“She lied to you?” Lily said. “But Campbell’s mama as good as confirmed it.”

“A case of mistaken identity,” I explained. “Wrong pregnant teenage girl.”

“And it’s just a coincidence that your mother and her friend both got pregnant?” Victoria asked.

I walked around to the back of the golf cart. “Help me push this,” I said. “It’s either that, or we leave it here.”

For a moment, I thought Victoria would press for answers, but she didn’t. “We need the light.” The White Glove was remarkably calm under pressure—and far more logical than I would have anticipated. “Phones don’t get a signal out here, so we’re on our own for getting back to the party. The headlights do a hell of a lot more than a cell in flashlight function.”

I listened but couldn’t hear even a trace of the other groups. How far into the woods had we gone? How big were they?

“Push,” Victoria told me. “Lily, if you need to ride . . .”

“I can push.”

Somehow, I had a feeling that after Victoria saw this side of my very proper cousin, getting an invitation to the next White Glove event wouldn’t be a problem for Lily.

We’ll be lucky if the next one doesn’t kill us.

“Do we even know which direction we’re going?” Lily asked five minutes later.

I was on the verge of responding, but Victoria beat me to it. “I always know exactly where I am. It’s a family trait.”

“Stop,” I said suddenly. They complied. “Listen,” I told them. The silence had given way, and in the distance, I could hear something—people. Talking. Laughing.

“Over here!” Victoria yelled. Lily and I added our voices, to no effect.

“We could go in that direction,” I said, eyeing what I could see of the terrain. “But we’d have to leave the cart behind. The brush is too dense, and the trees are too close together. We’ll never make it through that way pushing.”

We fell into silence and, again, heard laughter. It was faint, but it was there.

Victoria turned her phone back to flashlight mode. “I guess this will have to do.”

Lily and I followed closely on her heels. Eventually, the sounds of the others grew louder, and when there was finally a break in the trees, I could make out the outline of a golf cart ahead. It took until we got much closer for me to realize it was parked—and empty.

A second later, I heard the voices again and realized, with a start, that one of them was male. I looked to the key, still in the golf cart we’d found. Closer inspection showed that it had a key chain, but not one of ours.

No snake, no rose.

Victoria shone her flashlight on the key, and I saw that the key chain was a Mercedes.