Chapter 26
Staying at home by myself while my sister and parents went to the funeral wasn’t an option, so I was at Lucy’s house. It was fine, better, probably, than staying at home alone, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk anymore about what was going on with my sister. It was all Lucy wanted to talk about.
Emma was there, too, but she seemed indifferent. We decided to set up in Lucy’s bedroom so that when the rest of her family came back from the funeral we wouldn’t be overheard. The more Lucy went over what we knew and what we didn’t know, the more I wanted to shout for her to just stop. Somehow, it felt wrong talking about my sister’s problems—or whatever they were—while Drew was lying in a casket somewhere, being sunk beneath the earth, and covered with dirt.
Lucy didn’t seem to see it that way. She’d made a Wiki about what we’d found out so far. She drilled me about my conversation with Jack and what I’d talked about with Cadence. She was intrigued by Aaron’s appearance again the night before, and when I told them my Matt Bomer theory, she begged me to take a picture of him. I tried to explain I wasn’t saying he looked like the actor, I just thought he might be deceptively handsome to women. She still wanted a picture. I couldn’t blame her, I guess. If her sister had a super-hot guy sneaking into her room in the middle of the night, I’d wonder what he looked like, too, although it did no good to think about such things since neither Lucy nor Emma had a sister, and if a guy was sneaking into Daniel’s room to talk to him in the middle of the night, well, we could be back to the Matt Bomer thing, I guess.
“Aaron McReynolds has no social media presence,” Emma declared, her fingers flying over her keyboard. “But here’s something slightly interesting. I did a search using the key terms ‘Eliza’ and ‘purple hair’ and I got something.”
“Huh?” I asked, a little surprised, although, I thought there had to be more than one woman in the world named Eliza who happened to have purple hair, didn’t there?
“What makes you think that you found this elusive woman who drives a Lamborghini through a Google search?” Lucy’s words mirrored my own inquiry.
“Do you know how many Lamborghini Aventadors are in existence?” Emma asked in her matter-of-fact voice.
“Not so many?” Lucy inquired. Like me, she must think the number had to be low to beg the question.
“Less than 5000 per production year, and they haven’t been around that long.”
I was sure Emma knew the exact numbers, but sometimes she liked to be less strict with her quantitative evaluations so as to be a bit more relatable.
“’Kay,” Lucy said. “So… what does this have to do with whatever you found?”
Rather than answer, Emma turned her laptop around so the two of us, who were also sitting on Lucy’s bed rather than the sitting area in an alcove, which would’ve made more sense, could see it.
I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand. Emma’s Google search had produced a picture of the woman I’d seen. I was sure of it. She was wearing all black leather from head to toe, leaning back against the Aventador, her arms crossed and a cocky smile on her face. Her short hair was a dark purple, almost burgundy color in the direct sunlight. She wasn’t as tall as my sister, and I remembered thinking that when I’d first seen her out my bedroom window. The picture was a post from a social media site, and the caption read, “The company car is pretty rad.” The name on the account was @ElizaWrath.
“I take it that’s her,” Lucy said, her voice very quiet.
Without replying, I picked up my notebook and started writing. It was starting to get a little full now since I’d decided to go ahead and record my discussion with Cadence and the little I’d picked up from listening in on her late-night discussion with Aaron. (A Google search for IAC had not turned up much.) I needed to write this down so I could collect my thoughts.
“Is there any other info on her profile that might be helpful?” Lucy asked.
“Not that I could find,” Emma shrugged. “Of course, I don’t really know what I’m looking for.” She adjusted her glasses and turned her laptop back around. “I guess we could check all of her friends’ profile pictures and see if any of them match the people you’ve seen, Cass.”
Something told me Aaron was not the kind of guy who had time for social media. Elliott—maybe? “Check and see if she has any friends named Jamie or Christian,” I said.
“Or maybe something with a doctor name?” Lucy asked, and we both nodded.
I had finished my notes and set my notebook aside. While I had been hesitant to dig into all of this while the funeral was going on, seeing Eliza Wrath’s picture had sent chills down my spine. It was one thing to see the woman outside of my bedroom window from a distance but something else entirely to see that she really did exist in real life. Every time something proved that what was happening with my sister was real, I found it harder to accept.
I picked up my own laptop and went to the same website Emma was on, finding Eliza’s profile quickly now that I knew what I was looking for. The girl was pretty. She looked a lot like Ashley Greene, only with purple, curly hair. And taller.
Thinking of Ashley Greene led down a rapid chain of thoughts that had me slamming my laptop closed. My mouth hung open, and my heart began to race. “Oh, my God,” I said quietly. The thoughts that had entered my head seemed so completely impossible, but then, with the things I’d seen recently, anything was possible, wasn’t it? Apparently, even the laws of physics weren’t exactly what we’d thought they’d been. Neither was gravity the old friend I’d thought I understood for all these years.
