I was goingto vomit. I had nothing in my system to vomit, but I was going to vomit just the same.
"Are you all right?" Mrs. Ryan asked. "The bath should be ready. Or do you want to eat first? "
She stopped short of lifting a poison apple toward me, but she might as well have. I took a step back, still clutching her sweatshirt in my hands.
"It was you," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "You hired those men to kill me."
A brief shadow of fear crossed over her face, which she quickly replaced with a look of total confusion. But it was too late. I had seen
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it. I had seen the recognition and I knew she was the one. And I also realized I should have kept my mouth shut--probably would have if I hadn't been so exhausted from my six days alone on a deserted island. Should have asked for a phone so I could call my parents and instead called the police. Because now I was alone with the person who had been desperately trying to kill me for days. Alone and weak.
But there was nothing I could do about that now.
"It's been you all along!" I said, still backing away. There was nowhere for me to go, except maybe the bathroom, but she could cut me off there by going back out into the hall and entering from the other door. I was trapped. Trapped with the woman who'dbeen trying to kill me for two weeks. The woman Upton had promised would take care of me.
Upton Giles was turning out to be a seriously bad judge of character.
"Reed, I don't know what you're talking about," Mrs. Ryan said, reaching up to toy with her necklace.
"You did it for him. Because you were jealous of Upton and me," I spat. "That is just sick, do you know that? He's friends with your kids. You're married!"
A flash of anger lit her eyes and she snapped. "Do not talk about what you could never understand!"
"You did it, didn't you?" I said, stalling for time now. Noelle and the rest of my friends would be here any second. Any second now. All I had to do was stay alive until they arrived. "You spooked my horse
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that day in the woods. And you rigged that Jet Ski to go haywire on me. And when neither of those little ploys worked, you shoved me off your boat and took my necklace so you could set up Marquis to take the fall. God, you must have been so frustrated when they found me alive," I said. "That must have just killed you."
Mrs. Ryan's face had taken on almost masklike calm, but her eyes quaked in their sockets. "You're going to have to stop saying things like that," she said, advancing on me. "We have a large staff in this house. Someone might hear you. Someone might actually repeatyour delusional ramblings."
I glanced around at the dressing table for something I could use as a weapon. All I needed was something heavy. If I could take down Gravois, I could take down Mrs. Ryan. But there was nothing. Nothing but tiny gleaming bottles and tubes. Then something moved. Out in the hallway, I saw a shadow.
Please let it be Noelle or Upton and not Daniel or Paige or one of the other St. Earths nutbags.
"I'm not delusional," I said, the backs of my legs pressing into the dressing table. "And you're goingto jail."
"Oh, really?" she said with a smirk. "What makes you think anyone's going to believe you? What makes you think I'm going to let you have a chance to make them?"
My heart stopped, but I managed to see the flaw in her plan. "If you hurt me, they're going to know it was you. Upton just left us alone together. You'll be the one and only suspect this time."
"Not if I left you alone in the tub for just a few minutes and when I
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came back you had drowned," she said through her teeth, her eyes wide with innocent wonder. "Who knows what kind of ailments six days of exposure on an island can cause? Heart attack, stroke, simple fainting... any one of these things could cause you to go under. So tragic, drowning in a marble tub after surviving all those days on the island."
Before I could even process the insanity of all this, she lunged at me and grabbed my hair in her hand. I shouted out in pain as she dragged me forward, toward the bathroom and the full tub. I struggled against her, but she was freakishly strong and I was pathetically weak. I screamed at the top of my lungs and before the sound even died away, Sawyer came bounding through the door with some kind of long object in his hand. He slammed the butt of it down on the back of Mrs. Ryan's skull. Her eyes popped open so wide I thought I might have to catch them in my palms, but then they closed and she crumpled forward onto the floor.
Sawyer and I stood there for a moment, both of us heaving for breath. Then he dropped his weapon at his feet--I could see now that it was some kind of modern table sculpture--and reached out a hand to me. He was wearing a black tuxedo, his long black tie loosened and askew.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
I tripped over Mrs. Ryan's ankle as I flung myself at him. Sawyer backed up a couple of steps from the force of my embrace, but I clung to him like there was no tomorrow.
"I can't take this anymore," I rambled. "I can't. I can't take it."