“Make me understand, Randall.”
He knocked my hand away and rolled over awkwardly, and I stood up with him.
He turned around to face me, staggering a bit to his left. The blood leaked down his face onto his shirt. He tried to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, but managed only to smear it onto his cheek.
“She made me do it,” he said, sounding as if his mouth was full of gravel.
The anger surged again in my chest. “What?”
He looked at the blood on the back of his hand, then at me. “She made me do it, you dumbass.”
I grabbed him again, spun him around, and pushed him back toward the top of the stairs and the edge of the cliff. He tried to push me away, but I didn’t let go. He twisted around, trying to look behind him as I marched him toward the edge.
“Don’t!” he said, his eyes moving wildly. “It’s not my fault!”
I stopped about a foot short from where the edge gave way to a long, nasty tumble, the ocean groaning at the bottom. “All of this is your fault. All of it. You let Kate go down for your mistake.” I jerked him toward me so we were chest to chest, my fists full of his shirt, pushed up under his chin. “And now you’re telling me Kate made you do all of it? It was her fault?”
He blinked several times, and the fear that had shaped his face was gone. He looked at me for a moment, his hands dropping to his sides, giving up.
“You still don’t get it,” he said, almost laughing.
Anger streaked through my body, and I shook him hard, our foreheads banging together. “You’re right! I don’t!” I jerked on the oxford again and the buttons that ran down the middle popped loose and I stumbled a couple of steps back, a piece of the cotton fabric clutched in my right hand.
We stood there for a moment, both of us breathing heavily, the wind whistling around us. I looked at him, blood running from his nose onto his now exposed chest.
There was something so familiar about him.
Then I looked at the piece of shirt in my hand.
And that’s when I finally figured it out.
“Don’t move,” a voice whispered in my ear, the cold barrel of a gun pressing into the back of my neck. “Don’t turn around until I tell you to.”
The voice should have startled me, but it didn’t. I knew, staring at Randall, what I had been missing all along. I had been lulled into looking in the other direction, not looking right where I should have been all along. As I stood there, the voice whispering in my ear, my gun pulled from my waistband, I couldn’t believe that I had missed it.
And now, as the ocean roared down below us, I figured I was probably going to miss the rest of my life.
61
Emily Crier said, “Turn around slowly, Noah.”
I did as she said.
“You two having fun?” she asked, pointing my gun at me. She tucked her gun into the waistband at the front of her jeans. “Looks like it.”
I could only stare at her. Blond hair piled on top of her head. Black sweater and black jeans. Black sandals and black gloves. The blond hair was the only thing that made her stand out against the night.
Randall came up next to me, steadying himself against my shoulder. “I took care of Charlotte, Em. Like you wanted.”
Emily didn’t respond.
“And I didn’t tell Noah anything,” Randall said. “I swear.”
She looked at him. “That’s great to hear.”
She moved the gun from me to him and shot him twice in the chest, the shots echoing like cannon fire in the night.
Randall’s eyes widened, his mouth open in a large, silent circle. He stumbled backward, clutching at his chest.
She fired again, hitting him where his hands were clawing at the first two wounds on his chest.
He looked at her, confused, took two more steps backward, his legs giving way, and tumbled over the ragged edge, disappearing from sight down into the unwelcoming water below.
I stared at the empty spot where Randall had just been.
I turned to Emily.
“You were the other woman,” I said.
She laughed softly. “Brilliant.”
“Randall’s shirt,” I said, holding up the blue fabric in my hand. “That was the same shirt you had on when I came to your place the other night. It wasn’t your ex you were with. It was Randall.”
“I hope my parents weren’t paying you too much,” she said. She motioned with the gun to move. “Nice and easy, okay? Move under the light where I can see you.”
I dropped the piece of cloth and sidestepped slowly about fifteen feet to my right so that I was back under the dim light, next to the warning signs.
“Somebody’s gonna find Randall,” I said.
“I’ll be gone,” she said.
“They’ll find you.”
“No, they’ll think you did it. Came here all pissed off and shot him.” She smiled. “Your bullets, Noah.”
“How long were you with Randall?” I asked, now wondering if there was any way I was going to survive.
“Too long.”
“You love him?”
“Actually, yes, believe it or not. I loved him.”
I processed what I knew. “But he wouldn’t leave Kate.”
She let out an irritated sigh. “That’s right, Noah. He wouldn’t leave her. Little Kate won again.”
“Won again?”
She laughed. “Kate always won. Since we were kids. It got so damn old. Kate got everything she ever wanted.”
“I don’t think she wanted to die,” I said.
She laughed again. “No, you’re right about that.”
“You killed her because Randall wouldn’t leave her?”
She paused for a moment, as if she was considering what she was going to tell me. Then she gave a tiny shrug, like it didn’t matter one way or the other.
“If you wanna put it that way, I guess I did,” she said, rolling her eyes. “She decided to confront me before she went back home.”
“Confront?”
“She found out about me and Randall,” she said, smiling, her teeth biting into the darkness. “She listened to a message I’d left for him on his cell phone. A couple of weeks ago. She didn’t go to Randall with it. She blamed me, and I guess it took her that long to get up the nerve to call me on it.” She shook her head, clearly annoyed that her little sister was so weak. “So she called me up the night before she was supposed to go back to San Francisco, ranting and raving. I played dumb and offered to go down to the hotel to meet her that night. She was waiting for me in the parking lot, a little drunk and a little strung out. She started threatening me, telling me to stay away from Randall, and I had to make a decision. We were all alone.” She nodded, as if she were affirming her decision. “It wasn’t hard to do, and I felt better the second she stopped breathing.”
The way she spoke, the way she recounted killing her sister, came off like she was reciting a grocery list. I knew she’d have no problem killing me.
“But more than anything, I just got tired of coming in second,” she said, her eyes flashing. “Jesus, she even got out of the heroin thing.”
“You put the heroin in the car?”
“No, I had Randall do it,” she said, frowning. “That’s one of the things I made him do, as he started to tell you. I wasn’t touching that crap. But I knew she’d take the blame for him. Good little Kate.”
We stood there on the clifftop, the water crashing below us, the dark sky getting darker by the second. A realization hit me.
“You introduced Kate to heroin,” I said, staring at her.
Her frown shifted into a small smile. “That I did. She came to visit me my senior year at UCLA. A little weekend partying. Friend of a friend showed up with it. I never used it. But I wondered if she would.” The smile on her face darkened. “She did, and she was in love.”
I had family issues. Since I had never known my father, I guess it was just one issue-my mother. I wasn’t sure that I loved her, but I didn’t hate her, didn’t have the sick anger that would make me look for ways to destroy her.