Liar's Beach by Katie Cotugno

Author:Katie Cotugno [Cotugno, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

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August House was still and quiet when I let myself inside, Whimsy’s contented snores faintly audible from the kitchen and the cloying smell of the late-summer flowers on the front hall table hanging in the air. Mr. and Mrs. Kendrick always went out with friends after Illumination Night, I knew, and though Wells had mentioned something about going to Doc’s, so far neither Jasper nor Eliza had answered my texts and I felt weird about just showing up unannounced. Holiday probably would have wanted me to use the opportunity to do a little digging—in fact, if I’d let her know the house was empty, she probably would have left skid marks on the pavement in her hurry to turn around and come back—but I’d had about all I could stomach of the investigative life for one evening. Instead I headed upstairs to the turret room with a vague plan to either watch a movie on Netflix or jerk off in the shower, but as I turned the corner on the landing, I glanced out the window into the backyard, panic closing sharp and sudden around my throat:

There was another body in the pool.

It was floating facedown in the deep end: arms and legs akimbo, swim trunks ballooned around its pale, skinny legs. It was perfectly, preternaturally still, like possibly it had always been there—part of the landscape architecture, maybe, or an art installation I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t yell for help. I couldn’t make sense of anything but the pure white fear ricocheting through every vein and synapse, the animal urge to get as far as humanly possible from this fucked-up place. What had I done, by coming here? What in the holy hell was going on?

That was when the body stood upright.

It wasn’t a body at all, I realized belatedly, fingers curling around the windowsill even as my knees threatened to give: it had only been Jasper, doing the Dead Man’s Float in the pool. I watched as he tossed his head to get his hair out of his face, water spraying off him like a dog shaking himself dry after a bath. He made his way over to the ladder, pulling himself up and out of the pool in one smooth motion; if he sensed that I was watching, or that anyone was, he gave no indication.

I sat down on the delicate antique bench on the landing, my heart still slamming wildly away as relief and embarrassment battled it out in my chest cavity. I forced myself to take a deep breath, glancing warily in both directions to make sure nobody had caught me making a fool of myself and trying not to notice the way the walls felt just a little bit closer than they had a moment before. Downstairs I could hear Jasper letting himself into the kitchen, his wet feet slapping against the tile; I thought about calling out to him and telling him he’d scared the shit

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