Page 64 of She Doesn't Have a Clue
“Did you poison her, too?” Juliette demanded.
“I didn’t do anything!” Kate cried, sounding way too frantic to beinnocent. “She was already dead when I found her. I only put her back in the plant for safekeeping.”
“You stuffed her in aplant?” Cassidy cried.
“This isn’t going great,” Jake said, surveying the room.
“I know this isn’t going great,” Kate hissed. “Help me get it back on track!”
“Hang on, everybody, it’s not what it sounds like,” Jake said, holding up his hands and trying to calm the crowd with his trademark smile. “We were very careful with her—”
“You were there, too?” asked Abraham, looking shocked and disappointed. “You are her accomplice? Such physique, such a waste.”
“No, no, no accomplices!” Kate looked to Jake helplessly. “It wasn’t like that!”
“Oh my god!” Cassidy gasped, as a brutal gust of wind blew out another window, dousing the back half of the room in rain.
“We need to get out!” someone screamed. “Before we all drown!”
“But the ceremony isn’t done!” a bridesmaid cried.
“Oh, believe me, honey, it’s done,” said Serena loudly, holding up a protest sign and waving it as if she were directing air traffic. “Let’s go!”
“Wait, what about Aunt Rebecca?” Kennedy cried, shoving against the rising tide of fleeing guests to reach Kate. “Where is she? Did you mean it, what you said? Is she…”
Kennedy gulped, the sound lost in the crush of departing guests, but Kate could see her throat bobbing hard. Richie and Steven came to stand behind her, as well as Cassidy and Spencer and his parents, all of them forming a wall around Kate. Trapping her.
“It’s not what you think,” Kate said.
“Is she dead or not?” Mrs. Lieman demanded.
Kate swallowed hard. “Yes, Rebecca is dead. But I didn’t kill her!”
Kennedy burst into tears once again. Cassidy could only stare, presumably in shock, while Richie looked far more discerning in light of this disastrous family news.
“I don’t even know your name, but I know enough to know you’ve been the center of every controversy this weekend,” Richie said, crossinghis arms. “You put on that little show during the rehearsal dinner. And then youconvenientlyfind Kennedy down in the wine cave, but oh it was just some bad oysters, right? So, what did you do to Auntie R, drop a toaster in her bathwater? Tranquilizer dart to the neck? Stab her with a decorative letter opener?”
“Those areso specific,” Kate said. “But I didn’t do anything to her. I never even met her before this weekend!”
“Maybe she caught you with the poison,” Juliette said, taking a defensive stance beside Kennedy. “And you needed to keep her quiet.”
“I didn’t poison Kennedy!” Kate said, throwing up her hands in exasperation.
“If Ms. Hempstead truly is… deceased,” Steven said in his most lawyerly tone, “I’ll need to confirm it.”
Yeah, Kate bet he would need toconfirmit. She looked hard at him, then at Richie, then back at him, waiting for one of them to twitch or sneeze or cough, some kind of tell that they were guilty. But they looked stern and bored, respectively, no sign of guilt that she could tell. She’d have to press them harder, as soon as she wasn’t everyone else’s prime suspect.
“Where is she?” Cassidy asked. “Take us to her.”
“Of course,” Kate said, reaching for Jake’s hand for stability as she led their small group out of the sunroom. Juliette and Cassidy closed ranks behind Kate, prodding her forward. They closed off the door to the room and sealed the gaps around it as best they could with layers of sheets and heavy furniture to keep the door braced against the howling wind.
They followed Kate and Jake up the stairs to the second floor and the office where she had discovered Rebecca’s body what felt like a lifetime ago. Her steps slowed as they reached the landing, her toes practically dragging through the heavy carpet as Cassidy charged forward and swung the office door open. The interior was relatively serene, the raging of the storm outside muffled to a dull roar, but Kate would have preferred braving the hurricane-force winds to the storm Cassidy looked like she was about to unleash on them. Kate hung back by the door, which got her a sharp prod from Juliette.
“I was all state in track, don’t bother running,” Juliette muttered.
“Innocent people don’t run,” Kate said absently.
“Where is she?” Cassidy demanded. Gone was the sobbing girl from the rehearsal dinner, and in her place was a no-nonsense, vengeance-seeking woman. Briefly Kate wondered which version of Cassidy was the act and which one was the real deal, before Juliette nudged her again.