The Last Time I Lied: A Novel

In the woods, Vivian taunts Emma for clinging to her. Emma in turn accuses Vivian of “demanding [her] attention” because Emma stopped painting her. She wonders why she never sees Natalie and Allison, and Vivian points out that she “barely knew” the other girls.

Vivian offers Emma a game of Two Truths and a Lie. First, she tells Emma she already has everything she needs to find the girls. She also tells her that the important question is not where Miranda, Krystal, and Sasha are but where Vivian, Allison, and Natalie are. Finally, she tells Emma that if she finds out what happened to her former cabinmates, Vivian might go away forever. Then Vivian walks away and disappears. Emma doesn’t know which is the lie, but she hopes the hallucinations will stop if she solves the mystery.

Intent on finding all the missing girls, Emma slips back through Dogwood’s window to collect Vivian’s map. The map is gone, suggesting that Miranda, Sasha, and Krystal took it with them. Feeling hopeful, Emma hurries back out the window. She canoes across Lake Midnight and docks at the gazebo. She climbs out of the canoe and sees a page from one of Krystal’s Captain America comic books. She realizes that the girls left “a trail of breadcrumbs” to mark their path (331).

Emma follows the comic book pages up the sloping hill. When she reaches the mass of boulders and the homestead ruins, she calls out for the girls and hears a “muted” voice say her name. The girls’ voices come from the root cellar, which has a large boulder blocking the door. Emma finds a sturdy branch to use as a lever and hoists the boulder out of the way. Miranda, Sasha, and Krystal tumble out, “[s]weaty and dirt-smeared” but unharmed (334). They tell Emma that Miranda wanted to look for Emma’s missing friends because Emma was “so upset” talking about them. However, someone surprised them when they were investigating the cellar. They punched Sasha, who was waiting outside, shoved her in, and shut the door. None of the girls got a good look at the culprit.

Emma tells the girls they need to leave quickly. However, a flashlight beam suddenly blinds her. As she shades her eyes, she sees Theo’s silhouette.

Emma is sure that Theo attacked the girls and has now come back for them. Her accusation 15 years ago was “[t]ruth disguised as a lie” (337). Trying to stay calm, Emma tells Miranda to take Sasha and Krystal to her canoe and row back to camp. Theo claims innocence, telling Emma that he followed her; he didn’t want to tell the police because he wanted to believe she didn’t hurt the girls. Emma suggests that Vivian rejected Theo when they were teenagers and that he did something to her in retaliation. She further believes that he tried to frame Emma for the disappearance of Miranda, Sasha, and Krystal. He tells Emma she is “troubled” and steps toward her, trying to help.

Emma turns to run. Desperate for a place to hide, she crawls into the monolith’s cracked opening. Theo calls to her, and Emma crawls deeper into the crack. As she moves backward, the cave becomes slippery and starts slanting downward. Soon she is sliding uncontrollably and dropping into darkness.

Emma lands in the water. She surfaces unharmed and finds herself in a flooded cave. She managed to hold on to her flashlight and phone but has no signal. The hole she fell through stands 10 feet up the slippery cave wall, and she tries to climb up several times but falls back, landing hard on her ankle. Cold and in pain, she screams, realizing she is trapped and that no one knows where she is.

Cold and shivering, Emma dozes, checking the time periodically on her phone. The flashlight battery dies around four o’clock in the morning, leaving her in complete darkness. At one point, she wakes to see Vivian sitting in front of her. Vivian says they are now “even,” and Emma apologizes for telling Vivian she hoped she never came back. She again asks Vivian what happened to her and the other girls, and Vivian tells her that she “left [Emma] so many clues” (347); Emma just needs to recognize the obvious.

Suddenly, Emma realizes that she can see. Light is coming in from an underwater tunnel that leads to the lake. Emma thinks she can swim through, but she doesn’t know how wide the tunnel is. She swims a few laps around the cave to warm up and then dives for the circle of light.

Emma keeps swimming and surfaces in the middle of Lake Midnight. She hears the sound of a motor and sees Chet skimming over the lake in a boat. She screams to him, and he navigates toward her, telling her they’ve been looking everywhere. He helps her into the boat and tells her the girls returned to camp early that morning. Theo also returned to camp, and Emma warns that they have to keep him away from the girls. Chet tells her she is “crazy” for suspecting Theo, but Emma discovers her phone has a bit of battery left and hurries to call 911. Chet hits her with an oar, causing her to collapse into the boat.

When Emma comes to, the boat is moving again. As she rolls over, Chet tells her that he “can’t believe [she] had the nerve to come back” (353). He admits to playing tricks on her and enjoying her anxiety and confusion. However, his main motivation for wanting her to return to Camp Nightingale was to frame her for the disappearance of the girls in her cabin. He explains how he stole her bracelet and changed the surveillance footage so it looked like Emma followed the girls out; in reality, they left over an hour before Emma woke up.

Chet says that Emma’s accusation against Theo upended their lives, so he wanted revenge. He didn’t plan to kill Emma, but since she freed the girls, he needs to cover his tracks. The boat stops in a small cove that Emma doesn’t recognize. However, she sees a rooster weathervane poking out of the water and understands that Peaceful Valley Asylum lies below them. Emma pleads with Chet, telling him she’ll take the blame for the girls’ kidnapping. She insists he is a “good person,” and Chet hesitates for a moment. She braces for a blow, but instead, she hears a shot ring out. The boat tips sideways, and she tumbles into Lake Midnight.

Emma falls through the water and slams into the roof of the asylum building. The rotting wood gives out beneath her, and she drops into the building itself. She swims through the rooms and is about to resurface when she sees a skull sitting among a pile of bones. She sees Vivian’s gold locket and knows the bones belong to her former cabinmates. An arm seizes her, and Theo pulls her to the surface. Flynn stands in a second boat with his gun pointed at Chet.

After the ordeal, Emma spends two nights in the hospital. Flynn tells her that Vivian probably learned the whereabouts of Peaceful Valley Asylum and that she and the other girls got trapped swimming inside. Emma finds the thought of Vivian drowning like her sister “too tragic to comprehend” (360). There is no evidence of foul play, but the police are still retrieving bones from the lake. The detective tells Emma that Chet plans to plead guilty and will likely be sent to a mental health facility; Flynn also apologizes for suspecting Emma.

When Emma returns to camp, everyone has been sent home. Lottie takes Emma into the Lodge, where Franny apologizes on behalf of her son. Emma argues that she is the one who must apologize, but Franny insists that she forgave Emma “long ago.” She tells Emma she should speak to someone else and gestures toward Theo, who is sitting on the banks of Lake Midnight.

Emma sits next to Theo, thinking of all the pain she has caused him. She thinks about how he saved her and how she can never repay the debt or adequately apologize. Instead of trying to do the impossible, she introduces herself to him and holds out her hand. He shakes it and introduces himself back. Then he offers her her charm bracelet. Emma takes it but then throws it into Lake Midnight, saying she no longer needs it.

Franny passes away in September, and at her funeral, Emma sees Theo for the first time since Camp Nightingale. Theo tells her he is returning to Africa for another year with Doctors Without Borders, but he asks her to have dinner with him when he returns.

Emma begins painting again. Her work still features the girls in the same order, but now she covers them with “sinuous shapes in various shades of blue and green and brown” (366). By January, she has a new series of 21 paintings, and Randall arranges a new show. On the day the show opens, Emma receives a phone call from Flynn. He tells her that the bones in the lake belong to Natalie and Allison but that none match Vivian. He tells Emma that Natalie and Allison’s skulls were fractured and that chains and bricks near the bones suggested the bodies were weighted down. The strand of hair that Emma found with Vivian’s diary is polyester from a wig, and the bag contained traces of materials used to make fake IDs. Emma remembers that when Vivian returned to find Dogwood’s door locked, she asked Emma to let her in but made no mention of Natalie and Allison.

That night at the gallery opening, Emma is standing in front of her largest painting when a woman stops beside her. Looking sideways at her, Emma gasps as she recognizes Vivian. Speaking in a “calm whisper,” Vivian begins a game of Two Truths and a Lie. One: She tells Emma that Allison and Natalie were with her sister the night she died. They dared her to walk on the ice and didn’t help when she fell in. Suspicious, Vivian befriended them and finally learned the truth on the Fourth of July. The fight Emma walked in on was really a confession. Two: She tells Emma she was sure of Allison’s and Natalie’s guilt even before they admitted to their actions and that she had chosen the location of Peaceful Valley to hide her crime. She led the girls to the spot and drowned them. Finally, she tells Emma, “Vivian is dead” (369). Emma chooses the last one as the lie, but Vivian insists she chose wrong, telling her to let Vivian “rest in peace” (369).

She leaves the gallery, and Emma follows but loses the other woman on the street. She returns home and paints all night, creating a portrait of Vivian that she will mail to Flynn. She plans to tell him everything: Emma is finished lying and refuses to “hide [Vivian] behind layers of paint” (370).