Copyright © 2019 Smart Blonde, LLC
The right of Lisa Scottoline to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published in the USA in 2019 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
First published as an Ebook in Great Britain in 2019
by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
Cover photograph © James Brey/iStock/Getty Images Plus
eISBN: 978 1 4722 4313 3
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Also by Lisa Scottoline
About the Book
Praise for Lisa Scottoline
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Part One
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Part Two
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
© April Narby
Lisa Scottoline is the New York Times bestselling author of over twenty novels. There are now more than twenty-five million copies of her books in print, and she is published in over thirty countries. She has been awarded the Edgar Award for crime fiction, and the Cosmopolitan Fun Fearless Female Award. In addition, Lisa writes a weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as a number of non-fiction titles with her daughter, Francesca Serritella. Lisa is a former trial lawyer and lives in Philadelphia with an array of disobedient pets.
By Lisa Scottoline
Fiction:
Someone Knows*
After Anna*
Exposed*
One Perfect Lie*
Damaged*
Most Wanted*
Corrupted*
Every Fifteen Minutes*
Keep Quiet*
Don’t Go*
Betrayed*
Accused*
Come Home
Save Me
Think Twice
Look Again
Lady Killer
Daddy’s Girl
Dirty Blonde
Devil’s Corner
Killer Smile
Dead Ringer
Courting Trouble
The Vendetta Defense
Moment of Truth
Mistaken Identity
Rough Justice
Legal Tender
Running From The Law
Final Appeal
Everywhere That Mary Went
Non fiction (with Francesca Serritella):
Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim
Best Friends, Occasional Enemies
Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog
* Available from Headline
About the Book
From the New York Times-bestselling author comes her latest heart-pounding thriller.
Twenty years ago four teenagers spent a blissful summer as the closest of friends. But when a new boy looked to join them, they convinced him to play a dangerous initiation game with deadly stakes. What happened next would change each of them forever.
Now, after leading separate lives, three of the four friends reunite for the first time since that summer and unbearable memories come flooding back. Someone knows what happened - but who? And just how far will they go to keep their shocking secrets buried?
Praise for Lisa Scottoline:
‘Lisa Scottoline is one of the very best writers at work today’ Michael Connelly
‘A deliciously distracting thriller’ Huffington Post
‘Scottoline knows how to keep readers in her grip’ The New York Times Book Review
‘Scottoline is a powerhouse’ Robert Baldacci
‘Scottoline writes riveting thrillers that keep me up all night, with plots that twist and turn’ Harlen Coben
‘Scottoline gets all the details right, and gives all the characters flesh and blood, breath and life. This is a novel that is as full of thrills as it is full of heart’ Kristen Hannah
‘Scottoline is a star’ Time Magazine
To my ama
zing daughter, Francesca, with love
It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
What you must go on forgetting all your life.
—JAMES FENTON, “A German Requiem”
PROLOGUE
Nobody tells you that you’ll do things when you’re young that are so stupid, so unbelievably stupid, so horrifically stupid that years later you won’t be able to believe it. You’ll be on your laptop, or reading a book, or pumping gas, and you’ll find yourself shaking your head because you’ll be thinking no, no, no, I did not do that, I was not a part of that, that could not have happened.
You’ll tell yourself that you were young, that you were drinking, that good teenagers make bad decisions all the time. But you know that’s not it. You know that when teenagers get together, something dark can take over. Call it peer pressure, call it a collective idiocy, call it something more primal and monstrous, like whatever makes frat boys haze their so-called brothers to death. Writ large, it makes Nazis murder millions and soldiers torch Vietnamese villages. But whatever you call it, it will make you do the worst thing you ever did in your life. And in your darkest moments, you will wonder if it made you do it, or simply allowed you to.
You know this now but you didn’t then, and you’ll shake your head, thinking I can’t believe I did that, I can’t believe I was a part of that, but you were, and not in Nazi Germany, My Lai, or a frat house, but in the safest place you can imagine—in the suburban housing development where you grew up, specifically in a patch of woods mandated by township zoning, confined by fences, and bordered by the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In other words, in a completely civilized location where even Nature herself is domesticated and nothing ever happens.
Except this one night.
You and your friends decide to play Russian Roulette, a game so obviously lethal that you can’t even imagine what you were thinking. Days later, years later, a decade later, it’s still so unspeakable you can’t say a word to anyone, and all the books you read that you should’ve learned something from—Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace, and Crime and Punishment—teach you absolutely nothing. You read like a fiend, you always have, but you don’t let the books teach you anything. You never apply them to your life because they’re fiction, or even if they seem real, they’re someone else’s life, not your life, except that you and your friends decided to play a prank and someone blew their brains out in front of you.
You won’t be able to remember exactly what happened because of the booze and the horror, the absolute horror, and yet you won’t be able to forget it, though you’ll spend night after night trying. People say something was a night to remember, but this was a night to forget and yet you can’t forget, and then you’ll hear some random playlist and Rihanna singing don’t act like you forgot and you’ll realize you’ve been acting like you forgot your entire adult life, and you’ll feel accused by a song, nailed by a phrase, and don’t act like you forgot is everything, don’t act like you forgot is all, and you’ll pick up the bottle and say to yourself, I’m acting like I forgot but I didn’t, I didn’t forget, and you’ll need to be put out of your own misery, so you’ll drink and drink, trying to drink yourself to death.
But that takes too long. Years too long. Time doesn’t move fast enough. You learned that the hard way.
One night, you’ll lose patience.
CHAPTER 1
Allie Garvey
Allie gripped the wheel, heading to the cemetery. The death was awful enough in someone so young, agonizing because it was a suicide. The family would be anguished, wracking their brains, asking why. But Allie knew why, and she wasn’t the only one. There used to be four of them, and now there were three. They had kept it a secret for twenty years. She didn’t know if she could keep it secret another minute.
Allie drove ahead, her thoughts going back to the summer of ’99. She could hear the gunshot ringing in her ears. She could see the blood. It had happened right in front of her. Her gut twisted. She felt wrung by guilt. She had nightmares and flashbacks. She’d been fifteen years old, and it had been a night of firsts. First time hanging with the cool kids. First time getting drunk. First time being kissed. First time falling in love. And then the gunshot.
Allie clenched the wheel, holding on for dear life, to what she didn’t know. To the present. To reality. To sanity. She had to stay strong. She had to be brave. She had to do what needed to be done. She should have done it twenty years ago. She’d kept the secret all this time. She’d been living a contents-under-pressure life. Now she wanted to explode.
Allie approached the cemetery entrance. She knew the others would be there. A reunion of co-conspirators. She hadn’t spoken to them after what had happened. They’d had no contact since. They’d run away from each other and what they’d done. They’d thought getting caught was the worst that could happen. Allie had learned otherwise. Not getting caught was worse.
They’d grown up in Brandywine Hunt, a development in a corner of Chester County, Pennsylvania, where the horse farms had been razed, the trees cleared, and the grassy hills leveled. Concrete pads had been paved for McMansions, and asphalt rolled for driveways. Thoroughbred Road had been the outermost of the development’s concentric streets, and at its center were the clubhouse, pool, tennis and basketball courts, like the prize for the successful completion of a suburban labyrinth.
Allie always thought of her childhood that way, a series of passages that led her to bump into walls. Her therapist theorized it was because of her older sister, Jill, who’d had an illness that Allie had been too young to understand, at first. It had sounded like sis-something, which had made sense to Allie—her sister had sis. Until one nightmarish race to the hospital, with her father driving like a madman and her mother hysterical in the backseat holding Jill, who was frantically gasping for breath, her face turning blue. Allie had watched, terrified at the realization that sis could kill her sister. And when her sister turned seventeen, it did.
Allie bit her lip, catching sight of the wrought-iron fence. Her sister was buried at the same cemetery, the grave marked by a monument sunk into the manicured grass. Its marble was rosy pink, a color Jill had picked out herself, calling it Dead Barbie Pink. Allie remembered that at Jill’s funeral she had cried so hard she laughed, or laughed so hard she cried, she didn’t know which.
Allie braked, waiting for traffic to pass so she could turn. GARDENS OF PEACE, read the tasteful sign, and it was one of a chain of local cemeteries, fitting for a region of housing developments, as if life could be planned from birth to death.
Her gut tightened again, and she focused on her breathing exercises, in and out, in and out. Yoga and meditation were no match for a guilty conscience. She hadn’t fired the gun, but she was responsible. She replayed the memory at night, tortured with shame. She’d never told anyone, not even her husband. No wonder her marriage was circling the drain.
Allie steered through the cemetery entrance. Pebbled gravel popped beneath the tires of her gray Audi, and she drove toward the black hearse, limos, and parked cars. Mourners were walking to the burial site, and she spotted the other two instantly.
They were walking together, talking, heads down. Gorgeous, privileged, rich. The cool kids, grown up. They didn’t look up or see her. They wouldn’t expect her, since she hadn’t been one of them, not really. They hadn’t followed her life the way she’d followed theirs. She was the one looking at them, never vice versa. That’s how it always is for outsiders.
Allie told herself once more to stay strong. The cool kids believed their secret was going to stay safe forever, but they were wrong.
It was time for forever to end.
Part One
—TWENTY YEARS EARLIER—
This is where we began
Being what we can.
—STEPHEN SONDHEIM, “OUR TIME,” Merrily We Roll Along
CHAPT
ER 2
Allie Garvey
Allie ran up the hill in the woods, her breath ragged and her thighs aching. Her house was just around the corner, and she wished she could sneak home, but she didn’t want to be there, either. Her sister, Jill, had died last summer, and since then the house had felt hollow, empty, silent.
Allie had to keep going, pumping her arms. When Allie had turned nine, her mother had finally explained Jill’s illness, which wasn’t sis but cystic fibrosis. Allie hadn’t known that the disease was fatal back then, or any of the statistics on life expectancy, but when Jill was well enough to travel, the Garveys took trips to Disney World and Hawaii, like a do-it-yourself Make-A-Wish. Her mother said we’re making memories, but Allie didn’t know how to live in the present and the future at the same time. The Garveys smiled hard when they were happy because they were also sad, taking the bitter with the sweet, the good with the bad, every single minute.
Her sister’s coughing was the background noise of her childhood, though Jill muffled the sound at night, not to keep the house awake. Every morning, Jill took antibiotics in pill form, and Pulmozyme and albuterol through a nebulizer. Every time she ate a meal or a snack, she took pancreatic enzymes, and she endured percussive therapy twice a day. Jill never complained, and everyone said she was a trouper, an angel, even a saint, but Allie knew the real Jill, who was funny, goofy, and naughty. The real Jill loved thick books with maps in the front and joked that she was going to smoke when she grew up. The real Jill wasn’t a saint, but something much better. A big sister.
If Jill was dying on the outside, Allie was dying on the inside. When Jill was hurting, Allie couldn’t stop her tears, crying in her pillow for them both. The worst was when she helped with Jill’s percussive therapy. She’d beat her sister’s rib cage to loosen up the mucus, which left them both drenched with effort, just to win a few puffs of something as insubstantial as air. Air. You couldn’t see it, but you couldn’t live without it. It didn’t weigh anything, but it had all the weight in the world. It was like a bad riddle. It was even free. All you had to do was breathe. Take a deep breath, people said, but Jill had never had one of those in her life, which ended after seventeen years, at home.