That wasn’t particularly suspicious in itself. They could’ve just been friends who met through Ava, and they might’ve hung out for a couple of hours that night before someone else killed Lindsay.
For a while after I discovered their chat log, I thought about going over to Silvercreek to find Laney. Ask her what she knew. How Lindsay seemed that night. If anyone else was there. If she even saw her, or if she actually called her to decline her invitation to hang out.
But then I saw the necklace.
That was the second piece of evidence.
For Lindsay and Adam’s birthday two years ago, Mom and Dad were both away—no surprises there—so I sorted out some stellar gifts to make up for the lack of parental attention on their special day. For Adam, I arranged a private tour of the brand new SpaceX buildings down in New York, seeing as he’d always been a total tech nerd. For Lindsay, I contacted the jeweler who did a lot of my mom’s pieces and made them design a necklace with an L pendant for her.
To an untrained eye, it looked like a normal little diamond and emerald pendant that anyone could pick up from an average jewelry store for five hundred bucks or less. What they didn’t know was that the emeralds came from our family’s private collection of rare jewels, and the particular stones I gave to the jeweler were worth an absolute fortune.
All up, the necklace was worth around eighty grand… and it went missing after Lindsay’s death. I knew because we wanted to put it on her for her burial, but we couldn’t find it in any of her jewelry cases.
My parents didn’t think much of it at the time, figuring she just left it at a friend’s place or lost it somewhere before she died. I wondered if something else had happened to it, though.
Then, by complete coincidence, I met Laney waitressing at my dad’s RFA alumni party a few months ago. She was wearing Lindsay’s pendant around her neck.
I recognized it immediately, and I knew it wasn’t just a coincidental copy. There was no way a penniless teenaged waitress from Silvercreek could afford a custom-designed necklace like that, or even a cheaper knock-off version. It had to have been stolen.
Evil bitch.
The third piece of evidence I had against her was the newest and most tenuous. It was more of a hunch, really.
It was the perpetually-haunted look in her eyes, and the way her face contorted with shock when I called her a murderer earlier. That wasn’t the expression of an innocent person who had no idea what I was talking about. It was the expression of a guilty person being called out for the very first time.
That cemented it for me. I was fucking right about her all along. She came to my house a year ago and pushed my sister off the roof, sending her plummeting to her death.
If she’d ever spoken up about it, I could’ve believed it was a terrible accident. Maybe they were messing around, and Lindsay simply slipped over the edge. Unlikely yet still possible.
But she never said a word.
It was that silence that gave it away, and the fact that she had the necklace. She obviously took it from my sister’s body like it was some sort of trophy, and now she was right here, smugly parading it around our town. Our house.
I honestly couldn’t believe the fucking balls on her. It was bad enough that she hurt my sister, but to come to our place a few months later and wear her fucking necklace while she worked one of our parties… that was a real low.
Now things were even worse, because she’d latched onto my brother. I kept telling him to stay the fuck away from her, in case she ever tried to hurt him too, but he refused to listen to me unless I told him why.
I couldn’t tell him the truth. Not yet. He’d just think I was crazy and grasping at straws, like my father and David Burgin already thought.
When I made the mistake of telling Dad that I thought Lindsay’s death was suspicious several months ago, he shut me down right away. Refused to listen to anything and told me I needed therapy to get over my supposed ‘obsession’ with her death.
As for Burgin, his response was basically this: the so-called evidence I had didn’t actually prove anything. Lindsay was wild, flighty and irresponsible when she was still alive. Clumsy, too. Everyone knew that, so it could easily be argued that she misplaced the necklace somewhere, and then someone else came along, found it, and decided to keep it. Someone like Laney.
It could even be argued that someone else found it and gave it to Laney, and that she honestly had no idea where it came from.
Burgin thought the chat log and phone record was a no-go too. All it showed was that Laney spoke to my sister that night. For all we knew, she could’ve called to say ‘Hey, sorry, I have other plans. Maybe next time,’ instead of ‘Hey, sure, I’d love to hang, just tell me your address and I’ll head over now’.
As for the GPS data which placed her in Royal Falls that evening, that could be explained away easily. Her mother Ava worked two jobs in Royal Falls—three days a week at our mansion as a maid, and another three days as a cleaner at an office downtown. So Laney could’ve just driven over that night to pick her up from the cleaning job.
I hated that Burgin was right about all of that shit, but it didn’t change the fact that he was. So before I told anyone else what I suspected about Laney, I needed to gather real evidence.
That was where my plan came in.
Once I knew who Laney was, I spent months gathering information on her. Her patterns, her habits, her whole life… I knew it from top to bottom. I planned on using that information to take her when the time was right and force a confession out of her. I wanted to hurt her, too. Torture her until she felt even a sliver of the horrific pain she caused me and my family.
Crazy and totally fucking illegal? Yeah, obviously. But it was also necessary as far as I was concerned. Otherwise I’d never be able to turn her in, make others believe me, and get justice for my sister.
Unfortunately, when she showed up at my school a month ago, it threw a huge spanner in the works. I couldn’t move to the next stage of my plan with her there, because a missing girl from an exclusive prep school would attract much more public attention than a missing girl from Silvercreek. That meant I had to get rid of her, and fast.