“I didn’t drive Iris to the hospital,” he said evenly.
My blood ran cold. “What? But you—”
He placed his hands on my shoulders. “She was already gone. There was no saving her. I knew driving her to the hospital would only raise questions we didn’t want to answer.”
I shrugged his hands off. “What did you do, Cole?”
“I wrecked her car into a tree and put her in the driver’s seat, then walked to a gas station and took a car home.”
I stared daggers at him. “You let her die.”
“She was already dead, Stella. News of an overdosed hooker in our house would have been worse for you than it was for me. I wasn’t the one having an affair with her.”
My breath caught in my throat. I reached for words, but none came.
“Yeah,” he taunted over the howling of the wind. “I knew.”
“How?” I managed.
“Oh, come on.” He rolled his eyes. “She just happened to be in the house cooking dinner the night I wasn’t supposed to be home? How did she get in unless someone gave her a key? And you lost your damn mind after she died, remember?”
I reached for memories of the time after Iris’s death, but they were buried by a sea of booze and drugs. “But you never said anything.”
He shrugged. “You were a wreck, and it was over between us anyway. I didn’t want to fight. All I wanted was to get past it and get divorced. But then you got pregnant, and I had to stick around until that mercifully ended.”
“Fuck you.” The lights flickered as I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why did Felicity accuse you of murdering Iris?”
He sighed. “She was in the car.”
I inhaled sharply. “Felicity was?”
He nodded. “Hiding in the back. I didn’t know she was there. But she told the police I’d been driving the car and that Iris was already dead. No one believed her, but they still had to question me. Jackson corroborated my story about being home with him, and I asked the police not to bother you with the details because you’d been sick and didn’t need any stress.”
I could barely hear him over the blood rushing in my ears. “And they went along with that?”
“Of course they did. I’m Cole Power. I took pictures with them and signed autographs for their kids afterward. It was like they’d won tickets to Disneyland.”
I took a deep breath, trying to still my rattled nerves. “And Felicity…What else did she see?”
“I don’t know. I assume she was hiding in the car the whole time. She probably overheard us arguing about which hospital to go to.”
“And then you didn’t take her to one.” I dropped my head back on the cold leather pillow. “The fentanyl…She wants revenge.”
He nodded. “This entire time she’s been giving you too many pills and leaking photos, developing the story that you’re an addict that can’t keep clean, so that when she slips you the fentanyl, it’ll look like you accidently overdosed, just like her mother did. Symmetry.”
The whole thing sounded somehow familiar—like the plot of a movie. Though I couldn’t recall doing a movie with that plot. Had Cole? Maybe it was only something I’d seen on TV. At any rate, I’d had nothing to do with Iris’s death, and Felicity had had ample opportunity to kill me and she hadn’t. It made more sense for Cole to be the one she was after—if she was in fact after anyone at all. “How do you know she wasn’t going to kill you?” I challenged. “You’re the one who didn’t take her mother to the hospital.”
“Does it matter?” he asked. “She was going to kill someone, and logic states it’s one of us.”
Rain pattered on the skylights above us. “We’re jumping to conclusions,” I pointed out. “Maybe we should ask her.”
“You think she’ll tell the truth?” He laughed. “She’s a fantastic actress. I’ll give her that.” He dropped his smile. “We have to get rid of her.”
“What? No!” I protested. “Jesus. You’re not serious.”
He caught my gaze and held it, his eyes hard. “She was going to kill you, Stella.”
“You don’t know that. And anyway, she didn’t.”
My mind drifted to my conversation with Felicity last night. I’d been so drunk I didn’t remember most of it, but I knew I’d disclosed my relationship with Iris to her. Which meant she had to understand I could never have had any part in Iris’s death. So why hadn’t Felicity confessed her true identity to me when she’d had the chance? I’d practically opened the door for her, and she hadn’t stepped through it. My heart sank. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, maybe Cole was right about her.
“The fact she hasn’t killed you yet doesn’t mean she’s not planning to. That’s why we have to get to her first,” he said gently.
“Are you insane? This isn’t some movie we’re in. This is real life, and I’m not killing anyone. She can’t do anything now anyway. We have the pills.”
He waved the baggie before me. “How do you know this is the only trick she has up her sleeve? A hurricane would be the perfect cover for killing someone. No authorities on the island, no witnesses—”
“That’s the end to The Siren—”
He shook my shoulder. “Wake up, Stella. I know you don’t want to believe it because in that delusional head of yours you still think she’s your friend, but she let Mary Elizabeth out knowing that you wouldn’t leave the island without her.”
Mary Elizabeth. My little darling, lost out there in the wind and the rain. Something inside me hardened. I wanted to punish Felicity for that injustice. But in no world would I have any part in killing her, no matter what she’d done. The very fact that Cole was suggesting it with a straight face was chilling. “We can report her to the authorities, give them evidence to put her in jail, but I’m not murdering her.
