The Last House Guest Page 8

  She blinked twice, her eyes sparkling. Well, hello there. Nice to meet you. I’m Sadie.

  I laughed. And then, I told her, fueled by her response, I showed up drunk at our friends’ house. The Point B&B, you know it? I mean out-of-my-mind drunk, looking for him. Convinced he and my friend Faith were bonding over my current state. And when Faith tried to get me to calm down, I made such a scene, her parents called the police.

  Sadie’s mouth formed a perfect O. She was delighted.

  One more part, the punch line of my life: The police arrived just in time to see me push Faith. She tripped backward on one of those pool hoses, you know? Broke her arm. The whole thing was a mess.

  The confession was worth it just to see Sadie’s face. Were you arrested? she asked, her eyes unnaturally wide.

  No. Small town, and Faith didn’t press charges. A warning. An accident. I added air quotes to accident, even though it was. I hadn’t meant to hurt Faith, not that I could remember the details that well. Still, it turned out the general population was much less forgiving when physical assault was involved.

  She sipped her lemonade once more, never breaking eye contact. Your life is so much more interesting than mine, Avery.

  I really doubt that, I said. Later, Faith had said I was crazy, fucked up, in need of some serious help. When even your closest friends give up on you, you’re as good as done. But I loved Sadie’s reaction. So I kept sharing the stories of that winter—the recklessness, the wildness—owning all of it. Feeling the weightless quality that comes with turning over parts of your life to someone else. When we finally stood, she put a hand down on the table, catching herself. Head rush, she said. I think I’m high on your life.

  I curtseyed. I feel it’s only fair to prepare you.

  All these things that had pushed people away, they only pulled her in closer, and I wanted to find even more. To make her laugh and shake her head. To watch, while I kept sliding toward some undefinable edge. To become everything I had been trying to forget, until the season turned two months later and she was gone. A quick stop back home in Connecticut before returning to college in Boston.

  We texted. We called.

  The following May, when she finally returned, I was waiting for her on the bluffs, and she said, Do you trust me, and I did—there was no thought to it, no other choice. She drove us straight to the tattoo parlor two towns up the coast and said, Close your eyes.

  * * *

  CONNOR WAS MINE. HE was my story, my past. But over the years, Sadie’s and my lives started to blur. Her house became my house. Her clothes in my closet. Car keys on each other’s key rings. Shared memories. I admired Grant because she did; resented Bianca because she felt the same. We hated and loved in pairs. I watched the world through her eyes. I thought I was seeing something new.

  But she hadn’t told me about Connor, and I hadn’t noticed. I’d been too distracted by the money that had gone missing at work and the resulting fallout. The way I’d been avoided and ignored after—a feeling I could not tolerate yet again.

  Now I scrolled through her contacts in alphabetical order. Bee, Dad, Junior. I knew the last referred to Parker, had been a joke, a name she started to call him, to bother him, when he cast aside the expected rebellion of his youth.

  He’ll take over the company one day, she’d explained when I questioned it. A little star protégé. A junior asshole.

  What about you? I knew she was studying finance, interning with her father, learning the ropes of the company herself. It could’ve just as easily been rightfully hers.

  Never me. I’m not tall enough.

  I had scrolled through both the C’s and H’s without stumbling upon anything related to Connor, when, at the end of the list, there he was. Listed as *Connor, so his name fell to the bottom of the alphabet.

  I never knew what Sadie’s suicide note said. I knew only that it existed, and that it closed the case in a way that made sense.

  But before they found the note, there was a reason the police kept asking me about Connor Harlow, and it must’ve been this—the hint of a secret relationship, something worth hiding.

  And now: his image in her phone, his name with an asterisk, as if she were guiding the way back to him.

  Well, he always was a terrible liar.

  * * *

  I PLUGGED SADIE’S PHONE into my laptop, copying her photos.

  The images were still transferring when a car pulled slowly up the drive. I peered through the window beside my front door in time to see Parker stepping out of his idling car to slide open the garage door. I folded the list of names and times I’d just copied down, slid it carefully into my purse.

  I needed to talk to him. There had been two confirmed break-ins at their rental properties. Noises in the night, footsteps in the sand.

  And now I was thinking of someone else with Sadie after I had sent her that message. Someone out there on the bluffs with her. Arguing. Pushing her, maybe. The phone falling on the rocks in the process, shattering. The other person picking it up, coming to the party, hiding her phone when the police arrived. Someone who had been at the party after all. Someone who could’ve slipped out and come back with no one knowing.

  CHAPTER 8

  The garage door was open, but Parker stood with his back to me, rifling through the trunk of his black car.

  “Do you have a minute?” I asked, making him jump.

  He closed the trunk and turned around, hand to heart, then shook his head. “Now you’re the one giving me a heart attack.”

  The garage here was as exclusive as the main house: a sliding door like that of a barn, with the same slanted-ceiling architecture. And it was immaculately organized inside—red containers of gasoline for the generator, in the corners; tools hung along the walls, probably touched only by the landscaping company; cans of paint on the shelves, left behind when the painters came through two years earlier.

  But there was a layer of dust over everything here, and it smelled faintly of exhaust and chemicals. A forgotten extension of the Lomans’ property.

  I shifted on my feet. “Have you noticed anything off since you’ve been back?”

  He frowned, lines forming around his mouth where there’d been none, last I’d noticed. “What do you mean by off?”

  “The power went out in the guesthouse last night. It’s happened a couple times. You saw the garbage can, right?” I shook my head, trying to show him that I didn’t think it was serious, either.

  The familiar line formed between his eyes. “Probably the wind. I could feel it even when I was driving in last night.”

  “No, you’re right. I was just wondering. The main house, everything seems fine?”

  “I guess so. Not like we left much behind. Come on,” he said, gesturing me out of the garage. “I want to lock up.” As if something worrisome had worked its way inside his head regardless of his words. His hand trembled faintly as he slid the garage door closed, engaging the lock. The Parker I once knew was unflappable, but loss can manifest in other ways. Signs of age, of illness, of pain. A tremor in the fingers, nervous system on overdrive. A wound slow to heal.

  The summer after my parents died, a heavy ache would settle in my legs every night, even though, by all accounts, I was too old for growing pains. Still, every night, my grandmother would rub my calves, the backs of my heels, the bend of my knees, while I braced myself on the bed until the tension released. If I closed my eyes, I could still imagine the feel of her dry fingertips, her singular focus on this one thing she could fix. So that by the time it passed, months later, I believed I had earned my place in the world, in this body.

  Maybe Sadie’s death would make Parker more than he had previously been. Give him some depth, some compassion. A perspective he’d always been lacking.

  He walked toward the house, and I fell into stride beside him. He stopped on the porch steps, the key ring looped on his finger. “That all, Avery? I’m working remotely this week. Have a couple calls I need to jump on soo
n.”

  “No, that’s not all.” I cleared my throat, wished we were back in the night before, sitting on the couch inside, when he was loose with liquor, more vulnerable and open. “I was wondering about the investigation. About the note.”

  Parker rocked back on his heels, the wood creaking underneath us.

  “I was wondering, who was it for?” I couldn’t help it, wanting to know. Sadie had left her text to me unfinished. Who had she left her last words for instead?

  The frown lines around Parker’s face were deepening again. “I don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. We found it in the trash.”

  “You don’t think she meant to leave it for you?”

  He rubbed a hand down his face, then put the keys back in his pocket and sat on the porch step. “I don’t know. I don’t know why Sadie did half the things she did, most of the time.”

  In all the years I’d known them, Sadie and Parker had never seemed close. Even though they shared the same circle, both professionally and personally, neither seemed that interested in the other’s life beyond the surface of things.

  I frowned, sitting beside him, choosing my words carefully, quietly, so as not to disturb the balance of the moment. “What did it say?”

  “What does it matter now? I don’t know, she was making peace or whatever. I guess it was for Dad and Bee.”

  “Making peace for what?” I was already losing him. He’d put his hands on the porch step, pushing himself upright, but I grabbed his wrist, surprising us both. “Please, Parker. What did she say, exactly? It’s important.”

  He stared at my hand on his wrist, and I slowly uncurled my fingers. “No, Avery, it’s not important. It’s done with. I don’t remember.”

  And that was how I knew he was lying. How could he not be? Her last words, the ones I’d been trying to conjure into being, picturing the dots on my phone, given to him. But maybe he really didn’t care. Didn’t see her as I did. Didn’t store her words every time she spoke them, keeping them all, filing them away to revisit later.

  “Do you still have it?”

  He shrugged and then sighed. “My guess, it’s still with the police.” We were so close, I could see the muscle in his jaw tensing.

  “But if it was really that vague, making peace or whatever, that shouldn’t be enough, right? The police can’t know for sure she jumped. Not one hundred percent.”

  He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “She was obsessed with death, Avery. Come on, you knew that, too.”

  I blinked slowly, remembering. It was true that she was quick to mention the things that might harm us, but I never took it seriously. It was how we met—a warning of tetanus, sepsis. And it continued on, poking through the surface at random times. A warning, a joke, the dark, dark humor. An elaborate play. But sometimes I wasn’t sure. Whether it was an act or not. Whether I was in on the game or an unsuspecting bystander.

  I flashed to sleeping on the lounge chairs on her pool deck, the afternoon sun warming my skin. How I’d felt her hand resting on my neck, her fingers just under my jaw. My eyes had shot open at her touch.

  I thought maybe you were dead, she’d said, not moving away.

  I was sleeping.

  It can happen, you know—the brain fails to send a message to your lungs, to breathe. Usually you wake up, gasping for air. But sometimes you don’t.

  I’d pushed myself to sitting, and only then did her hand slip away. I placed my own hand there, on instinct, until I could feel the flutter of my pulse. You seem really broken up about it, I joked.

  Well, I’m a little upset that I won’t be able to practice my recently acquired CPR skills and save your life and have you forever in my debt.

  I smiled then, my face mirroring hers.

  She never saw the threat of death in the things that could truly harm us: drinking to excess so close to the water, the cars we got into, the people we barely knew. The way we pushed each other to more and more until something had to give, and the thing that finally gave was the season, and she was gone, and the winter cool slowed everything: my heart rate, my breathing, time. Until it grew unbearable in the other extreme, and every day was waiting for the spark of spring, the promise of summer on the horizon once more.

  Parker called it obsession, but it wasn’t.

  I saw obsession in the stacks of paintings in my mother’s studio; in the boats setting out on the ocean before dawn, day after day. Obsession was the gravity that kept you in orbit, a force you were continually spiraling toward, even when you were looking away.

  “Just because you talk about it doesn’t mean you want to do it,” I finally replied. The other possibility was too painful: that she had been crying out for help, and we had merely stood back and watched.

  Parker took a deep breath. “She would stare at her veins sometimes . . .” He cringed, and I could feel my own blood pulsing there. “You didn’t know what was going on under the surface.” He shook his head. “When you take everything together, it’s the thing that makes the most sense.”

  “But how are they sure the note was even hers?”

  “They matched her handwriting.” He pushed himself off the porch step, pulling out his house keys.

  I was wrong about the phone signifying something dangerous, then. The phone was not where it should’ve been, but there were other ways it could’ve gotten to the house in the last eleven months. Maybe Sadie had dropped it on her way to the edge or left it behind, beside her gold shoes. Maybe someone had gone back for her that night when I had not. Who found the phone and took it in an impulsive move. Something worth protecting inside, to keep hidden.

  Knowing what I knew now about Connor’s photo, his name in her phone, I wondered if it had been him all along. If he’d somehow ended up with her phone and panicked, knowing what might lay inside. Losing or leaving it in the chaos of that night, when the police arrived. If that was why he had shown up at the Blue Robin after I was there today. If he’d heard about the break-in and been worried.

  There were ways, after all, to capture someone without putting them in jail. A civil case for wrongful death. I’d heard about that on the news before—the people who pushed someone to suicide, convinced them to do it, or pressed them to see no other option, taken for all they were worth by the family left behind.

  There were many forms to justice. Something more satisfying than an immobile brass bell with a melancholy phrase—everything about it so far from the person Sadie had been.

  I pictured her hastily writing a note. Balling it up. Staring out the window. Her jaw hardening.

  Sadie didn’t handwrite many things. She kept notes on her phone, sent texts and emails. Always had her laptop open on her desk.

  “Parker,” I said as the key slid into the lock. “What did they match it to?”

  His hand froze. “Her diary.”

  But I shook my head again. Nothing made sense. “Sadie didn’t keep a diary.”

  The door creaked open, and he stepped inside, turning around. “Obviously, she did. Obviously, there’s plenty you didn’t know. Is it such a surprise that she wouldn’t reveal the contents of her diary to you? She didn’t tell you everything, Avery. And if you think she did, you sure do have a high opinion of yourself.”

  He shut the door, made a show of turning the lock after, so I could hear the thunk echo inside the wooden frame.

  And to think I’d almost shown him Sadie’s phone.

  * * *

  PARKER NEVER WANTED ME here. He made that clear, both verbally and not, after the decision had already been made. Grant had wanted my grandmother’s property, which I was in danger of losing anyway. The mortgage had been paid down with my parents’ small life insurance payout—not enough to live on but enough to gift me the security of a place to call my own. So the remaining monthly payments weren’t the primary problem. It was all the accompanying costs—the insurance, the taxes, the appliances. It was the last of my grandmother’s medical bills and every res
ponsibility suddenly falling in my lap. But still, it was home. And I had nowhere else to go. The visitors had priced us all out of our own homes, so the best I could hope for would be an apartment, alone, miles from the coast.

  Others had also offered to buy the home—the other residents of Stone Hollow didn’t want the land to go to rentals—but the Lomans were offering me something else. To step into their world, live on their property, become a part of their circle. So I sold my house, and therefore my soul, to the Lomans.

  When Grant offered to let me use their guesthouse, I said I’d need that part in writing—experience had turned me wary of taking anyone at their word, despite their best intentions—and he tipped his head back and laughed, just like Sadie would do. You’re going to be okay, kid, was what he said to me. It was the smallest sort of compliment, but I remembered the warmth that swept through me then. This belief that I would, that he could see it in me, too.

  But I could hear them arguing about it later, after Grant drew up the papers. Parker’s voice was too low to hear clearly, but I heard Sadie calling him selfish, and Grant’s steady voice explaining what was to happen, no room for questions. It is fair, and it’s the right thing to do. The house is never used. Grow up, Parker.

  Parker didn’t argue any more after that, but he was the only one who hadn’t helped me move.

  Bianca had handled the practicalities—having me set up a P.O. box and list her address as the physical location so that, officially, I existed in relation to them: Avery Greer, c/o 1 Landing Lane.

  Grant himself had helped at my grandmother’s house, hiring a few men to transport the boxes as he surveyed the lot, the frame of the house, the rooms. Assessing everything, assigning it a value, deciding whether it was worth more standing or demolished.

  Sadie came, too, saying no one should have to deal with Grant Loman on their own, but I appreciated his efficiency in all its unsentimental brutality.