The Last House Guest Page 7

  I was caught half a step behind, because Connor and I no longer had the type of relationship where we spoke to each other or sought each other out. And now that he was standing in the room with me, it seemed he didn’t know what he was doing here, either.

  He was dressed for work, in jeans and a red polo with the Harlow family logo on the upper-left corner. Even so, Connor always reminded me of the ocean. His blue eyes had a sheen to them, like he’d been squinting at the sun for too long. The saltwater grit left behind on his palms. His skin twice as tan as anyone else’s, from out on the sea, where the sun gets you double: once from above and once from the reflection off the surface. And brown hair streaked through from the summer months, escaping out the bottom of his hat. He’d always been thin, more wiry than strong, but he’d grown into the sharper angles of his face by the time we were in high school.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  He didn’t speak at first, just stood between me and the front door, looking me over. I knew what he was seeing: the slacks, the dress shoes, the sleeveless blouse that transformed me into a different person with a different role. Or maybe it was just the way I was standing, frozen in place, unsure how to move—like I had something to hide. And for a moment, I could only hear the detective’s questions: What about Connor Harlow? Would you know his state of mind last night?

  Connor frowned, like he could tell what I was thinking. “Sorry,” he said. “The door was open. I saw your car at the B&B when I was making my delivery. Mr. Sylva told me what happened. Everything okay here?” He looked around, taking in the downstairs.

  “Nothing’s missing,” I said.

  “Kids?”

  I nodded slowly, but I wasn’t sure; I thought we were talking ourselves into something. If not for the presence of the phone I’d just found, it was the most logical explanation. Something we were all too familiar with here. In the off-season, we had a youth problem. We had a drug problem. We had a boredom problem. An inescapable, existential problem. We would do anything to pass the winter here. It was a bigger problem if it was bleeding over into the summer.

  We had all peered inside the homes in the off-season. Curiosity, boredom, a tempting of fate. Seeing how far we could get and how much we could get away with.

  Connor and I knew as well as anyone. He and Faith and I had stood at the base of the Lomans’ house one winter long ago, me on his shoulders, climbing onto a second-story balcony, shimmying through a window of the master bedroom that had been left open. We didn’t take anything. We were only curious. Faith had opened the freezer, the fridge, the bathroom cabinets, the desk drawers—all empty—her fingers trailing every surface as she moved. Connor had walked the rooms of the unoccupied home, not touching anything, as if committing them to memory.

  But I had stopped in the living room, stood before the picture hanging on the wall behind the sofa. Staring back at the family there. The mother and daughter, blond and slight; father and son, darker hair, matching eyes. A hand on the shoulder of each child. Four pieces of a set, smiling, with the dunes of Breaker Beach behind them. The closest I’d been to Sadie Loman. I’d stepped closer, seen the finer details: the crooked eyetooth that had yet to be fixed. I pictured her mother holding the curling iron to her otherwise pin-straight hair. The photographer smoothing out any imperfections so that her freckles faded away, into her skin.

  Eventually, Connor had circled back, found me standing in front of that family portrait in their living room. He’d nudged my shoulder, whispered into my ear, Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.

  * * *

  NOW HE STOOD ON the other side of the room, and I still didn’t know what he was doing here. Why he was so interested in a break-in at a rental where nothing had been taken.

  “Whoever it is, they came in through that window,” I said, shaking off the chill. “The lock doesn’t latch.”

  His eyes met mine for a brief moment, like he was remembering, too. “You need the number for a window repair?”

  “No, I got it.” I stared out the glass, picturing Connor’s face as it appeared that night, fractured in my memory. “Do you remember how it broke, the night Sadie died?”

  He flinched at her name, then rubbed the scruff of his jaw to hide it. “Not sure. Just saw that girl standing on the other side, checking it out. Parker Loman’s girlfriend.”

  “Luce,” I said. Every move I made that summer, it seemed that she was watching.

  He shrugged with one shoulder. “She seemed upset, so I figured she did it, honestly. Why?”

  “No reason. Just thinking about it.” Because Sadie’s phone was in my pocket and nothing made sense anymore. I was holding my breath, willing him to leave before he noticed my hands. How I had to press them to the sides of my legs to keep them from shaking. But Connor paced the room slowly, eyes roaming over the windows, the furniture, the walls.

  “I remember that picture,” he said, pointing at the painting that hung from the wall.

  It was my mother’s print, taken from Connor’s dad’s boat one evening, in the autumn before the car crash. We were in middle school, thirteen, maybe. Outside the harbor, she’d taken photo after photo of the coastline as evening turned to dusk turned to dark. The homes along the coast were no longer lit up and welcoming but appeared monstrous, darker shadows standing guard in the night. She kept taking pictures every time the light shifted, until the dark had settled, complete, and I couldn’t make out the shadows anymore, couldn’t tell sea from land from sky, and I lost all sense of orientation and vomited over the edge of the boat.

  “I think the kids have had enough, Lena,” Mr. Harlow said with a laugh.

  She’d tried to capture it in this painting, after endless drafts in her studio. The final product existed in shades of blue and gray, something between dusk and night. The gray of the water fading into the dark of the cliffs, disappearing into the blue of the night. As if you could take the image in your hand and shake it back into focus.

  Years later, I’d had it reprinted, and I’d hung it from the living room wall of every home I oversaw. A piece of her in all the Loman homes, and nobody knew it but me.

  Staring at her painting, I was overcome with the impulse to do it—to reach out and grab it. I wanted to take this moment and shake it into focus. Stretch a hand through time and grasp on to Sadie’s arm.

  Until Sadie’s note was found, Detective Collins’s questions kept circling back to Connor Harlow, even though his alibi panned out. He’d been at the party; no one ever saw him leave. Still. He had been spotted with Sadie earlier that week. Sadie had told no one about it. As far as I knew, neither had Connor.

  “Did you see her that night, Connor?” I asked as he was still facing away.

  He froze, his back stiffening. “No,” he said, knowing exactly what I was referring to. “I didn’t see her that night, and I wasn’t seeing her at all. Which I told the police. Over and over.”

  When Connor was angry, his voice dropped. His breathing slowed. Like his body was going into some sort of primitive state, conserving energy before a strike.

  “People saw you two.” I remembered what Greg Randolph had said about Sadie and Connor on his boat. “Don’t lie for my benefit.” As if there was something remaining, seven years later, that he needed to handle with care.

  He turned back around slowly. “I wouldn’t dare. What would be the point of that?”

  I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his teeth were clenched together. But all I could remember was the list Detective Collins had put in front of me. The names. The times. And the fact that I couldn’t answer for Connor. “When did you get to the party that night?”

  He shifted on his feet. “Why are you doing this?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not a hard question. I’m assuming you told the police already.”

  He stared back, eyes blazing. “Sometime after eight,” he said, monotone. “You were in the kitchen, with that girl—with Luce.” His gaze d
rifted to the side, to the kitchen. “You were on the phone. I walked right by you.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to feel him there in my memory. The phone held to my ear, the sound of endless ringing. I had made only one call that night—the call to Sadie when she didn’t pick up.

  “You know,” he continued, eyes narrowing, “I expected these questions from the police. Even from the Lomans. But this . . .” He trailed off. “She killed herself, Avery.”

  Maybe the silence between us was better after all. Because the things we had to say were going to slide to places neither of us wanted to go.

  He shook his head as if he realized the same thing. “Well, it’s been fun catching up.”

  My arms were crossed over my chest as he made his way back outside to the delivery van in the drive. From the front door, I saw the sheer white curtains in the house across the street—Sunset Retreat—fall back into place. I could see the outline of a shadow there. A single figure, unmoving, watching as I locked the front door and made my way around the house toward the wooded path, disappearing into the trees.

  The biggest danger of all in Littleport was assuming that you were invisible. That no one else saw you.

  CHAPTER 7

  I couldn’t tell if Parker was back home, but I didn’t want him seeing me, stopping me, following me. I practically ran from my car into the guesthouse, locking the front door behind me. My hands were still shaking with misplaced adrenaline.

  Sadie and I had the same model phone. My charger should work. I connected her phone to the wire on my desk and stared at the black screen, waiting. Pacing in front of the living room windows. Hearing her words again, the last thing she said to me: What do we think of this?

  This time the scene shifted until I saw a different possibility: She’d been planning to meet someone. The pale skin of her shoulders, the nervous energy that I had mistaken for anticipation, a thrumming excitement for the party that night.

  Now I was walking through another potential version of events.

  Somewhere in my phone, I had a copy of that list, the one Detective Collins had written out for me last summer. I scrolled back in time until I found it, slightly blurred, my hand already pulling away as I took the photo just when the detective turned back. I had to zoom in to see it, twist it to the side, but there we were. The list of names: Avery Greer, Luciana Suarez, Parker Loman, Connor Harlow. Our arrival times written in my handwriting.

  There was something the police had been looking for in here. A story that didn’t add up. I tore a blank sheet of paper from the notepad on my desk, copying the list—now complete with the information Connor had given me:

  Me—6:40 p.m.

  Luce—8 p.m.

  Connor—8:10 p.m.

  Parker—8:30 p.m.

  I tapped the back of my pen against my desk until the rhythm made me anxious. Maybe Sadie and Connor had plans to meet up. Maybe when she told Parker not to wait for her, it was because Connor was supposed to give her a ride to the party.

  I had no idea what she’d been up to earlier in the day while I was working. She was dressed and ready by the early afternoon, while I had been reconciling the rental property finances all day, caught up in the end-of-season work. Luce said she thought Sadie was packing. Parker said Sadie told him not to wait for her.

  But somehow her phone had ended up at the rental house across town while her body was washing up on the shore of Breaker Beach. Was it possible that someone had hidden it inside the chest recently? Or had it been there ever since the night she died?

  As soon as the display of her phone lit up, prompting the passcode screen, I pressed my thumb to the pad. The screen flashed a message to try again, and my stomach dropped.

  Sadie and I had just come out of a rough spot in the weeks before she died. Until then, we’d had access to each other’s phones for years. So we could check a text, see the weather, take a picture. It was a show of trust. It was a promise.

  It had never occurred to me that she might’ve locked me out when things turned cold.

  I wiped my hand against my shirt and tried to hold perfectly still but could feel my pulse all the way to the tips of my fingers. I held my breath as I tried once more.

  The passcode grid disappeared—I was in.

  The background of her home screen was a picture of the water. I hadn’t seen it before, but it looked as if it had been taken from the edge of the bluffs at sunrise—the sky two shades of blue and the sun glowing amber just over the horizon. As if she’d stood out there before, contemplating the moment that would follow.

  Last I’d seen her phone, the backdrop had been a gradient in shades of purple.

  The first thing I did was open her messages to see if she’d sent me something that never came through. But the only things in her inbox were the messages from me. The first, asking where she was. The second, a string of three question marks.

  I was listed as Avie in her phone. It was the name she called me whenever we were out in a crowd, a press of bodies, the blur of alcohol—Where are you, Avie?—as if she were telling people that I belonged to her.

  There was nothing else in there. No messages from anyone else, and none of our previous correspondence. I wasn’t sure whether the police could access her old messages, either with or without the phone, but there was nothing here for me. Her call log was empty as well. No calls or messages had come through after the ones I had sent. I had presumed that her phone had been lost to the sea, and that was the reason it had been offline when the police tried to ping it. But I looked at the crack in the upper corner again, wondering if her phone had been dropped or thrown—if the same event that had cracked the screen had knocked the power out, too.

  Had she been afraid as she stood at the entrance to my room? Had her face faltered, like she was waiting for me to come with her? To ask her what was wrong?

  I clicked on the email icon, but her work account had been deactivated in the year since her death. She had a second, personal account that was overstuffed with nothing of relevance—spam, sale alerts, recurrent appointment reminders that she’d never gotten the chance to cancel. Anything prior to her death was no longer accessible. I tried not to do anything permanent or traceable on her phone, like clicking any of the unread emails open. But there was no harm in looking.

  I checked her photos next, a page of thumbnails that had not been deleted. I sat on my desk chair, scrolling through them while the phone was still gaining charge. Scenic pictures taken around Littleport: a winding mountain road in a tunnel of trees, the docks, the bluffs, Breaker Beach at dusk. I’d never gotten the sense that she’d been interested in photography, but Littleport had a way of doing that to people. Inspiring you to see more, to crack open your soul and look again.

  Scrolling back further, I saw more pictures of a personal variety: Sadie with the ocean behind her; Sadie and Luce at the pool; Parker and Luce across the table from her, out to dinner somewhere. Clinking glasses. Laughing.

  I stopped scrolling. An image of a man, familiar in a way that stopped my heart.

  Sunglasses on, hands behind his head, lying back, shirtless and tan. Connor, on his boat. Sadie, standing above him to get the shot.

  Maybe these photos had been accessible from elsewhere by the police. Maybe this was why the police kept asking about Connor. About the two of them together. He could deny it all he wanted, but here he was.

  * * *

  SADIE HAD KNOWN CONNOR’S name almost as long as she’d known mine. But as far as I was aware, they had never spoken before. That first summer, while Sadie’s world was opening up to me, she was looking at mine with a sort of unrestrained curiosity.

  Her eyes lit up at my stories—the more outrageous, the better. It became addictive, taking these pieces of that dark, lonely winter and re-forming them for her benefit.

  How I spent the winter in a stupor, like time had frozen. How I drank like I was searching for something, so sure I would find it, the deeper I sank. How I fought my friends, pushing
them away, the stupid, reckless things I did. Trusting no one and losing everyone’s trust in return.

  For a long time, I was forgiven my transgressions—it was grief, and wasn’t I a tragic cliché, stuck in a loop of anger and bitterness? But people must’ve realized what I too soon understood: that grief did not create anything that had not existed before. It only heightened what was already there. Removing the binds that once shielded me.

  Here, then, was the true Avery Greer.

  But Sadie didn’t see it that way. Or she did, but she didn’t mind it. Didn’t think I was something to shy away from.

  We’d spend late afternoons sitting on the patio of Harbor Club, overlooking the docks and the streets of downtown, ordering lemonade and watching the people meandering the grid of shops below. Sadie always added extra packets of sugar as she drank, even though I could already see the granules floating, impossible to dissolve.

  She’d point someone out below whenever they caught her eye: Stella Bryant. Our parents are friends, so she’s over all the time. Insufferable, truly. And another: Olsen, one of Parker’s friends. Kissed him when I was fourteen, and he’s been scared to talk to me ever since. Come to think of it, I still have no idea what his first name is.

  Once she pointed her straw over the edge of the railing, toward the dock. Who’s that?

  Who?

  She rolled her eyes. The guy you keep looking at.

  She didn’t blink, and neither did I, until I sighed, leaning back in my chair. Connor Harlow. Friend turned fling turned terrible idea.

  Oh, she said, her face lighting up as she leaned closer, chin in hands. Come on, don’t stop there. Tell me everything.

  I skipped the worst part, about who I became over the past winter. The things about myself I’d rather not know. I skipped how he had been my oldest friend, my best friend, the role she was currently replacing. Typical story. Slept with him once, before I knew it was a bad idea. I cringed. And then once more, after I already knew it. She laughed, loud and surprising. And then, I continued, because self-destruction knows no bounds, he found me on the beach with his friend the next week.