Never Coming Home by Kate M. Williams

Author:Kate M. Williams [Williams, Kate M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2022-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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Emma Jane stood up and brushed the sand off her butt and started to walk toward the boathouse. “Where are you going?” Justice called after her.

“I just want to see something,” she said.

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” Manny said. “He’s not in good shape.”

Emma Jane kept walking.

“Wait! I’ll come with you.”

Emma Jane turned to see Celia scrambling up and running toward her.

“What do you want to see?” Celia asked when she caught up.

“I don’t know,” Emma Jane said. “I guess I’ll know it when I see it.” She was slightly annoyed, as she had wanted to look around alone, but out of everyone, Celia seemed the least likely to get in her way. “Why do you want to come with me?”

“I don’t, really,” Celia said flatly. “But there’s a smashed-up body in there, and I don’t want you to have to see it alone.”

Emma Jane stopped midstride and turned to stare at the small, mousy girl next to her. Celia couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and her skin looked like it had gotten more sun in the past few hours than it had in the past few years, but she was clearly tough. Emma Jane thought that this was the nicest thing anyone had said to her since Sergio died.

“Thanks,” she said. “But don’t tell anybody what I do in there, okay?”

Celia nodded and they started walking again. Emma Jane’s brain had been in a nonstop whirl since Chelsea had collapsed. It reminded her of the few times she had done mushrooms—there was a thought, an idea, just outside the perimeter of her mind. She didn’t know what it was, but she knew it was there, and she couldn’t grab it. At least not yet. So she was trying to collect as much information as she could to lure it closer.

Earlier, she had waited for Robby to leave the dining room, then snuck back in and took pictures of everything she could—the tables, the chairs, the dirty dishes. She’d noticed that not only was Chelsea’s glass ringed with coral lipstick but that there was also a coral smudge on the tablecloth where her face had hit. No one else was wearing this kind of lipstick, and this meant that the glass was obviously Chelsea’s glass. They had all watched her pop a new bottle of champagne and pour it herself, which meant that if she had been poisoned, the poison had been in her glass, not the champagne.

Chelsea had been drinking from the same glass all morning, and they had all been in the dining room the entire time. If there was poison in her glass, then someone had put it there right before she drank from it.

One of them had put it there right before she drank from it.

Then, when everyone left to move Margot’s body to the freezer, Emma Jane had snuck into Margot’s bungalow and taken pictures of everything in it. She’d climbed up on the counter in the bathroom to peer into the light fixture full of bees.

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