Someone Knows Read online

  Copyright © 2019 Smart Blonde, LLC

  The right of Lisa Scottoline to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published in the USA in 2019 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  First published as an Ebook in Great Britain in 2019

  by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  Cover photograph © James Brey/iStock/Getty Images Plus

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 4313 3

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Also by Lisa Scottoline

  About the Book

  Praise for Lisa Scottoline

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Part One

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Part Two

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  © April Narby

  Lisa Scottoline is the New York Times bestselling author of over twenty novels. There are now more than twenty-five million copies of her books in print, and she is published in over thirty countries. She has been awarded the Edgar Award for crime fiction, and the Cosmopolitan Fun Fearless Female Award. In addition, Lisa writes a weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as a number of non-fiction titles with her daughter, Francesca Serritella. Lisa is a former trial lawyer and lives in Philadelphia with an array of disobedient pets.

  By Lisa Scottoline

  Fiction:

  Someone Knows*

  After Anna*

  Exposed*

  One Perfect Lie*

  Damaged*

  Most Wanted*

  Corrupted*

  Every Fifteen Minutes*

  Keep Quiet*

  Don’t Go*

  Betrayed*

  Accused*

  Come Home

  Save Me

  Think Twice

  Look Again

  Lady Killer

  Daddy’s Girl

  Dirty Blonde

  Devil’s Corner

  Killer Smile

  Dead Ringer

  Courting Trouble

  The Vendetta Defense

  Moment of Truth

  Mistaken Identity

  Rough Justice

  Legal Tender

  Running From The Law

  Final Appeal

  Everywhere That Mary Went

  Non fiction (with Francesca Serritella):

  Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim

  Best Friends, Occasional Enemies

  My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space

  Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog

  * Available from Headline

  About the Book

  From the New York Times-bestselling author comes her latest heart-pounding thriller.

  Twenty years ago four teenagers spent a blissful summer as the closest of friends. But when a new boy looked to join them, they convinced him to play a dangerous initiation game with deadly stakes. What happened next would change each of them forever.

  Now, after leading separate lives, three of the four friends reunite for the first time since that summer and unbearable memories come flooding back. Someone knows what happened - but who? And just how far will they go to keep their shocking secrets buried?

  Praise for Lisa Scottoline:

  ‘Lisa Scottoline is one of the very best writers at work today’ Michael Connelly

  ‘A deliciously distracting thriller’ Huffington Post

  ‘Scottoline knows how to keep readers in her grip’ The New York Times Book Review

  ‘Scottoline is a powerhouse’ Robert Baldacci

  ‘Scottoline writes riveting thrillers that keep me up all night, with plots that twist and turn’ Harlen Coben

  ‘Scottoline gets all the details right, and gives all the characters flesh and blood, breath and life. This is a novel that is as full of thrills as it is full of heart’ Kristen Hannah

  ‘Scottoline is a star’ Time Magazine

  To my ama
zing daughter, Francesca, with love

  It is not your memories which haunt you.

  It is not what you have written down.

  It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.

  What you must go on forgetting all your life.

  —JAMES FENTON, “A German Requiem”

  PROLOGUE

  Nobody tells you that you’ll do things when you’re young that are so stupid, so unbelievably stupid, so horrifically stupid that years later you won’t be able to believe it. You’ll be on your laptop, or reading a book, or pumping gas, and you’ll find yourself shaking your head because you’ll be thinking no, no, no, I did not do that, I was not a part of that, that could not have happened.

  You’ll tell yourself that you were young, that you were drinking, that good teenagers make bad decisions all the time. But you know that’s not it. You know that when teenagers get together, something dark can take over. Call it peer pressure, call it a collective idiocy, call it something more primal and monstrous, like whatever makes frat boys haze their so-called brothers to death. Writ large, it makes Nazis murder millions and soldiers torch Vietnamese villages. But whatever you call it, it will make you do the worst thing you ever did in your life. And in your darkest moments, you will wonder if it made you do it, or simply allowed you to.

  You know this now but you didn’t then, and you’ll shake your head, thinking I can’t believe I did that, I can’t believe I was a part of that, but you were, and not in Nazi Germany, My Lai, or a frat house, but in the safest place you can imagine—in the suburban housing development where you grew up, specifically in a patch of woods mandated by township zoning, confined by fences, and bordered by the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In other words, in a completely civilized location where even Nature herself is domesticated and nothing ever happens.

  Except this one night.

  You and your friends decide to play Russian Roulette, a game so obviously lethal that you can’t even imagine what you were thinking. Days later, years later, a decade later, it’s still so unspeakable you can’t say a word to anyone, and all the books you read that you should’ve learned something from—Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace, and Crime and Punishment—teach you absolutely nothing. You read like a fiend, you always have, but you don’t let the books teach you anything. You never apply them to your life because they’re fiction, or even if they seem real, they’re someone else’s life, not your life, except that you and your friends decided to play a prank and someone blew their brains out in front of you.

  You won’t be able to remember exactly what happened because of the booze and the horror, the absolute horror, and yet you won’t be able to forget it, though you’ll spend night after night trying. People say something was a night to remember, but this was a night to forget and yet you can’t forget, and then you’ll hear some random playlist and Rihanna singing don’t act like you forgot and you’ll realize you’ve been acting like you forgot your entire adult life, and you’ll feel accused by a song, nailed by a phrase, and don’t act like you forgot is everything, don’t act like you forgot is all, and you’ll pick up the bottle and say to yourself, I’m acting like I forgot but I didn’t, I didn’t forget, and you’ll need to be put out of your own misery, so you’ll drink and drink, trying to drink yourself to death.

  But that takes too long. Years too long. Time doesn’t move fast enough. You learned that the hard way.

  One night, you’ll lose patience.

  CHAPTER 1

  Allie Garvey

  Allie gripped the wheel, heading to the cemetery. The death was awful enough in someone so young, agonizing because it was a suicide. The family would be anguished, wracking their brains, asking why. But Allie knew why, and she wasn’t the only one. There used to be four of them, and now there were three. They had kept it a secret for twenty years. She didn’t know if she could keep it secret another minute.

  Allie drove ahead, her thoughts going back to the summer of ’99. She could hear the gunshot ringing in her ears. She could see the blood. It had happened right in front of her. Her gut twisted. She felt wrung by guilt. She had nightmares and flashbacks. She’d been fifteen years old, and it had been a night of firsts. First time hanging with the cool kids. First time getting drunk. First time being kissed. First time falling in love. And then the gunshot.

  Allie clenched the wheel, holding on for dear life, to what she didn’t know. To the present. To reality. To sanity. She had to stay strong. She had to be brave. She had to do what needed to be done. She should have done it twenty years ago. She’d kept the secret all this time. She’d been living a contents-under-pressure life. Now she wanted to explode.

  Allie approached the cemetery entrance. She knew the others would be there. A reunion of co-conspirators. She hadn’t spoken to them after what had happened. They’d had no contact since. They’d run away from each other and what they’d done. They’d thought getting caught was the worst that could happen. Allie had learned otherwise. Not getting caught was worse.

  They’d grown up in Brandywine Hunt, a development in a corner of Chester County, Pennsylvania, where the horse farms had been razed, the trees cleared, and the grassy hills leveled. Concrete pads had been paved for McMansions, and asphalt rolled for driveways. Thoroughbred Road had been the outermost of the development’s concentric streets, and at its center were the clubhouse, pool, tennis and basketball courts, like the prize for the successful completion of a suburban labyrinth.

  Allie always thought of her childhood that way, a series of passages that led her to bump into walls. Her therapist theorized it was because of her older sister, Jill, who’d had an illness that Allie had been too young to understand, at first. It had sounded like sis-something, which had made sense to Allie—her sister had sis. Until one nightmarish race to the hospital, with her father driving like a madman and her mother hysterical in the backseat holding Jill, who was frantically gasping for breath, her face turning blue. Allie had watched, terrified at the realization that sis could kill her sister. And when her sister turned seventeen, it did.

  Allie bit her lip, catching sight of the wrought-iron fence. Her sister was buried at the same cemetery, the grave marked by a monument sunk into the manicured grass. Its marble was rosy pink, a color Jill had picked out herself, calling it Dead Barbie Pink. Allie remembered that at Jill’s funeral she had cried so hard she laughed, or laughed so hard she cried, she didn’t know which.

  Allie braked, waiting for traffic to pass so she could turn. GARDENS OF PEACE, read the tasteful sign, and it was one of a chain of local cemeteries, fitting for a region of housing developments, as if life could be planned from birth to death.

  Her gut tightened again, and she focused on her breathing exercises, in and out, in and out. Yoga and meditation were no match for a guilty conscience. She hadn’t fired the gun, but she was responsible. She replayed the memory at night, tortured with shame. She’d never told anyone, not even her husband. No wonder her marriage was circling the drain.

  Allie steered through the cemetery entrance. Pebbled gravel popped beneath the tires of her gray Audi, and she drove toward the black hearse, limos, and parked cars. Mourners were walking to the burial site, and she spotted the other two instantly.

  They were walking together, talking, heads down. Gorgeous, privileged, rich. The cool kids, grown up. They didn’t look up or see her. They wouldn’t expect her, since she hadn’t been one of them, not really. They hadn’t followed her life the way she’d followed theirs. She was the one looking at them, never vice versa. That’s how it always is for outsiders.

  Allie told herself once more to stay strong. The cool kids believed their secret was going to stay safe forever, but they were wrong.

  It was time for forever to end.

  Part One

  —TWENTY YEARS EARLIER—

  This is where we began

  Being what we can.

  —STEPHEN SONDHEIM, “OUR TIME,” Merrily We Roll Along

  CHAPT
ER 2

  Allie Garvey

  Allie ran up the hill in the woods, her breath ragged and her thighs aching. Her house was just around the corner, and she wished she could sneak home, but she didn’t want to be there, either. Her sister, Jill, had died last summer, and since then the house had felt hollow, empty, silent.

  Allie had to keep going, pumping her arms. When Allie had turned nine, her mother had finally explained Jill’s illness, which wasn’t sis but cystic fibrosis. Allie hadn’t known that the disease was fatal back then, or any of the statistics on life expectancy, but when Jill was well enough to travel, the Garveys took trips to Disney World and Hawaii, like a do-it-yourself Make-A-Wish. Her mother said we’re making memories, but Allie didn’t know how to live in the present and the future at the same time. The Garveys smiled hard when they were happy because they were also sad, taking the bitter with the sweet, the good with the bad, every single minute.

  Her sister’s coughing was the background noise of her childhood, though Jill muffled the sound at night, not to keep the house awake. Every morning, Jill took antibiotics in pill form, and Pulmozyme and albuterol through a nebulizer. Every time she ate a meal or a snack, she took pancreatic enzymes, and she endured percussive therapy twice a day. Jill never complained, and everyone said she was a trouper, an angel, even a saint, but Allie knew the real Jill, who was funny, goofy, and naughty. The real Jill loved thick books with maps in the front and joked that she was going to smoke when she grew up. The real Jill wasn’t a saint, but something much better. A big sister.

  If Jill was dying on the outside, Allie was dying on the inside. When Jill was hurting, Allie couldn’t stop her tears, crying in her pillow for them both. The worst was when she helped with Jill’s percussive therapy. She’d beat her sister’s rib cage to loosen up the mucus, which left them both drenched with effort, just to win a few puffs of something as insubstantial as air. Air. You couldn’t see it, but you couldn’t live without it. It didn’t weigh anything, but it had all the weight in the world. It was like a bad riddle. It was even free. All you had to do was breathe. Take a deep breath, people said, but Jill had never had one of those in her life, which ended after seventeen years, at home.