Incriminated (25 page)

Grace quivered as she wept against Candace's shoulder. It was past midnight now. The room filled with a palpable sense of relief that a day they'd remember chiefly for its hideousness was finally over. At this point, Maya reflected, they'd latch on to any good outcome for the evening. Grace's father might go free. It was important to focus on something positive, make it easier to forget the horrors of the night.

But Maya couldn't bear to watch. How could she forget her own part in keeping Dana Alexander's secret? It made her sick to think that she'd ever sent that woman information about her housemates. Discreetly, she crossed the room, toward the French doors. On the side table beside the red chair, were the cell phones they'd left behind. Maya picked up her own, saw a text from a number she didn't recognize.

Her fingers fumbled, searching for the button to click on the text.
Strange number
, Maya thought.
Never seen it before
. Then she read the text.

O JUDGMENT, THOU ART FLED TO BRUTISH BEASTS. AND MEN HAVE LOST THEIR REASON.

“Huh, weird,” she said.

Candace asked, “What's weird?”

Maya held out her phone. “Take a look.”

Candace released her grip on Grace, who seemed calmer now, took the phone, and read aloud: “‘O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts. And men have lost their reason.'” She looked straight at Maya. “I know that line—it's from
Julius Caesar
.”

“Yeah,” nodded Lucy. “It's that ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen' speech. We had to learn it by heart last semester.”

“But what does it mean?” Maya said, mystified.

“Antony says it,” Lucy told her. “He's telling everyone that they have lost their minds, basically. That their judgment is shot to pieces; that they've lost the power to make good decisions. That they're reacting like
animals
.”

For a few seconds Maya's mind was wiped clean. All she could do was fixate on the screen, hunting for a coherent response.

“Maya, what's wrong?” she heard John-Michael say. He sounded nervous.

Maya lifted her head to look up at him. Whatever showed in her face must have really scared him, because John-Michael moved fast, caught her as she crumpled, falling to her knees. For a moment, Maya braced herself against John-Michael's shoulders and rose to her feet. With a slight cough to clear her throat, Maya said as evenly as possible, “It's . . . I think it's from Dana Alexander. She's going to rat me out to immigration.”

The others stared at Maya dumbly. There was a protracted silence. Eventually, Paolo said, “Is this a joke?”

Maya sighed. “Yeah, Paolo, I felt this was a good time for jokes.”

“Well, I don't understand,” was all he said.

“Seems pretty clear to me—Maya lied to us,” Candace said.

“No.” Maya shook her head, forcing herself to remain calm. Of course they would think that,
of course
. “All I know for sure is that my mom may have used forged papers to get my US citizenship. Dana Alexander knows, she's always known. That's why . . .” She stopped, took a huge breath, and released it slowly before continuing. “That's why I was doing stuff for her. All those reports. If you'd been a little less enraged earlier on, I would have told you but, honestly, I just wanted to stop talking about it.”

Candace sniffed, apparently disdainful. “Hmm. You got ‘ratting you out to immigration' from that Shakespeare quotation?”

“Presumably this is Alexander's fancy-ass way of letting me know she does
not
appreciate my decision to stop spying on all of you.”

Lucy took Maya's phone from Candace's fingers and read the text for herself. “So, so, so screwed,” she pronounced slowly.

Maya looked at Lucy. “You think I'm right?”

Lucy tried to laugh. “Oh yeah. That's from Dana Alexander, I'd bet this house on it.”

Paolo said, “Seriously?”

Lucy shook her head. A sad, amazed little smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Dana Alexander
knows
. She's telling us that she knows about everything. About me, about how we sent Ariana away, about Maya, about Candace making out with her precious little sister's boyfriend. I'm guessing she's not too happy about
that
particular piece of news. She's saying that
we've
lost our minds, our reason.”

On this final statement, Lucy fixed John-Michael with a deeply significant stare. Watching, Maya could feel her knees giving way once again.

Dana Alexander knew
everything
.

What if she even knew what had happened tonight? From the anxious, pale glances that she was getting from Paolo and John-Michael, Maya could tell that they were thinking the same way. They didn't dare articulate their fears, naturally. Not while they'd sworn to keep Grace and Candace out of the horrors of the past few hours. Maya
forced the rising tide of panic out of her mind and stumbled backward until she felt the sofa against the backs of her knees. She slumped onto the couch, furiously trying to think.

Alexander couldn't know absolutely everything. Could she? Surely not about what happened up in Malibu Canyon? But she might know that her plan to keep Lucy quiet had gone awry.

One of the two hit men could have gotten word to Dana Alexander. Sometime before the second guy had fallen off the cliff, Maya guessed. He must have called Alexander to tell her that the hit hadn't been carried out. Now the woman would be wondering. Should she act quickly? Send someone else to silence Lucy? Or wait?

They couldn't afford to take the risk.

“We can't be here for the next few days,” Maya said with sudden and absolute conviction. “And if we're gonna make any calls, they can't be traced. So we need to buy some new burner phones.”

Candace frowned at this. “New?”

“We have to get out of LA.” She stood up. “Tonight. All of us. Now.”

Wind trailed through Grace's fingers as they rested lightly on the open window of her sister's car. The night was warm and Candace liked to keep the air-con of the Prius turned off to be eco-friendly. For someone who'd initially sneered at her mother's choice of car, Candace was turning into quite the proud owner.

From the backseat, Maya spoke up. “I just got a text from John-Michael. They're going to get gas at the next service station. We should fill up at the one after. Our cars shouldn't be photographed together anywhere.”

Neither Candace nor Grace said anything. It was just another mysterious element of what was now a thoroughly troubling night. And they couldn't even ask why.

The car stereo was playing some electronic dance music, dreamy and pulsating, the kind of thing that Candace liked to play at the end of a party—total contrast to the chaos that was tearing Grace up on the inside.

This music only made her sad; nostalgic for a time
that Grace now realized had gone—perhaps forever. A time when they'd all been happy together, closer than she'd ever believed it would be possible for a group of friends to be. Closer than she'd ever felt with her family.

The saddest part, Grace reflected, was that only now did she see that time for what it was. The time they'd first met. Their first party.
Seinfeld
marathons all day long, eating John-Michael's amazing sandwiches. Lazy afternoons on the beach, watching Maya surfing, chatting around a campfire. The warmth of knowing she was surrounded by people who cared for her, who understood what it was to be right there, in that time, in that place, who understood and accepted in a way that no one else did.

All that—it was gone.

Whatever had happened tonight at the house, whatever had caused Lucy, Maya, Paolo, and John-Michael to disappear for around four hours with absolutely zero explanation—it had to be
really
bad. There was trust between the group now. It had been sorely earned, months of struggling with individual problems; John-Michael and the death of his father; Lucy and the nightmare visions of her past; Candace and her indiscretion with her costar; Maya being blackmailed into spying for Dana Alexander. Tonight, finally, all of that had exploded, scattering the housemates as they reeled, shell-shocked.

And yet, they'd instantly gravitated back to one another, to the Venice Beach house.

Paolo alone had no secret. He'd been frank about
wanting Lucy, even though it had led to rejection. His transformation by that disappointment was almost disturbing. Grace doubted that Paolo was happier since being emancipated. Yet, he shared the depth of his frustration with no one, as far as she knew. Instead, he wore it on his skin.

Perhaps Paolo was the only one who truly understood how to keep something
in the vault
. Grace caught herself smiling at the irony of that. She was still holding out on her own feelings for him, after all.

“How long do you think we can stay at Alexa Nyborg's house in Napa?” Candace asked Maya, breaking across Grace's troubled thoughts.

“Nyborg just emailed to confirm that she's going to Washington for the weekend and the invitation is still open.”

“How long will we need to stay?” Grace asked. But Maya didn't seem to want to commit to any specific time frame.

Candace sighed with longing. “Hey—the show is on summer hiatus until the middle of August, so I'm in no hurry to rush back. How seriously cool is it that you know a billionaire?”

Unbelievable. Candace wasn't paying the slightest attention to their dilemma. Grace wanted to scream at her:
Do you get what's happening here? Have you listened at all to what they've been saying? You still believe this is some kind of vacation?

“A paper billionaire,” Maya protested quietly. “I bet most of her shares are still in escrow.”

“Alexa Nyborg is a real-life billionaire, and she's chosen you to be her little protégé. She even replies to emails you send her at midnight on the Fourth of July. Girl, you've won the lottery,” mused Candace. “Aren't you gonna tell Hottie McBrit?”

Maya didn't answer. She sidled up to the car window and stared into the darkness beyond. Grace could almost hear the ache in Maya's shallow breathing. Whatever Maya felt about her newfound business angel and her English crush, it was somehow tainted by whatever had happened tonight.

The new secret was a fault line in the group. The collective understanding that had once existed between them was finished. Grace touched a finger to a button and closed her car window. The interstate road was climbing higher into the hills and the air had turned cold.

The fault line between the friends might become a chasm, but Grace resolved that she would find a way, somehow, to heal it.

She closed her eyes for a moment. Behind her eyelids she saw the pale green sky of a late evening on Venice Beach, the silhouetted palm trees, the sound of hard plastic wheels on the concrete path that wound through the low, grassy dunes, the smell of grilled maize tortillas near Andy's fish taco place, of board wax at the surf rental shop, of freshly baked funnel cakes at Santa Monica Pier. It would be waiting for them, everything they'd left behind. One day, they would return.

Uneasy in her position, Grace turned to observe Maya. The girl was scrunched up, folded like an ironing board, knees drawn up to her chin, arms wrapped around her legs and her head resting lightly against her kneecaps. Sitting behind the driver's seat, Maya was staring through the side window. The next moment, she flinched so hard that her limbs unwound as if released from a spring.

The sudden movement was enough to jolt Candace, who lost control of the car for a moment, causing it to swerve into the next lane. When the momentary scare was over, Grace saw Candace looking fiercely at Maya in the rearview mirror.

“Freak!”

“I'm sorry,” Maya muttered miserably.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Candace demanded before adding, with thick sarcasm, “Oh yeah, that's right, I'm too precious to be told.”

To Grace's surprise, Maya neither replied nor reacted. Instead, she simply continued to gaze through the window with a kind of drawn-out expression, breathing in little gasps, through parted lips. After a moment she said, “Did either of you see that white Buick earlier on, the one that passed us just now, did you see it before we left the PCH?”

Exasperated, Candace said, “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Maya's voice dropped to a whisper. “I think I saw it before.”

Grace faced Maya, tried to catch her eye. “Why do you
care? Why would someone be following us
now
, Maya? Maya?
Maya?
”

Maya didn't reply at first, instead she rolled her head against the backseat like a cat trying to get comfortable and lie down. A minute passed, then she mumbled, “Forget it.”

Grace stopped trying to get any further response after a while, she just sat back in her seat and considered, focusing on the darkness beyond.

Maya should have been happy, on the way to enjoy the first rewards of her hard work. But she wasn't. Maya was
afraid
. And try as she might to think soothing, rational thoughts, Grace couldn't ignore it for another minute.

She was scared, too.

From the beginning I speculated about how I would take things to a dark place in this second installment of the Emancipated series. What was conceived as a somewhat escapist story line—six emancipated teenagers living the SoCal dream—felt like the perfect opportunity to explore morality. If things went badly wrong, what would each one of them be prepared to do to protect their “perfect” life?

The entire Malibu Canyon section of this story was inspired by a twisty drive with my good friend Hoku Janbazian through the Hollywood Hills and down to Malibu beach, where we ate some terrific fish tacos. A lovely day dreaming up some hideous drama—I thoroughly recommend the location.

Huge thanks are due to Katherine Tegen for supporting this incarnation of the “escapist” teen story. Two fantastic editors have been massively helpful in finding the Goldilocks zone between “dark enough” and “too dark.” Thank you, Elizabeth Law and Maria Barbo!

Thanks to Emily Wheaton, a former US soldier and
fellow member of the
Once Upon a Time
fandom, for all her great advice about firearms. Thanks also to California resident and fellow Oncer Cyndi Burke for additional advice about her home state and also about guns!

Team Emancipated at Katherine Tegen Books and HarperCollins ran a terrific internet-based marketing campaign for book one, including videos and a cool quiz. Thanks especially to Kelsey Horton for all her creativity, energy, and enthusiasm. Other members of our wonderful team include Bethany Reis, Veronica Ambrose, and Rebecca Schwarz. A virtual cookie to you all now and a real one later!

Fellow children's author and friend Michael Grant continues to be a source of steady encouragement and support with the promotion of the Emancipated series—thank you, Michael. Thanks also to my agent, Robert Kirby, at United Agents in London; to my husband, David; and daughters, Josie and Lilia. The kids were especially eager to further their favorite “ships.” One gets her way—but #nospoilers.