Page 111 of All These Beautiful Strangers
“Perfect,” Margot said, handing the waiter her menu. “And dressing on the side, please.” Margot looked at me expectantly. “Grace?”
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t be a goose and make me eat by myself,” she said. “Order something.”
I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t imagine eating anything. But to satisfy her, I glanced down at my menu and picked the first thing I saw.
“Minestrone,” I said. I couldn’t even form a full sentence.
“Of course,” the waiter said, sliding my menu off the table.
When the waiter left, I leaned forward and asked Margot, “What do you mean it was an accident?”
Margot took a sip from her wineglass. She looked so poised, so calm, so collected, as if we were talking about our weekend plans rather than Jake’s death.
“We were in this club together at school,” Margot said. “Very secretive, very exclusive.” She waved her hand. “Jake and I were initiates and we had gone through this whole thing to get in. I don’t much like to think of it, really, the things we did. They weren’t pleasant things. Anyway, we were out celebrating one night at this place off campus called the Ledge. We were drinking, and someone had brought Percocet and was passing it around. Jake had a bad reaction to the mixture. He went into respiratory arrest.”
“He stopped breathing?” I asked.
“Naturally, we all panicked,” Margot said. “I mean, we were just kids, and we were all drunk or high, so we weren’t exactly firing on all cylinders. We knew we couldn’t take him to the hospital, because then we would get in trouble too—suspended, expelled. We couldn’t risk our entire futures—and what was the point, really, when he was already dead?”
I stared blindly at her. I could picture it. A dark, cold, starless night. I remembered the chill in the air that evening, and how I hadn’t slept really, because I had been so anxious and excited to see Jake again. And while I was stirring listlessly in my bed at my parents’ house in Hillsborough, a couple hundred miles north at some place called the Ledge, Jake was taking his last breath, dying alone and afraid, surrounded by his so-called friends who were too selfish and stupid to help him.
“Thank god for Alistair,” Margot said. “Without him, I don’t know what we would have done. But Alistair, he always has a plan. He always takes charge. He was brilliant really.”
“Alistair?” I asked.
“Yes, it was all his idea—to make it look like a suicide,” Margot said. “He and one of the other senior boys tossed Jake over the Ledge into the ravine. Alistair forged this note and it was almost too perfect when the school authorities searched Jake’s room later and found the exam he had stolen as his last initiation task. The story basically wrote itself—a scholarship student who looks like this golden boy from the outside is secretly desperately insecure. He doesn’t feel he measures up. He cheats to get ahead, and then someone finds out and threatens to turn him in. He can’t take it. So he kills himself. Everyone loves a good pathetic tragedy. They ate it up—barely questioned it.”
I remembered hearing about the stolen exam. I had questioned it. Jake had always been a straight-A student. Confident and smart. So unlike the portrait of the person conjured up in that suicide letter. I had known something was off, something wasn’t right. But then my mother had told me to stop asking questions, to stop picking things apart so that everyone could start to heal.
“It wasn’t until later—when the autopsy report came out—that we discovered Jake didn’t die of an overdose,” Margot said. “He drowned. Turns out, he was still breathing when we threw him in.”
They had killed Jake and then they had turned him into something he wasn’t.
“But if Jake had Percocet in his system when he died, wouldn’t that have shown up on the autopsy?” I asked.
“It did,” Margot said. “They found evidence of alcohol, acetaminophen and oxycodone in Jake’s system when they ran the tox screen. They’re listed in the autopsy. But that’s not unusual for suicide cases. I’m sure Jake’s family was made aware of the results, but I can understand why they might not have shared that particular detail with many people.”
I exhaled the breath that I had been holding. “Why did you tell me all of this?” I asked Margot.
Margot shrugged. “Because I knew it would kill you to know,” she said. “And I’m really going to enjoy watching you rip your marriage apart over this.”
“My marriage?”
Margot took a sip of wine and gave me a cruel smile. “Just imagine it. Every time you look at your husband—for every day of the rest of your life—every time you kiss him, or pour him a glass of wine, or laugh at one of his jokes, or make love to him, you’ll know he’s the person who’s responsible for Jake’s death. If it weren’t for Alistair, Jake would still be here. In fact, if it weren’t for Alistair, who knows? You and Jake would probably be married right now, and settled in the suburbs with a house full of little brats. It’s kind of funny if you think about it, you ending up with the guy who stole Jake’s life.”
“You’re going to pay for what you’ve done,” I said. “All of you—all of you are going to pay.”
There had to be consequences. I would make sure of it.
“What we did?” Margot asked. “Don’t you mean, what Alistair did?”
“You were all there,” I said. “You could have done something. You could have stopped him. You’re just as guilty.”
Margot looked at me like she almost felt sorry for me. She wiped the corners of her mouth with a napkin in a precise gesture so that it didn’t smear her lipstick. “Oh, honey, don’t be so clueless,” she said. “What evidence do you have to bring any sort of case?” She gestured at the photographs on the table. “A couple of paltry pictures that put us at the place of Jake’s death on the night he killed himself? Those don’t prove anything. Short of a confession, which none of us are going to give you, you don’t have a leg to stand on here. We’re not seventeen-year-old kids, scared of getting expelled for being out late and doing drugs on a school night. Like it or not, this all ended a long time ago.”
I reached for the photographs and tucked them into my purse. She was wrong. She had to be wrong. They couldn’t just kill Jake and completely rewrite his story and then walk away with no consequences. This was murder we were talking about. Murder.
