Page 101 of An Academy for Liars

“Just try to relax,” said Lennon, squeezing her fingers.

But Carly snatched her hand away. “What are you doing? You’re hurting me.”

Here, Lennon choked back tears of her own. “I’m sorry—”

“Just tell me the truth.”

One memory left. The one of that first phone call at Dante’s house, when Lennon had asked for her help. What a mistake that was, to drag her sister into all of this mess, to put her through this. She had so many regrets, but that was the one thing she regretted most. At the time she’d felt like a child, wanting her big sister to fix her mess. But she had been careless, selfish, to drag Carly into this.

“Stop it,” said Carly. “Just please stop. Be honest with me—”

Lennon ripped the memory free of her mind. Carly stiffened. A slick of blood trailed from her left nostril and filled the dip of her cupid’s bow. Lennon grabbed a few damp cocktail napkins and tried to wipe up the mess, but Carly slapped her hand away, stood up so sharply her stool rocked back and clattered to the floor of the bar. She gazed at Lennon, confused, disoriented—not even remembering why she was there in the first place. All Lennon had had the time to do was extract her memories pertaining to Dante, but she hadn’t had the time to replace them with new, false ones to explain why Carly had come to Savannah at all. There was a wound in her memory, raw and open. Needing to be sutured shut. But Carly wouldn’t let her.

“You ruin everything, you know. Everything you touch it just…it goes to shit.”

“I know,” said Lennon, through tears. “And I’m sorry.”

Carly snatched her bag, light without the folder and laptop that Lennon had stolen. She didn’t seem to notice, though. She slung it over her shoulder and made her way to the doors of the bar. “I have a flight to catch.”

From the hotelbathroom, Lennon took an elevator back to Dante’s. She gave the house a quick pass—just to make sure it was empty, that he was still at Drayton—before locking herself in her bedroom. There, Lennon spread all of the papers from Carly’s file across the floor, arranging them chronologically. When she saw it all together, it painted the picture of a broken and violent man. The man that Claude had warned her about. A man she didn’t know.

Lennon thought back to Claude’s accusations in the wake of Benedict’s death, those drunken tirades she had been so quick to dismiss. As much as Lennon wanted to believe that the dark rumors weren’t true, that Dante wasn’t in fact the troubled boy turned violent man she feared him to be, there were certain things she could no longer deny. Namely, that Dante had been lying to her. He had been lying about his child. He had been lying about Eileen. He had probably been lying about what happened to August too. She couldn’t shake the image of him, with the open throat and the fear in his eyes. It was obvious that something unspeakable had happened to him. Andwhile she had not ever asked about—or pried into—the particulars of his past, these files made it clear that that too had been kept from her.

What if he was keeping secrets about Benedict’s death too?

What if he’d been lying to her about his involvement?

Claude had been so convinced of Dante’s hand in Benedict’s death—a murderer, he’d called him. Even Alec had his sneering suspicions, which he’d expressed in fewer words when he’d visited weeks ago. Lennon had been so quick to dismiss it all, to cling to the lies she told herself just to keep believing that Dante was the person she needed him to be.

But as she sat on the bedroom floor, staring at the array of evidence, the truth she’d denied for so long took shape before her eyes. A portrait of a disturbed and dangerous man who’d left bodies in his wake. A man who had lied to her, a man who had killed before and likely would again.

She could see it now: Dante towering over Benedict’s desk, forcing him to take up the letter opener and cut his own wrists. His formidable will bearing down on Benedict with such a force that even a persuasionist of Benedict’s skill didn’t stand a chance. And if anyone had suspected his involvement, Eileen had both the means and incentive to clear his name. They had a child together, a relationship developed over years. Was that why Eileen had redacted the particulars of his file? Kept these secrets locked away in her office, so that no one could see them or speculate? Had she done the same when Dante had killed Benedict? Cleared his name and kept the faculty from investigating, even though it was obvious to everyone that something horrible had happened?

Lennon wasn’t sure about a motive, but it was obvious that there was bad blood between Benedict and Dante. And it was clear to Lennon that Dante had a penchant for discarding those who stood in hisway. Claude had warned her of as much, and Lennon hadn’t listened because she’d wanted, so badly, to let herself love him. But now the truth seemed so clear to her that she couldn’t believe she’d ever been blind to it.

Still, there was one question Lennon couldn’t get past: If Dante knew that Benedict was dead, why would he have taken her to his house after he’d died? Why hadn’t he removed the body? Burned down the house? He was cunning, so surely he could’ve staged a more convincing murder. He could’ve made Benedict pen a suicide letter. Altered his behavior over a period of weeks, or even months, leading up to his demise. Benedict lived in a relatively rural area, so at the very least, Dante could’ve compelled him to leave his house and die in a place where his body wouldn’t have been discovered for some time. It just didn’t make sense. If Dante was the mastermind of Benedict’s death, why had it all been so sloppily executed?

There was, Lennon realized now, only one real way to answer that question. Something she’d been too afraid to test before. If Lennon opened a gate to the past, she could discover what really happened to Benedict the night he died, and she would know once and for all if Dante had been lying to her about this too.

So there, alone in her bedroom, Lennon raised a gate to the past. It was her first time doing it without Dante’s aid. Her skill and stamina had advanced considerably over weeks of practice, but it still took hours for her to call the elevator, its doors charring the wall as it appeared. Lennon, bleeding from the nose, stepped into the cabin. Its doors drew only partially shut behind her, an inch-wide slit between them.

The elevator cabin began to sink, down into the past. At first, it was a slow descent. Lennon saw a blur of light in the narrow slit between the doors, glimpses of sunlight and grass, the warped sound ofdistant voices speaking in reverse. But as the cabin picked up speed, the light between the doors intensified, grew so bright that it hurt to look at it. Lennon squeezed her eyes shut and saw nothing but the hot red of her inner eyelids. She felt stretched and pulled, the cabin screaming as it plunged through time itself.

And then, when Lennon was convinced she was about to die, the elevator slowed and came to a stop with the screech of metal on metal. The doors didn’t open, but through the crack between them, Lennon saw a sliver of Benedict’s foyer. She gritted her teeth, pried the doors apart, and slid sideways through the slit. The elevator disappeared as soon as she left the cabin, and she heard a voice she would’ve known anywhere. Benedict’s: “You’re just in time for tea.”

Lennon rounded thecorner to find Benedict in the kitchen, preparing two cups of tea. His hand shook a little as he filled the strainers with heaping spoonfuls of oolong. He spoke without looking at her, but she felt him enter her mind as soon as she stepped into the kitchen. It felt nothing like being examined by Eileen. His was a soft presence within her, like cold fingers skimming along the plain of her psyche. But even though Benedict wasn’t particularly probing, he must’ve seen something within her that disturbed him, because he flinched, as if she’d struck him, and a spoonful of tea leaves scattered across the countertop when he did.

“You’re not the Lennon I know, are you?” he said.

Lennon came to stand behind him. She wondered what he’d seen to make him so afraid of her. Was it Ian crushed within the doors of the elevator? The culmination of all that she’d become since they’d last spoken? A gatekeeper? A murderer? “No,” she said. “I’m not her.”

Benedict nodded, poured water into the teacups, stared down into the blooming steam. She wondered if it was shame or fear that kepthim from looking her in the eye. He set sugar and a small pitcher of cream on the tea tray, then nodded down the hall. “Let’s talk in the study.”

They sat on either side of the large oak desk where Lennon had first been interviewed all those months ago. As soon as Lennon settled into her seat, she noted the golden letter opener on the left side of the desk. It was the same one she’d found crusted with blood the day they’d discovered Benedict dead.

“Are you all right, Lennon? You don’t look well.”

Benedict’s gaze was arresting and almost painfully harsh, like staring directly into the sun. “I’m fine,” she said.

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