Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost / Призрак миссис Рочестер (by Lindsay Marcott, 2021) - аудиокнига на английском

ONE In my mind, I can picture it clearly. Thorn Bluffs. December 17. Their fourth wedding anniversary. He’s dressing for dinner, charcoal serge pants, a linen shirt the color of mist rise. Black sport coat, brushed and steamed by Annunciata an hour ago, hung within arm’s reach on a padded hanger. Black silk socks laid out. Polished black loafers. Should he wear a tie? Hasn’t in years, except for the occasional mandatory event. A board meeting. The obligatory charity gala. His wedding, of course, somber butterfly clutching his throat. But tonight, no taking chances. An open collar might be something that could set her off. He selects a tie. Silver-gray silk. The reservation is for 5:30 p.m. at Sierra Mar. Unfashionably early, but she’s at her most docile in the early evening after her second clozapine, and anyway, he couldn’t give a damn about fashion. Everything arranged in advance. Corner table on the glassed-in terrace jutting out over the Pacific. The menu: pear and allium to start, black cod with caviar beurre blanc, chocolate ganache. No wine, of course. Cocktails made of lavender and lemonade. She won’t need to make choices. Nothing to decide. And maybe they’ll get through the dinner without incident. He shrugs on the sport coat. Fastens his father’s weighty chrome Breitling on his wrist. As he moves out of the dressing room, he hears the two German shepherds barking outside. They’re agitated. They sense a threat. An intruder? He checks the property-cam monitor: the gates to the private road are securely shut. By boat from the cove? The violence of that lashing sea. No small craft could navigate it. He steps out onto the terrace with its sweeping vista of ocean and bluffs. The storms of the last few days have subsided, and the sunset has illuminated the sky, the last clouds gold, pink, azure blue, but the sea is still turbulent, surging high against the bluffs. There’s no boat in the cove or beyond it in open sea. He shifts his gaze down to the beach. Gives a start. She’s standing at the breaking point of the roiling waves. The tendrils of her long pale hair are streaming in the wind, and the handkerchief hem of her ice-blue dress flaps and flutters against her legs. She looks like an exotic sea anemone displaced from some placid tropical ocean. She turns and looks up at the house. Does she see him? He shouts her name, but the wind blows his voice back. She turns back to the sea. Takes a step into the frothing surf. The water foams above her ankles, drenching the hem of the dress, weighing down the silky fabric. And now he’s running. Through the bedroom, down the floating staircase to the front hall. Bursts outside and keeps running. To the edge of the promontory, the gate in the stake fencing, the rickety flight of wooden stairs that scales the cliff. He takes the steps two, three at a time, collecting splinters in his bare feet, accompanied by an honor guard of the two bounding German shepherds. As he steps onto the crescent of sand, he stumbles on a shoe. A silver high-heeled sandal, almost freakishly long and narrow: she has them handmade in Milan. But he can’t see her at all, not on the beach or in the water. He screams her name again, then plunges blindly between rocks large and small into the swells. The currents are brutal: he’s punched under by a powerful surge. His shirt and trousers drag him farther down. His arms scrape against stones; the icy force of the clashing waves overpowers him. The Breitling strap catches on a snag. Freeing it gives him forward momentum, enough to catch a towering swell and ride it back to flat rocks and, with his last strength, crawl back to sand. He lies gasping. Snorting water up from his lungs. His eyes sting with salt and silt. The dogs nose and lap at him with concern. And now Hector’s face looms above him, impassive as always. He lets Hector help him to his feet. He wipes his face with his hands. Looks for the silver sandal. Finds it, recruits the dogs to comb the sliver of beach for its mate. But it’s been lost to the sea. And so has she. She’s gone. He’s certain of it. He can do nothing for her anymore. Nothing except notify the police. This, at least, is the way I imagine it happening. But then again, I’ve always had a vivid imagination. TWO I should have seen it coming. Carlotta’s demise, I mean. I should have had my eyes wide open long before it happened. Our ratings had been in free fall for the past two seasons. Our sponsors were evaporating like steam from cooling tea. But Carlotta Dark, the small cable network show I wrote for, was no run-with-the-pack series. Edgy and erotic, with notes of black comedy. Addictively Gothic. It was set in the gloom of the nineteenth-century Adirondacks: We had vengeful ghosts luring newlyweds to gruesome suicides, vampires guzzling blood from cut crystal like so many dirty martinis. Young Carmelites who’d strip off their habits at the wink of a strapping gravedigger’s eye. How could it possibly be over? I’d been with the show since it had begun six years before, starting as a lowly intern, then fighting my way up to writing staff. I was good at my job, and I loved it. Which might’ve seemed strange, since I don’t look very Goth. My flyaway hair is light brown. My eyes a lucid shade of gray that tend to blab everything I’m feeling. And I rarely wear black. I think it washes me out. But I’d always been attracted to the macabre. When I was little, I imagined a rather kindly skeleton named Mrs. Teeny Bones who lived under my bed and rattled her teeny bones whenever it thundered. At Halloween, no princess tiaras for me. “I want to be a mummy,” I insisted. And Mom, her theatrical heart tickled, gamely complied, bandaging me from neck to forehead with gauze she’d steeped in cold tea to make it look authentically rotten. Maybe this penchant of mine came about because when I was three years old, my father blinked out of existence. I had no concept of death at that age, of course. All I knew was that one day I had a daddy with a lap to wriggle myself up onto and a mop of wiry copper hair to tug. And then I didn’t. Where’s Daddy? He had an accident, sweetheart. But where did he go? Go to sleep, sweetie. I’ll leave on the night-light. My father vanished. And after that, Mom died, too, in a way. She never remarried. Sent every suitor quickly packing and poured all her considerable passion into acting in community theater. Swapping real-life romance for the make-believe of the stage. And so, yeah, I liked it when the dead didn’t stay dead. When they came back, even as rattling bones or monsters in rotted rags or vampires slurping gore. And, yeah, a show like Carlotta Dark was right up my alley. And then that, too, blinked out of existence. A blustery morning in October. The head writer, Wade O’Conner, called me into his office. Wade was both my boss and confidant—a handsome guy with the beginnings of a wattle from a habit of tugging the skin under his chin when he was worried. He was tugging on it like mad now. “Bad news, Janie. You’d better sit down.” I felt my face pale. I couldn’t take any more bad news. Not with the sick-sweet smell of Mom’s memorial flowers still fresh in my nostrils. “What’s happened?” “We’ve been canceled. The end of next month.” “Canceled?” The word seemed meaningless. Nonsensical. “Yep. They’re replacing us with a wellness show. Six-minute cardio, berries that cure cancer. That kind of thing. Sorry to be the one to give you the news.” I stared at the photos of our show’s stars above Wade’s head. Perfect teeth. Profuse hair. It lent them a vague family resemblance. And we were like a family, weren’t we? Cast and crew, one close-knit, never-to-be-parted family. Lies! I wanted to rip the grinning faces off the wall and smash them on Wade’s desk, and I wanted to scream and kick and rage. But I didn’t. Instead I fell back on Mom’s expression for all calamity, whether terminal illness or a misplaced recipe for caraway cookies. “Shit, shit, shit,” I said. That was in October, and now it was the end of May, and I was perched cross-legged in the window seat of my Cobble Hill apartment, polishing off a bottle of Sancerre—opened God knew when because it was halfway to vinegar—my MacBook balanced precariously on my knees. I’d earmarked the afternoon for bills—a grim accumulation of them. It had been a wet, cold spring, one dreary day after another, and the dismal rain spattering the window drummed a suitable accompaniment. I’d been out of work nearly eight months. I’d pulled every string, knocked on every door. But there’d been a wave of canceled series in the past year. A deluge of writers from bigger shows pounding on the same doors. “Just hang on till the fall,” my agent told me. “It’s dead in summer—things will pick up then.” But my severance had run out in March. My savings, never robust, were rapidly becoming a figment of my imagination. I’d been waking up at three in the morning, my thoughts revolving on a groove approaching panic. The rent on my apartment was exorbitant, even by Brooklyn standards. I’d scoured Craigslist and Airbnb for a cheaper place, blasted emails to everyone I knew. The only possibilities were hideous. And in the meantime, the bills kept coming. I took a fortifying swig of wine. Opened the first notice. Tender Care Hospice Services. $2,647.19. BALANCE OVERDUE. Shit. I’d forgotten about this one. Nine months since I’d scattered Mom’s ashes from the Ocean City boardwalk (illicitly, before dawn) and I was still paying off what her insurance didn’t cover. I’d wanted the best care for her. I didn’t regret it. But now, suddenly, it all came rushing back to me: her dinette transmogrified into a hospital room; the curio cabinet crammed with vials and syringes; the bleeping monitors on the sideboard; and the squeech, squeech of thick-soled shoes on linoleum. A searing bubble of loss, grief, guilt burst in my chest. I leaped off the window seat and strode into the kitchen and poured the dregs of the Sancerre into my glass. I was drinking too much. I didn’t care. My cell jangled. I reached for it. “So you are still alive.” Otis Fairfax’s sunny baritone. “How come you didn’t answer my texts?” “Sorry, I haven’t checked messages today.” “Whoa. You sound like you’re in a major funk.” “Yeah, well, maybe,” I said. “It’s been raining forever, and I feel like spring is never going to come. I mean real spring, with dogwood and daffodils and everything.” “Yeah, right. It’s just the rain.” He knew me too well. Otis was the closest thing to family I had. Like sort of a kid brother—the kind who’s forever wrecking cars and getting bounced out of jobs and then swears to God he’s got it together this time, and if you don’t actually believe him, you fervently want to. He’d moved to California two years ago to attend—and drop out of—a Sausalito culinary school. I hadn’t heard from him in months. “Where are you?” I said. “Still working at that tapas place?” “God, no, I quit ages ago. The manager was a little Mussolini. I’m down in Big Sur now, working for a cousin of mine. An estate on the ocean, gorgeous, knockout views. It’s called Thorn Bluffs, and I’m his private chef and kind of helping to run things.” “It sounds great.” “It is, and it’s why I’m calling. I got that email you sent about needing a new place, and listen. There’s a cottage here. It’s really nice, and nobody’s using it. You could have it, like, for free, for the summer, maybe even longer.” “Wait,” I said. “You mean in California?” “Yeah. I know it’s a long way to come, but it’s perfect for you, really. And you won’t have to pay any rent.” A cacophony of barking rose behind him. “Hold on a sec. Let me kick the dogs out of the kitchen.” His voice added to the canine din: “Out, all of you! Outa here!” To me: “We’ve got five dogs right now, and naturally I’m the designated wrangler. So where was I?” “A freebie cottage with ocean views. What’s the catch?” “Nothing. I mean, not a catch. Except Evan—that’s my cousin—he’s got a daughter coming back from school for the summer. She’s thirteen and in that stage, you know? She was supposed to go to her grandmother’s, but Grandma broke a hip. And her mom died a couple of years ago . . .” I drew a breath. “How?” “Oh, she worked for some NGO and was on a famine-relief trip to Africa and ate some dish she didn’t know had peanuts in it. She was fatally allergic. Evan didn’t even know he had a kid until then. It was a one-night thing, and the mom never got in touch.” “That poor little girl,” I murmured. “Yeah, crappy break for her. But I figured you could relate because of your mom, you know? Talk to her and all.” “Just talk to her?” “Well, no, not just. She’ll be going to summer school for some classes she flunked, but she doesn’t focus well. She needs extra tutoring. You’d get paid, of course. In addition to the cottage. A good hourly. My cousin definitely isn’t cheap.” “I’ve never tutored before,” I said. “It wouldn’t be hard. French—you speak it, right? And, like, earth science, and that’s easy—you can just go through the textbook.” “But why me? Why don’t you get a professional tutor?” “Evan hates having strangers around. I told him you’re like family to me, and I’m family to him, so in a way we’re all kind of related.” I felt light headed. The vinegary wine was going to my head. “So what does he do, this cousin of yours?” “Second cousin once removed, actually. He’s an entrepreneur. Finances start-ups, mostly in Silicon Valley.” A little too casually, Otis added, “You might’ve heard of him. Evander Rochester?” I placed the name with a shock. “The one who murdered his wife?” “So you heard about that?” “Well, yeah, Otis. It was all over the media just this last winter. His wife was a famous model. Beatrice McAdams, right?” “Yeah, but he didn’t murder her. Jesus! It was suicide. She drowned herself. She was schizophrenic or something. Everyone knew she was crazy—that’s how she blew up her modeling career. She stabbed some Vogue photographer with a Chanel pin. Right between the eyes.” I gave a startled laugh. “Really?” “Yeah, and worse things besides. Plus, Evan tried to save her, but he was too late. Her body got swept out to sea. The current is a killer here.” He gave a kind of strained giggle. “Look, you won’t be in any risk, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I mean, I wouldn’t lure you here if you might get your throat cut in the middle of the night or anything.” “I don’t know, O.,” I said. “You don’t always think things through.” “But I have thought this through. And I really, really want you to come. And you can help me with stuff here. I don’t know how I’m going to cope otherwise. I’m swamped with things to do. And Evan’s away most of the time, so it’ll just be me here with Sophia and a couple of the help. I’m practically a prisoner.” I paused. “Why do I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me?” “I’m telling you everything. Honest. And you’ll love it here, I promise. We’re close to Carmel-by-the-Sea. Lots of art galleries, you’ll love that too.” His phone bleeped. “It’s him—I gotta go. I’ll text you some pics.” He hung up. I finished off the Sancerre. Typical Otis. Suggesting I hop out to California like it was a jaunt to Montauk on the Hampton Jitney. My text pinged. Two photos. The first a spectacular aquamarine cove encircled by sloping pastel-tinted bluffs. View from your cottage! The second a blurred selfie, Otis in a white chef’s apron, brandishing a slotted spoon. Me in the kitchen!! I’d missed him. More than I’d realized. Like family. Outside, the rain had tapered to a cheerless spritz, and the apartment was growing dim in the fading light. It was the first place I’d looked at when I’d had to immediately move out of cheater Jeremy’s loft, and I’d grabbed it. Even if I could afford to stay here, I didn’t want to—it was howling with bad memories. Those places he’d mentioned—Big Sur, Carmel-by-the-Sea—they sounded romantic, all pounding sea cliffs and mission bells tolling in the distance. And that poor young girl. Losing her mom so suddenly. I felt a tug toward her, even without knowing anything more about her. Maybe I could be of some help to her. And help Otis hang on to a gig for a change. A new place. A new sense of purpose . . . But what wasn’t he telling me? Something. I was sure of it. BEATRICE Thorn Bluffs, December 17 Early morning Braidy Lady is brushing my hair. Gentle, she wants me to think she’s going soft, but she yanks a snarl, and I snarl back, low in my throat, and she stops. I can sense her hand tightening on the handle of the brush. She’d like to hurt me more—I can feel that—but she doesn’t dare. I maybe took a bite at her once. I can float a picture of it in my mind, her square brown hand, my sharp teeth sinking into it like a chicken thigh, and she hissed. Braidy Lady hissed like a brown snake and tried to put a witch spell on me, but now she’s afraid, afraid of my clicking sharp white cat’s teeth. I don’t know for sure. There’s a fog twisting through my thoughts. But I like it when the fog is thick in my mind because it feels like swimming. Like being underwater but still being able to breathe. I hear the door open, and I turn my head. He’s there, standing in the doorway with his back to the shadows. He’s all starey. Eyes black like coal. He says something very loud to Braidy Lady. “Annunciata,” he says. That’s her name. It makes me think of the Virgin Mary. You are the Virgin, Beatrice, Mary Magdalene’s voice whispers to me. Annunciata puts down the brush, and now they’re talking together, my jailer and her. They speak in their secret witch language, the one they use when they plot against me. I keep my smile pinned on my face as I take the brush. The handle is black like his eyes, and the bristles are made from the hairs of a wild boar. I tilt my head back and scrape the boar hairs down the long, long length of my hair, and I watch it turn silvery in the light. He speaks to me now. “Today’s the seventeenth, Beatrice,” he is saying. “December seventeenth. It’s our wedding anniversary, do you remember?” I dig the boar hairs of the brush into my head. They feel like a thousand tiny daggers. Yes, I remember. I walked down the aisle, and I wore white like the Virgin. Did he think it was the first time I went down an aisle wearing white? They paid me $2,000 an hour to walk down the catwalk aisles. I was the most famous girl, the most beautiful one. The virgin who wore the white dress, the bridal dress. The last dress before the finale. “I thought we might go out to dinner tonight,” my jailer is saying. “To celebrate our anniversary. Would you like that?” I liked prowling the catwalk. Sometimes they put me in black lace and leather or sometimes spotted fur, like a leopard or a cheetah, or striped like a tiger, and I prowled up and down the aisle they called a catwalk, my hips swinging wide, my face a little fierce. My famous Beatrice McAdams walk. But at the end, I am always the bride, the virgin. The girl who wears the white dress. Mary Magdalene whispers to me. Don’t forget the Russian girl, Beatrice. The very young one from St. Petersburg. The one they put in the white dress in Milan. Yes, I remember. The new girl. Sixteen years old. The next Beatrice McAdams, they were saying. They couldn’t see she was a sabertooth. So clever, she kept her claws hidden up inside the tips of her fingers and toes. But I could see. In the procession, the finale in Milan, I watched her claws come out—sharp, horny claws breaking through her shoes, curling out from the tips of her fingers. I knew she was planning to pounce on me, to rip me apart, and I was afraid. Quick, quick, I pounced first. One flick of my hind foot and I took her down. I heard her scream, and all around, people were making noises. But the girl was stealthy, she sheathed her claws so they couldn’t see what she really was. And then Fiona from the agency was on my phone. Like a crow and it scared me: caw cracka caw, craw. Broke her nose, Fiona cawed. Two teeth chipped. We’ll be sued. Caw, caw. Crackety caw. I put the phone down while she cawed, because I badly needed some snow white. I kept it in a shiny brown canister that used to contain tea. CHAI DIARIES, the tea canister said. ORGANIC CLASSIC BREAKFAST. I sniffed up a little snow white from my canister so I could talk to Fiona. My shoes were too small, I told her. They were too tight for me to walk in. I stumbled. It wasn’t my fault. It’s the last time we’ll cover for your shit, Beatrice. One more incident and we’re cutting you loose. Do you understand? “Are you listening to me, Beatrice?” My jailer’s voice has sharp glass in it. It goes through me like a cut. “Have you been listening at all to what I’m saying?” He still stares at me from the doorway with eyes all inky. He thinks I don’t know. About what he is planning to do. So many words whispering in my mind, like prayers in church at Easter when all the pews are full and people stand in the aisles and there are lilies on the altar. Lilies. I want to scream a little. But I behave like a model prisoner. Words are floating through my mind, but I pick only the words he wants to hear. “Of course I’m listening, darling,” I say. “Happy anniversary.” THREE I was lost. I crept in my rented Nissan through fog thick as cotton wadding, fog that shimmered specter white in the headlights before dissolving into the witching-hour blackness beyond. My GPS had conked out twenty minutes ago, and I hadn’t seen another car in almost as long. The Pacific Ocean pounded hundreds of feet below, and my pulse was pounding in synchronicity. I must have overshot the turnoff to Thorn Bluffs. Easy to do on this twisty road, Otis had warned me. Just over eleven hours ago, I’d left my apartment for the last time and boarded a Delta nonstop from JFK. Heavy turbulence over the Rockies, me on my third tiny bottle of cabernet. Then a sprint across the vast sprawl of LAX, only to find my Alaska Air connection delayed due to fog in Monterey. I tapped a guy in a green hoodie embossed with a giant clam. “Any idea how long it could be?” “Fog’s pretty intense this time of year. Could be twenty minutes, could be six hours.” Six hours! I had an impulse to turn and catch the next plane back to New York. But my apartment was now sublet to a Dutch photographer with pink hair. My bank account was nearly flatlined. Most of my friends were scattered to the winds. I went instead to grab a Frappuccino. Two Fraps, a turkey wrap, and a margarita later, my flight was called. Another rock and roll up to Monterey, a lengthy wait at the Alamo counter. And now it was almost midnight, and I was lost. I crept around an almost invisible bend. A road sign materialized in the fog like ectoplasm. A rudimentary drawing of a pig with a brutish snout, a piglet in tow. The wild boar crossing! Otis had said it was a landmark. Yes! I stabbed the air with a fist. And now, there was the turnoff—a break in the thick underbrush marked by two round white boulders. I steered between the rocks onto a rutted lane and in several yards came to a high metal gate. Pressed the button on a black metal call box. An open sesame effect: the gates creaked apart. I continued down a dark lane of worn-away asphalt flanked by towering black columns of redwoods. Thickets of ferns glistened like otherworldly plants between the trunks. Humpbacked shadows flickered in the foliage beyond. Every so often, goblin-like fingers groped the hood of my car. A storybook road. It could lead to a gingerbread house. Or a beast drooling for blood inside a crumbling castle. The road snaked and twisted upon itself, and just when I was sure some malevolent spell had taken me right back to where I’d started, the redwoods thinned to a clearing and the fog began to dissipate, revealing one of the most beautiful houses I’d ever seen. Three stories made of redwood, glass, and steel. The top story with a deck that cantilevered toward the sea. The facade softly illuminated by ground lights nestled in natural landscaping. I pulled into the drive. The front door flew open, and Otis burst out, wearing a monkish brown robe and pajama pants. I gave a start as a beast face suddenly pressed against my window—black and hairy, with peering bright-black eyes. “Pilot! Down, boy! Down!” Otis yanked the dog’s collar, for that’s what the beast was—a black, unclipped standard poodle. It broke away from him and cavorted off into the darkness. “Sorry, he’s still a puppy. New here. Sophia just brought him home yesterday.” I staggered, travel-buzzed, from the car. He caught me up in a bear hug. “Shit, Janie, I’m so glad to see you—you can’t even imagine!” “Me too.” So glad that tears welled in my eyes. “You haven’t changed a bit!” He hadn’t: his face was still like the Raisin Bran sun logo, round with spiky pale hair and crockery-blue eyes behind gold glasses. “Neither have you. Except you’re too skinny. This air will give you back your appetite. It’s very bracing.” “Yeah, I noticed.” I pulled my summer-weight sweater closer around me. “What a gorgeous house!” “Isn’t it? You know the architect Jasper Malloy?” “Of course, great midcentury architect. He designed it?” “Yeah, for himself, in 1962. And also died here twelve years later. There was a story it was haunted by him, so for a long time, nobody would touch it. It was a wreck when Evan bought it.” Otis flipped up the Nissan’s hatchback and swung out my suitcase. “Though probably the real reason was because Malloy’s architecture had gone out of style. But now he’s considered a genius and a visionary, and all his buildings are masterpieces. Architectural Digest is dying to do a spread on this, but Evan says no way. If they come around, he’ll set the dogs on them.” “Is he here? Mr. Rochester?” “Ev? Nah, away as usual. And Sophia’s asleep. At least I think so. It’s hard to tell—she keeps her music going twenty-four seven. But hey, you must be beat. Let me get you to your place.” He popped the handle of my suitcase. “Leave the keys in the car. I’ll get it moved in the morning.” I grabbed my carry-on and followed as he rolled my bag to a descending set of wooden stairs. The ocean now boomed like it was inches under our feet. The steps were slick with moss. I clung to the railing. Any visions of luxury I’d had from the sight of the main house were dashed by the cabin at the bottom of the steps. Unpainted redwood surrounded by run-wild bushes. A peaked wooden roof. The remnants of a chimney. A sign faded to illegibility over the door. “What does that sign say?” “Magritte Cottage. This used to be an artist colony in the 1940s. Ten cottages all named after painters. All burned down except this one.” He pushed the door open. A standing lamp illuminated one large room, simply furnished with rustic-looking pieces painted in faded primary colors. A bricked-over fireplace, the wall blackened around it. A very darkened gilt-framed mirror above it. A frayed braided rug over most of the planked floor. Opposite the fireplace, a pair of sliding glass doors slightly askew on their runners. “It looks better in the daylight,” Otis said anxiously. “It’s nice. Cozy.” I dropped my carry-on and purse on the bed, a four-poster with a fuzzy plaid spread. “Reminds me of sleepaway camp. Except without the bunk beds.” “It’s all original, except the glass doors. Malloy added those to give the ocean view. The furniture’s from Evan’s parents. They were archaeologists, mostly in South America.” “Retired?” “If you call dead retired. Plane crash when Evan was at Stanford.” “Oh.” My eyes seized on a rough arrangement of wildflowers in a glass on the bed table. “Pretty bouquet.” “Sophia picked them. She worried they’d already be wilted by the time you got here. Wildflowers don’t last long.” “That was sweet of her.” “She can be. Sometimes.” He ticked his spectacles higher on his nose. “So . . . there’s a kitchenette through the folding doors. I left some stuff for breakfast in the fridge. The connectivity is okay, not great, worse with the cell. If it goes out entirely and you really need it, you can go up to the house—it’s heavy-boosted up there. Oh, and you can drink the tap water, by the way. It’s from a well, and it’s delicious.” I nodded, stifling a yawn. “And you’ve got your own terrace. The view of the cove like I sent you.” I glanced at the glass doors. “No curtains?” “I could tack some up, if you want. But there’s nothing really out there.” I went over and peered out into the blackness. I could hear but not see the pounding water. “So that’s where it happened? With Beatrice McAdams?” “Where she drowned herself, yeah. Last December. Wearing a party dress. Crazy, huh?” A cocktail dress and high heels. I remembered being captivated by that detail in the nonstop media coverage at the time. Otis gave a little clap of his hands. “Hey, I’ll let you crash. That bed’s pretty comfy, I tested it out myself.” He bounced a little on the balls of his slipper-clad feet, that way he’d always done. “I’m so truly glad you’re here, Janie. You made the right decision. You’ll see.” It didn’t seem like the right decision. I managed a smile. “I really have missed you, O.” “Yeah, me too. Like crazy. And now we’ll have each other’s backs. Watching out for each other, just like we always did back when we worked at the Clown, right?” “You bet.” We hugged again, and he left. I listened to his footsteps receding outside. A lonely sound. I pulled out my phone. Just one bar, which quickly sputtered out like an extinguished candle. There was an old black desk phone squatting on top of a dresser. I picked up the receiver. It was dead. Who would I call at this time of night anyway? I carted my carry-on bag with my toiletries into the primitive bathroom. The tap went on with a put-upon groan, then released alternating gushes of freezing and scalding water. I scrubbed my face free of travel grime. Brushed my teeth. Trudged wearily back to the main room and began to unpack. There was a midget closet with peeling flowered wallpaper and a musty, old-maiden-aunt smell. A small bureau with drawers that stuck. I pried open the top drawer. It was crammed with fashion magazines: Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire. I opened one—a Vanity Fair from 2013—to a page marked with a turned-down corner. Full-page ad for Lanc?me. The model was Beatrice McAdams at the height of her career. An exquisite silvery creature with hazy green eyes. All the magazines in the drawer appeared to have folded-down corners. I flipped to a few more of the marked pages. Each featured photos of Beatrice in her heyday. I tossed the magazines into a heap on the floor. Restocked the drawers with my undies, shorts, and tops. I peeled off my travel-rumpled clothes. Pulled on a nightshirt. Filmy white linen newly bought for what I’d imagined would be balmy California nights. It floated sensuously to my knees. I caught a glimpse of myself in the gilt mirror above the fireplace. A small pale girl in a thin white shift. Not a beauty. Just pretty enough. I felt a sudden overwhelming desire for a lover’s touch. The feeling startled me. I’d shut down that part of myself for almost a year. So why now, exhausted, in strange surroundings, so far from anything I thought of as home, did I feel nearly choked with desire? I leaned closer to the mirror’s speckled glass, as if to search its dark depths for an answer. Something moved in the reflection behind me. I gave a violent start. A figure, hovering just outside the glass doors. Hazy, white. Incorporeal. My heart began to pound. “Mom?” The word escaped my lips involuntarily. Whoever, whatever, it was receded into the dark. I stood paralyzed a moment. Then, with determination, I turned and strode to the doors. Cupped my face on the glass and peered out. Moonlight flitted in scrappy patterns between the branches of a tree limb swaying in the breeze. I gave a quick laugh. Just like me to conjure my mother’s ghost out of a flutter of moonbeam. I unbolted the door, jiggled it open on its uneven track, and stepped out into the brisk air. The sea was a black expanse with white foamings of phosphorescence where the waves tossed. The faint outline of a cliff descended on the left, the silhouette of a cypress on its crest—like a mad woman with her hair blown sideways. The surf now sounded like a war. Booming cannons. Clashing artillery. And suddenly my skin prickled. The kind of prickle that crawls up from the top of your spine and over your scalp when you’re absolutely sure you’re being watched. I scuttered back inside. Heaved the glass door shut and locked the bolt. Then went to the front door. There was a keyhole, the skull-shaped kind for a large old-fashioned key. I had no key. I felt a spurt of panic. Stop it! I was spooking myself. My exhausted state. The disorienting effect of strange new surroundings. I just needed to get some sleep. I crawled into bed between fresh sheets and the plaid blanket. I thought again of that hazy shape in the mirror, and another fancy floated into my mind. A mad woman in a cocktail dress. Beatrice. And then I drifted into unconsciousness. FOUR I woke up to the sight of startling beauty. Outside the doors, a misted blue sea stretched to the horizon, cradled by bluffs of ocher, violet, moss green. Pelicans skimmed the waterline. A hummingbird fizzed ruby and emerald at the glass, then flashed into thin air. Nothing ghostly. No goblins. I checked the time: 10:58 a.m.! I propelled myself out of bed and into the scalding-freezing shower. Washed with a slice of pickled-looking green soap perched on the rim. Threw on the first clothes I pulled out—canary-yellow cotton shirt, white capris. In the kitchenette, I found a bag of freshly ground Jamaican beans. OJ. Homemade cranberry muffins. Otis had remembered I preferred honey to sugar. I brewed coffee in a dinged-up Krups and took a steaming cup and a muffin out to the crumbling brick terrace. I ate sitting on the steps that led down into the property. In the distance, an electric saw buzzed, and two men yelled back and forth in a splashing kind of language—a little like Spanish being spoken underwater. Dogs barked occasionally from below. A feeling of remarkable well-being crept over me. My text tone sounded. R u murdered yet? I grinned. Wade O’Connor. He was teaching at UCLA while still hunting for a new writing gig. I texted back: Not yet. Mr. R. not even here. They put u in a spooky attic? Nope. Rustic cottage with staggering view. I’m in paradise!! Yeah? Don’t eat no poison apples. Gruesome way to die. Mwahahaha. I’ll try my best not to. The dogs below suddenly began barking frenetically. I stood up and went to the edge of the terrace, but even on tiptoe I couldn’t see down to the beach. I gazed out over the water. There were several large outcroppings toward the horizon, one of them particularly imposing. Very jagged—black and glistening. It looked to me like the ruined spire of a Gothic cathedral sunk beneath the water. My eyes traveled to a lower promontory north of where I stood. I spotted something else that looked medieval. The top of a small tower, round with a crenellated top, poking above the trees. So what could that be? I wondered. My text pinged again. Otis this time. U revived? Yeah. Be right up. I dumped my dishes in the minisink inside. Then I headed up the mossy little steps to the main compound. Otis was in the motor court unloading bags of produce from the back of his ancient Prius. “Hey,” he greeted me. “Sleep okay?” “Too well. I just got up. You’re right, O., it’s spectacular here.” “Told you.” “What’s going on with all the dogs?” “A dead tiger shark washed up on the cove. I’ve got to get it towed away before it rots and the smell gets up here.” His arms full, he started to the house. “Hey, could you do me a big favor? Pick up Sophia later? She goes to a tennis clinic in the mornings, and it gets out at two o’clock.” “Sure, anything I can do to help.” My rental Nissan was no longer in the drive. “Where’s my car?” “I had Hector—he’s the gardener here—take it back to Alamo. We’ve got a car here you can use.” “I already paid for a month.” “I called, and Alamo’s just going to charge you for one week.” I had an odd feeling of being trapped. “You should have asked me first, Otis.” “I thought you’d be happy. Not having to pay for the rental, right? And believe me, you’re gonna like this one a lot better.” He headed to a side door of the house. We entered a large service porch where a woman with long white braids was attacking the floors with a Swiffer. She was tall and gaunt. I couldn’t guess her age—fifty, sixty? Her nut-brown face looked carved from some obdurate tropical wood. “Hola, Annunciata!” Otis yelled. “This is Jane. She is staying in the cottage.” I smiled. “Nice to meet you, Annunciata.” She returned a glare. Then resumed her punishment of the floor. I trailed Otis into the kitchen—a stunner, all limestone and Euro stainless and another eye-popping view of the Pacific. “Annunciata’s really deaf,” he explained. “She’s got hearing aids—top of the line, Evan paid—but she hardly ever uses them. He says she thinks they pick up spirit voices. I believe it.” “She didn’t seem to like me much.” “It’s impossible to tell. She’s married to Hector—I told you, the gardener—and he’s the same way. They worked for Evan’s parents in Honduras, and I don’t think either of them likes strangers. Maybe they’re illegal. I never asked.” “Who else works here?” “Just me and the Sandovals full time. There are others who come part time.” He deposited the bags on a counter. “There used to be a lot more. A guy who was kind of a butler but called himself the estate manager. Two other full-time maids and a chef before me. And both Evan and Beatrice had personal assistants. The butler and the chef lived in the guesthouse behind the garage, but they all got sacked when the money got tight.” Otis rummaged in a drawer, pulled out a remote. “Okay, this opens both the gates and garage. First button, gates—next three, garage doors. The third’s got a blue Audi, that’s the car you’ll use.” I took the clicker. “Okay, thanks.” “The key fob should be on the seat. Tell your GPS ‘Carmel Tennis Club.’ You’ll want to leave early. There’s a lot of tourist traffic.” “Maybe I’ll go in now. Unless you need me for anything else?” “No, good idea, get the lay of the land. Oh, and you’re having dinner with me and Sophia tonight. Since the lord and master is away.” “Great.” I started to turn. “Oh, by the way, I need a key for my door.” “Didn’t I leave you one? Like, by the bed?” “No.” “I thought I did. I’ll see if I can dig you up another. Wait, let me show you first where you’ll be working with Sophia.” He led me to the center of the house, a floating staircase made of ash-colored wood. We descended to the lower level. “This floor is completely new,” he said. “It’s got a gym, a screening room. A couple more bedrooms. One for the Sandovals. They’ve got their own house on the other side of the highway, but sometimes one of them will stay over. Like if I’m away.” “So you weren’t exactly a prisoner here?” He gave me a puzzled look. Then threw open a pair of pocket doors. “This is the Ocean Room. Where you’ll work.” A spacious room, more traditionally furnished than those upstairs. An undulating sea-green light flooded in from floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. “It’s lovely,” I said. “It was Beatrice’s favorite room. She spent a lot of time in here, lolling on that chaise.” A tufted white chaise was positioned at a slight diagonal from one wall. “Evan never sets foot in here anymore.” “Won’t he mind us working here?” “Nah. He’ll like that it keeps you out of his way.” Pretty cold, I thought. Even if he had murdered Beatrice. Or particularly if he had. I returned to the cottage. Swapped my flip-flops for sandals, grabbed my bag, and headed to the garage—a nine-car structure connected by a covered passage to the main house. I stabbed random buttons on the remote until the middle bay rumbled open. “Wow,” I breathed. An Audi Coupe, sapphire blue with a white interior, crouched between a Land Cruiser and a Smart Car. In the Jersey burb I grew up in, car crazy came with the air, and here were eight mostly gorgeous ones, including a Tesla Model S at a recharging station. I stepped rapturously up to the Audi and slipped behind the wheel. Luxuriated in the buttery leather. A touch on the starter and the engine sprang to life with a sensuous purr. The coast road where I’d felt so lost the night before was now a blast to drive. The ocean flashed in and out of sight, with occasional peeps of snowcapped mountains to the east. A tap on the pedal and I surged effortlessly into traffic on the main highway. Twenty-two minutes to the turnoff to Carmel-by-the-Sea. Charming in a postcard kind of way. Whitewashed cobblestone alleyways. Tutti-frutti-colored geraniums dripped from windowsills. Pedestrians spilled from the sidewalks, snapping pictures, licking gelato. I lucked into a parking space and joined the stroll. Shelled out twenty-seven bucks for a Cobb salad at a sidewalk caf?. Nothing seemed quite real. The geraniums. The gelato. A hazy sunshine added to the dreamlike atmosphere. At a quarter to two, I got back in the Audi. The GPS steered me to the tennis club—a low building shaded by sycamores, the bark like Marine Corps camouflage. The parking area was jammed. I made a full circle before spotting a car pulling out—a high-end Range Rover, metallic blue. I cruised up beside it. The driver, a woman, braked suddenly. Odd, I thought. I’d left more than enough room for her to maneuver. She continued to back out, then swung forward and braked again directly beside me. Misted sunlight dazzled the window: I registered silver-blonde hair, finely etched features. Eyes hidden behind large and opaque dark glasses. A tap on my opposite window made me jump. A fairly tall and tan girl flumped into the passenger seat. “Hi,” she said. The Range Rover pulled sharply away. I stared briefly after it, then back to my passenger. “Oh, hi . . . Sophia? I’m Jane.” “Yeah, I know, Otis said.” She twisted herself to wedge a racket and a neon-orange Patagonia duffle behind her seat. “Thanks so much for the lovely flowers. It was so thoughtful of you.” “No problem.” She wriggled a little. “So how come you get to drive her car?” “Whose car?” “Beatrice’s. She used to seriously lose her shit if you even, like, looked at it.” Beatrice’s car! A sudden pinging made me jump again. “Seat belt,” I said. With the air of granting a particularly nonsensical favor, Sophia yanked the belt across her chest. Tugged her short-shorts from between the cleft of her buttocks, excavated a pack of Bubble Yum from the back pocket, and ripped it open. Crammed two pink slabs in her mouth. Chewed a moment. “I thought you’d look different,” she said. I began to pull out of the lot. “Really? How?” “I don’t know. Just different.” Her voice sounded blurred. A moustache of sweat glistened above her bow-shaped upper lip. She was certainly different than the waif I’d been picturing. A heart-shaped face bruised with magenta eye shadow, purple mascara, purplish-brown lip gloss. Earlobe-length red hair in want of shampoo. Orange tube top. Those short-shorts. She blew a quivering bubble. Popped it. “Otis said you used to work for a TV show.” “Yeah, I did. A show called Carlotta Dark.” “Never heard of it.” “It was on the ALX network. It ran for six years, then got canceled.” “That sucks.” She spat the gum back into the wrapper, crumpled gum and wrapper into a wad, and dropped it at her feet. Then let out a belch. I caught the distinctive funk of regurgitated bourbon. “Have you been drinking?” “No.” “There’s no point in lying. I can smell it on your breath.” A shrug, one shouldered. “Did you even go to tennis practice?” “Yeah, I did.” “And?” “We broke early ’cause the coach, Marianne, she’s got, like, fibroids and gets these major cramps? So she had to go to the gynecologist. And I went to hang with Josh, the dude who runs the bar.” “He lets you drink?” “I had, like, half a Manhattan. No big deal.” A louder belch. “It seems like a big deal,” I said. My attention suddenly shifted to the rearview mirror. A car was tailgating us. A metallic-blue SUV. Possibly a Range Rover. I slowed to see if it would pass. It lessened its speed to remain behind me. I had a wild thought: it was Beatrice McAdams chasing me. Sophia suddenly let out a low gurgle, like the sound of oatmeal coming to a boil. I swerved to the shoulder and stopped. “Roll down your window. Breathe.” She whirred the window down and hung her head out, gulping in fresh air. Then she dragged her head back in and slumped crookedly against her seat. “Okay?” I asked. A feeble assent. I pulled back onto the highway, compulsively checking for a metallic-blue SUV behind me. It was gone. Did I really think it was Beatrice? My old childhood yearning for the dead not to stay dead. Ridiculous. I drove back as fast as I dared, swung carefully onto the Thorn Bluffs private road, taking the switchbacks as gently as possible. Pulled to a stop in front of the house. Helped Sophia out, half hoisting her by the shoulders. Guided her inside. “Where’s your room?” “Down the hall.” I supported her down the long hallway past the central stairs. She lurched for a doorknob and tottered inside, collapsing on her bed. I followed her in. An unholy mess: I waded through an archipelago of tangled panties, athletic socks, puddles of perfumed goo, tokidoki shopping bags, a spilled-out box of sport tampons. I noticed a gold Zippo lighter. A fish tank with no water. I went into her equally slovenly bathroom. Found a glass that didn’t look like it was actively cultivating a norovirus. Filled it from the tap and brought it to her. “Drink some water. Just a few sips. It will make you feel better.” She turned her face to the wall. “Are you going to tell my dad?” “No,” I said. She turned back to me. Just enough to shoot me a slit-eyed glance. “But if you keep on doing this, I’m sure he’s going to find out.” “How do you know? He’s hardly ever here. You’ve never even met him.” “That’s true. But here’s what I do know. I know I used to be your age once. And that somewhere in this pigsty of a room there’s a joint stashed away. Or a bottle of something. Or both. And I’ll bet cigarettes too. And I also know that if you want to hide your drinking, bourbon’s the worst way to go. Anyone can smell it on your breath a mile away. You’re way better off with vodka.” Another slitted peep at me. “I’ll just leave the glass here. But trust me, you’ll feel a whole lot better if you stay hydrated.” As I closed her door behind me, I heard a rustling. Then the clink of a glass being lifted off a surface. I felt a little surge of triumph. Maybe I could be of help to her after all. “Do you think I should go check on her again?” “Nah.” Otis set a tureen on the table: cioppino, chunky with fresh seafood and fragrant with anise and oregano. “I’ve found it’s better to just let her sleep it off.” “So she’s done this before?” “Yeah, a couple of times. Annunciata likes her rum and once left a bottle around that Soph got into. And maybe another time after tennis. But she really can be sweet sometimes. I was hoping that was the side you’d get first.” We were settled in an alcove on the sea-view side of the kitchen. Five dogs milled and begged at our feet. I finally had them all straight. The poodle, Pilot. Julius, an obese bulldog. A terrier mutt, Hermione, who’d lost a leg to a fox poacher’s trap and was now fitted with a prosthetic contraption. Also a pair of black German shepherds—siblings, Minnie and Mickey—who still appeared to be sizing me up. “By the way,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me it was Beatrice’s car?” “The Audi? So what? It’s an amazing car, right? And it’s just sitting out there.” “It feels kind of ghoulish for me to drive it.” “Don’t think about it like that.” “It’s going to be hard not to. Please, O., just ask me before making any more decisions for me, okay?” “Okay. I will.” He ladled out bowls of the cioppino. I was suddenly very hungry. I quickly downed a couple of spoonfuls. “I didn’t know Sophia had even ever known Beatrice.” “Yeah. Soph first came here about a month after her mom died. From what I know, it was Beatrice who wanted her shipped off to a boarding school.” “Your basic wicked stepmother?” “Your basic off-her-rocker stepmother.” He took a taste of the cioppino and grunted. “Too much oregano.” “Not for me. It’s delicious.” I wolfed a little more. “So what’s that kind of medieval tower sticking up across the grounds from my cottage?” “Oh, that. Jasper Malloy’s old drafting studio. A mini version of his ancestors’ back in Ireland. It’s where he dropped dead, by the way. While working at his drafting table. His body wasn’t found for weeks, and it was all decomposed and eaten by animals by the time it was.” I put my spoon down. Otis grinned. “It’s just used for storage now. Evan says no one’s allowed to go in it. He doesn’t have to worry. It gives me the creeps just to go near it.” “Malloy’s ghost?” “Somebody’s ghost.” I paused for a moment. “Hey . . . Otis? Are you sure . . . I mean, positive, that your cousin is innocent?” “Evan?” “Yeah. Do you think it’s possible he could have killed Beatrice?” Otis evaded my eyes. “No. I mean, not in cold blood. But he can get pretty mad sometimes. I mean scary mad. So on the spur of the moment, if she drove him to it . . .” He shook his head. “But he didn’t, okay? It’s the media that stirred all that up. They wouldn’t let it go. They drove him away from here for months.” “Really? Where did he go?” “His house up in San Francisco. Gorgeous Victorian on Russian Hill. He didn’t come back until almost May. And now he’s had to rent it out because his money is so tight.” Otis’s tone suddenly hardened. “But look. Just drop all this, okay?” I didn’t think I could totally drop it. I took a different tack. “A weird thing happened at the tennis club today. Somebody seemed to recognize the Audi and began following me. A woman driving a metallic-blue Range Rover. Maybe some friend of Beatrice’s?” “She didn’t have any friends. There’s a brother. A real asshole. I think he drives a sports car.” “This was definitely a woman. Maybe somebody who works here?” “There’s only the Sandovals full time, but they’ve got a truck, and anyway, Annunciata doesn’t drive. Lots of people come and go, but I wouldn’t know. Car ID’ing isn’t really my thing.” “She had pale-blonde hair. Silvery.” I gave a little laugh. “I had this utterly crazy thought. I mean, it’s pretty insane. But what if it actually was Beatrice?” “Back from the dead? And driving a Range Rover at the tennis club?” “I know. I’m probably just writing stories in my head. But it’s kind of an intriguing mystery, isn’t it? That whole thing about her.” “It’s not, I told you,” he said vehemently. “She was nuts. She committed suicide—end of story.” “Except it was only his word that she did. And you said her body was never found.” He put down his spoon. “Look, Janie. Don’t get involved with Evan’s affairs. Seriously. I’m not kidding about this.” Would I disappear as well? “Okay, I won’t,” I said. We were silent a moment. But then we began to reminisce about our early days in New York. Laughing ourselves silly over memories of the East Village dive bar we’d both worked at. All tension disappeared. We washed down the cioppino with chilled Montrachet (“I get to drink the dregs of Evan’s bottles,” Otis said). For dessert, a fresh-made mascarpone fig tart. He refused to let me help clean up. “Seriously. I like to do things exactly my way. But you could walk Pilot if you want to help. He’s hyperactive, even for a poodle.” “He could use a good grooming,” I said. “And Julius is wheezing. When was he last taken to the vet?” “Never since I’ve been here. Why don’t you take over the dogs? That would be a huge help to me.” “All of them?” I glanced dubiously at Minnie, who was eyeing me in a way that kind of dared me to make a sudden move. “The shepherds too?” “You’re one of the family now. They’ll accept you.” He glanced outside. “The fog’s coming in—you better take a flashlight. There’s some in the service porch. And one of the jackets—it gets chilly.” I called to Pilot, and he instantly scampered with me into the service porch. I selected a flashlight and grabbed a quilted jacket from a hook. It swamped me, but none of the others looked any smaller. The fog streamed in white scarves and pennants, with a bright half moon playing hide-and-seek among them. I walked briskly down the asphalt drive, Pilot racing figure eights around me. We cut across switchbacks toward the highway. I kept to the gravel shoulder as the grade descended. A pair of headlights glowered in the mist, then swept swiftly by. The highway continued to dip. Pilot romped ahead and disappeared from my sight around a curve. “Pilot!” I heard him barking but couldn’t see him. I quickened my steps. I found myself in the middle of a dense cloud. Fog gathered in the depression in the road. “Pilot?” I yelled again. “Where are you?” Excited yapping. But he was a ghost dog. The roar of a motorcycle echoed from around the far side of the bend. Through the blanketing cloud, I caught a glimpse of the poodle trotting onto the road. “Pilot, get back here!” I screamed. The motorcycle’s headlamp glowed dimly as it appeared on the near side of the bend. Pilot barked with sudden frenzy. The headlamp veered crazily. Pilot darted off the road into the underbrush. A sickening sound of tires skidding out of control on gravel. A shout. With horror, I watched motorcycle and rider slam down onto the gravel shoulder. I ran toward the rider. He was sprawled crookedly next to the bike, but his limbs, encased in black leather and jeans, were moving stiffly. Alive, at least. With a groan, he hoisted himself up onto his elbows. “Are you okay?” I shined my flashlight on him. He whipped his head. “What the hell are you?” “Just a person,” I said quickly. He yanked his goggles down. “For Chrissake. I meant who are you? What are you doing here?” “Taking a walk.” “What kind of lunatic goes out for a walk in this kind of fog?” “Maybe the same kind of lunatic who drives way too fast in it.” “You call that fast? Christ.” He gingerly gathered himself into a sitting position, then flexed his feet in the heavy boots experimentally. He took off his helmet and shook out a head of rough black curls. A week’s tangle of rough salt-and-pepper beard nearly obscured a wide mouth. The prominent nose might be called stately on a more good-natured face. “What the hell was that creature in the middle of the road?” “A dog.” “A dog?” “A standard poodle. Unclipped.” “Fuck me.” He put the helmet back on, then pulled a cell phone from his jacket and squinted at the screen. “Nothing,” he muttered. “The reception’s kind of iffy around here. Do you want me to go get help? I can get back to my place in about twenty minutes.” “Twenty minutes.” A snort. “Do you know how to ride a bike?” “A bike?” I had a confused mental image of myself pumping an old Schwinn. “A motorbike,” he said. I glanced at the toppled machine. A Harley Davidson, a behemoth of black and chrome. “I could give it a try. I drove a Vespa all through Umbria one summer.” “A Vespa. Christ God almighty.” He flung out an arm. “Help me up, okay?” I approached him tentatively. He was over six feet and powerfully built. About twice my weight, I guessed. “I’m not sure I can pull you.” “Yeah, you probably can’t. Stoop down a little.” God, he’s rude. I did, and he draped his arm around my shoulder, transferring his weight. My knees buckled a little but didn’t give. He began to stand, crumpled slightly, then got his balance and pulled himself up straight. I suddenly became aware of his intense physicality. The power of his arm and shoulder against my body, the taut spring of the muscles in his chest. As if he sensed what I was feeling, he shook off my support and stood on his own feet. “At least you can put weight on your feet,” I said. “That’s a good sign.” “Are you a medical professional?” “No.” “Then your opinion doesn’t count for much at the moment.” Go to hell, was on the tip of my tongue. But the fog’s chill was making me sniffle. It seemed absurd to attempt a stinging retort with a dripping nose. I swiped it surreptitiously with the sleeve of my jacket. He walked, limping slightly, to the Harley. “This thing’s supposed to take a corner. That’s the main goddamned reason I bought it!” He gave the seat a savage kick. Then howled, “Son of a fucking bitch!” and hopped on his nonkicking boot and shook a fist as if in defiance of some bully of a god who particularly had it in for him. I laughed. He whirled on me. My laughter froze. The look of fury on his face sent a thrill of alarm through me. I edged backward; I felt at that moment he could murder me without compunction and leave my corpse to be devoured by coyotes and bobcats, like the body of Jasper Malloy in that tower. But then, to my astonishment, he grinned. “You’re right. I look like an ass.” Pilot suddenly came crashing out of the underbrush. “Is that your mutt?” “Yes. Though, actually, not mine. He’s a recent addition at the place I’m staying.” He stared at me, a thought dawning. I forced myself to stare back: deep-set eyes, dark as ink. I was about to introduce myself, but he yanked the goggles back over his eyes and stooped to the handlebar of the bike. “Help me get this up. Grab the other bar. You pull and I’ll push.” “It’s too heavy.” “I’ll do the heavy lifting. Just do what you can.” Obstinately, I didn’t move. “Please,” he added. He made the word sound like an obscenity. I took a grudging step forward and grabbed hold of the handlebar with both hands. I tugged it toward me as he lifted his side with a grunt. The bike slowly rose upright. “Hold it steady,” he said. It felt like it weighed several tons—it took every ounce of my strength to keep my side up as he straddled the seat. He grasped both bars. Engaged the clutch, cursing in pain as he stomped on the pedal. He glanced at me briefly. And then, sending up a heavy spray of gravel, the Harley roared off into the enveloping fog. “You’re welcome, Mr. Rochester!” I shouted into the deepening gloom. BEATRICE Thorn Bluffs, December 17 Midmorning It’s time for me to take the poison. My jailer has come to my room again. He has the vial strangled in his fist. “Ready for your meds, Beatrice?” He looks like a pirate now. Pirate black curls and black eyes and his black jeans have ragged bottoms. The poison comes sometimes in green and sometimes in yellow, and sometimes it’s the color of the dust in a grave. At the dungeon, it came in an injection machine to squirt down my throat. But it’s always to keep me prisoner. I start thinking about the dungeon. The Oaks, they called it. He took me there in his car with no motor, the one he made run on his thoughts alone. He told me I had done something very terrible, and he left me there all locked up. Lilies. The voices all whisper together in my mind. You killed the girl named Lilies. I hear my jailer’s phone purring. He looks at it with a fierce frown. He begins to tap. Click, click, click, click. I think some more about The Oaks. Isn’t this a nice room, Beat? he had said to me. So cheerful, don’t you think? Terrific view. He couldn’t fool me. I could see it was a dungeon. There was no view. No windows. Only video screens with bars in front of them. Behind the bars, the screens showed pictures of dirty hills with trees that looked like dark-green umbrellas. I could have changed the channel and looked at what was really behind the bars. The cement blocks of the dungeon. But I was too stealthy. I didn’t touch the channels. I kept them tuned to those hills and the umbrella trees. The dungeon keeper was very fat. Pasty puddles of fat cheeks and big puffs of breasts and bottom. She could smell my fear when she came to me with her tube of poison. She called it a medicinal oral syringe. “Nothing to worry about, Beatrice.” She squirted poison from it under my tongue. But I could feel the poison seep through me, turning my blood dark green like the umbrella trees. And I grew fat and puffed up, too, just like the dungeon keeper, and I felt sleepy all the time. And then my jailer had come back to the dungeon. And he had brought me back here, and now he keeps me his prisoner. Until he can get rid of me for good. He wants it to happen tonight, Mary Magdalene hisses at me. You won’t let him, Beatrice. You have the plan. “Sorry, Beat.” My jailer’s voice rises over Mary’s. He stuffs his phone in his pocket. He shakes a poison pill from the vial into the palm of his hand. “All set?” It’s yellow today, the color of a corpse. The extrastrong kind. So I won’t resist when he comes to get rid of me. I am a model prisoner. I part my lips, and he places the corpse-colored pill on my tongue. “Here’s your soda.” He gives me the chalice to sip, and I do. I open my mouth to show him the poison pill is gone. “Good.” He smiles. “I’ve reserved at Sierra Mar for five thirty. You’ll want to dress up. Otis has somebody coming to do your face and hair.” I dip my head. Yes. “You’ll look gorgeous, Beat. You always do. Oh, and hey, Sophia sent an anniversary card. She’ll be home in a few days, you know.” He shows his phone to me. “Balloons.” I see bubbles falling and falling inside the screen. They are purple and pink and green, like the poison when it bubbles inside me. I scream, “Take it away!” When I scream, the pill slips down from behind my tongue and into my throat. I start to cough, and I choke. He puts the chalice back in my hand. “Drink some more, Beat.” I drink again, and the poison pill slides all the way down. “Rest up now. I’ll come back up later.” And then he’s gone. The poison, Beatrice. Mary’s voice is harsh. You have to get it out. Now! I walk very quickly into my bathroom. I sink down on my knees in front of my bidet. I put two fingers far, far down the back of my throat. It all comes up—the Dr. Brown and the yellow and green food from my breakfast and the pus and the mud from the poison that has already begun to work. I pick out the yellow pill in all the pus and mud. My jailer is clever, he put traps in all the drains, and he tests the water seven times a day. I swirl everything down the bidet except for the pill. I go into my closet room. I open my shoe closet. I push a button, and all the shoes start going round and round. I stop them and select one. A rosy pink pump with a glass high heel. It has a pointed toe. I bury the corpse pill deep inside the toe. Where even my jailer will never find it. FIVE I made it back to the cottage feeling shaken and chilled. Like a first-rate martini, I thought. Except, no, the best martinis were stirred, and suddenly I began to crave one. A shrill ring cut abruptly through the room. The old desk phone. The one that was dead. I stared at it warily. It continued to ring insistently: whatever ghost was on the line was not taking no for an answer. I picked it up. “He’s back,” said Otis. “I thought this phone didn’t work.” “The cord is frayed. Goes off and on. If it’s on and you press star, it rings on an extension over here. Anyway, Evan’s back. He had an accident—his Harley skidded on some loose gravel and went down.” “I know, I saw it happen. I didn’t recognize him at first.” Otis wasn’t listening. “He’s lucky he didn’t break his neck. He wants to see you. You don’t have to get dressed up or anything. Just come over soon. He hates to be kept waiting.” He hung up. I pressed star to call him back. The phone was dead again. What if Rochester was blaming me for the accident? So what? What was the worst he could do? Certainly not murder me in full sight of Otis. I pulled on dry clothes, ran a comb through my damp hair. Made sure my nose had stopped leaking. I headed up through the fog to the main house, letting myself in through the side service porch. Otis was in the kitchen, peeling foil from the top of a bottle of Cristal. I caught a whiff of marijuana. “Hey, just in time. You can bring him this.” He popped the cork. “He’s in the Great Room. It’s right after the stairs, the double doors. You’ll hear music, just follow it.” I took the bottle. “What do I call him?” “Evan, like most people do. He hates Evander.” I began down the hall. The mellow strains of Lauryn Hill, “Killing Me Softly,” drifted to me. One of my favorite songs. I felt strangely resentful. Like he had no right to it. I paused at the threshold of the Great Room. Pictured him inside, sitting by a smoldering hearth. Brooding about his injured ankle. Well, so be it. I squared my shoulders and strode briskly inside. A room with high ceilings, the ocean-side wall made entirely of glass. Modern furniture and elegant flat-weave rugs. Abstract paintings glowing on white walls. There was indeed a large stone hearth at the far end, but Evander Rochester was not seated brooding in front of it. Rather, he was planted firmly on both feet beside a coffee table spread with a lavish buffet, and if he was brooding over anything, it was whether to choose a slab of baby back ribs or a slice of lacy cheese. The German shepherds crouched in a kind of heraldic posture on either side of his feet. He turned at my entrance. “I cried for madder music and for stronger wine.” I glanced at him, startled. Was that a quote? He made a “gimme” motion with his fingers. I handed him the Cristal. “Want some?” He gestured with the bottle. I hesitated. Is he aware of our recent encounter? “Sure. Thank you.” He topped off a large chalice-like goblet and handed it to me. I sipped. Fresh tasting and delicious, the bubbles tickling my nose. He waved an expansive hand over the buffet. “Have a bite. Fairfax is a first-class cook.” “I know, but I’ve already eaten, thank you.” “Suit yourself.” He went for a cold sparerib. The dogs began making mewling noises. He fed the rib to one of them (Mickey?), another to its sibling (Minnie?). Then he polished off one of his own and tossed the bone, not over his shoulder into the fireplace as I half expected, but back onto the platter. Then lowered himself into a semireclining position on one of two facing couches. “Well, don’t just stand there. Sit.” I stiffened. “Oh, for Chrissake! Please, have a seat. And could we please skip the niceties? I like to say what I want, and I expect everyone to do the same.” I doubted that. At least the second part. Still, it seemed absurd for me to be hovering above him. I sank into the nearest chair. He fixed his eyes on me. An unrelenting black stare. “So you are real,” he said. So he does recognize me. “Did you actually think I wasn’t?” “I’ve got to admit I wasn’t absolutely sure. The way you appeared out of the fog—you and your spirit animal. Like creatures out of some weird spell. Of course, I’d just been dropped on my head, so I wasn’t thinking too clearly about anything.” “I seem pretty real to myself, if that’s any help.” “Not much.” He continued to stare. “How is your ankle?” I ventured. “Not broken or . . . anything . . . ?” “It hurts like a son of a bitch. So if you want another laugh at my expense, now would be the time.” I suppressed a laugh. “No, I’m good. But you might feel better if you get out of those boots.” He glanced at his feet as if they had obstinately and independently encased themselves in thick leather. He sat up, began tugging at the left boot, grimacing in pain. “Here, let me help.” I rose and started to him. “Stay back!” The dogs snarled. Startled, I sat back down. Felt a pulse of anger. What did he think I was going to do? He jimmied the boot off his left foot, then the other. Then he slouched back on the couch and stared at me just for a change. I was finding it a little easier to stare back. He looked no more handsome than he had in the dark—if anything, the interior lighting emphasized the crag of his forehead and the scruffiness of his beard. He’d taken off the young-Brando biker jacket and was now in a white pocket tee with a slight rip at the shoulder, giving him a young-Brando-in-Streetcar appearance. I had the image of him throwing back his head and howling, “Stell-a!” Smothered another giggle. He spoke. “So how do you like it here?” “I like it very much. It’s incredibly beautiful.” “The cabin okay? You weren’t expecting anything fancy, were you?” “No. I mean, I didn’t know what to expect. But it’s perfectly comfortable and charming.” “It’s a shack,” he said. The conversation faltered again. Amy Winehouse now drenched the air: “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” Low and a bit ominous, the bass drum like a heartbeat. My eyes roamed the room for some memento of Beatrice. A photo, maybe. A copy of Harper’s Bazaar. Anything to suggest she had ever existed. There was nothing. “You’re not from Tennessee, are you?” he said abruptly. “No. Why would you think so?” It dawned on me. “Did Otis say I was?” “He told me you grew up on the same block in Memphis.” I’ll strangle him. “We didn’t. We met in New York about eight years ago. At a club called the Clown Lounge. We were both bartending there.” “The Clown Lounge?” A spark of amused interest. “A grunge place. Lots of drugs, fights sometimes. The owner was a mean drunk who regularly stole our tips. I don’t know why Otis would tell you anything different.” “It’s not hard to know that Fairfax is fond of embroidering the truth.” He crossed his arms over his head, revealing a tattooed band around his left bicep. Words written in some strange alphabet. Sanskrit? “So tell me something about yourself that is true,” he said. My mind suddenly went blank. My life seemed devoid of incident, every day as vacant as the next. “Where are you really from?” he prompted. “Originally? Lowood, New Jersey.” “Rich commuter suburb?” “God, no.” “Gritty working-class town?” “Not particularly. I mean, it wouldn’t rate a Springsteen song.” A fleeting smile. “Still have ties there? Lots of family?” “No, no ties. No immediate family at all.” “Poor little orphan girl, huh?” I felt a knife slice through me. “We’re all orphans here,” he said brusquely. “One way or another.” What does he mean by that? I said quickly, “I might have an aunt still alive. My aunt Joanne.” “Might?” “She ran off when I was three. Nobody ever wanted to talk about her. I don’t really remember what she looked like, but for some reason, I think of her as looking like a giant frog.” “A frog?” Another gleam of interest. We were interrupted by the sound of rattling dishware. Otis appeared carrying a laden tray. He set it on the coffee table: the remains of the fig tart, a carafe and espresso cups, a cigar box made of polished ebony. Rochester reached for the tart, excavated a fig, and popped it into his mouth. “Good.” “There’s a drop of Chambord in the crust,” Otis said. “Jane’s already had two slices.” I shot him a death ray. Rochester flipped the cigar box open. “Only one of the Churchills left?” “It’s lucky there’s any. Those Russian guys you had here? They were sucking them down like candy.” “Why didn’t you stop them?” “Um . . . ’cause they had names like Vladimir and Sergey and were maybe packing guns?” Rochester let out a laugh of pure delight. It had a remarkable effect on his face, softening the crag of his features and accentuating the intelligence of his eyes. I could suddenly see why a beautiful woman might fall in love with him. Otis began piling the finished plates onto the tray. “Anything else you need?” “No, we’re good.” Otis glanced quickly at me, then hoisted the tray and walked briskly out. Rochester poured two cups of espresso, pushed one across the table to me, then selected a richly colored cigar from the box. Rolled off the red-and-gold band and clipped the end. “Ever try a Cuban cigar?” “Me? I’ve never smoked. At least not tobacco. Except a few Salem Lights at parties.” “Want to try one of these?” A mocking dare in his eyes. “Sure. Why not?” I took the cigar he extended and placed it between my teeth. It felt huge. Phallic. No Salem Light. He slid a lighter—a vintage gold Dunhill—across the table. I clicked it and held the flame to the end of the cigar and drew in a strong puff. My mouth filled with what tasted like scorched dirt. I began to automatically inhale, and harsh smoke bit my throat, causing me to choke. I willed myself, Do not inhale. Do not swallow. My eyes wept with the effort not to cough. And then, miraculously, the urge receded, and in its place, a heady little buzz—though from tobacco or triumph, I couldn’t tell. I blew out the smoke. Rochester granted me a look of amused respect. Made that “gimme” finger motion again. I relinquished the cigar to him. He took a drag. Then he clicked off the music with a remote. The thundering surf became prominent. “What’s wrong with my daughter?” he asked. I glanced at him cautiously. “I stopped by her room when I came in. She looked like she’d just come off a five-day bender. You drove her home from her tennis lesson, so I’m asking: What’s wrong with her?” “That’s something you need to talk to her about.” “I did, obviously. She said she had the stomach flu. Bullshit. She’s got the constitution of a young horse.” He scowled. “She’s a mess. She dresses like a Tijuana hooker and has a mouth to match. That school she’s at is costing me a fortune, and she’s barely hanging on there. Christ! She’s just turned thirteen. I know she drinks. Fairfax tries to hide it from me, but I’m not an idiot.” I chose my words carefully. “She’s a very young girl who recently lost her mother. It’s hardly surprising she’s acting out.” “Is that what you call it? Acting out?” “I can’t really call it anything. I’ve spent less than an hour with her.” “You must have formed some opinion.” “None that I’d feel right about sharing.” “Look,” he said. “I didn’t expect to have her here right now. It’s a difficult time for me, and I can’t deal with some kid acting out.” “That kid,” I said, barely controlling my voice, “is your daughter.” “What do I know about being a parent? I didn’t even know she existed until a year ago.” I stared at him with unconcealed disgust. “Okay,” he conceded. “That was a shit thing to say. Don’t get me wrong. I want to do right by her. But I’m in a critical position right now. I’ve had to downsize my office and staff, and I’ll be spending a lot more time here. And, frankly, if I’d known I was going to be around so much, you would not have come.” I shot to my feet. “If you give me a day, I’ll make arrangements to go somewhere else.” “Oh, for Chrissake! Sit down.” “I won’t stay in a place where I’m not wanted.” He made a sound of deep exasperation. “Fairfax was right—Sophia needs tutoring, but more important, she needs someone to relate to. I asked her what she thought of you. She said you were okay.” I couldn’t help a laugh. “That’s extravagant praise coming from a thirteen-year-old.” He allowed a smile. “Just stay out of my hair, okay? And keep out of the grounds beyond the compound. It’s too wild. I can’t be responsible. That goes for the beach as well. Is that clear?” “Stay out of your hair, and don’t wander into the woods. I think I’ve got it.” “I can’t allow visitors. And no posting about me or Sophia or any of us here. One photo on Instagram and you leave.” “I had no intention of doing that.” “Then we understand each other. Good.” He stood up, and I did as well. He extended his hand. “Welcome to Thorn Bluffs, Jane.” He knew my name. I’d have bet good money he didn’t. I took the hand he offered, and it closed firmly around mine. His was so much larger, the palm warm and dry. Something shivered in me, almost like an electrical sensation. A cell phone burred, and he released my hand. “Good night,” he said and turned to take the call. I left the room and went back to the kitchen. Otis hastily set down his joint. “How did it go?” “Why the hell did you tell him we grew up together?” I said. “Oh. Crap. I didn’t think it would come up.” “It did. It was bound to sooner or later. God, Otis! What were you possibly thinking?” “I guess maybe that it would make him feel better about getting you here. You know, like, if I knew you all my life. And then once you were here, I figured he’d hardly even notice you. But it’s okay, right? He didn’t kick you out or anything.” “Not yet. I won’t be surprised if he does. And I don’t think I should wait until he does. I think I should try to hunt up another place to go for the summer.” “No, I’ll make it okay,” he said frantically. “I’ll tell him it’s all my fault. You won’t have to leave, I promise.” “I’m sorry, Otis, but I can’t believe a single word you say anymore.” And before I softened, which I knew I would at his stricken expression, I stormed out of the house. In the cottage, I mentally replayed my interview in the Great Room with agitation. Strange man. Arrogant, rude. A tinderbox temper. That he was capable of violence, I had little doubt. Of murder? Possibly. Or at least driving his wife to the desperate measure of suicide. Her absence sure hadn’t affected his appetite. I thought of that spark I’d felt, that electric whatever, when Evan Rochester’s hand had closed around mine. What the hell was that? And then I began to feel jittery. More than just jittery: it was like my body was trying to burst out of my skin. And then something even stranger began to happen—though not entirely strange for me. My eyes began to haze, and a tiny yellow star exploded in one eye, followed by other larger stars in both eyes, and then bands of neon-orange zigzags began streaming across my vision. A migraine. Technically, not a real one. No excruciating headache. This was called a visual migraine. But still weird—hallucinatory and almost excruciatingly disorienting. The bursting stars in my eyes. The zigzagging patterns. Mom used to get them too. She called them texts from an alien planet. The aliens now seemed to be texting me a particularly urgent message: Idiot. You. Idiot. Didn’t you learn anything with Jeremy? I flopped down on the bed and squeezed my eyes shut, but the zigs and zags and supernovas still played against my closed lids. I began to hallucinate an image of Jeremy Capshaw. The man I’d been in love with. Crazy, dizzy in love. I could see him vividly: an artist, poetically thin in paint-stained jeans, at work on one of his soot-colored canvases I thought revealed something dark and thrilling in his soul. Another star exploded, and now it was Holly Bergen’s face that I imagined. Holly, my best friend. Hauntingly beautiful, thick mahogany hair, a lithe dancer’s body. Kind to everyone and all animals. I pictured us sharing that slummy Williamsburg apartment. The elevator, like a bad dog, rarely coming when it was called. Cockroaches so brazen they should have been on the lease. The freezing Valentine’s Day when the ancient boiler had finally given up the ghost. I saw the two of us huddled in coats in front of the stove. Holly reading my palm. Oh my God, babe! You’ve got the longest heart line ever. It means you’re going to find love everlasting. I could hear her bright looping laugh as she showed me her own palm. Not like me. My heart line’s just this skimpy little nothing. The scenes fast-forwarded. I was living with Jeremy now in his Bushwick loft. Lying on the futon on the floor after a long bout of lovemaking. My phone was ringing. A stranger’s voice, an admitting nurse at New Mercy Hospital in Lowood. My frantic dash to the hospital. The overworked young surgeon with black bags under her eyes. The x-rays had shown a huge mass lurking, like the deadly spider it was, on a lobe of my mother’s right lung. Mom lifting terrified eyes to me. I want to go home, sweetheart. And promise never to make me come back here. Never. I promise, Mom. The migraine was now reaching a peak. The zigging bands cascading, one after another. I pressed my fists against my eyelids, but the bands kept coming, and they brought more scenes from the past. I was now spending all my weekends in New Jersey tending to Mom. Jeremy so understanding and me loving him the more for it. And then the mild weekend in March when Mom had rallied a bit and I had caught a crack-of-dawn Sunday train into New York. I would slip back into the loft and surprise him before he was awake. The aliens were texting: Idiot. You. Idiot. And now I was unlocking the door to our loft. Confused by the sight of two people in the kitchen. One naked except for boxer shorts. The other in the purple-and-gold kimono I’d brought back from Kyoto. The boxer shorts pressing against the kimono’s back, hands inside the kimono’s open lapels. The kimono writhing like a lizard. And then a sudden scrambling of limbs. Holly running after me. We didn’t mean it to happen, babe. We didn’t want to tell you until, you know, your mom . . . Until what? I hissed. She dropped dead? The sting of my hand slapping her face. Her startled cry of pain. And the sound of a laugh. Jeremy laughing. The migraine was diminishing now. The bursting lights began dimming, then blinked out. The streaming bands of zigzags—those messages from Mars—were fading away. I sat up. I still felt jittery and unsettled. I’d suppressed thinking about this for almost a year. Somehow the encounter with Evan Rochester had stirred it all back up. Poor little orphan girl. I’d never told Mom what had happened with Jeremy, but my broken heart must have oozed something poisonous, because she sank rapidly after that. By June, she had withered beyond recognition. Her skin was the color of an old candle stub, the flesh almost completely melted away. Her nose, once so cute and snubby, became a tiny sharp bone, like a parakeet’s beak. One day at the end of September, I held a glass of tepid water to her lips and guided the straw. She took a sip. “Joanne,” she had murmured. “It’s not Joanne, Mom,” I said. “It’s me, Jane.” She shook her head. “A letter came. Once. For Jane.” “A letter? From Aunt Jo, you mean?” “Her handwriting. Her r’s always looked like s’s.” “What did it say?” “I didn’t open it. Ripped it up. Threw the pieces down the toilet.” “Why, Mom?” Another shake of her head. She drifted off to sleep. By evening, her breathing became harsh, each breath further and further apart. I held her wasted hand in mine. Squeezed it tight. I imagined I felt the ghost of a pressure back. “Please don’t leave me, Mom,” I begged her. “Please, don’t go away.” She had let out a single gentle breath, like a sleeping baby’s sigh. And then I had been left all alone in the world. My jitters finally subsided. I gave myself a mental shake. Yes, I had been left an orphan, but I was hardly a child. There was nothing to pity me for. I shouldn’t have betrayed any such feeling to Evan Rochester. He had physical attractions. I had to acknowledge that. He had, after all, married one of the most beautiful women in the world. But he didn’t attract me. That shock of whatever when he took my hand—I was just starved for physical contact. I thought again about the complete absence of Beatrice Rochester in the Great Room. Or in any other room, except that one—the Ocean Room. Her favorite. A single white chaise. Why has that been kept there? There were secrets on this estate; I was certain of it. Secrets in that room. And maybe I could uncover some of them. Find out what had actually happened to Beatrice the day she disappeared, all dressed up for their fourth anniversary. An audacious idea. But it gave me a thrill to imagine it. I was exhausted. I went to get my nightshirt from the hook on the closet door. It wasn’t there. And yet I definitely remembered hanging it on the hook that morning. I glanced reflexively at the glass doors. Something flickered. Moonbeams, branches. Only that. Nothing more. BEATRICE Thorn Bluffs, December 17 Late morning A voice floats into my head. “Beatrice, your masseuse is here. She’s setting up in the Ocean Room.” This voice is not in my head. It’s on the intercom. It’s the boy with the golden spectacles. You don’t have any time, Mary whispers. You need to get the blade. To get the blood. The plan. “Shut up, shut up!” I want a massage. I’m shaky and jumpy and afraid to do the plan. “Something is the matter, Mrs. Beatrice?” Annunciata is here, come to take me to the Ocean Room. Did she hack my thoughts, or did I say the words out loud? I can’t think. The fog is too thick in my mind. But now I find new words. “Nothing is the matter,” I say to Annunciata. “I’m ready for you.” She walks with me down all the stairs to the room with the sparkling light. The masseuse is there with her little table folded out. She has hair the color of rust and a chin with square corners. “Good morning, Mrs. Rochester. My name is Brenda. How are you today?” The light from the big windows sparkles on her like lemon sprinkles. I put my fingers together, pointed upward. Praying hands. She makes praying hands back to me. Then she fluffs a white towel and holds it up for me to hide behind. I don’t need to hide. I untie my silk robe and let it slip silky to the floor. I walk naked and lie facedown on the massage table. The towel settles over my bottom. Brenda offers a little bottle for me to sniff. “This lotion contains two essential oils. Coriander and bitter orange.” I inhale an edible scent. My mouth feels as dry as stale crackers. “Are you good with this one, Mrs. Rochester?” I find the words to say. “Yes, thank you.” My eyelids fall shut like shutters as cool lotion pools over my shoulders and then down the long dip of my back. Fingers, hands kneading deeply. The towel rises, and I roll over onto my back and the towel descends, covering my nipples and my belly button and my vagina. More lotion, Brenda works my feet, my special long feet. I’m a cat, purring. She is kneading and stroking, springing sensations up from my high arches. I hear a voice outside. The boy with the golden spectacles who cooks for us now. He’s scolding one of the little dogs. He’s out of the kitchen, Beatrice, Mary Magdalene whispers in my mind: Go there now! No. The sensations of the massage are too lovely. Get a frigging move on it, you silly twat! I sit up and brush off the towel, and I swing myself off the table. “That’s all.” “But we’re not finished yet. Don’t you want to finish the session?” Brenda’s voice is wobbly. She’s afraid she won’t be called again. I pick up my robe and slide it on. I can feel the rusty waves of her worry rippling over me. Hurry, Beatrice! I go quick up the stairs. My heart beats fast. I stop just before the kitchen, listening hard, but there is nothing but the patter of a little dog and the sound of the dishwashing machine. I keep on going into the kitchen, and a dog wags up to me. Hermione. The one with the fake leg. My jailer is crafty. He gave her the new leg. He wants everyone to think he’s a very kind man. I move past Hermione and pull at the long drawer that holds the knives. But it won’t open, even when I pull harder. It’s locked up tight. And so are all the drawers and the cabinets, all locked up. Your jailer hides the sharp things now, Mary reminds me. So you can’t defend yourself. I feel a scream rise up. It gurgles in my throat. At the same time, I hear the dishwashing machine gurgle water down the drain. I walk quick to it and pull down the door, and steam blooms hot in my face. There are footsteps coming into the pantry room from outside. Quick, quick, I grab at a silver gleam, a knife, and then I shut the dishwasher door and go to the refrigerator. I open it up. “Hey, Beatrice. Want something to eat?” It’s the boy with the spectacles. Not a very young boy, not beautiful. Thorny, pointed hair, and his eyes are milky blue. “Want me to make you something? No trouble.” I reach for a nectarine. I bite it. It has gone a little soft, and the juice dribbles down my chin. I close the refrigerator door and turn around. The boy’s eyes behind the golden spectacles go all circles. His mouth forms a big pink O. He spins on the balls of his feet and scampers away like a scared puppy. And now here is Braidy Lady. “Se?ora!” she cries out, and her eyes are also wide and staring. My robe is hanging open. Is that it? I don’t care. When I am backstage changing outfits, I am often naked, changing from panties to a thong. Hurry, Beatrice, my dresser hisses. I change from a bustier to braless. I am naked, and so are the other girls, and the boys, too, and nobody cares at all. Annunciata takes the ends of the belt and ties them tight around me. The Jacuzzi, Beatrice, Mary whispers. It makes the blood flow faster. “Please turn on the Jacuzzi,” I say to Annunciata. “Very hot, please.” “I do, Mrs. Beatrice. Come upstairs with me.” I go with her, feeling the sharp point of the knife in my robe pocket prick against my thigh. She doesn’t find it. She doesn’t know it’s there. SIX Madder music and stronger wine. They were the first words that came to me when I woke up the next morning. What Evan Rochester had said when I came into the Great Room. “I called for madder music, stronger wine.” I washed, dressed. Consumed a muffin while standing in the kitchenette and took coffee to my computer. Typed the line in the search box. A poem by a Pre-Raphaelite poet named Ernest Dowson about a man obsessed with his dead lover. He parties hard, trying to forget her, dances and drinks and flings roses with abandon. But when the partying is over and he’s alone in the dead of night, he realizes that in his soul he still belongs only to his dead and gone love, Cynara. I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. Could that be Rochester? Was he still obsessed by the dead and gone Beatrice? Even—or perhaps especially—if he had caused her death? But he kept no sentimental mementos. The net connection remained pretty strong, so I googled Evander Rochester. Thousands of results. The first pages dominated by the events of last December 17. I clicked on an article from the San Francisco Examiner. Rochester’s statement. He’d been dressing to go out to dinner to celebrate their anniversary. Heard his dogs making a commotion and went out to the deck. Saw his wife on the cove about seventy feet below, wearing a sapphire-blue cocktail dress. Watched her begin wading into the dangerous surf. He raced down and dived in after her, but he was too late. He found one of her shoes—a high-heeled sandal—on the beach. All that was left. I pictured it. The famous beauty in a cocktail gown walking purposefully to her death in a cold gray sea. Leaving one shoe, like Cinderella, behind. I continued reading. A gardener on the estate (Hector!) cited as a witness. He had hurried down to the beach but got there only after Mrs. Rochester was gone. A brother, Richard McAdams of Miami, Florida, had released a statement: “My sister was not suicidal. She had a bipolar condition, but it was controlled by medication. Her husband mentally and physically abused her, and I can and will produce evidence that this is true. He killed her for her money, to keep his financial speculations afloat. That will also be proved.” I searched for evidence of the proof in future articles. Either the police had kept it confidential, or the brother hadn’t produced it. There had been extensive land and sea searches for the body, but it was never found. Or anything else to definitely pin the murder on Rochester. Or even offer proof that it was a murder. So maybe Otis was not covering up anything. His cousin was innocent. And could be, in fact, still fixated on his wife. The net failed, then strengthened. I googled Beatrice McAdams. Millions of hits. I clicked on her wiki bio on the first page. Born Beatie June McAdams. Meth head mom. Unknown dad. Got shuttled in and out of various foster homes in the Florida Panhandle. Discovered at fourteen by a photographer at a middle school swim meet. (A swimmer. Interesting.) Modeled locally for a couple of years, then signed with Elite, changing her name to the more uppity-class “Beatrice.” With her older brother, Richard, as guardian, moved to Manhattan and launched a hugely successful career. Over the next ten years, on and off the list of most highly paid models in the world (three times on the cover of Sports Illustrated, tying with Christie Brinkley but two fewer than Elle Macpherson). I skipped down to the description of her increasingly erratic behavior. Kicked off a Virgin flight for spitting on an attendant. Chucked a bread plate at a waiter in a South Beach restaurant (eight stitches, lawsuit, settlement). Deliberately tripped another model, a young Russian girl, on a runway (chipped tooth, broken nose, lawsuit, settlement). Dropped by Elite, dropped by two lesser agencies. Then dropped out of the scene. I pulled up a YouTube video—Beatrice on the Today Show, giving Hoda tips on applying mascara. Her voice a half pitch higher than I’d imagined, a backwater twang sometimes sneaking in. Another YouTube video: Beatrice on a catwalk early in her career. Her distinctive walk—the Beatrice McAdams cheetah walk, it was called. Slightly predatory, always ready to pounce. And, yes, she was exquisite—but there was already something a touch deranged about her. That walk. The forward jut of her head. A too-bright gleam in her eyes. I felt it was just this bit of crazy that gave her an edge over dozens of other gorgeous girls. It was impossible to take your eyes off her. A knock at my door. “It’s me,” called Sophia. I got up and opened the door. She stood slouched, her tennis duffle slung over her shoulder. Her face, pale beneath her tan, was scrubbed of the bruised-looking makeup. Her hair, freshly washed and not quite dry, looked like poured maple syrup. She could almost have been a different girl. “Did you tell my dad?” she said. “No, I told you I wouldn’t. But he guessed anyway from the way you looked.” “So was he mad?” I measured my words. “More like concerned. You can’t blame him, can you?” “Is he gonna send me away? I mean, like, right away?” “No. Why would you think he would?” She shrugged, joggling the duffle. “He doesn’t want me here. He tried to pay St. Mag’s to keep me there. My school, St. Margaret? But it shuts down in summer, so they couldn’t.” She peered over my shoulder. “Can I come in?” I opened the door wider, and she loped into the room. Long limbed, athletic, like her father. Her eyes shot to the wildflowers she had picked, drooping now over the rim of the glass. “I knew they’d die,” she said. “They were still fresh when I got here. That’s what counted.” She glanced around the room. “Don’t you get scared all by yourself down here?” “I did a little the first night. But in the morning it seemed ridiculous. I’m not really that far from the house.” “I’d be scared.” She plunked herself down on the unmade bed. I straddled my one chair. “I’m looking forward to our sessions,” I said. “What level French are you at?” “Second year. But I suck at it. Earth science is easy—I only got an incomplete because I didn’t take the final. Algebra, I just never studied, so that’s the only reason I flunked it.” “Algebra? Am I doing that with you as well?” “Yeah, it’s one of the makeup classes I’m taking.” Otis had found it convenient not to mention that. I’d have to brush up on it quickly. “I’m pretty fluent in French,” I said. “I spent sophomore year of college at the University of Lyons, with a family there.” “So can you tell me how to say the word skank?” “Skank? Like, as in skanky?’” “Yeah. There’s this girl at the tennis clinic—she’s always making remarks about my dad and Beatrice. She doesn’t care if it’s true or not. And she pretends she’s expert in French. So I want to call her a skank in French and see if she gets it.” “Okay, well . . . putain is a good word for it. Or you could say salope, but that really means ‘bitch.’ You could use them both. Putain de salope.” She tested the words. “Putain de salope. Okay, thanks.” She placed her palms behind her, rocked back on them. “So what was your TV show about?” “You can watch it on Netflix. It was kind of Gothic, if you like that.” “We had to read Wuthering Heights last year in English. That’s a Gothic romance novel, isn’t it?” “The greatest, in my opinion. Did you like it?” “Kind of. I skipped a lot because the writing was archaic.” She shot me a glance to see if I knew the word. I remained deadpan. “Plus it was kind of gross in some parts. Like when the guy, what’s his name . . . ?” “Heathcliff?” “Yeah. Like when he digs up Cathy’s coffin so he can look at her after she’s been dead for years? And then he breaks off part of her coffin, so that when he gets buried next to her, they can rot together. Gross, right?” “I guess I’d call it horrific. But it’s not the part most people remember. They respond to the great passion between Cathy and Heathcliff. How his love for her obsessed him even long after her death.” “Yeah, but . . . like, rotting? Wouldn’t he be better to want their spirits to mix together instead of their guts?” I grinned. “Okay, you’re right. The rotting thing is gross.” She returned a small smile. “Can I ask you something?” “Sure. Anything.” “Do you think my dad killed Beatrice?” I glanced at her quickly. “It’s what everybody says, right?” “I don’t know. I’m new around here.” “Yeah, but it was all over the net and everything.” She chewed her upper lip. “I don’t think he did it. I think he’s still madly in love with her and waiting for her to come back.” Like the lost and gone Cynara. I said, “What makes you think so?” “He keeps all her things exactly the way they always were. Like, in her bedroom and her closets.” I couldn’t help asking, “Beatrice had her own bedroom?” “Yeah. All her clothes are still there. She used to have this girl named Kendra who brought her stuff to try on? But she’d scream at her, calling her a bitch and the c word because she said Kendra was bringing her fat sizes. So Kendra quit. And Beatrice started driving up to Silicon Valley, the fancy malls up there? She’d come back with all this designer stuff in teeny-tiny sizes. I can’t wear it. Maybe you could.” The idea sent a chill through me. “I doubt it. She was a lot taller than me.” “She was five feet ten. An inch more than me. But she bought, like, size minus two. And now it all just sits there with the price tags still on. Plus all her jewelry too. I borrowed these.” Sophia flipped a thick lock of hair behind one ear to reveal a dazzling diamond hoop. “Oh my God, Sophia! Are you allowed to take them?” “Nobody said I can’t. And she didn’t want them. There was this one night when I was first here? She was up on the deck outside her room and throwing all her jewelry off of it. Until my dad made her stop, and then Hector climbed down the cliffs and got some of it back. But there’s still some left out there.” I pictured emeralds, rubies, diamonds glimmering like dewdrops amid the gray-green vines. “You need to put those earrings back. And you should ask your father before taking anything.” “I always put it back. And he’s okay with it.” I wondered what else she might have borrowed. I flashed on my vanished nightshirt. “Sophia . . . by any chance, did you come by here last night? Wanting to talk or something?” “No. Why? Did Otis say that?” “No. I just had a feeling somebody had been here.” “Maybe it was me sleepwalking. My mom used to sometimes. She took pills before she went to Africa so she wouldn’t get malaria, and they made her sleepwalk.” “She sounds like an amazing person. What was her name?” “Bethany. It’s my middle name too.” “Pretty name. Do you have photos of her?” She pulled out her phone. Scrolled rapidly. Handed it to me. A video of a woman not much older than me. Lovely round face, red hair a shade darker than Sophia’s. She’d probably have preferred to be ten pounds slimmer. She was on a lakefront beach, wearing a polka dot one-piece, and she was trying to hide her thighs, crossing her arms over them, and she was shrieking but laughing, too, in that way all moms do: “You rat, stop! You promised—put that thing away! I’ll get you for this!” and off camera Sophia was giggling helplessly. I felt my heart break in two. An elephant trumpeted. Her text tone. She snatched the phone back. “Otis. He’s in the car. He gets perturbed if I’m even, like, two seconds late.” “Okay, go. I’ll pick you up later.” “You don’t have to. I’m going over to my friend Peyton’s house for dinner, and then her brother’s going to drive me home.” “What about our lesson?” “Oh crap, yeah. I forgot. Tomorrow.” She started to leave. “Wait,” I said emphatically. “After today, no more skipping sessions. No excuses. I mean it, Sophia.” “Okay, I won’t,” she said and shuffled out the door. My text began pinging. Three emoji texts from Otis. Begging forgiveness for lying to Evan. Weepy cat emoji. Speak-no-evil monkey emoji. Assortment of weepy cat, wailing baby, eye-rubbing teddy bear, hangman’s noose, and (bribe offer?) chocolate chip cookie emojis. I texted back: Ok forgive u. Don’t pull anything like that again. Won’t. Swear to god. He texted again. Don’t forget about dogs. Crazy busy now but come later and will show u feeding and shit. Ok. I returned to my computer. Closed the window on Beatrice’s bio. Looked up a local mobile groomer—Pampered Pooch—and scheduled them to come here at the end of the week. I researched a good vet on Yelp and made a series of appointments for all five dogs, beginning with the wheezing bulldog. Then I began to prepare for tutoring. I ordered Algebra for Dummies and Let’s Review Earth Science from Amazon and downloaded a thirty-minute lesson (twenty minutes to download with iffy Wi-Fi), “Beginner Algebra.” A woman fluting equations in a reedy voice. I took copious notes. Then I browsed new Wi-Fi routers and ordered an inexpensive plug-in, which might at least give a little boost to my connection. I lunched on the remains of my breakfast provisions. Jet lag began to creep up. Yoga, I thought. I googled yoga Carmel-by-the-Sea. Impressive variety. Every type from Bikram to something called aura healing. Much as my aura could have used a good tweaking, I decided on a Vinyasa class at three fifteen, walk-ins welcome. I wriggled into yoga clothes, stuffed a towel into my tote. Texted Otis I’d be right up to talk about the dogs. I headed up to the house. All morning, I’d caught sounds of activity from the compound, and now the motor court was jam-packed. A FedEx truck was backing out. A green van disgorged men and women wearing orange shirts and bearing cardboard boxes. I passed a flatbed truck with the Harley Davidson mounted on it and nodded to a hairy guy securing it with chains. Otis came out the side door, looking even more harried than usual. His Daft Punk T-shirt was wrinkled, and his gold-framed glasses sat askew. “What’s going on?” I said. “Ev’s setting up his new HQ in the guesthouse. I’m manning the front gates. God forbid anybody gets in who’s not supposed to.” He led me inside to an enormous pantry, gave me a quick rundown on dog foods, then showed me their various water and food bowls in the connecting service porch. A tall vase with several dozen tightly furled white tulips encased in green cellophane sat by the door. “Nice flowers,” I said. “Yeah, for Ev. Somebody spent a bundle. They should go to the office, but I can’t leave here.” He eyed me hopefully. “I’ll take them. I’m just heading out to a Vinyasa yoga class in Carmel. Where’s the office?” “The path going behind the garage. Follow the delivery guys.” He picked up the vase and thrust it into my arms. “Huge help, thanks.” I balanced the heavy cylinder in my arms, cellophane tickling my nose, and went back to the motor court. I followed one of the orange shirts down a gravel path to a small house that echoed the glass-and-stone architecture of the main house. Inside, more frenetic activity. Walls being knocked down to create one open space. Orange shirts everywhere, uncoiling thick snakes of cable, setting up various devices. The reek of fresh paint. Bam! went a hammer. A drill snarled. Somebody fiddled with music like some manic Spotify station switcher. I looked quickly around. He wasn’t there. Am I relieved or disappointed? Relieved, of course. I had promised to keep out of his hair, and here I was already invading his office. I headed to a relatively uncluttered desk, stepping over cables as adroitly as if I were back on the Carlotta Dark set, and put the vase between a power drill and an open carton of soba noodles. “You. Jane!” The voice came from on high. I looked up with a start. He was balanced on the top rung of a ladder, fiddling with a track of LED lights. “Stay there.” My heart sank. I watched him climb down the ladder, still favoring his injured ankle. He’d trimmed the wild-man-of-the-mountain beard, and his black curls now cleared the frayed collar of a white Oxford shirt. It made him look ten years younger. He unhooked a Bluetooth from behind his ear. Glanced at the vase. “Did you bring this?” “Yes,” I said. “But it’s not from me. It was delivered to the house.” He plucked a square white envelope attached to the cellophane. Slid out the card. A smile briefly played on his lips. He tossed the card on the desk. I caught a glimpse: a single elegantly looped initial, handwritten in green ink. The letter L. “So what do you think?” he said. I glanced quickly up. “About what?” He waved a hand. “All this. Will it do me for an office?” “I suppose so. How many people will be working here?” “None. My people will stay up in Los Gatos.” “So . . . just you?” “Just me.” That stare. I’d forgotten how unnerving it was. I would not be unnerved. I met his stare. “Your business is investing in start-ups, right? Apps and things?” “And things.” “Anything particularly interesting right now?” “I think so.” “An app? Or . . . another thing?” A quick smile. “A very other thing. A biotech start-up. A company called Genovation Technologies. We’re developing biobased software for the application of producing clean industrial technologies.” “In English, please?” His smile broadened. “It’s a kind of green technology. To make simple plants like algae produce chemicals to replace those made by more toxic processes. For example, certain chemicals in perfumes and cosmetics.” “So I’ll be dabbing algae behind my ears?” “Not quite. It’s on a molecular level. You wouldn’t know the difference. But perfume would be just the start. There are hundreds of potential applications. Paint. Clean fuel for cars, planes. There’s no limit, actually.” His face became increasingly animated. “It will be great for the environment. For the planet. It could be a real game changer.” The way he spoke, with such passion: I felt another shock of that electric spark, and I turned my eyes away. “It sounds like a pretty good business.” “I’m betting on it,” he said. “If it isn’t, this all goes up in smoke.” “This office?” “A lot more than that. Practically everything I’ve got.” But it was clear he did not expect to lose the bet. He was that sure of himself. Mariah Carey’s helium-high notes suddenly pierced the air. “How’s the treble, Mr. R.?” a male voice yelled. Mr. R. shot a thumbs-up, and the volume lowered. And suddenly, as if having materialized out of thin air, a man was hovering near us. A small man with a weathered face beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat. The famous Hector. Annunciata’s husband. The one who had also gone down to the cove the afternoon Beatrice purportedly walked into the water. But had gotten there too late to witness what had actually happened. Evan began speaking to him—that underwater-sounding language I’d heard on the property the day before. My name swam by. Hector glanced at me with neither hostility nor friendliness. More like indifference: you may be here, or you may not be—it’s all the same to me. He concluded whatever mysterious business he’d had with his employer. And vanished as instantaneously as he’d appeared. “What language was that you were speaking?” I asked Evan. “Miskito. With a lot of Spanglish thrown in, mostly for my benefit.” “Is that the writing on your tattoo?” His eyes narrowed. “What?” “The tattoo on your arm.” He glanced at his forearm with a frown. “No. This is nothing. Gibberish.” He picked up his Bluetooth. “Wait, one other thing,” I said. “I’ve been driving the Audi. I had a rental car, but . . . well, it got returned to Alamo by mistake. I’ll lease another car right away.” “Something wrong with the Audi?” “God, no. It’s a sensational car. It’s just that . . . well, I didn’t know it belonged to your wife.” “It’s leased under my name. You’re not grave robbing, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I flushed angrily. “It needs to be driven. If nothing else to keep rats from making nests in the engine. Drive the damned thing.” He rehooked the Bluetooth behind his ear and made his way back to the ladder. I turned and marched to the door, torn between anger and confusion. There seemed something so cold about the way he’d spoken about the Audi. It was just a car, okay, but wouldn’t a grieving spouse feel a little sentimental about it? And talking so flippantly about grave robbing . . . He wasn’t longing for his wife to come back, like the lost Cynara. He had already shrugged her off. Except Sophia said he kept all her clothes and jewelry intact in her room. She thought he was still madly in love with her and was hoping—maybe even expecting—her to come back. It was a puzzle. An intriguing as much as an infuriating one. And I felt more determined than ever to find out what I could about what had really happened last December. I got into the Audi, carefully closing the door, as if slamming it would desecrate Beatrice’s memory. I started the engine—protecting it from rats’ nests. As I backed out, I nearly clipped an old brown pickup truck parked haphazardly behind me, and I braked hard, causing something to roll out from under the front seat. A lipstick in a gold tube. I uncapped it. A pale and shimmering shade of lavender. One that would perfectly complement a beautiful woman with green eyes and silver-blonde hair. With a shiver, I tossed it into the glove compartment. L is for lipstick, I thought. So who was the L who’d spent a bundle on a vase of still tightly furled tulips? It was a letter I decided I didn’t like at all. The Audi was sensational. I raced ten, fifteen miles per hour above the speed limit, passing slower cars with a whisper of a tap on the gas pedal. The landmarks on Highway 1 were already beginning to seem familiar. Mama and baby wild-pig crossing. Farm stand advertising a yucky combo: GARLIC CHERRIES LIVE BAIT. The Esalen Institute where you steeped in hot tubs naked with strangers. I sang along with Adele on the radio, belting out the lyrics. As I crossed the vertiginous span of the Bixby Creek Bridge, a vehicle driving in the opposite direction pulled a U-turn and elbowed into my lane several cars behind. The driver was either drunk or insane. Horns blared. The vehicle began swooping around the cars ahead of it. More furious horns. It swerved in directly behind me. Idiot! I glanced in the rearview mirror. A Range Rover. Metallic blue. I felt a tick of alarm. It came up closer on my tail. I glanced again in the mirror, glimpsed light-blonde hair, large dark glasses. I increased my speed to the exit to Carmel-by-the-Sea and merged onto Rio Road. The Range Rover turned as well and surged fast up behind me, almost ramming my bumper. “Crazy bitch!” I muttered. She stayed close on my tail as I continued on Rio Road. The Carmel Mission appeared on the left, and I veered hard onto the bordering road. I heard a thud and a scrape of metal behind me. I looked back: the Range Rover had clipped a concrete parking curb and jolted to a stop. Good! I circumnavigated the Mission to Dolores Street and sped toward the center of town. But after several blocks, I pulled over. I shouldn’t be running away. The crazy thought flashed in my mind again: Beatrice. And maybe she hadn’t meant harm to me but was frantic to impart some vital information. Or to implore me to save her from harm. Ridiculous. Still, I argued to myself, I should find out for certain. I turned around and drove back to the Mission. The Range Rover was gone. And so was my chance to confront the driver. My GPS was still calmly recalculating the best route to the Prana Yoga Studio. I followed its instructions to a neighborhood on the west side of Carmel, a yellow-shingled bungalow on a mostly residential street. I pulled into the packed-dirt parking area in front. The Range Rover cruised up to the curb across the street. I drew a breath. Waited a moment to see what would happen. Nothing. It simply sat there, engine idling. What does she want? I tentatively opened my door. Then, more resolutely, I got out and began to stride across the street. The driver’s door of the Range Rover cracked open. A tall, slender figure with pale-blonde hair climbed out. My pulse pounded. But it wasn’t Beatrice McAdams Rochester. It wasn’t even a woman. SEVEN “Why are you driving my sister’s car?” The blond man came closer to me, his fists slightly clenched, body spring-loaded. “You’re her brother!” I exclaimed. The resemblance to Beatrice Rochester was startling. Same luxuriant silver-blond hair (his slightly receding in dagger shapes at the temples). Same perfect bone structure and willowy build. Like Beatrice, his skin was pale, almost translucent, his lips delicately etched. “I’m Richard McAdams,” he declared. “Answer my question. Who are you, and where did you get my sister’s car?” I was truly getting tired of uncivil men. “It was lent to me,” I said coldly. “Who lent it to you? Evan Rochester?” “As a matter of fact, yes.” “Why?” “Because I’m staying at Thorn Bluffs and I needed a car.” “Are you sleeping with him?” I flushed with deep anger. “What?” “You heard me. I want to know if you’re sleeping with my sister’s husband. It’s a straightforward question. Yes or no?” “It’s none of your business.” “My sister was murdered at Thorn Bluffs. Everything that goes on there is my business.” The bluntness of his statement gave me a moment’s pause. “That has nothing to do with me. And I don’t know for sure that she was murdered.” He took a belligerent step closer. “My sister was bipolar, but her meds kept her stable. It was not a fucking suicide.” He slid his dark glasses to the top of his head. His eyes were a more amber-tinged facsimile of his sister’s. “What’s your name?” “Again, none of your business. And you could have got us both killed. You were driving like a maniac. You followed me once before, and if you ever do it again, I’ll call the police.” His lips compressed so firmly they lost color. Then his eyes darted behind me, and his expression made a lightning change from menacing to benign. “Namaste, ladies,” he called out. I turned. Two women of late middle age, both toting rolled yoga mats, were heading into the studio. “Namaste,” one called back pleasantly. And now, with visible calculation, Richard McAdams tried another tack with me: his eyes softened; his mouth assumed a boyish smirk. “Look, I can see your point. My fault for overreacting. It was seeing her car yesterday at the club, another woman driving it. It was a tremendous shock to me. And I was actually just on my way to Thorn Bluffs when I saw you go by, and it was just as much a shock as yesterday.” His eyes flicked briefly back across the street, this time to the Audi. “The car is one of a kind, you know. The paint was customized for Beatrice when she bought it. Sapphire blue, her favorite color.” “I thought it was leased,” I said. “No, bought and paid for by my sister. And again, I’m sorry if I got reckless. I lost my head.” He was oozing with contrite charm now. “I don’t blame you one bit for being angry. Some maniac chasing you all over town, right? Tell you what. Why don’t we start all over again?” He removed a leather card holder from inside his jacket and, with an almost sleight-of-hand motion, slipped out a card. “I’m Rick McAdams. How do you do?” I glanced at the card: RICHARD MCADAMS ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. A mobile number. A Miami address. “What kind of law do you do?” “Trusts and estates. Wills and the like.” “In Miami?” “No, I’ve moved here. I’m not actually practicing at the moment.” He waved off my attempt to return the card. “Please, keep it. And you are . . . ?” “Jane,” I said simply. “Great to meet you, Jane. And again, let me apologize. My sister and I were extremely close, and her loss still seems very recent to me. The idea of another woman already taking her place . . .” A forlorn shake of his shoulders. “I haven’t taken her place,” I conceded. “I’m not with Evan Rochester. I’m a friend of Otis Fairfax, who works for him. Otis arranged for me to use a cottage there for the summer.” “Oh, Otis. Sweet guy. So you’re on vacation in Big Sur? Lovely.” “Not exactly a vacation.” He gave me a questioning look. I ignored it. “Listen, Jane, why don’t you let me buy you a drink? To make amends. I know a place near here that makes the best mojito in town. Tinker’s, I’ll give you the cross streets.” His charm had become effusive. “Did you know that in the town of Carmel proper there are no street numbers? We just use cross streets. It keeps us quaint.” He was used to women melting in his presence. And he was astonishingly handsome, a slender build enhanced by expensive clothes—well-cut seersucker jacket, white linen pants. But despite his beauty, there was something repulsive about him. Slithering. Like some bottom-feeding creature on the ocean floor. “It’s a little early for drinking,” I said. “And I have a yoga class. I’m going to be late.” “Then after. I’ll wait. We really need to talk, Jane. If you’re staying at Thorn Bluffs, there are things you need to know.” He lowered his tone. “Evan Rochester is a monster. He abused my sister. He beat her. He threatened her life, and then he took it. I’ll explain it to you.” I hesitated. His tone intensified. “So what do you say? After yoga?” I was suddenly no longer in a frame of mind for Vinyasa. I didn’t trust him, but I was intensely curious to hear what he had to say. “Okay, let’s go now. I’ll follow you.” He led me about a mile to a restaurant in a small clapboard house tucked down a cobblestone alley. I circled several blocks to find a parking space. By the time I got to the restaurant, he was already at a table for two. He waved energetically with both hands over his head, as if I needed to locate him through a dense crowd, though the dining room was almost empty. “Mojitos coming up,” he said. “I took the liberty of ordering. Hard to find a parking spot? Tourist season. I hate it like poison.” A young waitress set frosty glasses in front of us. Rick’s amber eyes twinkled up at her. “Thanks, love.” She simpered a little in the bright beam of his charm. He directed himself back to me. At this close distance, he looked less handsome. More shopworn. Like an overused marionette, head jerking slightly this way and that, as if pulled by invisible strings. “So what are these things I need to know?” I said. He plucked both mint sprig and lime slice from the rim of his glass. Took a deliberately long sip. Keeping me in suspense. “You should know who you’re dealing with, Jane,” he said. “For your own protection, if nothing else.” “You think I’m in some kind of danger?” “Maybe yes, maybe no. But I can tell you that Evan Rochester is a sociopath. He’s got absolutely no conscience. No regard for the feelings or needs of others. He can be charming if it suits him. But he’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants. And if it destroys somebody . . . he’ll feel no remorse.” Rick’s face now loomed a little closer to mine. “My sister lived in terror of that man, Jane. He threw her down a steep flight of stairs. I saw the bruises, Jane. Her broken ribs. Her beat-up face.” I shuddered. “Did you know, Jane, that he had her locked up in a mental institution?” “I know she’d been hospitalized. It’s no secret. You said yourself she was bipolar.” “Yes, but even after she was stabilized on meds, he kept her shut up in that place. God knows how long she’d have been there if I hadn’t made some calls to get her out. Of course, now I regret doing it. I can’t help thinking maybe . . .” His voice broke. “Maybe if I hadn’t, she might still be alive.” His eyes misted, turning them a shade more like his sister’s. “When she came back, that monster kept her locked up. Drugged and isolated. Even from me. Like she was his prisoner. Shut off from the world.” I looked at him dubiously. “There were quite a few people working at Thorn Bluffs back then.” “All under his strict control. That couple, the Sandovals? They acted as her keepers.” His head jerked one way, then the other. “She was terrified he was going to kill her, and finally he did.” “Why haven’t you told this to the police?” “I have, of course. But sociopaths like Rochester can lie more convincingly than most of us can tell the truth. He had easy explanations for everything. She was suicidal. She threw herself down the stairs. She was the one who got violent.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, overcome with emotion. My throat felt suddenly tight. I took a long swallow of the mojito. “So you’re accusing Evan Rochester of being a sociopath wife beater who went too far and finally killed her.” “Oh no, not like that. He’s one cool customer. He planned the whole thing. Staged that first so-called suicide attempt as an alibi, so when he actually did murder her, he’d get away with it.” “And you have proof of that?” “It’s the only explanation that fits. It would guarantee him getting all the money. You see, Beatrice wanted to divorce him. Like I told you, she was terrified of him.” He leaned ever closer, battered puppet’s face looming just inches from mine. “You know about this biotech company he’s invested in?” “A little. He said it would be great for the environment.” “Also great for his wallet. He’s a gambler by nature. He’s won big, but other times he’s lost just as big. This time he’s bet it all. And he’s on the edge of going bust.” His face was now so close I could smell his lime-scented breath. I shrank back. “There was an earthquake about a year ago. It was five point three on the Richter scale. It ran right under this company’s lab. Huge damage. The rollout of their process got pushed back another year. But in the meantime, Rochester had to keep paying on all his costs and loans. He was out of cash, so he borrowed against his assets. Thorn Bluffs. His house in San Francisco. Other properties.” “So?” I said. “They were jointly owned by Beatrice. If she divorced him, he’d have had to buy out her half. The only way he could do that would be to sell off most of his stake in this company. Which he definitely did not want to do.” Rick gave a bitter laugh. “You know how much he stands to make on this deal?” “No idea.” “He’s on the brink of getting enormous new funding. Once it comes through, this company will be valued at about six billion dollars. Rochester will personally pocket several hundred million.” A billion. Hundreds of millions. The numbers bobbled through my mind like parade balloons. “So you tell me,” Rick continued. “Bankrupt versus filthy rich . . . is that worth killing for?” Part of me just wanted to get miles away from this man and the things he was saying. But a greater part of me was eager to know more. “Assuming any of this is true, how do you think he killed her?” “My guess? He drugged her into unconsciousness. Carried her down to the water. Held her under until he was sure no breath was left in her body.” “Or he could be telling the truth. She drowned herself.” A dismissive snort. “My sister was a competitive swimmer. We grew up in Florida, she practically lived in the water. She was like a mermaid. She couldn’t have drowned herself, even if she tried.” His head jerked, puppet on a string. “No, Jane, there’s only one way she could have drowned. If he did it. Though, of course, he might have killed her some other way. And then got rid of her body.” I let my eyes fix on a painting on the wall above his head. A pastel of an upholstered chair, a white blouse flung over one of its arms. As if a woman had meant to come right back for it but never had. “Did you know, Jane . . . ?” Rick’s voice dropped to an insidious murmur. “Are you aware of the fact he’s already begun to get my sister declared legally dead?” I glanced back at him. “Really?” “He filed with the court several weeks ago.” Could that be true? “But you could help me, Jane. Help me get justice for my poor sister.” He was irresistibly seductive now. Or trying to be. “The police still hold him under suspicion. They’re as sure as I am he’s guilty. But the DA will never file charges unless the evidence is airtight. You could help me get something.” I shook my head violently. “No.” He placed a hand on mine. “You’re very pretty, Jane, you know that? You could use that with him. He’s always had an eye for pretty girls.” I slid my hand out from under his. “If you were nice to him . . . he’s got an enormous ego. Under the right circumstances, if you were being extremely nice to him, he couldn’t resist bragging to you.” His murmuring voice was seductive, almost caressing, and it made my skin crawl. I rose to my feet. “I’m sorry for your loss. But there’s nothing I can do for you.” His face suddenly drained of any charm. His lips stretched in a bloodless grin. “You know, Jane, that if you do come across anything relevant, it makes you a material witness. You can and will be subpoenaed. And if you conceal anything, you will be charged with felony obstruction of justice.” “Thanks for the warning. And for the drink.” I began to turn away. “Your friend is already skating on very thin ice,” he said. I stopped. “Just to be clear. I hardly know Evan Rochester.” “I’m not talking about him. I mean your real friend, Otis Fairfax.” I felt a tremor of apprehension. “What has he done?” “He lied to the police. About where he was that night. He could go to jail. I’d hate to see that, Jane. And I’d really hate the same thing happening to you.” Rick raised his glass in a mocking salute. I walked as fast as I could back to the Audi. I popped the glove compartment. I pushed the lipstick tube to the side and searched for the car’s registration. There were two thick manuals and another folded document—the lease agreement from Audi Monterey for an Audi S5. The leaseholder was Evander Edward Rochester. Rick had lied about Beatrice buying it. Evan had told the truth. Obviously, I could not believe everything—or anything—Rick McAdams said. Including the thing about Otis being in jeopardy with the police. That was a bluff. Otis hadn’t even been at Thorn Bluffs yet when Beatrice disappeared. Or was he there? I tried to remember what he’d said: I left that tapas place ages ago. With Otis, “ages” could mean weeks or decades. I called him. Pick up, pick up . . . “Sup?” I heard traffic. He was in his car, the elderly Prius. “It was her brother!” I said. “The person I told you who was following me.” “Huh? Whose brother?” “Beatrice’s. Remember? I told you I thought a blue Range Rover with a woman driving was tailing me? It wasn’t a woman. It was Beatrice’s brother, Richard McAdams.” “Whoa, wait. How did you find out?” “Because he followed me again just now, and I just came from having a drink with him.” “Whoa,” Otis repeated. “Are you in your car? Where are you going?” “Up to SF for the night. But so what’d he say, McAdams?” “He’s positive Evan murdered his sister. He says Evan beat her and then claimed she threw herself down the stairs. And then he locked her up in a mental hospital against her will. To make it look like she was suicidal so he could get away with murdering her.” “It’s crap. That guy will say anything to get Beatrice’s share of the estate. And listen, don’t tell Evan about this. He hates that guy, and it could cause him to do something.” “Like what?” I said. “I don’t even want to imagine. Just don’t tell him.” I paused a moment. “Otis . . . did the police ever question you about any of what happened?” “Me? Uh, yeah. Once. Two detectives, a lady and a man. They asked me what I knew and where I was and that was that.” My heart sank. “I thought you were still living up in Oakland.” “No, I was already at Thorn Bluffs. But not actually there when Beatrice drowned, so they had no right to be up my ass.” “You made me think you’d never met her.” “I never said that. I mean, it was like I didn’t know her. She was almost always upstairs or in the Ocean Room, and Annunciata was in charge of her. Sometimes she’d wander around, but she was always stoned on meds, and Annunciata would get her back to her room.” Rick McAdams’s words: That couple, the Sandovals, acted as her keepers. “So would you say she was mostly kept shut in and cut off from talking to anybody?” “Uh . . . I don’t know. She was bonkers—she wasn’t capable of anything.” “And afterward—after she drowned—when Evan was living up in his San Francisco house, did you stay here without him?” “No. I went up too. Great house. Wish he didn’t have to rent it out.” I sighed. “So is there anything you didn’t tell the detectives? I mean purposely kept back from them?” A tick of hesitation. My heart sank further. “No. I was at this restaurant in SoMa, Alioso, like I told them. But the place was mobbed, so I guess that’s why nobody remembers seeing me there. And, well, maybe I didn’t stay as long as I told them.” Shit, shit, shit. “Are you covering something up?” “I’m not. There was this girl—she had some flat in the Mission—so I went there, but then couldn’t remember her name or exactly where she lived, so I just didn’t say anything about her. I swear to God that’s what happened.” Who were these gods that Otis swore to? Not ones who were sticklers for veracity. “We’ll talk about this when you get back.” “I’ve told you everything.” “Yeah, okay,” I said. But I doubted it. What else wasn’t he telling me? About his part in that day? About Beatrice? BEATRICE Thorn Bluffs, December 17 Late morning I am in the Jacuzzi now. It froths hot at my nipples. Hot to make blood flow faster. For when I use the blade. I take a very deep breath. I fill up my lungs to the very last cell. And then I slip down off the bench and keep sliding down, until my head is underwater. The jets are beating on my body. The sunshine forms crazy patterns through the bubbles, and it makes me remember the sea cave, where my jailer took me. It was on the island of Barbados. Yes. I remember. I had been there on a photo shoot. It was for Sports Illustrated, the swimsuit issue. But I was not going to be on the cover. “Sorry, babykins.” Fiona from the agency made cooing sounds. “This year you’re just one of the pack. Diversity’s what they’re after right now. No blondies for the cover.” They put me in a white one-piece swimsuit with cutouts, like a jigsaw puzzle of snow with missing pieces. I posed on white sand. “Arch your back, darling. More. Now give me fierce, darling. Yeah, that’s it. Snarl fierce, Beatrice. Beautiful, most beautiful girl in the world.” And then I was back at the hotel, outside under big swooping sails, where there was a firepit, and that’s when he arrived. He showed up with his starey eyes, and the other girls were twitter, twitter. Like baby birds with their beaks hanging open. Why were they all atwitter? He was not a handsome man. His body was handsome, yes. He was a cat like me. He moved with stealth—like he had a gun slung at his hips—but he did not have a beautiful face. Very stealthily, I took a photo of his face, and I sent it to Ricky. He texted me back. A player in Silicon Valley. Wins big but also loses big. Too risky BJ. But I couldn’t stop looking at him. And when I saw him watching me, I went to him. They had sprayed my body golden brown all over, and my hair was silver and gold, and my eyes were the color of the sea. I could tell he wanted me, and I wanted him too. And the next day he took me to the sea cave. “Barbados is famous for them, Beatrice.” He said that to me. “They’re fantastic. It’s like you can walk underneath the sea. I know one the tourists can’t get to—it’s on a friend’s private beach. Do you want to come with me?” I went with him to the sea cave, and we climbed down deep inside, and it was very beautiful. The sunlight came from far away, and it was like being in church, the light all misted, and there were twisty columns that came up from the bottom and also hung down from the top. They looked like the statues of saints. I wanted to see all the saints, so I kept going deeper and deeper into the cave, until I went down a passage and it became black as night. I was very frightened, all alone in the dark, and I screamed loud, and I heard him shout my name. And then I felt him close. “Take my hand, Beatrice. Hold on to me.” He wrapped up my hand in his. And he led me out of the darkness and back into the chapel, with the faraway light and the saints hanging upside down. You loved him then. The voice of the very young one called Beatie June now rises up in my mind. You loved him when he rescued you. Yes. I remember. And then he took me back to my room at the hotel with the swooping sails. I opened the door and left it open for him to follow. The bed in the room had a shimmery white net around it to keep away mosquitos, even though there were none at such a fancy hotel. But when I lay down on the bed, the shimmery mosquito net fell all around me, like the bridal dress on the catwalk. Men are all the same. They can’t come inside me quick enough. I part my long golden legs and arch my long back, and they moan like the ocean as it surges in and out from the shore. But this one was not the same. He was tender and kind. “You’ve had a scare.” He’d kissed me soft on my forehead and left me alone. He put you in the dungeon. Mary’s voice is loud in my head. Now he wants you gone for good. You heard the words on his phone last night. My lungs are starting to hurt, but I stay under in the Jacuzzi. The sunbeams are hula dancing over my head. I need to rise. But I keep remembering more about the island of Barbados. EIGHT There was a silvering in the air by the time I returned to Thorn Bluffs. Only a few vehicles remained in the motor court. An electrician’s van. The battered brown pickup truck. An unwelcome surprise in my cottage. My bed that I’d left rumpled was now made up military tight. My breakfast dishes were no longer in the sink. Every surface gleamed. Annunciata had been here with her Swiffer. I pictured that fierce figure washing my coffee mug, squaring the corners of my sheets. Thinking what? There was a churchy scent in the air. It was coming from a lit candle on my bed table. A votive with a Hispanic Madonna hovering on a cloud. It seemed funereal. I blew it out. And the fashion magazines I’d heaped beside the bed were gone. Just to be tidy? Or to keep me from examining them too closely? I’d bought some provisions at a deli on a street charmingly named Casanova. Turkey and swiss club. Tubs of assorted salads. Apples, peaches. An Argentinian Malbec from a bargain bin. I stuffed it all in my minifridge, except for the Malbec. I unscrewed the top and reached for a glass. Bad idea: only four thirty and I’d already put down half a stiff mojito. I went instead to my laptop and began checking out the things Rick McAdams had told me. There had been an earthquake last summer, 5.3 on the Richter scale, near Livermore, California, and it had caused major damage to several tech sites, including Evan’s biotech venture, Genovation Technologies. A Bloomberg article confirmed that Evan launched a funding round a few months later to raise $350 million. “Worth killing for.” Rick McAdams’s insidious words. I found an item dated April 26 of last year on a gossip site: “Supermodel Beatrice McAdams treated at the Monterey, California, ER after an accident at her glamorous Big Sur estate.” An accident. No suggestion of self-harm or foul play. So how could I know for sure? I pictured Evan Rochester in his new office space. I wondered if his ankle still hurt like a son of a bitch. I thought of his hand enclosing mine. The electric thrill that had shot through me. A similar thrill as I watched him describe his game-changing new tech. His passion for it animating his features. “Sociopath.” Rick’s slithery, seductive voice back in my mind. A wave of jet lag swept over me. I suddenly felt as lost and all alone as I had the night I’d arrived. I curled up on my newly made bed and fell into a deep sleep. I slept for several hours. When I woke up, I stepped out onto my terrace to further clear my head. It was still daylight, but misty now, the ocean and the bluffs in soft focus. I glanced over at that strange medieval tower—the architect Jasper Malloy’s drafting studio. It looked romantic in the mist. Off-limits, Otis had warned me. No one allowed to go in it. Why? What could it be hiding? There was a washed-out service road behind the cottage that appeared to lead in the tower’s direction. I could go for a run. Get to the tower and back while it was still light. I felt suddenly compelled to do it. I went back inside. Put on running shoes and pulled a fleece over my yoga top and then launched myself onto the road. It veered in a wide loop toward the highway. I soon realized running was impossible; large sections of the asphalt were eroded to ankle-snapping patches of rubble. I could only walk briskly. It would take longer than I had expected. After about twenty minutes, a brown pickup truck came rattling from the opposite direction. Hector Sandoval at the wheel. I put a hand up in greeting. He drove by without acknowledging me at all. Where is he coming from? I pushed myself to go farther. Wondered if it was too far, if I should turn back. But in about fifteen minutes, the road looped back toward the sea, and to my relief, the tower appeared ahead. I approached it curiously. It was sited on its own promontory, a smaller and lower one than the compound was built on, and it looked even more mysterious up close. A crenellated top, like a crude crown. Thin vertical windows. The redwood base and windowsills were rotten, causing the entire structure to tilt. It creaked and groaned in the freshening breeze. The door—heavy, wooden—wasn’t locked. It opened to reveal a circular space crammed with a jumble of old furniture and artifacts. I stepped cautiously inside. Bars of light from the narrow windows wriggled like sea snakes across the jumbled stuff. An odor of rot and mold and dust. The tilting floor made me slightly seasick, like being on a boat that was starting to capsize. There was furniture like the South American pieces in my cottage, made of once brightly painted wood. Gilt crucifixes and statues of saints. Blackened paintings of conquistadors. Rising in the center of all this clutter, a rusty spiral staircase that stopped in midair. A staircase to nowhere. I picked my way to the back. A metal drafting table thick with dust was set against the far wall. Where Jasper Malloy died, alone and forgotten. I pictured his body slumped over it. Decayed. Gnawed on by wild animals. I shuddered. There were a few mildewed architectural drawings pinned to the wall above the table. Each labeled Thorn Bluffs, with a date in 1962. Renderings of the not-yet-built compound. The tower did one of its groaning things. Startled, I stepped backward and kicked something on the floor. A thick glass goblet—the same type Evan Rochester had poured champagne into the night before. I picked it up. Reddish-brown dregs in the bowl that smelled faintly of cherry. Not champagne. Some sort of liqueur. Or a kirsch? I set the goblet back on the floor, and as I did, I spotted something pushed far back beneath a large armoire. Something obviously hidden from casual sight. I scrunched down to look. A rectangular object, about three feet by four feet in size, tightly wrapped in a white drop cloth. Probably just another blackened conquistador. Except no, it wasn’t covered with a layer of dust. It hadn’t been there very long. I wriggled it out and propped it up against the armoire. Took off the drop cloth. I gasped. A framed portrait of a young woman painted in the style of Modigliani. Cropped dark hair, a pale oval face crooked slightly to one side. Exaggeratedly long neck. But the image had been grotesquely mutilated. Eyes gouged into gaping black holes. Mouth slashed to a shrieking rictus. Furious slashes on the bodice and all around the sides of the painting. It seemed personal—like whoever had done this had wanted to do it to the real-life girl in the painting. And suddenly, I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I rewrapped the painting in the drop cloth and shoved it back underneath the armoire. Then I bolted outside and continued walking fast onto the far point of the promontory. I stood inhaling the cleansing ocean air. Letting it clean out the dust and rot from my nostrils. The sight of that hideously mutilated portrait from my eyes. The tide was ebbing: the surf sounded more like a moan than a roar. I gazed down at the small cove below. A deep and ragged U shape sealed off on both ends by gargantuan boulders. The mist had begun to roll in, making the cove seem completely isolated. Desolate. But then, suddenly, the sparkle of a firefly. It twirled briefly in the mist before blinking off. It triggered a memory. I was four or five. Sitting with Mom on the back stoop, watching tiny lights flash in the weeping willow. “They’re called fireflies, sweetheart.” “So are they all going to burn up?” “No, silly Billy. It’s not real fire. It’s a light they turn on to let the other fireflies know they’re looking for love.” Why did she blink out her own light so soon? Give up on real-life love? I felt a bubble of grief rise from my chest: Why did you give up on love, Mom? Settle for pretend romance on a stage? As if in response, the firefly glimmered again. And something struck me: there were no fireflies on the Pacific coast. They didn’t exist west of the Rockies. I was pretty sure of that. And even if it were a firefly, the spark would be too tiny to see from up here. I kept my eyes fixed on it. And now there seemed to be a figure in the sparkle. Whitish. Like the figure I’d imagined outside my sliding glass door, this time moving slowly in the tiny light. My pulse quickened. A heavy gust of fog obscured my view, and when it passed, the glimmer was gone, and there was nothing down there at all. Nothing except sand laced with gray foam and glistening rocks and the heaving sea beyond it. Nothing could have disappeared so quickly. Nothing except a ghost. I laughed at myself. Still writing stories in my mind. The fog was rising at a rapid rate, and the temperature had plummeted at least ten degrees. I was suddenly cold. I hugged my arms around me, headed off the promontory. As I did, I heard a cry. Faint, as if reverberating up from the shore, but distinct nevertheless. Like the shriek of a tortured soul. And now I pictured that mutilated portrait of the girl, her mouth slashed into that hideous scream. It sent a shudder through my already agitated brain. I broke into a run, back onto the service road, stumbling on the patchy asphalt until the tower was no longer in sight behind me; then, panting, I slowed my pace. Everything was fast becoming obscured by smoky fog. The pines and shrubs were now just flat silhouettes. Cutouts pasted in an album. The old road kept disappearing beneath my feet. I thought of children in fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel. Lost in dark woods. Prey to witches, wolves, mythical beasts. And as I thought this, the black shadow of just such a mythical beast slithered out of the fog ahead. It came at me, crouched low on all fours. And right behind it, another mythical figure, crooked, striding furiously, encased in its own unearthly light. BEATRICE Thorn Bluffs, December 17 Late morning My lungs are bursting, but I stay under in the Jacuzzi. And I remember more about the island of Barbados. I remember how I took my jailer to my room the next night after he saved me from the sea cave. I took him into my bed, and we stayed there all night. Except very late that night I took my phone and crept out to the end of the hall. I sat down on a carpet made of coconut hair. I called Ricky in Miami where he was going to night school to become a lawyer. I whispered to him. “I like this one, Ricky.” “Then you better get him fast, Beatie. Before he finds out your prognosis. He’ll want a prenup, but we’ll make him give you a wedding gift. Blue-chip art. Van Gogh. Modigliani.” “I’m out of snow white, Ricky. I sent you money, didn’t I?” “Yeah, got it this morning. I overnighted a canister to you.” I went back to the bed under the white veil. I stayed the next day with my jailer, and then another, and we hardly ever left the bed, but I kept the snow white in the tea canister from Ricky snug in the bottom of my tote bag. And then a message on my phone from Fiona. “Where the fuck are you, Beatrice? Don’t know what you’re frigging up to and don’t care. Hair and makeup tests start tomorrow. If you don’t show, you’ve pulled your last stunt, swear to God.” I told my jailer I was supposed to be in Paris. “I’m booked to walk for Valentino and Alexander McQueen. You made me forget.” “I can get you there. It won’t be a problem.” He made a phone call. He told somebody to charter a jet. He was very happy—he liked saving me. And I loved him very much. And for my wedding present we went to Paris again. We went to an auction house, and he made a gesture, a very small gesture, with his hand when a painting by Amedeo Modigliani came up for sale. The painting of the girl. Maybe I’ll stay here under the Jacuzzi forever. NINE A magical beast and a hobgoblin. I didn’t feel particularly afraid. More like fascinated. I stood raptly, waiting as they approached. The beast resolved itself into Minnie, the female German shepherd. And the hobgoblin became Evan Rochester, walking swiftly but still with that hint of a limp, a pair of LED lights fastened around his neck. Minnie ran close circles around my feet, barking, and a moment later, Mickey appeared and joined her in keeping me tightly herded. Evan strode furiously up to me. “I told you to stay out of the grounds.” “I thought if I kept to the road it would be okay.” “The road? There’s nothing left of it. Can you even see it right now?” “A little.” “A little. Christ almighty! In another fifteen minutes, the fog will be twice as thick. Do you have a flashlight?” “No.” “Do you even have your phone?” I shook my head. “Do you have any idea how close we are right now to the edge of the bluff?” The mumble and moan of the ocean suddenly seemed right beside us. I pictured that vertiginous drop. The tide sweeping me away. “You could have easily wandered over the edge. Christ almighty God.” I felt light headed. “I didn’t realize.” “You didn’t realize,” he repeated. “What the hell are you even doing out here?” “I was just out for a quick run. Or walk, actually. It was still light when I started. I went a little too far. And then . . .” I hesitated. I decided not to mention the tower; he was too angry right now. “Then I stopped to watch a ghost.” He gave a violent start. “What?” “Just something I thought I saw down on the cove. The one below the tower.” He seized me by the shoulders. “What did you see?” “Let go,” I said. “You’re hurting me.” He immediately released his grip. “Tell me exactly what you saw.” “Nothing much, really. I was looking down from that other promontory. I saw something sparkle. A few sparkles of light. And for just a second, it seemed like there was something down there.” “Like what?” “Like a whitish kind of figure. Walking on the beach. And then a patch of fog came swirling in, and when it cleared, there was nothing there. I’m sure there never had been anything.” He stared at me. His expression unreadable. “It was just my imagination,” I continued quickly. “I like imagining things like ghosts. I used to write about it.” I kept my eyes fixed on his face. “But there couldn’t have been anything. It was impossible, wasn’t it?” He didn’t reply for a moment. “It’s natural to see sparkles of light on the water. Bioluminescence. It makes the surf glow. And the fog can play tricks with your sight. I’ve seen things that seemed so real . . . so real that sometimes I’ve had to stop myself from reaching out and trying to grab it.” Beatrice? Was it her ghost he imagined seeing in the fog? Wishing—or fearful—that I had seen her too? “There was something else,” I said. I watched him carefully. “I heard a sound, a strange sort of cry. Almost like a child screaming. I can’t really describe it. But it gave me chills.” He paused again. “An owl. A barn owl. Their calls can sound almost human. Eerie if you’ve never heard them before. Or a juvenile great horned owl.” I nodded. The fog continued to thicken around us, isolating us in the pool of light from his LEDs. He stared past me, silent, lost in some dark mood, as if forgetting I was even there. The dogs milled restlessly, waiting for a further command. I became aware once again of his intense physicality. His height. The breadth of his shoulders. The power of his musculature. The rage had faded from his face, and I no longer felt threatened. Just the opposite, I realized. I felt protected. I moved a small step closer to him. “How did you know I was out here?” “Hector. He saw you.” “Does he always report everything to you?” “Pretty much, yeah.” “And Annunciata too?” “If it’s something I need to know.” “They sound very devoted.” “They are. Just as I am to them. I got them out of Honduras after their son and daughter-in-law were killed by the cartels. They sent Hector and Nunci a video of the execution.” My eyes widened with horror. “That’s . . . I can’t even imagine.” “Yeah.” For a moment, I couldn’t breathe, consumed with the horror of it. “How did you get them out?” “I flew them. I’m a pretty good pilot. My plane was big enough to take us all.” “Was it dangerous?” “Somewhat. It was late at night. The weather wasn’t ideal, particularly over the mountains. But I don’t mind taking risks. It was a lot worse for them.” I pictured it, the bucking flight over dark mountains. The traumatized couple. It stirred something deep inside me. The fog continued to thicken. He still made no move to return to the compound. “Listen,” he said abruptly. “I need my daughter to get back into that school. I’ll pay you a bonus if she gets off probation.” “That’s not necessary,” I said quickly. “I’m going to do everything I can to help her. And I can’t guarantee she’ll pass.” “I’ll make it worth your while if she does. I know your situation. You need money.” I flushed. “Did Otis say that?” “He didn’t have to. I checked you out before you came.” I stared at him. “What do you mean? You snooped into my finances?” “I hired people to, yeah.” My voice was shaking. “What did you find out?” He smiled. “You really want to know?” “I do, yes.” “All right. I found out you really are an orphan. Your father killed himself on a New Jersey highway when you were little. Your mother died last year, small-cell carcinoma. No siblings. I didn’t know about Aunt Froggy.” I stared at him incredulously. “For a couple of years, you lived with an artist in Brooklyn. Moved out suddenly, paid overmarket rent for a place in Brooklyn.” “You had no right!” I swiveled in a rage, began to walk away. But it was too dark, the fog too obscure. The ocean pounding so close. He caught up with me, grinning. “I see I’m not the only one with a temper.” “You snooped into my personal life without my even knowing it. I feel . . . violated.” “Come on. Did you really expect me to have a stranger living on my property, getting close to my daughter, without checking first? And don’t tell me about feeling violated. I’ve had every inch of my private life invaded for the past six months. Mine, my wife’s, every detail about us dragged through the mud. And what they couldn’t find out they made up. Can you honestly tell me you didn’t look at any of that crap yourself?” I was caught short. “Okay. I did, some. But last night, in the Great Room, when you asked if I was from Tennessee, you already knew the answer. Was it a test?” “I suppose.” “And after I passed the test, why didn’t you tell me the truth?” “I should have. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now.” I felt a wash of conflicting emotions. Maybe I should have expected him to check on me. But digging into my personal life. My relationships. And something occurred to me. What he’d said about my father. Killed himself. Not died in an accident. There was the grumble of an approaching vehicle, and then twin halos, like marsh fairies, floated around a bend. “There they are,” Evan said and stepped toward the halos. Hector Sandoval’s old pickup lurched up to us, stopping with a grind of gears and brakes. Annunciata beside him. Braids undone, abundant white hair streaming witchy down her back. Evan went to the window, conferred with Hector. Annunciata handed him something. The truck rattled forward into the veil of fog and began to execute a painful K-turn. Evan turned back to me. “Nunci said you needed this.” He handed me a large iron key. “Keep your door locked at all times. Raccoons are ingenious at getting in. And skunks.” The key was heavy and cold in my hand. “She cleaned my cottage today. Annunciata. She doesn’t have to do that. In fact, I’d rather she didn’t.” “It’s her job. She does every room on the compound. Except Sophia’s. Nunci’s afraid of snakes.” “Does Sophia have a snake?” “A ball python in a tank. It has a habit of getting out.” The fearsome Annunciata afraid of pet snakes. It made her seem more human. “She left a candle burning. A votive with a Madonna on it. It’s nice of her, but it seems like a fire hazard.” He smiled. “The Virgin of Guadalupe. To keep spirits at bay. Not much of a hazard.” The truck pulled back up beside us. Evan stepped to the back, unhooked the rear panel, and yanked it down. “Climb up. They’ll take you back.” “What about you?” “I’ll walk with the dogs.” “I can walk with you.” “No.” He said it not harshly. I hoisted myself awkwardly, one knee first, onto the truck bed crowded with gardening tools, pots, sacks of soil and gravel. I perched on a stack of burlap bags. Drew my knees to my shivering chest. “You’re cold.” He shrugged off his heavy denim jacket. “No, I’m okay.” “The hell you are. You’re turning blue.” He draped the jacket like a blanket over me, tucking it around my arms and waist. A surprisingly tender gesture. The warmth of his body heat seeped from the jacket into me. He stepped back, waved to Hector, and the truck began jouncing away. Thoughts swirled in my mind like the fog that now encompassed everything. The sparkle on the cove, the hazy figure. The hideously mutilated portrait. Rick McAdams’s accusations and threats. What was real; what were lies? I drew the collar of the jacket to my nose. Inhaled leather and soap and sweat and cigar smoke. I shivered again, but this time not from the cold. TEN The following day, I succeeded in making the yoga class I’d passed up to go have a drink with Rick McAdams. Vinyasa proved to be the kind of yoga that kept you in perpetual motion, one pose flowing into the next without pause. The seven others in the class were sinuous beings who twisted and pretzeled nonstop for fifty minutes without seeming to break a sweat. I, on the other hand, was sopping by the end of the session. I staggered to the changing room to towel off. A woman dropped onto the bench beside me. “It gets easier, trust me.” I’d noticed her in the class. Fortyish. Lean. So flexible that her tomahawk of mink-colored hair brushed the mat in back-bending poses. “I hope you’re right,” I said. “You’re really good.” She shrugged. “I was born rubbery.” She began to vigorously towel her shoulders and elaborately tattooed midriff. “You’re Jane, right? The one living at Thorn Bluffs?” “How did you know?” “Rick McAdams. Bumped into him at a bar last night. He said you’d probably pop up here sooner or later.” I became wary. “Is he a friend of yours?” “Not really. I just know him from around. Everybody does—he’s that kind of guy.” She eyed me with insinuation. “He certainly seems taken by you.” “Oh God, no,” I protested. “I really don’t think so.” “I believe it. You’re adorable. I’m Ella Mahmed, by the way.” She stood up and shimmied a green tunic over her head. Smoothed it deftly over her torso. “So are you relocating to this area?” “No, I’m just here for the summer. I’m tutoring Evan Rochester’s daughter.” “Yeah, Rick mentioned that.” How did he know? I hadn’t mentioned it to him. Ella Mahmed rummaged in an enormous African-print tote bag. Pulled out a flat-brimmed cap and smashed it far back on her blade of hair. “I’ve got something of a connection to Thorn Bluffs. My first ex-wife was the architect of record on the renovation of the house.” I glanced at her with greater interest. “It’s gorgeous. Your ex is a terrific architect.” “She’s good enough, but she actually just drew the plans. Rochester was clear what he wanted. Modern, open. The way Jasper Malloy designed his most famous houses. Funny, though, not Thorn Bluffs, which was for himself. It was like a rabbit warren, a lot of cubbies and secret passages and shit. I guess he went a little nuts at the end of his life. He croaked there, you know. In his drafting studio.” “I’ve heard that.” I grimaced. “You must know the estate pretty well.” “Not really. Hallie and I got divorced soon after she started the project.” “Oh, sorry.” “Don’t be. It was alimony from Hallie that paid for the ceramics gallery I now own. Mystic Clay, it’s on Monte Verde. You should come by sometime.” “I’d love to. Though I won’t be able to buy anything. Unless you sell I Heart Carmel mugs.” “Ha, no, definitely not. Art pieces. I sell to the rich. Tech moguls, rich Asian tourists. Once almost to Beatrice Rochester.” My interest shot up another notch. “Almost?” “It’s a good story. Maybe I’ll tell you when you come to the gallery.” She dived back into her tote, took out a phone. “Give me your info, and I’ll send you mine. It’s great to have you around. We really need some fresh blood in our little circle here.” We exchanged info. I left feeling buoyed by the idea that maybe I’d made a new friend. For the first time, I felt a real connection to Carmel. My text sounded. I glanced at it. Mojito time? I gave a start. Rick McAdams. Still stalking me. I texted back: How did u get my number? Not hard. We need to talk more. Serious. I glanced up and down the street, looking for the metallic-blue Range Rover. It was nowhere in sight. No. And stop stalking me. I’ll call the police. I have friends among police. Don’t forget what I told u about your friend. Threats. I blocked his number. I went from yoga to the tennis club to pick up Sophia. I was early. I sat on the sidelines watching her play. She had grace and speed and a keenly competitive spirit that reminded me of her father. I praised her skills on the ride back. “I loved watching you. You’re a natural athlete.” She shrugged but looked pleased. “My mom always said I didn’t get it from her. She was a klutz at sports. She said I got it all from my dad’s side.” “Did she tell you a lot about him?” “Nothing. She just said he was smart. And tall and I’d be tall too. And when I was old enough, she said I could find him myself if I wanted. She’d help me.” She gave a sheepish little smile. “I used to pretend that I’d find him, and he’d be Roger Federer.” I felt a pang. She didn’t get a beloved tennis star. She got a man who was usually too busy amassing a fortune to pay much attention to her. And who—oh, by the way—was suspected of murdering his wife. She plugged herself into her phone and didn’t speak again for the rest of the ride. I dropped her off in front of the house. “The Ocean Room, thirty minutes. I’ll see you there.” I hurried back to my cottage to shower and change. Deliberated over what to wear. Nothing too schoolmarm but not like a kid, either. I finally chose a bright-red T-shirt and a black knee-length skirt. A bit of jazzy, a bit of sober. I jammed my laptop, a notebook, and a few pens into my tote and then headed up to the main house. The silver Tesla was backing out of the garage. The jacket, the warmth of his body seeping into me. I pushed the memory away. The car swooped quickly around and pulled up to me. Evan whirred down the window. “I decided you’re right about the Audi. Use the Land Cruiser from now on. It’s old but in good repair.” “Is this a punishment?” I said. He looked at me, puzzled. “For breaking the rules last night.” “Christ, no, I’m not that petty. I realized an Audi S5 is not a car for these back roads. And you’ll be carting dogs around, or so I hear from Fairfax.” “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve taken over dog-wrangling duties from him.” “Good. Don’t let the shepherds intimidate you.” “They won’t. In fact, I think Mickey has already started to warm to me. At least, he wags his tail when he sees me. Minnie, maybe not yet.” A smile played briefly on his lips. “I suspect she’ll become very devoted to you quite soon.” I flushed in spite of myself. He started to roll his window up. “Wait,” I said. “There’s something I want to ask you about.” “Yeah?” “Last night. You said something about my father. That he’d killed himself on a highway. But it was an accident. The road was icy—his car skidded. Were you being sarcastic?” “It was in the report. My investigators aren’t in the business of sarcasm.” Could he have misread it? “I want to see that report.” “It’s not possible. Anything else?” I hesitated. “No.” He rolled up the window, and the Tesla glided silently away. I continued walking down the slope that led behind the house to the level of the Ocean Room and entered it through the tall doors. Otis had set up a card table and two folding chairs on one of the rugs. The ocean light shivered pale green through the room. I set my tote on the card table. One of the legs wobbled, caught on something under the rug. I pushed the table aside, then knelt down and rolled the rug a little way back. There was a large stain on the bleached oak floor beneath it. Faintly reddish and shaped like an amoeba. Someone had scrubbed it but failed to get it out entirely. Could it be blood? My pulse quickened. I rolled the rug farther. The stain was extensive. If it was blood, it would have had to come from a pretty significant wound. Maybe even a lethal wound. There was a silver medallion placed in the middle of the stain. It was what had made the table leg wobble. I picked it up. Beaten silver, very tarnished, with a simple cross embossed on one side. Rudimentary symbols on the other—a crescent, a star, a heart pierced by an arrow. A religious medal of some sort? Sophia’s footsteps echoed through the hallway outside, and I put the medal back on the floor and quickly rolled the rug over it. I pushed the table back to a place where none of the legs would be in contact with the medallion. Then I sat down and composed my face as she shuffled in. Purple backpack hooked on one elbow. Phone in opposite fist. Earbud cords still dangling at her chest. Tinny rap notes emanating from her head. She sat down heavily. “Earbuds,” I said. She plucked them out, tossed them on the table. “So how long do we have to go?” “Until five o’clock. You know the deal.” A piglet squealed. She’d changed her text tone. She glanced at the screen. Giggled. Tapped. “Phone down, please,” I said. “One second.” Tap, tap, tap. I snatched it from her. “I mean it, Sophia. Not until we’re done.” Her brow furrowed. Her mouth set. I braced myself for a test of wills. But then she let out a sigh, one that declared she was the most persecuted, the most put-upon person in the history of the entire world and slumped a little farther down in her chair. “Okay,” I said, “let’s begin with French.” She excavated a textbook from the backpack. Slid it across the table. Bien dit!: French, Level II. “My class is at where the paper is.” I flipped open to a folded sheet of notebook paper inserted in the binding. “Future tense of irregular verbs?” “Yeah.” I groped for a moment about where to begin. “Okay, give me a sentence using ?tre in the future tense.” The piglet squealed. Her eyes darted to her phone. I muted it. “A sentence?” I said. She gave me a face. “Jane sera une putain de salope.” My temper flared. She was pissed about her phone. About her mom. About the entire world. I got it. But I wasn’t going to put up with it. “Okay, the tense is right,” I said crisply. “But ‘Jane will be a skanky bitch’ isn’t really a full sentence, is it?” A shrug. One shouldered. “It needs completing. For instance, you could say ‘Jane will be a skanky bitch if she talks trash about me to Andr?.’” Eye roll. “Andr??” “Or whoever.” “I don’t know how to say ‘talks trash.’” “You know what?” I said. “I don’t really either.” In spite of herself, she dropped her brat face and giggled. Her eyes darted around the room. “You know, Beatrice used to hang out down here a lot.” “Yeah, I know. Otis told me.” “There was this one time? I came in and she was looking out the window, like, way out at the water. At that big rock out there. And she was, like, talking to it.” I swiveled to look. That immense jagged outcropping that was like the spire of a sunken Gothic cathedral. “What was she saying?” “I don’t know. Her words were all jumbled. She called it Mary. Like the rock was named Mary. It creeped me out, so I just left.” She wanted to divert me from the lesson and was coming perilously close to succeeding. I was very tempted to ask her more. But it wouldn’t be right. Not now, probably not ever. “Plus d’anglais,” I said. “Let’s run through some conjugations.” A slog through the verbs ?tre and avoir. Then I had an inspiration—a lightning round, past tense to future tense. It was more like a game—it sparked her competitive spirit—and she got into it. I moved on to other verbs. Not just irregular ones but more colorful ones. Chatouiller (to tickle). D?v?tir (to undress). I had her make up sentences about future torments to a hapless nerd named Andr?. It made her giggle (glousser) and get goofily inventive. So far, so good. We moved on to algebra. I’d downloaded a number of elementary problems, which I had her work through. She aced them. I’d have to cram harder to keep ahead of her. By four thirty, she was beginning to sigh and scrunch her brow and glance longingly at the door. On the dot of five, she lunged for her phone. “One more thing,” I said. “I have an assignment for you.” “We’re supposed to do all the work here.” “Who says? I want you to write an essay in French, all in the future tense. One page. Due in a week.” “About what?” she said. “Anything you want.” “Like what?” “Well . . . what would your future dream job be?” She sucked her lip. “Fashion designer? My mom and I used to watch Project Runway together.” “Perfect. Write a page about how it will be when you become a famous fashion designer.” She grabbed her phone, textbook, backpack and fled. I got up, stretched. This was definitely not going to be easy. But I felt oddly elated. She had made a little progress. It gave me a glow of satisfaction. Otis came clattering downstairs and sidled warily into the room. “How did it go?” “Okay. Really good, I think.” He mimed whew, hand swiping his forehead. “Yeah, I feel that way too,” I said. “She did try her best to distract me, though. By telling me things about Beatrice.” “Oh God. What?” “She said Beatrice used to talk to that rock out in the cove. And that she called it Mary.” “Not surprised. The rock probably talked back to her. She heard voices, you know. It was part of her syndrome.” “Wasn’t she on meds?” “Yeah, but I guess they didn’t always work. Sometimes she seemed pretty strongly demented.” I zipped up my tote. “Did you know there’s a large stain on the floor underneath this rug?” “How do you know what’s under the rug?” “Something was making the table wobble, so I rolled it back. There’s a sort of reddish stain. And there’s a religious medallion placed on top of it.” He gave a snort. “Annunciata puts those things everywhere. Don’t ask me why.” “So what caused the stain?” “Could’ve been anything. When Beatrice got herself into a state, she was prone to throwing stuff around. Once I made this chicken tikka masala for them, and maybe it was too spicy for her or something, so she dumped the entire plate on the floor. She ate her lunch down here a lot, so who knows what else she dumped?” He gave a little shake of his shoulders. “How about a drink? There’s half a bottle upstairs of Pauillac de Latour with our name on it.” “Sounds fantastic.” “You earned it.” He put his arm around me and gave me an exuberant squeeze. My sort of kid brother, I thought. The closest thing I had to family. Later. After the gorgeous wine and instructions from Otis about tending to the various dogs . . . and after my solitary deli dinner, catching up with messages and sending breezy keeping-in-touch notes to my contacts . . . I was again at my computer, trying to focus on an article about volcanoes for Sophia’s earth science lesson. But my mind kept twisting elsewhere. Beatrice mumbling to a jagged black rock out in the water. The mutilated portrait stashed in the crumbling tower. Rick McAdams’s puppet head jerking to and fro, hissing accusations. “Monster. Can lie easier than most of us can tell the truth.” Was that true? And how could I possibly find out? Something shrieked outside, and a chill ran down my back. The same shriek that had reverberated up from the eerie little cove. It sounded now like a child in mortal terror. A barn owl, Evan had said. Or a juvenile great horned. I listened hard for a while. It didn’t come again. I turned back to my computer. The Wi-Fi booster I’d ordered hadn’t yet arrived, but the connection, though low, was serviceable. I pulled up a YouTube: “Western Barn Owl Screaming.” A flat-faced owl perched on a branch at night. A screeching call. Chilling. But not what I had heard. I did another search. Screech owl. A spooky flutter of high short whoops. Not even close. I listened to other owls, barred and spotted and pygmy, and then the calls of hawks and gulls and pelicans and eagles. And four-footed animals, coyotes and porcupines and skunks and anything else I could think of that might be lurking in these woods—until the Wi-Fi flickered out. I’d found nothing like that ghostly, chilling shriek. A new thought came into my mind. Something was out there. Or someone. Watching me. Waiting. I got up and pushed my dresser in front of the glass doors. Extra protection from whatever it was. And then I lit Annunciata’s votive candle on my bed table. Protection from spirits. BEATRICE Thorn Bluffs, December 17 Noon Two hands grab me under my armpits and pull me from underneath the Jacuzzi bubbles. Braidy Lady’s face is red and fiery. “You don’t come up, Mrs. Beatrice.” “I can hold my breath a long time,” I tell her. She says again, “You don’t come up.” She reaches for my silky robe next to the Jacuzzi. She’ll find the blade, Mary Magdalene screeches. Don’t let her do it! “Annunciata,” I say, “please bring me a Dr. Brown. My mouth is very dry.” She glances back at my bedroom doors and then back at me. She doesn’t know what to do. “Now! I need it now, right now!” My voice goes high, higher, I can’t stop it. Her face glows fiery again. She walks very fast into the house. I swing myself out of the Jacuzzi and put on my robe. The pointy knife pricks at my belly. Get the blood, Beatrice. It has to be now. Do the plan today. I think again of the island of Barbados. How I loved him there. I don’t want to do the plan. But now I can’t think anymore, the fog swirls thick. I start walking, my famous Beatrice McAdams cheetah walk, up and down the deck. I hear voices talking, but they are not in my mind. They come tangling up from the ground below. I go to the railing and look down. I see the brown truck that belongs to the small man, the sorcerer Hector. Next to it is the big white Land Cruiser car with all the dents in it. My jailer is down there and also Hector. It’s their voices I am hearing. They are plotting together in their secret witch language. I watch Hector go to the back of the brown truck. He slides out something all covered in white. He pulls open the cover. My eyes open wide. It’s the girl. The one named Lilies. And she is back in her picture frame. Back inside the picture that was painted by Amedeo Modigliani. My jailer had taken me to the auction house in Paris, and he bid the highest for this picture for my wedding present. “Modigliani. Just like you wanted, Beat.” And he hung it on the bedroom wall, and the girl looked down at me while I slept. Yes, that’s her in Hector’s truck. Her eyes are oval shape, and she makes sour cherries with her mouth. I can see her little breasts under her square white blouse. But I don’t understand. I killed her. You didn’t kill her, Mary hisses. I told you so. You heard her voice on his phone last night. The fog is in my mind. I watch my jailer now pick up the girl. Gently, by the edges of her picture frame, like a precious jewel, like a ruby for the queen’s crown. He carries her to the Land Cruiser. Hector lifts up the back hatch. He slides something from out of the back. It’s a big flat wooden box. Hector and my jailer fit the girl in her picture frame tight into the box. A laugh bubbles up inside me. It’s a coffin. She is dead. I killed her with my manicure scissors, that day in the month of last April. Yes. I stabbed her eyes, and I cut up her mouth and her breasts. And then I wrote her name all around her: Lilies, Lilies, Lilies. And now my jailer is going to bury her, along with her picture frame. The same way he had buried the old dog, Delilah. Hector bangs nails into the top of the box. Then he puts the coffin box inside an even bigger box made out of wood and slides it back into the Land Cruiser. The boy with the golden spectacles comes outside, and he speaks to my jailer. I watch him climb into the front seat. It’s a trick, Beatrice, Mary tells me. It’s a plot to trick you. To make you think she’s dead. But now you see that she isn’t. I don’t understand. You heard her voice on his phone last night. You heard the words she said. You know what he is going to do. I feel a scream come up from deep, deep inside me. You have to do the plan today. I take the blade from out of my robe pocket. I walk fast back toward the glass door of my room. Annunciata comes out with my Dr. Brown, but I don’t want it, I shove past her, hiding my blade so she can’t see it. I go inside my bedroom and lock my door. I take out the sharp little blade. ELEVEN I assumed that if I didn’t cause any further nuisance, Evan would take as little notice of me as he would some animal—a deer or a woodchuck—nesting harmlessly on his property. But I was wrong. Three days after he’d fetched me in a fury from the tower road, I was walking Pilot at dusk, as I now regularly did. At the first turn in the road, the shepherds, Minnie and Mickey, came racing hell bent from behind us. Pilot joyously greeted them, and all three went crashing into the underbrush. And then Evan came up, no longer limping, walking so quickly I expected him to pass me by. To my surprise, he slowed into step beside me. He was sunk in a dark mood. Trudged heavily beside me in silence. But I was not in a gloom, and I refused to be dragged down. After some minutes, I said lightly, “Could I ask you something?” He gave me a dark look. I persisted. “Why do you have gibberish tattooed on your arm?” “Oh, that. It was supposed to be English.” “Supposed to be?” A snort of disgust. “I was nineteen, in Cuernavaca. Wasted on mezcal. I wrote down what I wanted and then passed out. The damned vato couldn’t read my writing.” I laughed. He threw me another dark look. “What’s it supposed to say?” I asked. “‘I want to be true to the morning.’ D. H. Lawrence. At nineteen, I thought that meant something.” “But it does,” I said. “Mornings are when everything is fresh and new and seems full of possibilities. I’m at my best in the morning.” “I’m a night person,” he said abruptly. I might have guessed. We did some more silent trudging, until at last he broke the silence. “I have a question for you.” His gloom seemed to have lifted a little. “About Aunt Froggy.” I glanced up at him. “My aunt Joanne?” “Why do you think of her as a frog?” “I’m not sure. She shows up in my dreams sometimes—she’s a giant frog in a pink dress, with a croaky, frog-type voice. It scares me. The dreams are nightmares. I’d always thought she was dead. I found out from my mother she wasn’t, just before my mother died.” “Did you ever try to find her?” “A little bit. Online. But it’s a common name. Joanne Meyers. There are thousands of them, so it seemed hopeless. And . . . well, maybe I was reluctant to. Because of the nightmares.” I gave a quick laugh. “Stupid to be afraid of dreams.” “Not really. No one can be sane and have no fears at all.” I shot him a teasing look. “Then what are yours?” “Do you really expect me to tell you?” “Yeah, I do. I just told you one of mine.” “Okay. I’m afraid of the dark.” “Liar,” I said. “You just said yourself you were a night person.” “Then you can pick which one you want to believe.” He was teasing me now. And after that, our conversation came effortlessly. Darting from one topic to the next the way I’d seen small black-and-white butterflies flit from flower to flower outside my cottage. I found myself telling him things—silly things—about myself. About the Clown Lounge, where I’d met Otis, and how Otis had shown me the ropes. How to make drinks with names like Sloppy Pussy and Adios Motherfucker. How to deal with the owner, the drunken Afghanistan vet, Dooley, who threw darts at anyone he didn’t like. “Which was pretty much everyone,” I said. He laughed in that way that entirely transformed his face. I found, disturbingly, that I liked making him laugh. We walked for some time. The fog scattered silver on the foliage, and the shadows deepened to violet. It began to seem to me like we were the only two people left in the entire world, and that was exactly the way I wanted it to be, and perhaps he did too. And maybe when I stepped to avoid a gnarled root in my path, I stepped just a little wider than necessary so my arm brushed against his. Then we were back in the compound, and he said, “Good night,” and turned rather abruptly to his gorgeous house, whistling for the dogs to follow. And I went back alone to my rustic cottage. And thought again, Well, that’s that. But to my further surprise, he continued to pay me attention over the next weeks. Stopping me as I backed the Land Cruiser out of the garage or headed out of the main house. Asking solicitous questions: “The Cruiser running okay? Brakes still good? Do you have everything you need for your tutoring?” Checking up on me, I presumed. Making sure I was doing right by his daughter. Following his rules. But he began to linger a little longer. His questions became more personal. What music did I like? “Are you into jazz at all? How about hip-hop?” Did I travel a lot, or was I more of a homebody? “Did Fairfax show you my library? There are some first editions that you might find fun to look at. And feel free to borrow anything else.” He listened to my replies with a kind of absorption that made me feel—at least in that moment—that I was the most fascinating person he’d ever known. I began to look forward to these encounters. Each time I walked Pilot, I’d listen for footsteps coming up behind me and would feel a twinge of disappointment when they didn’t. And finally they did. I was halfway down the drive when he strode quickly up with the shepherds. He looked at me with mock reproach. “You might have waited instead of making me run a marathon to catch up with you.” “If I knew you were coming, I might have,” I said. “Though I do know one thing. You like to get your own way, even if it requires people to read your mind.” He gave a laugh of delight. “Am I that easy to figure out?” “No,” I said truthfully. “At least not to me.” “But I’m that unreasonable?” “Sometimes, yeah.” “But you won’t let me get away with it, will you?” he said. His face was shadowed by the redwoods’ dark canopy, but something in his tone of voice, low and intimate, made my heart somersault. We continued walking. But Rick McAdams’s words whispered at me. Manipulative. Charming when he needs to be. Was it true? Was he just manipulating me for whatever purpose? More than ever, I felt a driving need to find something definitive. To find Beatrice. Or her remains. Or some definitive proof that would clear his name. Or else prove he was the cold-blooded monster most people seemed to believe he was. Before I got myself into something I could no longer control. TWELVE It was over three weeks now that I’d been at Thorn Bluffs. I’d just returned from a midday yoga class. Ella Mahmed had been there, and I was liking her more and more. She was smart, brassy, quick to laugh. We’d nailed down a day for me to visit her ceramics gallery. I’d also become familiar with a group of other women in the class who called themselves the “Semi-regulars.” They had names like the start of a children’s counting rhyme—Connie, Terry, Honey, and Pam. They were all divorc?es, except Pam, who was widowed. They favored chunky jewelry and Goddess leggings. They all thought Evan Rochester was sexy as sin. And they all had damning stories about him. Connie: “He once pulled Beatrice out of a restaurant so violently he could have broken her wrist.” Honey: “She tried to run away one time. But he captured her before she could escape and kept her under strict lock and key afterward.” They’d heard the stories from friends. Or friends of friends. Gossip. Which of course couldn’t be trusted. Though I was dying to hear the “good story” Ella had promised to tell me. I had the feeling that hers would be authentic. I now slotted the Land Cruiser into its bay and climbed out. As I clicked the door closed, I heard a deafening roar: a black-and-yellow helicopter flying over the compound. I watched it descend like a gargantuan hornet to the helipad a short way inland. As I walked to my cottage, it rose straight back up and began to fly north, the crowns of the redwoods bowing in its heavy chop. I recalled Otis telling me Evan used to commute by chopper on weekends from his house in San Francisco, but now he only chartered one for the most urgent meetings. Who is he off to meet so urgently now? The letter L flashed into my mind. The single initial written on the card attached to the vase of expensive still-in-bud tulips. Nonsense. The chopper dwindled to a speck in the distance. I continued to my cottage, unlocked the door with that heavy iron key. I had a sudden hollow feeling. A stillness hung heavily in the room, despite the eternal crash of surf outside. A bit of my morning coffee remained in the Krups pot. I poured it into a saucepan and reheated it, making it palatable with an extra dollop of honey. My text sounded. Wade O’Connor, who continued to check in regularly. Find any body parts yet? I gave a laugh. Replied: Not even a bone. Why not? U been there long enuf to find whole skeleton. Sorry, no trace of B. But sometimes think maybe she’s found me. Whoa. What?? I sat down at the table. Paused. Then texted: Hard to explain. Every so often get the feeling somebody watching me. Thru my glass doors. Whoa!!! Mr. R. Peeping Tom? No. Happened one nite he wasn’t here. I paused again. Something else. Sometimes I hear strange shriek outside at night. Gives me chills. My phone rang almost immediately. “So what are you saying?” Wade demanded. “Somebody’s spying on you, and you think it’s Beatrice? Wandering around in the woods at night?” “No. I mean, you know that sometimes I let my imagination run away. Especially when I’m here alone at night. It gets kind of easy to have ridiculous thoughts.” “But what’s with this shriek?” “It’s hard to explain. It’s like a child screaming in terror. Evan said it was an owl of some kind. But I’ve listened to a lot of owl calls online and didn’t find anything like it. And then a couple of times I thought I’ve seen some kind of whitish shape. Kind of ghostly . . .” “Whoa, wait. Now you’re saying she’s a ghost?” “No. It’s just that I’ve felt some kind of presence outside. The housekeeper here, Annunciata, I think she does too. She keeps a candle burning on my bed table. A votive candle. It’s to keep away evil spirits.” “So it’s an evil ghost?” “No!” I said emphatically. “I’m sure it’s nothing at all. Just my curiosity about what might have happened to Beatrice. Which you keep stirring up, if you recall.” Wade gave a grunt. “Keiko is not going to like this. She thinks you never should have left New York in the first place for such an iffy situation. I sort of agreed. And now I’m definitely thinking you should get the frick out.” The idea of leaving gave me a sudden panic. I said quickly, “Come on, Wade. You and I both love making up stories. There’s no reason I need to leave. And I don’t want to. I’m making progress with Sophia, I can’t just abandon her now. And Otis depends on me too.” He made a ruminative sound. “Look. We’re going to be out in Marin County next month. Keiko’s roommate from Yale is getting married. We’re bringing Benny, and we were thinking of driving up to the giant sequoias afterward. But maybe we could come down your way instead.” “Don’t change your plans for me. Seriously, Wade. I’m fine.” “I sure as hell hope so,” he said. Fifteen minutes later, my phone rang again, this time Wade’s wife, Keiko. She worked for a boutique bond company, she was no-nonsense in the warmest possible way, and I was as close to her as I was to Wade, as well as an unofficial godmother to their five-year-old son, Benny. “Did Wade tell you I was losing my mind?” I said. She laughed. “Not exactly. He said he’s worried you might be getting carried away with your fantasies, or worse, you might actually have some weirdos around. I think it’s a great idea for us to drive your way. We can take Benny to the Monterey aquarium—he’ll adore that. We’ll swing by your place first.” “I’m not supposed to have visitors here. I can meet up with you in Monterey.” “Now, you see? You’re not allowed to have visitors—that’s got me even more worried.” “It’s really not that sinister. Evan just likes to protect his privacy.” “You call him Evan?” “Well, yeah. What do you expect me to call him? Mister?” She sighed. “I don’t know, Janie. But I think you’re a lot more vulnerable than you realize. After all that awful stuff you’ve been through in the past year. I’ll feel better when I’ve actually laid eyes on you.” “And make sure I’m not murdered yet?” “For starters,” she said. “I won’t be,” I told her. “I promise. And if you do come, I’ll be thrilled. Tell Benny I miss him, and give him a big kiss for me, okay?” “He says he’s too old for kisses now. He’s okay with hugs.” “Then tell him I’m sending a big old hug right at him.” I hung up. Finished my leftover coffee. Wade was right: I was spinning lunatic stories. Beatrice’s ghost peeping in at me. Making shrieky ghost sounds. If there really had been any peeping, it was far more likely to be by somebody alive and kicking. But who? Not Otis. God no. I couldn’t imagine that. Sophia sleepwalking? Maybe. Then I thought of my panic at the idea of leaving Thorn Bluffs. It was true what I’d told Wade. I didn’t want to abandon Sophia or Otis. But I hadn’t told him the entire truth. That I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving Evan Rochester. That giant hornet carrying him away. The hollow feeling it had left me with. Stupid. I needed to get a good grip on myself. I had a tutoring session shortly; I needed to look composed. I hadn’t picked up Sophia today—Otis had collected her after a dental appointment he’d had in Carmel. I headed out to the Ocean Room a little before four o’clock, passing through the breezeway that connected the garage to the main house. As I began down the slope to the lower level, I suddenly froze. Annunciata was directly outside the Ocean Room doors. Bent over the shrubs, sprinkling a white powder on the roots. I’d had no contact with her since Otis had first introduced me. She had continued to clean my cottage but always in stealth. Somehow knowing when I wasn’t there. It gave me the willies. It was ridiculous to avoid her. I continued up to her and spoke loudly. “Hello, Annunciata.” She straightened. Her braids, tied with bright-blue yarn, swung against the sturdy girth of her waist. Other than the color of the yarn, her outfit was unchanging—men’s dungarees, a loose khaki-colored shirt, rope-soled shoes. She wiped powder from her fingers on the leg of her dungarees. Glared at me. I persisted. “Thank you for cleaning my room. And for the candles.” Had she heard me at all? Yes—she gave a curt nod. I stood uncertainly a moment. My smile felt stretched ear to ear. I nodded back at her, then turned self-consciously and proceeded into the Ocean Room. I sensed her eyes still on me. The room danced with a pale gold light that was almost fizzy. I put my things on the card table, and when I looked back out, Annunciata had moved away. Drawn by the source of the lemonade light, I went over to the tall windows. The cove sparkling silver and blue looked inviting. As if wading out to take a swim—even in a cocktail dress—might not be such a terrible idea. My eyes traveled to that jagged spire of a rock. It now looked made of polished glass. The ridges on it stood out in sharp relief. It looked close enough to think maybe you could just wade right out to it. I turned from the window and moved to a recessed bookshelf in the adjacent wall. It was sparsely filled. A black porcelain bowl. A green obelisk. A mounted geode, dull gray on the outside, dazzling pink crystal within. The bottom shelf held a number of coffee-table-size art books. That ruined painting hidden in the tower. I squatted down and browsed the titles for one on Modigliani. They were all on Renaissance art. Titles like Masterpieces of the Renaissance. The Art of Florence. Italian Renaissance Sculpture. I pulled out a couple and sat down cross-legged on the floor. Opened the first. The Early Renaissance in Italy. On the flyleaf, a signature in black ink: Beatrice McAdams Rochester. I felt a tingle. Her book. One page had a corner turned down. I felt another tingle. Like the fashion magazines I’d found in the dresser of my cottage—each with folded corners marking photos of Beatrice in her prime. I opened the art book to the marked page. A full-page color plate of a sculpture by Donatello: The Penitent Magdalene. It didn’t resemble Beatrice in her prime or otherwise. It was carved almost crudely in wood—and it was not the young and beautiful Mary Magdalene. This was an ugly old hag. Emaciated, sunken eyed. Almost toothless. But the hands were beautiful—long fingered, the raised fingertips almost, but not quite, touching. And they were heavily encircled in black ink. Why? To make them look bound together? Like a prisoner? I opened the other book. The Art of Florence. Again, a signature on the flyleaf: Beatrice McAdams Rochester. And again, a single page folded at the corner. It opened to the same reproduction—The Penitent Magdalene. The hands of the statue again furiously encircled in black ink. But this page also had a scratchy kind of black writing that filled all the margins. More like slashes than scratches. With a shock, I remembered the slashes around the edges of the Modigliani portrait in the tower. So both this writing and those slashes must have been made by Beatrice. But what did a Modigliani from the 1920s have to do with a Renaissance sculpture? There was no resemblance at all between the works. I examined the encircled hands of the Magdalene. Strong, ridged hands. Making a prayerful gesture. Fingers creating a steeple shape. A church steeple. An idea occurred to me. I sprang to my feet and looked out at the cove again—at that huge jagged outcropping. The one that reminded me of a ruined spire of a sunken cathedral. I compared it to the hands of the statue in the book. My heart began to beat faster. I could imagine that Beatrice in her madness might think there was a resemblance. The steeple shape. The ridges in the rock face like the veins in Mary Magdalene’s hands. Mary. Sophia had said Beatrice called the rock by that name. I glanced over my shoulder at the white chaise. The one Otis said Beatrice had spent so much time lolling around on. The way it was placed in the room, slightly angled—it gave an unobstructed view of the cove. And of that jagged steeple-shaped rock. I thought of that faint reddish stain hidden by the rug in the center of the room. Annunciata’s tarnished silver medallion placed on top of it. What had happened in this room? Outside, Annunciata moved again into my sight. I put the art books back on the shelf and went to the card table. I opened my laptop and kept my eyes fixed on it. “I wrote the thing.” Sophia tore two pages out of a spiral notebook and handed them to me. It was the French essay I’d assigned her at our first session over two and a half weeks ago. She’d given a litany of excuses. So much homework from her real classes. Overtime practice for an upcoming tournament. I had finally threatened to take her phone away. “You can’t do that,” she protested. “I can and I will.” “I’ll tell my father if you do.” “Be my guest. He’ll back me up. I guarantee it.” I was pretty confident she wouldn’t test it. She hadn’t. I looked at the essay. Longer than I had expected—two full pages, written in block lettering. I began to read. “You’re going to read it now?” A tone of dismay. “You bet I am. I’ve waited long enough.” She fidgeted while I read it through. It was full of errors. Sloppy mistakes. Words used wrong. But it was also remarkably vivid and inventive. In the future she will win Project Runway with an amazing dress (une robe incroyable) composed of fake monkey fur and recycled brown paper and a hem of candy kisses (bonbons bisous). She will make an ensemble for Lady Gaga to wear to the Grammys and also a hat with a nest of eggs. The eggs will open, and baby doves will fly into the audience. And Gaga will tell her to make every new ensemble for her and for all her friends. I read the last line with a pang: Et puis je serai riche et je sauverai beacoup d’animals. Et egalement j’adoppterai une douzaine enfants orphelines. She will be rich, and she will rescue many animals. And, equally, she will adopt a dozen orphan children. I looked up. “It’s terrific, Sophia.” “You think?” “Yeah, I really do. There are lots of mistakes. Your spelling is atrocious. You’ve got to start using accent marks. But you’ve really learned the future tense. And it’s incredibly creative. I love that you want to adopt a lot of animals and kids.” I wrote a large A on top. A flush of pleasure lit her face. She was starved for this kind of praise, I realized. Particularly when she knew she deserved it. “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “For the earth science lesson, let’s go to one of the beaches near here and gather up rocks. Then tomorrow we can identify them and classify them.” “Awesome!” The outing was a success. We brought Pilot, and at the beach, he romped in and out of the surf, trailing long tresses of kelp. We filled bags and stuffed our pockets with black and green and speckled rocks and shards of mussel and clam shells until we couldn’t carry any more. We hauled our booty back and spread the rocks on the promontory to dry. Otis came out to admire the display. He made venison chili, and we ate in the screening room watching National Velvet—my choice so Sophia could get to know Elizabeth Taylor, who my mother had adored (though Sophia liked Piebald the horse a lot more). Afterward, I slipped back into the Ocean Room and collected the art books—seven all together—and carted them back to my cottage. I began looking through them all. Each one had a corner turned to a reproduction of The Penitent Magdalene. But only the one book—The Art of Florence—had scratchy writing in the margins. I examined the writing again, searching for the word Mary. I could only pick out a few capital Ss and Es. And what seemed to be a lot of capital Ls. Or maybe I just had the letter L on my mind. L as in lipstick. That single initial L written in green ink on a white card. Maybe it had nothing to do with that reddish stain underneath the rug in the Ocean Room. Or the religious medal placed on top of it. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that it did. BEATRICE Thorn Bluffs, December 17 Early afternoon I am in my bedroom, and I am still holding the little blade, and I am breathing very hard. But Mary’s voice is soft. Gentling me to do the plan. A shopping bag, Beatrice, she whispers soft, soft. Hurry, Beatrice, go get one. I put the blade back in my pocket. I walk into my closet room and open one of the many doors. There are lots of shopping bags on the floor. I choose one that says NEIMAN MARCUS. It’s shiny and black. It has tissue paper inside it and a sweater all folded up and new. I dump out the sweater and also the tissue paper, and I bring the bag into my big white bathroom. I place it on the floor next to my shower. Outside in the hallway, Braidy Lady is knocking soft on the door. “Mrs. Beatrice? I have your Dr. Brown’s.” Don’t take it, Beatrice. She’s put a witch spell on it. The knocking stops. But I know Braidy Witch is out there. Weaving her spells. Don’t worry about her. Now is the time, Beatrice. Do it now! I take the little knife out again from the pocket of my robe. I toss the robe onto the floor. I step naked inside my shower. I am suddenly screaming so hard inside me, I don’t think I can hold it in much longer. Keep it inside you. Remember the witch at the door. I keep my scream inside. I raise my arm up high over my head. There is hair in my armpit and also on my legs and vagina because they won’t let me have a razor anymore. I place the sharp point of the knife in the hair that grows in the deepest part of my armpit. I am screaming inside. I stick the point in my armpit very hard. I feel the sharp sting. It makes me feel good. THIRTEEN Evan did not return that night or the next. I asked Otis where he’d gone. “LA. He’s got a big-time investor on the hook. A venture capitalist, guy named Dillon Saroyan.” “When will he be back?” I kept my tone casual. “He did not confide that information to me. He might not even know.” Good, I told myself. His presence had been starting to muddle my thinking. I scoured Beatrice’s books, page by page, searching for other marks she might have made, but there weren’t any. The library in the main house held a collection of art books, and I searched those for Renaissance titles or any that might have belonged to Beatrice. These were mostly on mid-twentieth-century art and architecture, with several on Asian and African art. None had Beatrice’s signature on the flyleaf. None was on Modigliani, either, though he was mentioned as an influence in a couple of the midcentury books. I was strongly tempted to go back to the tower. Get a closer look at that grotesquely mutilated portrait. But I couldn’t risk that road at night with its dangerous proximity to the edge of the bluffs. And during the day, one or the other of the Sandovals seemed always to be watching—like they had the shaman-like ability to be in several different places at once. After four days of Evan’s absence, I had stopped constantly listening for the chop of a returning helicopter. That afternoon, I headed into Carmel to make my long-promised visit to Ella’s gallery. I arrived just before two o’clock. A one-story building awash in flamingo pink on Ocean Avenue. It contained a collection of small galleries, Ella’s marked with a placard: MYSTIC CLAY BY APPOINTMENT ONLY She swung the door open before I could even ring. “Saw you on the camera. I keep the door locked not because of burglars. To discourage the lookie-loos.” She gave one of her brass-bell laughs and ushered me inside. A stark white space lit by rows of dangling incandescent bulbs. The ceramics—vases, bowls, platters, a few fanciful cups and sugar bowls—were displayed on blond wood shelves behind glass. “All my stuff is contemporary,” Ella said. “No Ming vases, no Wedgwood teapots. None of it is really functional. No practical use except to nourish the spirit.” “I could definitely use some spirit nourishing,” I said. “I want to look at everything.” “And so you shall.” She began steering me from piece to piece, regaling me with mini lectures on ash glazes and lead glazes, and colorants made of cobalt or copper, and the meaning of multiple firings. Some of the pieces were thick and muddy. Some were delicate, as if spun from the filaments of spiderwebs. One was like nothing I’d ever seen before. A yellow-glazed vase shaped like a Grecian urn and overlaid with a macabre collage. Faded-out sepia photos of Victorian ladies. A woman’s cartoon face with huge lurid lips. A leering, naked old man on a toilet. Vines with peculiar flowers writhed between the images, and banners with strange sayings floated by. “Tell me about this one,” I said. “Interesting. It’s the same one Beatrice Rochester picked out.” I glanced at her. “Is that the good story?” “Yep.” She removed the vase from the shelf and placed it on a long viewing table. “It’s by Grayson Perry. He’s British. A cross-dresser, very flamboyant. And brilliant. As you can see.” I peered closer, both captivated and repelled at the same time. “Are those cracks part of the technique?” “No, they’re part of the story. When we’re done here, I’ll make us tea in the office and tell you.” We moved on to the few remaining pieces, but my mind remained fixed on that peculiar vase. Finally, she led me into her office, a cubbyhole in back. She brewed clove tea in an Iranian samovar. Set out a plate of lacy cookies. “Rose water. I made them myself. Bet you never guessed I was so domestic.” “No, but somehow I’m not surprised.” I bit into a crumbly wafer. “They’re delicious.” She poured out the tea into square cups. I said, “Okay, you’ve got me on the edge of my seat. What happened with the vase?” She plunked herself into her chair. “Okay. Well. Mrs. Rochester—Beatrice—she showed up here about a year ago. No appointment, but I recognized her in the camera and buzzed her right in. She’d put on weight, but her face, still so beautiful.” I nodded. I could imagine. “I started to give her my standard rap, but she made a beeline for the Grayson Perry. It seemed uncanny. Like it had called to her. And I mean literally called out to her.” I flashed on the rock in the cove. Beatrice talking to it. “She used to hear voices. So maybe it did call to her. In her mind.” “Yeah, I’ve heard she did, so maybe. Anyway, I took it out of the display and put it on the table, and she was, like, enraptured by it. She said, ‘I’ll take it.’ Just like that. I told her the price. Seventy-two grand. I expected her to haggle. They all do, even the richest. Especially the richest.” Her laugh pealed again. “But nope, she just waved her credit card. I was over the moon, of course. But when I ran it, it was refused.” “Maxed out?” “A black Amex, no limits. It was canceled. Amex told me to cut it up. I told that to her, and she smiled at me in a way that gave me the shudders. And then she turns and starts walking out, and as she passes the table, she knocks off the vase.” “On purpose, you mean?” “I couldn’t be sure. It broke but, thank God, didn’t shatter. She didn’t stop, just sailed on out the door. I was flipping out. I paged the guard, and then I went outside. The guard was confronting her, and she was starting to get really agitated and yell and scream.” “What did you do?” “I didn’t know what to do. And then this brand-new Tesla comes cruising up, and Rochester gets out. He had obviously been close by, right?” My attention was riveted. I nodded. “And Beatrice looks at him with a kind of panic, and . . . well, he snaps his hand around her wrist. Like a handcuff, you know? Like she was his prisoner.” He kept her prisoner. What Rick McAdams had said. And the Semi-regulars had said something like it too. “I told him she broke an expensive vase,” Ella continued. “He said ‘Send me the bill.’ There was a look in his eyes that scared the shit out of me. But Beatrice had calmed down. Pretty quickly, in fact. He got her into the car and drove away.” “Did you send him the bill?” “I sure did. For the entire price. He paid up immediately. I contacted him a few times to ask where to send it but never heard back. Finally, I had it restored, and, well . . . there it sits. If he wants it, he can have it. I won’t even charge for the restoration.” “Did Beatrice ever come back here?” “Nope. I never saw either of them again. But when I heard what happened . . . I felt bad. Like maybe I could have intervened somehow. That it would have made a difference.” “Probably not,” I said softly. “Yeah, probably not.” She took a sip of tea. “But, hey, I don’t mean to alarm you. I mean, like, scare you off his place. Though I guess you already know he did away with his wife.” I looked at her, startled. “Are you so sure he did?” “You’re not, huh?” “My friend Otis who works for him is convinced it was suicide. And there are other possibilities.” “Like what?” I paused. I didn’t want to believe he was a monster. Or anything close to it. “Maybe she just ran off, for whatever reason. Or maybe she’s still somewhere at Thorn Bluffs. Didn’t you tell me there used to be secret passages in the house?” “Yeah, according to my ex, Hallie.” “Maybe there still are. Hidden passageways. Or rooms.” “No, I saw the plans for the restoration. Not even a secret broom closet. It was a total gut, and the new place is all open plan and modern. But I get where you’re going. Rochester didn’t kill his wife—he’s still got her shut up somewhere.” She gave a snort. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he had a dozen wives locked up somewhere.” “No,” I said quickly. “I meant she could be hiding. Just a wild thought.” “It’s a fun idea. But I doubt it. Hallie supervised the construction, she’d have known if there was any conceivable place to hide.” Ella refilled our cups. “Do you want to see the plans?” “Sure. Do you have them?” “No, but Hallie probably does. I’ll call her and get her to send you a scan. I’ve thrown a few referrals her way—she owes me.” “Great.” Maybe they’d give some answers. Help me figure out what was reality and what was just my ever-active imagination. The plans arrived via email from the architectural office of Hallie R. Bookman that evening. I scrutinized them carefully. They were exactly like Ella had described—all modern and clean lines. Exactly as the rooms I’d been in so far at Thorn Bluffs all appeared to be. But I’d never been to the top floor where Evan and Beatrice had had separate bedroom suites. Things could be changed after construction, couldn’t they? Rooms rebuilt. Walls moved. I looked up at the sound of a distant rumble outside. It grew quickly to a deafening roar. The chopper returning to the helipad. I felt a quick thrill. How long will it be until I see him? I saved the plans to a file and clicked it shut. The next evening, he was waiting for me in the motor court with Pilot and the two shepherds when I came up to fetch Pilot for his walk. “There you are,” he said. As if I had obstinately kept him waiting. “Yeah, here I am.” My tone was breezy. But my heart was scudding. Once again, we fell immediately into easy conversation, as if it hadn’t been five days since we last were together but just five hours. I described Sophia’s essay. Her future career as a fashion designer. Doves hatching on Lady Gaga’s hat. “It was truly brilliant,” I said. “So she’s making improvement?” “She is, yeah.” “And she’s stopped acting out?” “Not entirely, no. I think she needs more attention. From you, I mean. You need to spend more time with her.” “Time is the one thing I’m short on right now. When all this is wrapped up, I’ll have plenty of time for Sophia.” “By then she might not have any time for you,” I said sharply. He narrowed his eyes with irritation. Then gave a relenting grunt. “I’ll have dinner with her tonight. How’s that?” “It’s a start. A good start if you can keep from answering your phone before dessert.” “Christ,” he muttered. The dogs had roamed too far out in the brush, and he whistled to herd them back in. A question was forming in my mind. A risky question, but my curiosity was too intense not to try to get an answer to it. I said, “Something has stained the wood flooring in the Ocean Room. I wondered what it was. A refinisher might be able to get it out.” Was it my imagination, or for one brief moment did something dark cross his face? Dark and terrible. But it vanished instantly, if it had been there at all, and he spoke easily. “My wife once threw an open bottle of wine at Raymond Thurkill, who used to be my estate manager. I plan to redo that room. It’s too feminine for my taste. I’ll have the floors refinished then.” Easy answers. I said nothing further about it. But when I parted from Evan in the compound, Rick McAdams’s warning flashed in my mind. You don’t really know who you’re dealing with. And a week later, it became clear to me that I didn’t. FOURTEEN “Where are those blasted girls?” Otis grumbled. I was sitting beside him in the Explorer, the largest vehicle of the Thorn Bluffs fleet. “I just texted Sophia,” I said. “They’ll be right out.” It was the Fourth of July. Over a month of my precious three had now flown by. Evan was throwing a fireworks party for his employees, which we were attending, on a beach above Santa Cruz, about seventy miles up the coast. Otis leaned on the horn. Minutes later, Sophia clambered into the back seat, followed by a girl from her tennis clinic, Peyton Dreyer. She’d recently become Sophia’s best friend, and Sophia spent as many overnights at Peyton’s as she could wheedle permission for. They now sported nearly identical outfits—jeans with sparkly heart and kitten patches and splashy cropped jackets. Their eyelids were greased with iridescent blue swoops that reminded me of hummingbird wings. “What do you two have on your eyes?” Otis said. Peyton issued a do-I-really-have-to-explain-this? sigh. “It’s statement makeup. Because we’re attending an event.” “It’s a statement,” Sophia echoed. I swiveled. “I think you both look gorgeous.” Sophia beamed. Peyton took it as her due and munched on a strand of hair. She was a year older than Sophia, with a pretty, slightly pushed-in face, half screened by curtains of brown hair. She exuded an attitude of privilege. It made me uneasy to see Sophia copy her. Otis cracked a can of soda. I caught a whiff of cherry. “What’s that?” I asked. “Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda. Diet.” “It’s gross,” Sophia remarked. “There’s boxes and boxes of it in the pantry.” Otis began to pull out of the compound, steering one-handed. “Beatrice drank it,” he said. “It disguised the aftertaste of her meds.” “Did you ever bring a glass of it to the tower?” I asked him. “You kidding? Told you I never go near that place.” “Somebody did. There was a glass with dregs of it.” “Jeez, Jane. Did you go in there? I told you nobody was allowed.” “I almost went in once,” Sophia put in. “But there was a tarantula climbing up the door, and it freaked me out, so I didn’t.” “You’re making that up,” Otis said. “We don’t have tarantulas.” “There are totally tarantulas in central California.” Peyton was something of a know-it-all. “Extremely large ones. They’re hairy and have fangs, and the females devour the males after they mate. And sometimes if she doesn’t want to mate with him, she kills him first. Before he can copulate with her. And then she devours him.” “That is so gross,” Sophia said. “No, it’s not,” Peyton said haughtily. “It’s just natural.” “Let’s have some music.” Otis began streaming an emo-rock mix to vocal disgust from the back seat. They plugged into their phones and leaned their two heads together, swiping and tapping and giggling. We meandered in heavy holiday traffic up the peninsula coast road. After about an hour and a half, we turned off the highway to a dusty parking area. We tramped down a packed-dirt path to a beach of pebbly brown sand, where a small crowd was already densely encamped on blankets and tarps. Kids raced between the tarps. EDM throbbed from towering speakers. An intern—young, floppy haired, East Indian—corralled us. “I’m Khalim. I’ve been on the lookout for you guys. There’s a space for you reserved down in front.” He led us zigzag through the crowd. I glimpsed Evan, who had come down early in the morning to supervise the setup. He was surrounded by people, with others hovering for their turn. We spread out our tarp on the reserved space. Otis scavenged, returned with a bounty—Cokes, Tecate, ballpark snacks. Sophia and Peyton grabbed Cokes and bags of Wavy Lay’s. We began to get in full party swing. “Hey, there’s Malik!” Otis waved to a nearby couple with three gangly teenage boys. The dad saluted Otis. I recognized him—Malik Anderson, Evan’s chief lawyer, whose sleek red Porsche coupe was a regular in the motor court. I had exchanged small talk with him from time to time—a charmer with freckled black skin, a buffed bald head, canny dark eyes. Always exquisitely dressed—even the windbreaker he had on now looked bespoke. Peyton and Sophia began to rustle and preen and strum their hair, sidling glances at Malik’s sons. The boys began to roughhouse, fully aware they were being checked out. The girls soon ditched Otis and me to join them. Then Otis sprang up. “I’ll fetch us more eats.” I found myself alone. But not lonely. It was a beautiful evening. The sun was settling plumply on the ocean like a fat orange hen onto a dark nest. There’d be fireworks soon, and I loved fireworks. I felt exquisitely alive, as if I’d had a long illness and was finally coming back to health. I caught a scrap of Evan’s voice and saw him approach Malik’s tarp. He dropped down beside Sophia and Peyton, began talking to them, and whatever he was saying made them preen again and giggle with delight. Sophia said something, and he laughed in that full-throated way that I loved. I felt a warmth pulse through me. He caught my eye and smiled. He gave Sophia’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze, then jumped up and came over to me. “What took you so long?” he said. “We were just a little late. Sophia and Peyton wanted to look special.” “They succeeded.” He reached for my bottle of Tecate, took a swig. Handed it back. “Sophia’s coming into her looks. She could become a knockout.” “I’m sure of it.” “She’s coming into her brains too. Or at least some of them. I can thank you for that.” I flushed happily. “She just needed a little more confidence. Maybe I’ve helped her get that.” “What do you think of the friend? She seems like a pretty self-possessed kid.” “I’m not sure what I think yet. She’s got a lot of influence with Sophia. It might not be such a good thing.” “If it’s her influence that’s getting Sophia to wear clothes that cover her backside, that’s not a bad thing.” He slouched himself back onto his elbows. He was wearing the black denim jacket he’d tucked over me in the back of Hector’s truck. I remembered the sensation of his body’s warmth seeping through me. I looked away from him, made a pretense of surveying the crowd. “This is a fantastic party. It’s very generous of you to do it.” He made a disparaging sound. “Nothing compared to what I used to do. But next year . . .” His voice became playful. “Next year I’ll have three times the crowd. Four. I’ll get whoever does the Macy’s fireworks to do them for me. And a top DJ. Or else a live act. Who would you like to hear?” Did he assume I’d be here a year from now? “Anybody at all?” I said. “Anybody. I’ll book them.” “Okay, David Bowie, then. Or Prince. Or wait, Aretha. Definitely Aretha.” He stared at me, suddenly not playful. “There’s a lot I can do. But I can’t bring back the dead.” I flushed again, this time deeply. “I’m sorry, that was stupid. I shouldn’t have . . .” My voice trailed off. He grabbed my Tecate again and drained it. He looked suddenly very happy. “It’s all happening for me, Jane,” he said. “It’s all finally coming together.” “With your deal, you mean?” “Yeah, with Genovation. All the financing is clicking into place. It’s been tough. Christ, really tough. I gave them everything they asked for, but they kept wanting more, more. I was damaged goods. I get it. All the damned rumors about me. But now it’s all going to happen.” “So you won’t lose Thorn Bluffs?” I said. He smiled. “No, I won’t. I came close, though. Very close to losing everything. The jackals were circling. They were just waiting to get to my corpse. But they’re going to be disappointed. I’m going to recoup every nickel I’ve lost and a hell of a lot more.” I diverted my eyes. “That’s good. I’m happy for you.” “Are you?” he said. That he was about to become preposterously rich? I wasn’t. Not in the least. I looked back at him. “Of course I am. You’ve worked hard and taken risks. I’m happy it’s all paying off for you.” “And what if it had gone the other way? If I’d lost everything, my money, my property? Even my freedom?” I felt suddenly like a cold shadow had passed through me. Like the shadow of a premonition. As if what he’d described—losing everything, even his freedom—these were things that were actually going to happen. “Would you still stick by me if I went bust?” he pursued. “Or would you drop me cold and walk away?” “That’s a ridiculous question,” I said. “What difference would it make to me if you lost your money?” “Most of these people here, it would make all the difference. They’d be off in a shot.” “They’re your employees, not your friends. Your real friends would stick by you.” He looked at me intensely. “You are my friend, aren’t you?” His voice was low. “I think you are.” Just a friend? Was that how he thought of me? Except everything in his eyes, his expression, was telling me differently, that he was as drawn to me as I was to him. Could I be that wrong? Not even the most proficient liar in the world, even a sociopath, could fake that kind of emotion. Could they? He glanced up. Malik Anderson was approaching us. “Hey, Malik. Do you know Jane?” “Of course I do, the Thorn Bluffs cottage dweller. We’ve met several times.” Malik smiled at me with melting charm. “Enjoying the party?” “I am, very much.” He said to Evan, “We need to talk a second. I just heard from Saroyan’s people.” Evan leaped up. “Problem?” “A few issues with the term sheets. Nothing major, but better to deal with them now. There’s good cell reception in the setup tent.” Malik gave me a rueful smile. “Sorry, Jane, I’ll have to steal him away.” “I understand.” I glanced at his family’s tarp. “Where did the kids go?” “To the grill station to grab some burgers.” I rose to my feet. “I think I’ll go check on them.” “Tell them the show is going to start soon,” Evan said. “It’s almost dark.” He turned with Malik toward a white flat-topped tent pitched near the water. I began threading through the crowd, running into Otis carrying an overloaded cardboard tray. “Where are you going?” he said. “I was just bringing us dinner.” “The fireworks are about to start. I’m going to fetch the girls from the grill station.” “Good idea. There’s a lot of weed around.” The music amped up. A Sousa march, all brassy patriotism. A far cry from the Queen of Soul. The crowd stirred in anticipation. I continued on to the grill station set up just past the footpath to the parking area. As I approached the path, a woman heading down from it waved at me. Someone I knew. “Hi, excuse me!” As she came closer, I realized I didn’t know her; she was a stranger who simply reminded me of someone else. She was dressed more for a cocktail party than a brisk California beach. Sleeveless linen dress with a short skirt. High wedge sandals. The gauzy pale-pink scarf lassoing her neck was for fashion, not warmth. “Excuse me,” she repeated. “Do you have any idea where I could find Evan Rochester?” “I was just with him,” I said. “He was heading to the setup tent.” “Where would that be? I’m in something of a hurry. I’ve got to get to another event in Cupertino.” That explained the cocktail gear. “Keep going toward the water. You’ll see the top of a white pitched tent.” “Are you sure he’s there?” Her peremptory tone made me take an instant and pronounced dislike to her. “No, I’m not sure,” I said curtly. “But even if he’s not, he’s pretty easy to spot. He’s tall with dark curly hair . . .” “I know exactly what he looks like.” There was now a proprietary note to her voice that made me dislike her even more. It didn’t help that she was strikingly lovely. Long limbed. Slender. A cap of shiny dark hair accentuating an oval face and almond-shaped dark eyes. “Good,” I said. “You’ll have no trouble finding him.” Her face tilted a little. Appraising me. “You’re not with his company, are you?” “No.” “So who are you with? One of the VCs? Hagersly Brothers?” “No,” I said. “I’m just with myself.” She narrowed her eyes, seemingly torn between curiosity and suspicion. The rim of the sun blazed briefly, then blinked out below the horizon, and the breeze coming off the water freshened. She hunched her shoulders in a shiver. “It’s freezing on this beach.” “It usually is at this time of day. It helps to dress for it.” That face tilted again. “Yes. Well, thanks for your help.” She turned away, and as she did, a gust of wind sluiced under her scarf, causing it to flutter high up her long neck. I glimpsed a birthmark on the nape. An ugly birthmark. Large. Reddish purple. Parabolic in shape and slightly puckered. Or no, not a birthmark. More like a scar. Maybe from a burn? She was obviously eager to keep it hidden: she quickly yanked the scarf back over it and knotted the ends more securely, and only then did she continue on into the crowd. I watched her thread her way through the sand with difficulty in those ridiculous heels. Someone shouted her name, and she turned. “Laura,” it had sounded like. Or it might have been “Lana.” It had been mostly swallowed by the surf. But definitely a name that began with an L. There was a loud sizzling. A white snake writhed up into the sky and exploded into twin white chrysanthemums above the ocean’s black horizon. “Hey, Otis?” I was the designated driver on the way back. The girls, having gorged on junk food and flirting and illicit gulps of beer, were sound asleep in the back, and Otis was nodding out as well. “Yeah?” he muttered. “There was a woman who arrived late tonight. In her late twenties, very pretty, short dark hair. She looked dressed for a cocktail party.” “Didn’t notice.” “Her name was something like Laura or Lana. And she’s got a kind of a scar on the back of her neck.” He turned a puzzled face. “What are you talking about?” “A girl who was looking for Evan. I thought maybe she was the one who had sent him the tulips.” “What tulips?” “There was a vase of white tulips delivered when Evan was first setting up his office. A large bunch, not open yet. Do you remember?” “Oh yeah. Were they tulips? I thought they were some kind of lilies.” Then he was asleep, snoring lightly.