Katharine McGee - The Towering Sky

Campbell leaned his elbows onto the table, trying to impress upon Leda how much sheer physical space he occupied. “Mariel drowned. Her body was found in the East River.”

Leda’s mind lurched violently to one side, as if yanked by a thin thread of memory, but it snapped off and floated away before she could be certain of it. She felt cold all over.

Mariel had ended up with the death she’d tried to give Leda. There was a dark irony there, as if this were some kind of poetic justice administered by the gods.

“What does this have to do with me?”

The two police officers glanced at Leda, then at each other, then at Leda again. They seemed to come to some unspoken understanding, because Kiles leaned forward with what she probably assumed was an encouraging expression. “You may not have known Mariel, but she certainly knew you. She was gathering information about you before she died. She had a file on you and your movements.”

Of course she did. Mariel had been planning her revenge on Leda, for what Leda had done to Eris. But the police didn’t know that—right? If they did, wouldn’t she have been brought here a long time ago?

Leda did her best to act afraid, which wasn’t difficult given that her nerves were stretching tighter and tighter over the empty pit of her panic. “Are you saying that Mariel was stalking me?” she demanded.

“That is what it looks like, yes.” There was a pause. “Do you have any idea why she might do that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? She was grief-stricken over the loss of Eris and wanted to feel close to her. So she turned to Eris’s friends.”

It was a gamble, but it was the best Leda could come up with on the fly.

There was a silence heavy with meaning, as if all the air in the room had gone stale. Finally Campbell lifted his brows. “You see, until now, we thought Mariel’s death was accidental. But we recently uncovered new evidence that suggests it might have been the result of foul play. So we’ve reopened the case as a murder investigation.”

Mariel had been murdered ? But who would do such a thing, and why? Leda blinked, panicked that the subject of her thoughts was somehow visible.

“We’re trying to understand what was going on with Mariel before she died. Especially since she had been dating Eris.” Officer Campbell lifted an eyebrow to underscore the strangeness of it, that two young women should die under unexpected circumstances, so soon after dating each other.

“What kind of new evidence?” Leda asked as innocently as she could.

“That’s classified.”

Leda’s mind echoed with a strange, unsettling silence. It was a silence that rang with chilly finality, like the weight of a gravestone, as if the entire current of the East River was pressing down on her chest, forcing the air from her lungs. They might find out.

If the police were investigating Mariel, they might somehow discover Leda’s relationship to Eris—and worse, the fact that Leda had accidentally pushed her. . . .

“Mariel was very fixated on you,” Kiles was saying. “I don’t think it’s just because you were friends with Eris. Do you know of any other reason she might have been watching you?”

“I don’t know,” Leda said defensively, wishing she could put her hands over her ears to block out the terrifying silence. Fear and alarm were swirling wildly through her.

“Perhaps you—”

“I don’t know!”

The words burst out of her like bullets and rebounded sharply around the room. Leda put her hands firmly on the surface of the table to hide their trembling and stood.

“I have made every effort to be cooperative,” she said clearly. “But this line of questioning is useless. I didn’t know this Mariel person and have no information about what happened to her. If you need to get in touch with me again, please do so through my family’s lawyer. Otherwise, I believe we’re done here.”

Leda stormed away, half expecting one of the detectives to stop her. But neither of them said a thing.

Outside the station, she leaned against a wall for support, her mind spinning through the implications of what had just happened.

The police were reinvestigating Mariel’s death. They had already discovered the connection between Mariel and Leda. How long would it take before they found out the reason Mariel was stalking her: that Leda had pushed Eris off the roof?

And that wasn’t the only thing that Mariel had known before she died. There were also the other secrets: Rylin’s, and Avery’s, and Watt’s. The secrets that Leda told her in a drug-fueled haze. If the police kept digging, they might discover Mariel’s connection to the others too. They were in danger, and it was her fault.

She was going to have to see them again, she realized. All of them. Even Watt.

YOU’RE NERVOUS.

I’m not nervous , Watt insisted, then realized that he was perched on the very edge of Avery Fuller’s couch. He scooted back against the pillows self-consciously.

Okay , he told Nadia. Maybe a little nervous.

When Leda flickered him last night, Watt had practically slid out of his desk chair in shock. He almost thought the message was some kind of twisted practical joke from Nadia. He hadn’t been expecting to hear from Leda anytime soon—really, anytime ever —given the bleak finality of their good-bye last year.

Then Watt realized that it was a group message, and the other two recipients were Avery and Rylin. We need to talk—in person , Leda had written. I think we’re all in danger.

And despite the gravity of the situation, despite the fact that he should probably be concerned about whatever Leda had discovered, Watt couldn’t help feeling a fragile hope ballooning in his chest. He was going to see Leda again.

He’d shown up early to Avery’s apartment, hoping that he might catch Leda for a moment alone; after all, she was the one who’d summoned them all to this group meeting. But she hadn’t yet arrived. Watt just sat there silently, ignoring Avery’s pointed glances, trying to figure out what the hell he was going to say. How did you greet the girl you loved when you hadn’t seen her in eight months—when her last words to you were If you care about me at all, you’ll leave me alone ?

He cast his gaze nervously around the room, all brocade carpets and blue-patterned wallpaper and carved antiques that looked as if they’d been shipped straight from Versailles. For all Watt knew, maybe they had. He’d forgotten how imposing it was simply to get this high: switching on the 990th floor to the private elevator that opened onto the Fullers’ landing, then stepping through that massive two-story entryway. He’d felt a bit like Hercules climbing the staircase of the gods to Mount Olympus.

Now here he was, in the fabled sky island, the bright human aerie perched atop the greatest structure in the world. Watt glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows, the flexiglass so impossibly clear that it looked like it wasn’t there at all. He felt like he could stretch out his hands and brush the sky. What was it like for the Fullers, having no neighbors except those below them? Didn’t it feel strange that their only connection with the rest of the city was the opening to their private elevator shaft?

His head darted up at the sound of the doorbell, but then he realized that of course Leda wouldn’t need to ring the doorbell at all. She was on the preapproved entry list here.

“I thought we were done with all this.” Rylin Myers sank into the opposite armchair.

“I thought it was over too. A long time ago.” The sleeve of Avery’s sweater dress fell forward as she reached for a glass of lemon water. A platter of snacks was arranged on the coffee table before them, completely untouched.