Page 107 of What Lies in the Woods

“As if you don’t know.”

“All I know is that I got a panicked call from Cody saying that you knew something and he was going to take care of it, and I should come meet him,” she said.

“And you know about Jessi. You know what he did to her.”

“Sort of,” she hedged. I could almost see the shift behind her eyes, her lies rebalancing. It was a neat trick.

“He told me what happened to Liv.”

Her lips parted. Her head cocked slightly, curiously, as she tried to rebalance again. “What happened to Liv,” she repeated softly. Not sure how much I knew.

“He killed her so she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about Persephone. But, Cass, there’s no way he could have known that she was about to tell us. Unless… unless you already knew,” I said.

Cass’s lips pressed together. “I knew my dad was fucking Jessi. And I knew what it meant when Cody showed up at our house in the middle of the night, covered in blood and panicking. My dad talked him down. They didn’t know I saw.”

“And when we found Persephone…”

She drew something out of her pocket, staring down at it. Then she held it out to me. A plastic bag. Inside it was a chipped plastic name tag. CODY. A scrap of fabric still hung from the pin, and a splotch of what looked like dried blood marred one corner. “It was raining. I guess Cody gave her his work jacket,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t you say anything?” I asked, still unable to comprehend what I was hearing.

“Can you imagine what a mess that would have been?” Cass said. She looked back at Cody. “Cody’s life would be over. And my dad would get dragged into it, too, and you know this town. Even if he could prove he hadn’t killed her, that would be it for him.” She looked at me, tearsswimming in her eyes, and put a hand on my knee. “Besides, we needed Persephone. We needed something to tie us together before we went to middle school. Keep us from drifting apart.”

I nodded slowly, as if this made sense. As if it was anywhere in the neighborhood of sane. “But, Cass, how did Cody know?”

She let out a heavy sigh. “Okay, I’ll admit I screwed up there. It was when I was trying to get the lodge up and running. We were out of money. Completely out. I was going to lose everything—all the work I’d put in, all the money my parents had invested. So I called and asked Cody if he could invest some of Gabriella’s money. He didn’t feel like he could ask her for that much, so I… provided him with an extra incentive.”

“You blackmailed him.”

She rolled her eyes. “You make it sound like some mustache-twirling villain thing. I just reminded him that he owed me and my dad for not saying anything. If you want to get anywhere in life, sometimes you have to get people to do things they don’t want to, and it helps to have leverage. I learned that a long time ago.”

“You warned Cody that Liv knew it was Jessi.”

“I didn’t think he’dkillher. I thought he’d get a fucking lawyer or something,” Cass hissed.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re smarter than that.”

Her lip trembled. “I didn’t hurt Liv. I wouldn’t.”

“Then why tell him at all?”

“Don’t you think he deserved to know that Liv was about to blow up his life for no reason?” Cass asked. “After everything he’s done for you? You’re so determined to believe the worst of people. I didn’t realize what he was going to do until he called me again.Aftershe was dead. He threatened me, Naomi. He said if I didn’t help him cover it up—” Her eyes welled with tears, and her voice choked off.

She’d planted the suicide note. A note she’d held on to, just in case. Like the photograph of her father and Jessi, and everything else in that box of horrors. Cass had used the gate code, gone into the house whileKimiko slept, left the note, taken the gun so that she could make it look like Liv had used it to kill herself.

She’d put in the code at 4:47. It would have taken too long to get up to the pond and back; it would have been daylight by then. There might have been early-morning hikers. She hadn’t been able to plant the gun until after the police had searched the pond. She’d raced to the lodge instead, providing herself with an alibi—fudged a bit, maybe, thanks to whatever dirt she had on Percy.

That was why they hadn’t found the gun at first. It wasn’t there to find. But then Bishop and I had refused to let it go. When had she decided she had to plant it? After I called Cody about Jessi?

“When you helped me look for her, you already knew she was dead,” I said. “You pretended to think it would all turn out okay. Youknewshe was at the pond, and you let me go up there alone. You tried to convince me to stop digging. God, that eulogy at her funeral—it was all bullshit. It was all a lie.”

“It wasn’t a lie. Liv was my best friend,” Cass said. “But what could I do? She was already dead. Cody was ready to tell everyone that we were in on it together. I had to protect myself.”

I swallowed a laugh. “You should have left it alone. If you’d never helped Cody, it would have been fine, but you wanted to be the mastermind, didn’t you? Collecting your blackmail. Pulling everyone’s strings. But you’re kind of shitty at it, as it turns out.”

Her hand whipped out so fast I could barely flinch before her nails were sinking into my cheek, gouging at the knot of scar tissue and raking down to my jaw. I fell backward against the tree trunk with a yelp of pain and clapped my hand to my cheek, feeling a hot trickle of blood beneath my fingers. She looked at me with vicious contempt.

Cody came striding over, looking alarmed. “What’s going on?” he asked.

---