Lies That Bind Us

“She switched them, Gretchen. She admitted it. You were a target for them before the trip even began. It’s why they invited you. And once they figured out it wasn’t you sending the messages with Manos’s name in them, that it was one of us, they were going to get rid of us all no matter what you did or said.”

I thought back to the trial, as I had done constantly since it ended. At first, Simon said virtually nothing under cross-examination, offering mere shrugs, denials, and claims that he couldn’t remember. He implied the whole thing had been a mistake, the result of a faulty generator and our—mainly my—paranoia and deception. Melissa, by contrast, had been defiant, denying everything but somehow managing to blame everyone else, as if everything that had happened was due to the stupidity and mean-spiritedness of other people and a hostile universe. This impulse toward self-justification was bizarre and, in some ways, more frightening than anything she had said or done the night she set out to kill us all. For someone who had always seemed so composed, so attentive to the way others viewed her, this careless dropping of the veil was shocking and contemptuous, as if no one had the right to judge her so she didn’t care what they thought. That included the jury, whom she frequently sneered at in ways that made for newspaper headlines. I was reminded of the look in her eyes when, after she had been yelled at by the dead boy’s mother that day at the restaurant, Brad had refused to play along with Melissa’s pity party. There had been a feral rage in her face at the thought that someone had the audacity to disrupt what she felt she deserved. It had been the same look she had had that night in the foyer, when she had attacked me for exposing what she and Simon had done.

But she continued to deny everything, even as she scornfully remarked that it was absurd that she might lose her liberty over the death of “some Greek waiter.” The court translator hesitated over the statement, barely keeping her fury in check, and the prosecution repeated the statement several times in his closing remarks. Each time, Melissa just rolled her eyes and sighed. I was surprised no one from the public gallery went for her, the tension, the hatred was so thick in the courtroom. I felt ashamed to have been her friend.

Though the evidence remained open to interpretation, the process of laying out who Melissa had become was excruciating, her beauty and charisma peeled back to show a heart so hard and shriveled that it was painful to look at. I felt the eyes of the jury on the rest of us too, all of them silently, fiercely asking the same question: How did you not know?

I couldn’t answer that. Simon had turned out to be shallow, selfish, and ruthless in a bland, predictable, and petty sort of way, but it didn’t shock me—maybe because he was a man. I’m used to the way men, suitably draped with respectability, with money and status, are absolved and dressed with things that, if squinted at without your glasses, look like virtues: strength, confidence, and ambition. Melissa was more of an enigma, her sense of sneering superiority to all around her—including, I would say, Simon—less easy to explain and harder to swallow. A double standard, perhaps.

Even so, the evidence against them was largely circumstantial, and it was still possible that, however much the jury hated them, they might still get away with it. The turning point came when Simon abruptly changed his plea to guilty. It was clear that the trial was going badly, and everyone in court—and, for that matter, in the papers—figured he was cutting his losses, but I felt that there was more to it than that. I think I saw the moment he made his decision. Melissa was on the stand. From time to time she had tried to play the radiant and misunderstood goddess, but her furious contempt kept showing through, and the mood of the room was solidly against her. The prosecutor asked her whose idea it had been to go scuba diving and, when the question had been translated to her satisfaction, she rolled her eyes.

“Si,” she said. “Of course.”

“Of course?” said the prosecutor.

“Si never misses a chance to show off.”

She smiled as she said it, but it was a knowing, disdainful smile, and I happened to glance at Simon. He blinked, as if slapped, and bit down on his lip, his eyes lowered. Five minutes later he started whispering to his lawyer, and the trial was halted for the afternoon. When we returned, the tenor of the proceedings had changed and Simon was on the stand, listlessly but clearly recounting what they had done and why.

It came, to everyone but Melissa, as an immense relief.

There were no huge surprises, but I was still amazed by the calculation behind that last night when they had tried to kill us all. They had already interrogated Gretchen and had no reason to believe she had told anyone what had happened to Manos Veranikis. Their plan, Simon said, had been to probe the rest of us for what we knew or suspected, me in particular, but Brad, already a thorn in their sides after his freak-out with Gretchen’s underwear, disturbed their set up of the generator hose. Melissa panicked, hitting him from behind, then I had come downstairs, and that brought everything else forward.

“We knew then that we would have to kill them all that night,” he said, almost casually. “That had always been the plan, but we hadn’t meant to do it so quickly. We still wanted to know who Jan might have told—we assumed she was the one sending the messages because it was the kind of thing she would get off on—so we chained her up in the basement and tried to get her to tell us what she knew. That was a mistake,” he added, giving me a quick, blank look. “We should have killed her first.

“Anyway,” he continued. The courtroom had become utterly silent as he spoke, his words echoed by the Greek simultaneous translator, the prosecutor holding back, letting him talk. “We got Brad back up to his room. He was sleeping alone because his wife didn’t want anything to do with him. Then, while we took turns to question Jan in the basement, we flooded the west side of the house with carbon monoxide.

“It was a simple plan. Perfect, really. Mel’s idea, of course. The east wing, where our room was, is self-contained, so we could stay there. We’d use the scuba gear to make sure we didn’t get poisoned, but we figured we’d just pretend to find everyone dead in the morning, discover that the hose had come disconnected from the genny, and no one would be the wiser. Apart from us, everyone who knew or had even the smallest suspicion about what happened to Manos Veranikis would die in that house. A tragic accident. We would walk away and get on with our lives.”

The baldness of the admission was staggering, as was his composure when, at the end of it, he looked at his wife and added, “I guess this time, you don’t get what you want.”

I never heard Melissa speak again.

I thought back on some of this as Gretchen nodded vaguely.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They just seemed like such nice people—Mel, anyway. So welcoming and . . . I don’t know. Maybe it’s our fault, you know? That we somehow messed everything up. I mean, I know they did terrible things, but if we had never met them . . . who knows?”

“Gretchen, practically the first thing Mel told you when you met her in that bar was that Simon had killed Manos Veranikis a few years earlier.”

“Well, that wasn’t the first time we spoke. Remember, we were old school friends.”

I brushed past this embroidery.

“Even so, she told you her husband had killed someone!”

“Well, yes, but it sounded like it was an accident.”

“Which they didn’t report.”

“No, but now they’re saying he did it on purpose. That doesn’t seem right.”

“Simon was angry at Mel for the way she played with men. When he saw the boy—one of the people she had led on quite deliberately—he lost it and ran him over. It wasn’t a coincidence or an accident.”

“You don’t know that, though. Not for sure. You can’t know what was in his mind. Not really. And even so, that wasn’t Mel’s fault, was it?”

I tell Marcus all this when we are back in Charlotte, the day I went to the graveyard, and he just shakes his head.

“She wants to hold on to her impression of who they were because they made her feel better about herself. Like she was singled out by rock stars or royalty to be their friend. Of course she wants to think the best of them.”

“They tried to kill her!”

“Yeah,” says Marcus, giving me a sideways grin. “There is that.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be close friends with Gretchen.”

“Despite the bond of imprisonment and attempted murder? Hard to believe.”

We walk a few paces in silence, leaving the cemetery and moving to Marcus’s rain-misted Camry.

“What about us?” I say. “You think we’re going to be close friends?”

He gives me that little side look again, and his smile this time is smaller, more watchful.

“I think it’s possible,” he says, turning away so I can’t read his face. “What do you think?”

“Definitely possible,” I say. “One condition, though.”

“What’s that?”

“We never buy a generator.”

“Deal,” says Marcus. “When the lights go out, we’ll light a candle.”

“And hold hands.”

He turns to me at that.

“You OK?” he says.

I look past him across the car roof, back to the wet, indistinct gravestones beyond the cemetery railings, and I nod, turning away from them and facing the future.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m good.”