The Undoing

On a bitter January evening, three people are found murdered in the isolated Blackbird hotel.

Best friends since childhood, Eric, Rory and Celia have always been inseparable. Together they’ve coped with broken homes and damaged families, clinging to each other as they’ve navigated their tenuous lives. Their bond is potent and passionate—and its intensity can be volatile.

When the trio decides to follow Celia’s dream of buying and renovating the Blackbird, a dilapidated hotel that sits on the perilous cliffs of Jawbone Ridge, new jealousies arise and long-held suspicions start to unravel their relationship. Soon they find themselves pushed to the breaking point, where trust becomes doubt, longing becomes obsession, and someone will commit the ultimate betrayal.

An unflinching story of ambition, desire and envy, The Undoing traces the events leading to that fateful night, revealing the intimate connections, dark secrets and terrible lies that wove them together—and tore them apart.

Praise for THE UNDOING

“Beautifully imagined and beautifully written, hypnotically suspenseful and truly chilling…this is a very superior thriller.”

—#1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child

“Smart, gripping, and thoroughly absorbing. Dean’s The Undoing had my brain twisted for hours.”

—New York Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain

“Averil Dean’s The Undoing is a tense, suspenseful tale that pulls the reader down a twisted path to the spine-tingling conclusion.”

—New York Times bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf

“Dark and haunting…a beautifully disturbing character study. And the writing itself—this isn’t simply good prose. The words are poetic and painful and unforgettable. The Undoing is a superb novel. Dean’s career as a suspense writer is going to be great fun to watch.”

—New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison

Praise for ALICE CLOSE YOUR EYES

“Chilling, riveting, intriguing, surprising and compelling, and I can’t think of a debut that kept me turning pages faster or more breathlessly.”

—M.J. Rose, international bestselling author of Seduction

“Alice Close Your Eyes is a crisply written, wickedly suspenseful debut…a dark, sensual nightmare.… Don’t miss it.”

—David Bell, author of Cemetery Girl and Never Come Back

“Alice Close Your Eyes will have readers on the edge of their seats. Promising newcomer Dean spins a web out of the deepest human obsessions…to reveal a haunting story.”

—Booklist

“Dean’s marvelous debut is dark, gritty and relentless… This psychological thriller borders on the erotic as it draws the reader into its web.”

—RT Book Reviews, 4 stars

“A haunting, intense novel that is at once psychologically compelling and emotionally unsettling. Taut pacing and skilled storytelling support a breathtaking plot and characters that are heartbreaking and horrifying yet somehow still accessible and sympathetic. It’s scorching, disturbing and tragic, but well-crafted and impressively written.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“An absorbing, deeply disturbing, darkly erotic psychological thriller of tragedy and revenge. Fans of…Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)…will love this disquieting novel.”

—Library Journal, starred review

The Undoing

Averil Dean

A NOVEL

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Andy

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Quotation

August 2014

One Day Earlier

January 11, 2009

One Day Earlier

Two Days Earlier

Three Days Earlier

December 24, 2008

Two Days Earlier

Five Days Earlier

September 2008

December 31, 2007

July 2007

January 2003

November 2002

June 2002

November 2001

July 1998

January 11, 2009

August 2014

Acknowledgments

Reader’s Guide

Questions for Discussion

A Conversation with Averil Dean

Copyright

“Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,” I shrieked, upstarting:

“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

Edgar Allan Poe

August 2014

JULIAN MOSS UNFOLDED the note and pressed it over his face with both hands. With his fingertips he molded the paper to his eyelids. His thumbs pushed the edges to his cheeks. The paper smelled like money now, like old leather and sweat. He wished he had a mirror so he could see whether the ink had transferred to his face, the opening line like a blue tattoo across his forehead:

Julian

I know what you did.

He eased forward, the note dangling from his fingers. Gravel crunched under his boot and skidded over the ledge, clattered on the rocky outcropping at his feet, then plummeted in silence to the river far below.

A long-ago conversation trailed through his mind: his father’s voice, describing a friend who had dived from the penthouse suite of a Seattle high-rise. The guy had gone there with a real estate agent as if he were looking to buy the place, making polite conversation throughout the showing, checking the taps, full of jokes about the owner’s choice of flooring and all the mirrors in the master bath. When it came time to leave, the agent glanced back and saw his client’s feet disappear over the railing.

A quick death, according to Julian’s father. From that height it would have been like dropping a water balloon.

Not that it would be that way for Julian. The ravine was not that deep, and the slope dropped off in a series of rocky shelves. There would be no spectacular burst at the end, no terrible, literal emptying of his head. For him it would be more concussive, like a pumpkin tossed down a flight of concrete stairs.

The agent said he’d heard his client laughing, right at the end. Julian could understand the guy’s state of mind. He felt the same giddiness, a lightening of the senses, as if the air itself were pulling him skyward, the pine trees standing like spectators with their arms out ready to clap.

His eye was caught by a yellow wink of light at his wrist. His watch. He imagined his mother, signing for his possessions at the county morgue, finding the watch among them. Knowing or coming to know what it meant.

A dizzying relief poured through him at having remembered in time. He unclasped the band and pulled off the watch. The hands had long since stopped turning. A diamond had come loose from the face and rattled around behind the glass like the bead in a Cracker Jack toy. Easing back from the ledge, he wound up and threw the watch as far as it would go. The band turned itself inside out as it went, flashing and wriggling in the air. It sailed across the ravine and disappeared into the scrub on the other side.

His arm seemed lighter without it. A faint stripe showed at his wrist, the skin there tender and pale where the sun hadn’t reached and where the dark hair of his forearm had worn away. Strange to think how much the watch had meant to him once. The heft of it, the shine. How was it that he’d never realized how heavy the thing was? For the first time in years, he felt the weight of both arms equally, one no lighter than the other, neither side dragging him down.

A fine feeling, balance. He wished he’d tried it sooner.

He steadied himself with one hand around the branch overhead. The rough bark was gummed with sap, releasing the astringent scent of pine into the morning air. To his right, at the tip of a crescent-shaped shelf of rock, a veil of white smoke lifted into the sky. Through the haze he could see the skeletal outline of the Blackbird Hotel. Its spine and ribs stood in jagged black lines against the sky, and at the far end, the old stone chimney teetered unsupported, leaking smoke from both ends. As he watched, an arc of water rose over the ruins, undulating gently as the fire hose swept back and forth. A subtle rainbow formed in the mist, appearing from the ground, then fading, unfinished, just before the apex.

He raised his eyes and looked out the mouth of the ravine, past the smoldering hotel to the bank of the mountain range beyond. Wide swaths of the hillside had been cleared and were thick with late summer grass that gleamed in the sunshine like new-fallen snow. The lifts were still now, spidery black cables trailing post to post up the hill in shallow arcs, the chairs swaying gently in the breeze. He imagined himself hurtling downward, the air whistling in his ears, the far-off roar of the crowd tugging at the tips of his skis. A rise in the snow, liftoff, his body tucked up tight as the chatter of the skis was silenced.

It had been years since he’d felt the wind that way, self-generated, in evidence of his own physical power. Already he could feel his body weight, the inexorable tug of gravity against the soles of his feet, the mindless acceleration. He wondered whether his father’s friend had laughed all the way down for the sheer joy of falling.

The note fluttered in his hand as if calling for attention.

He let it slip from his fingers. The paper drifted down and caught on a thorny bush, opening and closing in the breeze like the beak of a duck. He could see the words inside—I know what you did—abruptly superimposed with the memory of Eric’s voice in that dead-on mimic, quacking like Donald Duck.

Julian laughed, a wide, billowing sound that swelled around his ears and made him sway on his perch like a bird in high wind. The wave of hilarity lifted him to his toes, drew his head and shoulders steadily back. But once started, the laughter wouldn’t stop. It began to grind through his torso, shred his throat, until he was drawn stiff as a bow on the edge of the ravine and racked with pain. He loosened his grip on the branch and opened his hand, let the bark scrape over his palm and all the way down his fingers. Then he let go.

His hands filled with air, a gentle kiss over the sting.

Oh, Celia.

How she would love to see him now.

One Day Earlier

THE TOWN OF Jawbone Ridge started life around a copper mine. No more than a diggers’ camp at first, a ramshackle collection of pine-log boxes that flanked the road, which snaked through the treacherous San Juan Mountains to feed the community and shift the copper ore. The camp was soon fortified by a mercantile and a saloon, legitimized by two brick hotels and a post office, and for a time the people thrived. But eventually the price of copper plummeted and the miners moved on, leaving the hollowed-out detritus behind them.

The slope was steep on that side of Deer Creek, and a century’s worth of Colorado snow had exhausted the town, which was gradually losing its grip on the mountainside, collapsing down the embankment to the riverbed below. The surviving buildings had gone swaybacked and frail, propped up on nests of two-by-fours and tied to the trees around them like elderly relatives on life support.

The slow spectacle was a draw for visitors to nearby Telluride, who skied in to the Ridge for lunch and dumbstruck pictures—Can you even believe this place is still standing?—and returned along the network of ski lifts to the cloud-laced peak, then down again on Telluride’s side of the mountain, trailing perhaps a new set of poles or a scarf with the town’s tagline in bloodred letters, listing sideways as if toppling down the fleece: The Crookedest Town in the West.

It was a living. Barely. A few overbuilt homes were nestled among the aspen, the ultimate in inaccessibility, but for the most part the charm of Jawbone Ridge was lost on the masses. The town’s precarious situation made visitors uneasy and anxious to get away. The ground there felt uncertain, and the year-round residents had a strange way of moving, never stepping too hard on the frozen ground, their eyes sliding warily uphill as if waiting for the mountain to let go and finally finish them off.

At the far end of town, the road curved sharply along the edge of the ravine, then split off and turned abruptly uphill. The windshield of Julian’s car filled for a moment with pine boughs against a flat blue sky—then, as the road leveled off, the scene was replaced as if by magic with the roof, walls, windows and doors of a dark, narrow building.

Julian turned the car aside on the gravel lot and killed the engine.

Next to him, a woman’s voice filtered back into his mind.

“...two years ago. And it was beautiful weather. We didn’t even want to stop. We were the last ones on the gondola, and by the time we got to the top I had to pee so bad I didn’t think I’d make it to the bathroom.”

Emma giggled, a soft purring sound. She stretched widely, seeming to notice for the first time that they had arrived. She pressed her hand to the window, fingers spread like a spindly starfish.

“What is this place?” she said.

After the blocky cabins and rugged lines of Jawbone Ridge, the hotel next to them was strangely proportioned, crouching on the edge of the ravine as if driven there by the cluster of buildings below. A tall, crooked little place, with two steep arches flanking the portico and a roof like a hat smashed down over the top. The age-blackened walls imposed a sort of gravitas, and the leaded windows a sense of romance, but the hotel gave Julian the impression of a child at the edge of the playground who has not been asked to play.

Dark, neglected, unloved and unremembered.

No. Not true. Celia had loved the Blackbird. And Julian sure as hell remembered.

He popped the trunk and pulled out their bags: his, in sleek charcoal gray, hers a candy-apple red, studded around the handle with rhinestones that bit into his palm. A damned silly color for a suitcase and exactly the sort of thing Emma would choose. She had a passion for bling and kept herself well glazed: lip gloss, diamond earrings, a satin headband to hold back her wheat-blond hair. The effect was so convincing that he had only noticed her weak chin yesterday morning when she got out of the shower, her hair slicked back and face bare of makeup. This girl hadn’t even been given orthodontics, and here he’d taken her for money, for one of his own. Now he noticed the overbite all the time and held it as a sullen resentment against her, as though somehow she’d deceived him.

She was smiling up at him now, her rabbity head tilted to one side.

“Used to be part of the copper town.” Julian nodded toward the sign in black and red above the door: blackbird hotel. “Built by the mine owner so he’d have someplace to stay when he was in town, above the stink of it all. It’s changed hands many times since then, been modernized and all that.”

He faced the hotel with their bags in his hands.

An unexpected thrill of anticipation expanded in his chest. Any second now, Celia would open the door, or lean out an upstairs window, her hair lifting out like a banner, that slow smile on her face to show she’d been waiting for him. The sensation was so strong that for a moment he found himself searching the windows for movement, straining to hear her voice.

A second later, the excitement subsided. She wasn’t here. She never would be again.

Emma was waiting for him. She seemed to occupy too small a space in the scene, as if he were seeing her through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Are we going inside?” she said.

Too late now to change his mind. A cold knot of dread replaced the warmth of his original response. The Blackbird didn’t want him here any more than Celia had.

They crossed the rutted gravel lot and mounted the front steps. Julian opened the heavy wooden door and held it with his foot as Emma went inside. A bell hanging from the brass knob jingled as the door swung shut behind them.

Beyond the tiny vestibule, the room opened with surprising expansiveness to a tall, narrow space with a massive stone fireplace towering like a sentinel on the opposite end of the room. To their left was a winding staircase with a curved wooden banister, soaring up to the second floor. At its foot, a heavy door stood half-open; through the doorway, he could see a couple of hammered copper pots hanging from a rack and the edge of the long kitchen table. Celia had sanded that table to a beautiful sheen and finished it in a rich chestnut brown. She used to rub it down with an oiled rag after every meal; you’d catch the scent of it sometimes while you were eating, a faint bite of lemon where the warm plates sat.

As he watched, the kitchen door opened farther. A woman came halfway through the doorway and stopped. She was wearing a dark T-shirt and a pair of designer jeans so tight they had set into a series of horizontal creases up her thighs. On the front of her shirt was a screen-print image of the Blackbird Hotel, in white lines like a child’s drawing on a chalkboard.

Julian caught his breath.

Again he felt vaguely disoriented, thrown back in time. Yet Kate Vaughn was unmistakably part of the present. Her brown hair was lighter now, longer and fashionably streaked, but she looked much older than when he’d last seen her five years before. The babyish roundness of her face had gone, leaving a sharper line at her cheekbones and chin. It was the face of a beautiful woman now, evolved and polished. Cute little Katie, he used to call her. But it seemed that girl, like so many other things, was gone.

He thought at first that she was going to come forward and embrace him. She took one step, then hesitated as if she’d changed her mind.

“Julian,” she said.

“Hello, Kate.”

“How are you?”

“Surprised, at the moment. I didn’t realize you’d be here.”

He understood the lay of the land immediately. Kate’s family must have bought the only remaining property on the Ridge. Presumably to indulge her, to assuage any lingering grief; the Blackbird was far too small to make more than a very modest profit. Nothing like the Vaughns’ resort hotel in Telluride or the two in Vail and Crested Butte. Kate had probably finagled this tiny property out of her father like a kid with her heart set on a fancy tree house.

He’d met Justin Vaughn once or twice. A sweet, shrewd guy with three daughters and a knack for keeping them happy. Kate was the youngest by fifteen years, and she could wrap her father around her little finger simply by adding an extra syllable to his name: Dad-dy, can you lend me the car? Dad-dy, will you buy me a hotel of my own, the Blackbird Hotel, we can’t let them tear it down...

“Oh, you two know each other?” Emma said, affecting an air of cool disinterest.

“We used to,” Kate said. “In the biblical sense. Kate Vaughn.”

Emma’s face was blank as she took Kate’s outstretched hand. “You went to church together?”

Kate’s mouth twitched at the corner, a dimple winking in her cheek. The moment swelled as Julian realized he should introduce them and couldn’t, because he didn’t know Emma’s last name and wasn’t entirely sure of her first one. Emma could be Ella, or Anna, or Abby, or Eve. He had resorted to an assortment of pseudo-endearments over the past few days, waiting for her to repeat her name—which, maddeningly, she never did.

Kate turned to Julian.

“You heard about the reopening, I take it? Did you get our email? I blasted it to everyone in my contacts.”

He nodded. It had given him a shock to see the Blackbird’s photograph appear on the screen. He’d shut the window down immediately, unable to open it again for more than a week. When he finally gathered the courage, he pored over every page and all the fine print on the hotel website.

THE HISTORIC BLACKBIRD HOTEL

GRAND OPENING

JAWBONE RIDGE, COLORADO

Nowhere had the flyer mentioned the Blackbird was now one of the Vaughn family properties.

“I didn’t realize—” he said again.

“Yeah, that’s my dad’s thing. I think he doesn’t want people to realize it belongs to us. Not our finest business investment, by a long shot. He probably wants to save face if the whole thing folds or falls off the cliff or something.”

She walked over to a small desk, where a computer sat next to a stack of unopened mail. Insects buzzed from outside the half-open windows.

“So, what’s up? Do you need a room?”

“No,” said Julian.

“Yes,” said Emma at the same time.

“We just wanted to see the place,” he said. “We don’t need a room. Probably stay at the Adelaide.”

It was a foolish thing to say, with two suitcases at his feet and this fluffy blonde hotel accessory clinging to his elbow. But seeing Kate here unnerved him, gave his anger a point around which to coalesce.

“It looks good,” he said, glancing around. “Very...tasteful.”

A deep flush rose up her neck. “Yes, well, I’m not sure the whole bohemian thing would have worked out that well in the long run.”

“I think it would have worked fine.”

“Do you? Would you have me leave it as a shrine?”

“I would have had you leave it alone.”

“Ah. And is that what you’re doing? Leaving it alone?”

Julian pressed his lips together.

“They were going to tear it down,” Kate said. “I’m trying to save it. I would have thought you’d approve. They were your friends, too.”

“What friends?” Emma said.

“You didn’t tell her about the murders?” Kate said.

“She doesn’t need to hear about that,” Julian said.

“Murders!” Emma said. “Of course I need to hear about it. When was this?”

“What’s it been now, Julian?” Kate said. “Five years?”

A slow prickle crept up Julian’s back, under the collar of his cotton shirt. His ears seemed to fill with sound, a low, almost electrical hum that muffled the sound of her voice.

Five years. An anniversary, a number that meant something, that indicated something might happen again. Five. Dangerous, sharp-sounding, like a blade or the edge of a stony cliff.

“Five,” he said, carefully.

“Wait, you were here?” Emma said.

“We were both here,” Kate said. “Staying in the hotel, that is. We didn’t witness the crime or anything.”

A sour taste convulsed Julian’s mouth. No, he wanted to say, I didn’t see a thing; it’s nothing to do with me. But the words were swimming in water and he couldn’t get them out.

“Oh,” Emma said. “So who was murdered?”

Kate slid behind the desk and switched on the computer. “My friends. My three best friends.”

Emma was taken aback. “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought...if you don’t want to talk about it...”

“Celia Dark. Celia’s stepbrother, Rory McFarland, and her boyfriend, Eric Dillon.”

The computer chattered to life, an alien presence in the gothic gloom.

“We don’t need to go into it.” Julian’s temple ached from gritting his teeth.

“I don’t mind.” Kate smiled and gave Emma a little half shrug. “It was a long time ago. And anyway, there’s no escaping the topic here on the Ridge. It was all anybody talked about for months. You couldn’t get away from it, not if you lived here.”

Julian walked to the other end of the room, where the boxy new furniture was arranged around the fireplace. It looked nothing like it had five years before, nothing like the way he remembered it.