The Last House Guest Read online

  This journal, sad and angry, was just a moment in time. Looking back at these pages, I knew that I had been trying to find my way through it.

  Only now that I was past it did I see how close I truly came. The darkness that I was ready to dive headfirst into.

  I kept looking at all the places death might be lurking. In so many lists, I ended with the blade. I remembered, then, the feeling of my blood pulsing underneath my skin. The image of a car crash, bodies versus metal and wood. The pressure of the blood in my grandmother’s skull. Staring at my veins, at the frailty of them, so close to the surface.

  The blade, the blade, I kept coming back to the blade.

  The sharp glint of silver. The empty kitchen. The impulse and chaos of a single moment.

  I hadn’t anticipated the amount of blood. The sound of footsteps. I couldn’t get it to stop.

  I hid in the bathroom, pressing the toilet paper to the base of my hand.

  Thinking, No No. Until Sadie slipped inside.

  You’re lucky, she’d said. You just missed the vein.

  * * *

  I BARELY SLEPT. FEELING so close to the person I’d been at eighteen. Like my nerves were on fire.

  At the first sign of light, I took my car down through town, at the hour when it was just the fishermen at the docks and the delivery trucks in the alleys. I drove up the hill, past the police station, up past the Point Bed-and-Breakfast, to where I could see the flash of the lighthouse beckoning, even in daylight. And then I turned down the fork in the road, heading for the homes on the overlook.

  Most of the Loman rental properties were located along the coast. A view drove up the cost of rent nearly twofold—even more if you could walk to downtown. To compensate, the homes on the overlook were more spacious, typically renting out to larger families. And with school starting up soon, these were usually the first homes to go vacant.

  I had all the keys with me, each labeled with a designated number that corresponded to a specific property. By this point, I knew them all by heart.

  Someone had broken in to the home called Trail’s End last week at the edge of downtown, smashing a television. Someone had sneaked inside the Blue Robin up here, looking for something. And someone had lit the candles at the Sea Rose, down by Breaker Beach.

  I was starting to see the pattern not as a threat to the Lomans but as a message.

  Someone knew what had happened that night. Someone had been at that party and knew what had happened to Sadie Loman.

  As I drove up the lane of the overlook, I saw a dark car parked in front of the Blue Robin, lingering at the curb.

  A shadow sitting inside. Eyes peering in the rearview mirror.

  I parked behind it, waiting, my own car idling in a dare. Until Detective Ben Collins emerged from the car. He walked in my direction, frowning.

  “Funny seeing you here,” he said as I exited the car.

  “I have to check the properties each weekend. Before the new families arrive,” I said.

  “Someone staying here next week?” he asked, thumb jutting at the Blue Robin.

  “Yes.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Move them. We’re gonna need to see inside.”

  My heart plummeted, but I clung to his words. “Are you reopening the case?” I asked. Maybe he believed me after all.

  Detective Collins stood back, assessing the house—quaint and unassuming, like a birdhouse hidden amid the trees. “I was trying to see how someone might leave without notice. There’s a path behind the house, right?” Not answering my question but not denying it, either. He believed it was possible, then, that something else had happened that night.

  “Right. To the bed-and-breakfast.” You could walk it in five to ten minutes. You could run it much faster.

  “Show me inside?”

  I led him in the front door, watched as he peered around the vacant space. He hadn’t been one of the officers who’d come to get Parker that night. But he’d taken the call from the Donaldsons about the break-in earlier this week.

  “Show me where you found the phone,” he said.

  I opened the door to the master bedroom, pointed to the now closed chest at the foot of the bed. The pile of blankets sat beside it, untouched. “In there,” I said. “I found it in the corner. Seemed like it had been there a long time.”

  “That so,” he said. The lid creaked open as he peered inside. He stared into empty darkness, then closed it again. “Here’s the thing, Avery,” he said, pivoting on his heel. “We got a good look at her phone, and it’s really nothing we didn’t know.”

  “Other than how it ended up here?”

  He paused, then nodded. “Exactly.” He paced the room, peering into the bathroom where I’d once cleaned the floor alongside Parker. “There was one thing I noticed, though. In all those pictures on her phone, you weren’t there.”

  I froze. Sadie and Luce; Sadie and Parker; Connor; the scenic shots. Everything but me.

  “I thought you were her best friend,” he said. “That’s what you told me, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re not in her pictures. She didn’t respond to your text that night. And we got a lot of conflicting information during the interviews.”

  I felt something surging in my veins, my fists tightening of their own accord. “She didn’t respond because something happened to her. And I’m not in the pictures because I was busy that summer. Working.” But I could feel my pulse down to the tips of my fingers as I wondered if there had been rumors—about the rift, about me, about her. I thought no one had known—I thought Grant had kept it quiet.

  “About that. Your work,” he continued, and my stomach dropped. “Luciana Suarez provided us with some interesting details. This was her first summer in town, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. She’d started dating Parker the fall before.”

  “Is it true that you took over Sadie’s job?” And there it was. Luce. I should have known.

  “Luce said that?” I asked, but he didn’t respond. Just held eye contact, waiting for the answer. I brushed the comment away with a wave of my hand in the air, like Sadie might do. “They didn’t need two people to do it. She was reassigned.” Not fired.

  “But, to be clear, you have her role.”

  I pressed my lips together. “Technically.”

  “You know what else Luciana said?” He paused, then continued like he didn’t expect me to answer. “She said she’d never heard of you before.” A twitch of his mouth. “Said that she didn’t know anything about you until she arrived. No one had seen fit to mention your existence. Not even Sadie.”

  “Because Luce was Parker’s girlfriend,” I snapped. “There was no reason I would’ve come up.” I was being blindsided yet again. This was an interrogation, and I’d walked right into it.

  “She told us she’d been a friend of the family first.”

  “So what? That doesn’t mean she and Sadie were close.”

  He looked at me closely, steadily. “Rumor has it you and Sadie were on the outs.”

  “Rumors are shit here, and you know it.”

  He smiled then, as if to say, There you are. That girl they all remembered. “I just think it’s odd, is all, that Sadie never would’ve mentioned you.”

  Luce. She had complicated everything. Always with a quizzical look in my direction—something dangerous that kept me second-guessing myself. Luce became the unwitting wedge that summer, leaving everything off balance. If anyone understood what had happened in that house, it was her. Always there when I thought we were alone. I had no idea what she’d told the police during her interview. It hadn’t mattered then, because of the note.

  Detective Collins paced the room again, the floorboards creaking under his feet. “If I had to make a professional assessment, I’d say the friendship was a little one-sided. If I’m being honest with you, it seems a little like you were obsessed with her.”

  “No.” I said it louder than I meant to, and I lowered my voi
ce before continuing. “We were growing up. We had other responsibilities.”

  “You lived on their property, worked for their family, ran around with her crowd.” He held up his hand, even though I hadn’t said anything. “You considered them family, I know. But,” he continued, lowering his voice, “did they consider you the same?”

  “Yes,” I said, because I had to. I trusted them because they chose me. Taking me in, welcoming me into their home, into their lives. What other choice was there? I had been adrift, and then I was grounded—

  “I know who you used to be, Avery. What you’ve been through.” His voice dropping, his posture changing. “Shitty hand to draw, I get it. But are you saying you never thought, just once, that you wanted to be her instead?”

  I shook my head but didn’t respond. Because I did, it was true. Back then, when I met her, I wanted to crawl inside someone else’s head. Stretch their limbs. Flex their fingers. Feel the blood pulsing through their veins. See if they could hear it, too, the rhythm of their own heartbeat. Or if something else surged in their bones.

  I wanted to feel something besides grief and regret, and I did. I had.

  “This phone does raise some questions, in more ways than one. Of course, your prints would have to be on it, since you were the one who found it. Right?”

  I jerked back. Did he think I was lying?

  I wanted to tell him: The note wasn’t hers, the journal wasn’t hers.

  But I knew what they would have to ask next: “I’m sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.” What were you apologizing for, exactly, Avery?

  I knew better than to give any more of myself away.

  “Well,” he said, “this has been enlightening. We’ll be in touch.” He tapped the bedroom door on the way out.

  CHAPTER 15

  I was shaking as I watched the detective drive away, looping his car too fast around the cul-de-sac, passing Sunset Retreat on the way down the street.

  They would be back. That’s what he was implying. They would be back, and they were looking at how someone might’ve left the party that night.

  I had been at the party the entire time—I’d proved it. But the phone meant something. It meant that being at the party did not absolve us. Chances were, if her phone had been left there the night of her death, she’d been murdered by someone at the party.

  That list Detective Collins had handed me, the details I had given him in return—

  Me—6:40 p.m.

  Luce—8 p.m.

  Connor—8:10 p.m.

  Parker—8:30 p.m.

  What had once been our alibis now became a cast of suspects.

  * * *

  IT DIDN’T LOOK GOOD that I was there for so long alone. It didn’t look good that I was the one who found the phone. Detective Collins was fixating on my role in the Lomans’ lives as if the rumors had reached him as well.

  There had been no public fight. Nothing people could’ve witnessed and known for sure. Just a lingering chill. A feeling, if you knew what you were looking for. A brief shrug-off in public at her planned birthday lunch, when I’d tried to catch her after—I can’t talk to you right now—where she looked at my hand on her arm instead of me. And a humiliating moment the next night, though I’d thought we were alone.

  I’d been heading toward the Fold—she hadn’t been answering my calls, my texts—when I saw her slip out the entrance with Luce. They were standing close together, Sadie a head shorter than Luce, who was relaying a story in a voice too low and fast to hear clearly, her hands moving to accentuate her points. But they parted at the corner, Luce heading for the overflow of cars, Sadie walking toward downtown.

  I waited until Luce was out of sight to call her name, then again: “Sadie,” the word echoing down the empty street. She stopped walking just under a dim corner streetlight. Her skin looked waxy pale, her hair more yellow than blond in the halo of light. She ran her fingers through the ends of her hair as she turned around, eyes skimming the road and then skimming right over me—pretending she didn’t see me standing there, looking back. The casual cruelty she’d perfected with Parker. Like I was invisible. Inconsequential. Something she could both create and unmake at her whim.

  She turned away again without a second thought.

  I wondered now if Greg Randolph had whispered those words before—Sadie’s monster. If others had, too.

  If it was blinding the detective to everything else.

  I had to nail down my time line, and everyone else’s, before everything got twisted.

  But first I needed to clear this house. I’d thought about moving the family who was supposed to stay at the Blue Robin into Sunset Retreat across the way—there was even more space, and I didn’t think they’d complain. But I needed to check it out first, especially since I was sure I’d seen a shadow watching me the day I found the phone.

  The key for the property was in my car. As soon as I stepped across the threshold, I knew something was wrong. The air had a thickness to it, some unfocused quality I couldn’t quite put my finger on, until I drew in a slow breath.

  My hand went to my mouth even as I was backing away on pure instinct. The scent of gas, so thick I could practically taste it.

  The room was full of it. I shut the door behind me, running down the front path.

  I dialed 911 from the front room of the Blue Robin across the street, safe behind a layer of wood and concrete.

  * * *

  I WAS WATCHING OUT the window when the fire truck arrived—expecting to see an explosion, everything reduced to rubble. But a stream of people in uniform entered the home, one by one. Eventually, another van arrived, delivering a crew of maintenance workers.

  After they came back out, removing their gear, conferring with one another, I walked out front, meeting them in the street between the properties. “Everything okay in there?”

  “You the person who called this in?” the closest firefighter asked. He still wore the bottom half of his uniform but had removed the rest and was wearing a T-shirt and ball cap. He looked a good decade older than the rest, and I assumed he was in charge.

  “Yes, I’m Avery Greer. I manage the property.”

  He nodded. “A connection at the back of the stove, come loose. Probably a slow leak. But must’ve been going on for a while, with nobody there to notice.”

  “Oh,” I said. I felt nauseated, sick. The shadow inside the house—had they been waiting for me to walk inside next?

  He shook his head. “Lucky nothing made a spark.” Then he motioned for the maintenance crew that it was safe to enter. “Still, I’d give it some time to air out,” he said. Then, as if he could see something simmering within me, some fear made clear, he put a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, it’s all right. You did the right thing, and we caught it in time. Everything’s okay.”

  * * *

  I’D BEEN DEBATING CALLING Grant on the drive home. I hated to do so unless it was urgent, didn’t want him to think I couldn’t handle things on my own.

  As I was passing Breaker Beach, I decided to do it.

  He would know whom to contact, and his name would carry more weight than mine. We were taught to always consult with the company lawyer before engaging. I’d already failed when I let Detective Collins inside. If the gas leak was a crime, I needed Grant’s input on how to proceed before involving the police further.

  His cell rang until it went to voicemail. I turned the car up the incline of Landing Lane, leaving him a message on speakerphone. “Grant, hi, it’s Avery. Sorry to bother you, but there’s a problem. With the rentals. I think I need to talk to the police. Please call me back.” When I turned down the stone-edged drive, I tapped my brakes. There was another car in the driveway—dark, expensive-looking, familiar.

  I swung around the corner of the garage, parked in my spot, hidden out of sight. I could hear voices coming from the backyard—Parker’s and someone else’s, deep and firm.

  I moved as quietly as I could, hoping no one noticed my arri
val. So I wasn’t paying attention as I approached the door of the guesthouse.

  The front door was unlatched. A sliver of light escaping from inside. I held my breath, pushed the door slowly open.

  The living room was in disarray. My box of things in the middle of the room. My clothes pulled out of the closet, heaped on the couch. And waiting in the center of the room stood Bianca.

  “Hello,” she said. Her blond hair was pulled back so severely it seemed to blend in with her scalp. She was imposing, even at Sadie’s height, both of them at least four inches shorter than I was.

  “Hi, Bianca,” I said. I’d been waiting for Bianca and Grant to return since the start of the season.

  No one had mentioned anything about my job in all the time since Sadie’s death. The money kept coming. I thought maybe it was just a moment when we’d said things that each of us would rather take back, and we could chalk it up to grief, on both sides.

  The state of my living room suggested otherwise.

  Bianca’s face remained expressionless, and I knew I’d had it all wrong. “I thought I told you to leave,” she said.

  SUMMER

       2017

  The Plus-One Party

  10 p.m.

  The police were coming. That was what everyone was whispering when I stepped outside the master bedroom, joining the rest of the party at the other end of the darkened hall.

  The blackout. Ellie’s scream as she fell into the pool. Someone had heard it, called it in. Three people told me in the course of two minutes. I didn’t know any of them by name, but I assumed one of them was the person Parker had told me about who’d been looking for me. It was a small thrill to realize that they knew who I was, that I was the one to turn to. That I was the person in charge here.