Page 70 of The Villa

What she doesn’t know, what she can’t know then, is that even if you’re never suspected, there’s no such thing as getting away with it.

Not really.

But that night, she puts on clean clothes, and she goes back into her room, and shuts the door. The rain gets louder, but Mari can’t hear it as inside Somerton House, Victoria wreaks her bloody revenge.

She finishes just as the sun rises. Outside her window, the first rays of the new day brighten the sky, chasing off the storm from the night before.

The End,Mari writes, and downstairs the front door opens, and after a moment, Noel begins to scream.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I don’t come out of my room the next day. I tell Chess I’m not feeling well, and she seems willing to accept that.

But my body feels fine. It’s my soul that is suddenly a little ragged. I don’t know if it’s from reading what Chess wrote about me, or from her lies, or if I’m still reeling from Mari’s last chapter, but I don’t feel capable of sitting across from Chess and pretending everything is normal.

So, I lay in bed instead, listening toAestason my phone and rereading Mari’s confession over and over again.

It was stupid, not thinking about the album like I had the novel. Maybe I just felt more drawn to Mari because I’m a writer, too, or maybe, when I’d briefly googled Lara, there was something about her that felt a little off-putting.

Something in that bright smile of hers that made me think of Chess.

But that’s not fair to Lara. Or to Mari. They came to the villa that summer as muses at best, hangers-on at worst,because that’s how the men in their lives saw them. The only way theycouldsee them.

And look at what they’d become.

SoAestas—and Lara—are just as important to this story, and that means I need to read, and listen. I’m hungry for further clues, any hint of the truth of that summer in Lara’s lyrics.

It’s harder with music, the language more metaphorical and flowery, the links not quite as clear, but I find—or think I find—a few.

There’s the opening track, “Golden Chain,” that’s clearly about Pierce, Mari, and Lara’s twisted relationship, and it seems obvious “Night Owl” is about Mari herself. Chess already identified that “Sunset” is about Noel or Pierce or both.

But I want more than that. InLilith Rising, there’s the horror, the blood, Victoria with Colin’s literal heart in her hand, and now, it all makes so much sense to me. Mari couldn’t tell the truth about what happened to Pierce, what she did, so she had Victoria do it for her.

Did Lara do the same in her songs? Or would she have? All I have is Mari’s story, how Mari saw it. Stories change depending on who’s telling them.

Look at how Chess saw me. I didn’t recognize that version of me in her manuscript, but that didn’t make it wrong in the end, did it? It was just Chess’s side of the story. Didn’t she look different through my eyes than she did to the rest of the world?

When the album ends, I start it over, then eventually hit the Repeat All button on my music app to keepAestasplaying on a constant loop.

I think there might be something in “Last at the Party,” a line that goes,I watch you drift out the door/the music soloud, but your eyes so sad/and do you ever miss me, too?/Do the ghosts we knew come looking for you?

As I scratch that lyric down on a notepad, I flex the fingers of my free hand, my pulse jumpy. I want to tell someone about this, I realize. I want to compare notes, I want to share what I found in Mari’s papers, explain how the story of the murder at Villa Rosato is so much bigger than anyone ever knew.

And the fucked-up thing is, I don’t just want to tellsomeone.

I want to tell a particular person.

I want to tell Chess.

Even after everything.

She’s the only one who will get this, who will get why it’s so significant.And she’ll make these other connections, find different ways of looking at the story.

She’ll take it,another part of my brain reminds me.This is yours. With these papers, if you can get them verified, you don’t just have a measly $10,000 payment for a cozy mystery, you get a chunk of a seven-figure advance. You pay your lawyer. You get even better, scarier lawyers,andyou keep every dime of your money, forever.

So I shove down that stupid, childish impulse, that desire to run to my best friend, to confide all my secrets. Instead, I keep listening toAestas, keep making notes, and later, I sleep and I dream, but all my dreams are of bloodshed and screams, and Chess is there—she’s always there, somehow.

I can’t avoid her forever and, after hiding Mari’s pages even better than I did before, I make my way downstairs the next morning.

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