“Stop!” she said. “Just stop! I didn’t. I never. Cora, please . . .” She turned to her right, begging Cora for help.
“Make up your mind, Mason,” Cora said. “Was it me who killed Sadie? Or was it Abi? Or maybe it was actually Fash, which is what you seemed to be implying before. The truth is you haven’t got a clue, have you? You’re plucking theories out of thin air, seizing on anything that will deflect attention away from you.”
“You’re right,” Mason said to her, with a smile that was anything but. “Maybe it was you. Because Abi wasn’t the only one who was jealous of Sadie, was she?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I wouldn’t have wished this, you know,” Mason said, in a voice I guessed was supposed to be Cora’s. “Maybe you didn’t know Sadie as well as you think you did.” He sneered at her, and shook his head. “You think I don’t know how much you hated me and her being together? You think it wasn’t fucking obvious?”
Cora cracked something like a smile herself. And even though I hate to say it, and maybe it was just because of the light, but I’d never seen her looking so ugly. “You arrogant shit,” she said. “You actually think I’d kill someone over you?”
“And Fash,” said Mason, ignoring Cora and turning to me. “You’re just as bad. We all saw exactly how much you fancied Sadie. So tell us, what happened? Did you come on to her and she rejected you? And you just lost it? It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t that what they say? Poor repressed little Fash, always the victim, always so under his mother’s thumb. Was it getting to you? Had you had as many knockbacks as you could take?”
My mouth fell open, but Luke stepped forward before I could speak.
“Listen to yourself, Mason. You’re talking shit! Saying one thing and then the other, just like Cora said.” He made a move as though to seize the bottle, but Mason took a step back.
“That’s because I don’t know what happened!” he said, with something between anger and desperation. “I don’t know who I can trust! For all I know, you killed Sadie.”
Even in the dark, I saw Luke’s face go purple. For a second, he looked as though he was going to hurl himself forward, broken bottle or not. “Sadie’s my sister,” he said. Not loudly. But in as frightening a voice as I’ve ever heard. “I’d sooner kill myself than hurt her.”
The bottle wavered in Mason’s hand, and for the first time I saw him show a flicker of doubt. But then he looked at me, Cora and Abi in turn, and his whole body seemed to tighten.
“Do you want to hear something, Luke?” he said. “Do you want to know why the police were so convinced it was me? Because they think Sadie was killed by someone she knew. Someone she trusted, who could have lured her out of the house. Which, yeah, puts me in the frame, but also applies to every single one of them.” This time he swung the bottle in an arc. Without any of us realizing, I think, me, Cora and Abi had clustered together. “And there was something else . . . something they found in Sadie’s bedroom. Something anybody here could have planted.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but even so, I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach.
“They found a test. Hidden away in her stuff. A pregnancy test.”
All at once inside the cave there was a silence, so heavy that for a moment it drowned out the rain.
“Sadie was pregnant?” said Cora, in shock, or horror, or both.
“I didn’t say that,” Mason hissed at her. “I said they found a test. Half a one. A two-pack, with one of the thingamajigs missing. To make it look like Sadie was pregnant. Which gave the police the one part of the case against me they were missing. It gave them motive. They think I wanted Sadie to get rid of it, or to keep it, or whatever she didn’t want to do.”
Even Luke shrank backward as he tried to process what he was hearing. Me, I couldn’t have said anything if I’d wanted to.
“But the thing is, me and Sadie were careful,” said Mason. “Always. There’s no way she would have had a pregnancy test. She wouldn’t ever have needed one. So what I want to know,” he went on, holding up the bottle again, “is the answer to the question I asked at the beginning. Which one of you did it? And which one of you tried to trick the police into thinking it was me?”
I looked at Luke, hoping that if anyone could get through to Mason, he could. But Luke seemed almost to have shut down. His mouth was hanging open, and his eyes were focused on the floor. Abi was no help either. She was staring at Mason, shaking her head uselessly.
“Mason, listen to me,” said Cora. “Nobody tried to frame you. I swear it. We’re your friends. We’re Sadie’s friends. We would never have tried to hurt either one of you!”
“So where were you, Cora?” said Mason. “If you’re my friends, how come I didn’t hear from any one of you after Sadie went missing? Even you, Fash. I had to come to you to ask for help, remember?”
To trick me, he meant. To use me.
But on the other hand, I guess he had a point. I mean, I could only imagine how he must have felt. How it might have seemed like we’d turned our backs on him. But it wasn’t that. Not for me, anyway. The truth is, there was another reason I was staying away. The same reason that, when Mason came to me, I agreed to do what he asked.
“Maybe I didn’t come to see you,” said Cora,
