Page 56 of Three to Fall

“I honestly have no idea. There’s a bunch of chats here and everything, but they’re all usernames. No legal names.” He held the phone out. “Here. Look. It’s weird.”

Hayden took it, scrolling through the pages of private messages. “You aren’t TulipRose1254?”

Kyle made a face at him. “Last I checked, no.”

Hayden passed the phone to Grayson with a shrug. “I don’t get it then. What is all this?”

Grayson raised an eyebrow. “And you think I get dating apps?”

Hawk sniggered. “There’s a doctor, two ex-cult members, a biker, and an ex-gang leader sitting at this table. Out of all of us, who do we think is going to be most likely to understand a dating app?”

We all turned to stare at Grayson.

“Yeah, okay fine. Let me see it.” He took the phone, glanced at the screen and then back at Kyle. “You definitely have an account set up under the name TulipRose. If that’s not you, then someone has been using your phone. Your mom maybe?”

Kyle screwed up his face. “Oh, absolutely not. Come on. She’s one hundred years old and married.”

“She’s maybe forty-five, Kyle,” I corrected. Though I totally understood how much older parents seemed when you were a teenager without any kids of your own. Having a baby and getting older yourself changed that mentality. Fact was, forty-five wasn’t even close to old, and Kyle’s mom very well could have been using his phone to contact a lover on the outside. She’d allowed Kyle to keep a secret phone, even though they were banned at Ethereal Eden. She clearly wasn’t as devoted to the rules as they made out.

But Kyle adamantly shook his head. “My mom wouldn’t do that to my dad. And she never had my phone that I know of. But…” He glanced at me.

“What? I didn’t take your phone.”

“No. But Alice did. A lot.”

Shock punched me in the stomach, but at the same time, this suddenly made a lot more sense. The day we’d fled from Ethereal Eden in Kyle’s truck, Alice had asked Kyle to use his phone. She’d known the password, and it was clear to me even then that it hadn’t been her first time using the device. She’d been too familiar with it, putting in the code and tapping her fingers across the screen confidently.

I took the phone from Grayson’s hand and scrolled through the pages and pages of texts. Here and there were messages from random usernames, but mostly, TulipRose talked with one other user.

I tapped on one of her chats with GoldenDreams and skimmed over the paragraphs of text.

In my head, it was Alice’s voice I heard reading them out loud. “Alice wrote these. They sound just like her.”

My gaze snagged on one message, dated the same day we’d left Ethereal Eden. The message opened up.

Alice’s message stopped me dead, the phone tumbling from my fingers and crashing onto the tabletop face up for everyone to see.

TulipRose:

We’re here. I’m so excited. I can’t wait to meet you.

Golden:

Sneak away as soon as you can. Meet me at Sixth Street in the city. It’s a club. I can’t wait to meet you either.

I stared at the phone in horror and then up at the men sitting around me. “She was meeting someone the night she was murdered.”

Grayson swallowed thickly. “What are the odds of being murdered by someone you know?”

Hawk pressed his lips together. “Way higher than being murdered by a complete stranger.” He glanced at me, but I already knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“We might have the text messages Alice sent her killer.”

15

KARA

Iread my sister’s texts in every spare minute for the next few days. In between helping Hayley Jade take a bath and cooking her dinner. On every break from the hospital. At night before I went to bed and in the mornings as soon as I woke up.

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