove was remarkably calm under pressure—and far more logical than I would have anticipated. “Phones don’t get a signal out here, so we’re on our own for getting back to the party. The headlights do a hell of a lot more than a cell in flashlight function.”
I listened but couldn’t hear even a trace of the other groups. How far into the woods had we gone? How big were they?
“Push,” Victoria told me. “Lily, if you need to ride…”
“I can push.”
Somehow, I had a feeling that after Victoria saw this side of my very proper cousin, getting an invitation to the next White Glove event wouldn’t be a problem for Lily.
We’ll be lucky if the next one doesn’t kill us.
“Do we even know which direction we’re going?” Lily asked five minutes later.
I was on the verge of responding, but Victoria beat me to it. “I always know exactly where I am. It’s a family trait.”
“Stop,” I said suddenly. They complied. “Listen,” I told them. The silence had given way, and in the distance, I could hear something—people. Talking. Laughing.
“Over here!” Victoria yelled. Lily and I added our voices, to no effect.
“We could go in that direction,” I said, eyeing what I could see of the terrain. “But we’d have to leave the cart behind. The brush is too dense, and the trees are too close together. We’ll never make it through that way pushing.”
We fell into silence and, again, heard laughter. It was faint, but it was there.
Victoria turned her phone back to flashlight mode. “I guess this will have to do.”
Lily and I followed closely on her heels. Eventually, the sounds of the others grew louder, and when there was finally a break in the trees, I could make out the outline of a golf cart ahead. It took until we got much closer for me to realize it was parked—and empty.
A second later, I heard the voices again and realized, with a start, that one of them was male. I looked to the key, still in the golf cart we’d found. Closer inspection showed that it had a key chain, but not one of ours.
No snake, no rose.
Victoria shone her flashlight on the key, and I saw that the key chain was a Mercedes.
A stick snapped up ahead of us. Victoria pivoted, and so did the light. One second, I spotted clothing slung carefully over a low-hanging limb on a nearby tree, and the next second, a naked man stepped into view and turned in the direction from which he’d just emerged.
Beside me, Lily let out a strangled whisper. “Daddy.”
I’d thought, in passing, that Lily’s father might be having an affair, but there was a difference between thinking something in the abstract and seeing it in the flesh.Literally.
I briefly entertained the ridiculous idea that maybe Aunt Olivia was out here with him, but the next second, a woman stepped into view. She saw the flashlight, even though Uncle J.D. was too involved in what he was doing—and her—to notice.
“J.D.,” the woman said softly.
I stared at her, trying to process what I was seeing. The woman reaching to grab her clothing off the tree had blond hair, but her features and skin-tone bore a striking resemblance to Victoria’s.
I know that woman.I told myself I was being ridiculous, that there wasno way, but the next word out of Uncle J.D.’s mouth put a nail in that coffin.
That word, which he murmured into her neck, was: “Ana.”
ily made a mewling sound. Her father saw her, sawus. There was frenzied movement as he pulled on his pants, then a string of stammered explanations, none of them worth a damn thing.Questions, cursing, demands—and all I could think, through all of it, was that the woman standing next to Lily’s father, the very naked woman he was having an affair with, looked so much like she had as a teenager.
Ana Sofía Gutierrez.She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t missing. She was here, pulling a dress over her head. She was looking at Lily and at Victoria and at me.
“Lily’s bleeding.” Victoria somehow managed to sound, if not calm, then at least somewhat in control of the situation. “We crashed. She hit her head. Hard.”
“Lily…” Uncle J.D. choked on her name. “Sweetheart, what—”
“No.” Lily’s voice wasn’t quiet, exactly, but I had to strain to hear it.
