her face as she’d tried to shut the door and I’d stopped her. She’d been desperate to get rid of me but trying to act as unsuspiciously as possible. Far better that I just remembered a strange woman lending a mascara than started telling tales of a fellow guest slamming the door in my face.
And it had nearly worked. It had so nearly worked.
Did she tell Richard when he came? I couldn’t be sure, but I thought not. He had seemed so normal at that first night’s dinner—the perfect host. And besides, it was her blunder, and he didn’t look like the kind of man you’d want to confess a mistake to. More likely she just crossed her fingers and hoped to get away with it.
Then she had packed her things, cleared the room, and waited.
After drinks that first night, Anne, somehow, had been taken to cabin 10. Was she alive, lured there by some cock-and-bull story? Or was she already dead?
Either way, it didn’t really matter, because the end result was the same. While Richard was back in Lars’s cabin, establishing his alibi with an uninterrupted poker game, the woman in cabin 10 had bundled the real Anne overboard and hoped that the body would never be found.
And they would have got away with it, if I—frightened and traumatized from the burglary—hadn’t heard the splash and jumped to a conclusion that was so wrong, it was almost completely right.
So who was she? Who was this girl who had hit me, and fed me, and locked me up here like an animal?
I had no idea. But I knew one thing—she was my best hope of getting out of here alive.
- CHAPTER 27 -
All that night I lay awake, trying to work out what I should do. Judah and my parents would not be expecting me home until Friday and would have no reason to suspect anything was wrong until then. But the other passengers must know that I hadn’t returned to the ship. Would they have raised the alarm? Or had Bullmer given them some story to explain my disappearance—unavoidably detained in Trondheim, perhaps? Decided to return home unexpectedly?
I wasn’t sure. I tried to think who might be concerned enough to ask questions. I had little hope of Cole, Chloe, or most of the others making a fuss. They didn’t know me. They had no contact details for any of my family. They would very likely accept whatever Bullmer told them.
Ben, then? He knew me well, enough to know that an early-morning flit to Trondheim without a word wasn’t in character. But I wasn’t sure. Under normal circumstances I was fairly certain he’d have contacted Judah or my parents with his concerns, but the way I had left things with him wasn’t exactly normal circumstances. I had all but accused him of being complicit in a murder, and aside from his justifiable anger, he probably wouldn’t be surprised at my disappearing off the ship without a word of good-bye.
Out of all the guests, Tina seemed like my best bet, and I was crossing my fingers that she would contact Rowan when I failed to return. But it seemed very slim odds to hang my life on.
No. I had to take matters into my own hands.
By the time morning came I hadn’t slept, but I knew what I had to do, and when the knock came, I was ready.
“Come in,” I said. The door cracked open, and the girl put her head cautiously around the doorframe. She saw me sitting quietly on the bed, washed and clean, holding the book in my lap. “Hey,” I said.
She put down the tray of food on the floor. She was dressed as Anne this time, wearing a headscarf, her eyebrows not penciled in, but she didn’t move like Anne, she moved like the girl I’d seen before, dumping the tray down impatiently and straightening up with none of the meditative grace she’d shown when impersonating Richard’s wife.
“Hey yourself,” she said, and her voice was different, too—the crystalline consonants elided and blurred. “You finished with that?” She nodded at the book.
“Yes, can you swap it for another one?”
“Yeah, I guess. What do you want?”
“I don’t mind. Anything. You choose.”
“Okay.” She held out her hand for The Bell Jar and I handed it over, and then steeled myself for what I had to do next.
“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly. “About the tray.”
She gave a smile at that, a flash of straight white teeth, a glint of