Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  The odds are slim that Vanessa will ever see how diligently we’ve worked on our social media profiles for her sole benefit. There are thousands of other Michael O’Briens and Ashley Smiths online; it will be difficult for her to locate our particular set in a sea of them. But if she looks hard enough, there we will be, with just enough of an Internet presence to assuage any fears. After all, if you aren’t willing to display yourself for public dissection these days, people assume you must be devious and unworthy of trust.

  A little poking around and Vanessa will be reassured that Ashley and Michael are just as normal as we said we were in our rental-site profile. A nice creative young couple from Portland, taking a year off from our lives to travel across America and work on creative projects. We’ve always wanted to spend time at Lake Tahoe, we wrote her; we’re even thinking of staying through the snowfall to get some skiing in. That sounds so lovely, Vanessa had written back almost immediately. It’s a quiet time of year, you can stay as long as you like.

  How long will we stay? Exactly as long as it takes to infiltrate her life, uncover Stonehaven’s secrets, and rob her blind. And at this thought, I feel a little stab of satisfaction, something vindictive and small that I know I need to suppress. Don’t make this personal. Don’t make this about the past.

  Lachlan finishes his soda, crumples his napkin, tosses it in the direction of the snarling wooden bear that looms behind us. The napkin lands in the bear’s open mouth and lodges there, snagged on splintered incisors. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he says.

  Dusk comes early in the mountains. The rain begins not long after we leave the restaurant, a fine gray mist, making the road slick and perilous. Long-haul trucks belch their way up the mountain in the slow lane; four-wheel-drive SUVs jacked up on hydraulics whiz past us on the left; we, in Lachlan’s vintage BMW, stay steady in the center lane. (One should always drive the speed limit when one has fake Oregon license plates on one’s car.) At Donner Pass the mountains already have a crust of dirty snow on the highest peaks, and it gleams in the waning light.

  Nothing about this part of the drive feels familiar to me. I’ve only been on this length of highway once, the day that my mother and I fled Tahoe, down the hill toward an uncertain future. And yet I carefully study the damp pines and mountain lakes we pass, nerves on edge, waiting for that nostalgic ping of recognition.

  It comes once we descend toward Tahoe City, and the highway begins paralleling the Truckee River. Suddenly the curves of the road have a kinetic familiarity. Each passing landmark tugs at me with a flash of recognition: a German restaurant in a crumbling chalet that flies by in the mist; a log cabin with a tin roof huddling in a clearing down by the water; the raw granite of the river boulders, water descending down their faces. They come back to me as visual echoes: memories surfacing from the bottom of a mind that long ago paved over them with more pressing concerns.

  It’s dark by the time we come to the edge of Tahoe City, with its low huddle of shops. We turn right just before town in order to follow the lakeshore south. As we drive farther from town, the vacation homes grow larger, newer, denser; classic A-frames make way for behemoth ski homes with two-story windows and wraparound decks. The pines grow closer to the edge of the road. A snowless ski resort flies past, its dirt slopes carved up with paths from the mountain bikers of the previous summer.

  Occasionally, we get glimpses of the lake from between the houses, a dark void, drawn up for the winter. The pleasure boats are already dry-docked, to remain covered until May. Even the pier lights have been turned off for the season. I remember this about November at Tahoe, how it felt like you were stuck in a kind of no-man’s-land: the summer crowd departed and the skiers yet to arrive, the sun absent but the snow still holding off, everything quiet and still and dormant. A useless chill, devoid of winter pleasures, too damp and cold to even hike. The locals scurrying about their errands like squirrels, hoarding acorns for winter.

  Lachlan and I drive the last few miles in silence. I stare out at the trees, mulling over my story, puzzling at the edges of the narrative we’d conceived—Ashley and Michael—until the pieces feel like they fit together smoothly enough. A strange mood has come over me, a churning mix of anticipation and nostalgia, a feeling that something is lurking in the shadow of the pines that I should be trying harder to see. I don’t realize that my knee is jittering until Lachlan puts a hand on my leg to steady it.

  “Having second thoughts, love?” He looks at me askance, squeezes my thigh with long warm fingers.

  The weight of his hand on my leg anchors me. I weave my fingers between his. “Not at all. Are you?”

  He gives me a bemused look. “Too late now, isn’t it? She’s expecting us before bedtime. If we don’t show up she might call the cops and God knows that’s the last thing we need.”

  And then the address is before us. From the road, you wouldn’t even know the estate was there. The property is unmarked, just a high stone wall with an iron gate along Lake Shore Drive. Lachlan buzzes at the intercom and has barely taken his finger off when the gate creaks open, squeaking on its iron hinges. The driveway stretches into the pines, which are softly lit from underneath by solar lights. I roll down my window and sniff at the air. It smells like damp things: tree roots and decomposing needles and the moss growing down at the lake. It stirs something inside me, a familiar juvenile melancholia: Those lights, the way they dance like spirits in the wind-tossed trees. The mist, the way it reflects diamonds in our headlights. Something magical is here in this grove; all the possibility of my past youth gathering here again, feelings I’d long ago forgotten.

  We pass a grass tennis court, the net sagging with mildew, and a handful of small wooden outbuildings: maids’ quarters, a butlers’ cabin, all dark and shuttered. Down the tree-lined slope toward the lake, I glimpse the boathouse, a hulking stone structure that hugs the shore. Finally, the road makes a sharp turn and Stonehaven shoots up before us like a great gray ghost in the gloom. I make a strange sound in my throat despite myself. I’d spent so long looking at photos of the house online, but they hadn’t steeled me for the familiar coldness of Stonehaven, monumental and admonishing.

  The mansion is an anachronism, a stone monolith crouching under the dense pines of Tahoe’s West Shore, timbered and guarded like some sort of medieval fortress. The house hinges at its center, the two wings connected by a three-story stone tower with narrow windows at its peak; it stands watch, like a castle keep, as if girded for an onslaught of intruders. Two chimneys bookend the home, stones mossy and streaked orange with age. The entire house is surrounded by a portico, with the trunks of enormous pine trees serving as pillars. Everything about the house that isn’t stone is shingled and painted brown, presumably to blend in with its natural surroundings; but it also gives visitors the sense that the house itself is retreating into the darkness of an encroaching forest.

  Stonehaven. Three stories, forty-two rooms, 18,000 square feet, plus seven outbuildings. I’d done some reading before we drove up, dug up a handful of photos in a back issue of Heritage Home magazine. The house was built in the early 1900s by the first American-born Liebling, a Gold Rush opportunist who had lifted his family out of their immigrant poverty and launched them into the new century as American aristocrats. At the turn of the last century Lake Tahoe had already become the chosen summer residence of the West Coast industrialist tribes. Liebling bought himself a mile of pristine lakefront forest, built his pile, and settled in to study his fellow millionaires across the lake.

  Somehow the family has hung on to all that land, five generations on. The house itself has been largely untouched since the day it was built, other than the occasional interior decorating whims of the successive residents.

  Lachlan stops the car in the drive and we stare at the house together. There must be something audibly wrong about the way I’m breathing—as in, I’ve practically stopped altogether—because h
e turns to me, his expression growing suspicious. His grip on my leg is suddenly too tight. “I thought you said you didn’t remember much about this place?”

  “I don’t remember much,” I lie, oddly reluctant to tell him the truth. He holds his cards close; I will hold mine. “Honestly, I don’t. I only came here three or four times, and that was over a decade ago.”

  “You look disoriented. You need to pull it together.” His voice is even and low, but I can hear the frustration building behind it. I am too emotional; this has always been his diagnosis of me, from the very beginning. You can’t be emotional when you’re pulling a con; emotion makes you vulnerable.

  “Not disoriented. It’s just odd, that’s all, to be back here again after all this time.”

  “This was your idea. I just want you to remember that if this somehow gets cocked up.”

  I push his hand off my leg. “I am fully aware of that. And I’m not going to cock it up.” I look up at the house, smoke coming from one of the great chimneys, lights burning in every window. “I’m Ashley. You’re Michael. We’re on vacation. We’re surprised and delighted at how lovely the house is. Never been to Tahoe before, always wanted to come, so excited to see the area.”

  Lachlan nods. “Good girl.”

  “No need to be patronizing.”

  There is movement from the house in front of us. The front door swings open and a woman appears in a rectangle of light. Her blond hair glints in a halo around her, her face inscrutable in the shadows of the porch. She stands there watching us, arms folded tight against the cold, likely wondering why we’re just sitting there idling in her driveway. I reach across Lachlan and turn off the ignition.

  “Vanessa is watching us,” I observe. “Smile.”

  “I’m smiling,” Lachlan says. He flips on the radio, tunes it until he finds a classical station, and cranks it loud. Then he reaches out and hooks me around the neck and pulls me in for a long, lusty kiss, and I’m not sure whether it’s intended as an apology or a show for her. The lovebirds, taking a moment for themselves before they get out of the car.

  Then he pulls away, wipes his mouth, straightens his shirt. “OK. Let’s go meet our hostess.”

  7.

  Thirteen Years Earlier

  MY MOTHER AND I made the eight-hour drive from Las Vegas to Tahoe City on the day after I finished my freshman year of high school. The highway traced the border of Nevada and California, and as we drove north and west I could feel the temperature dropping, the oppressive desert heat making way for the mountain chill of the Sierra Nevada.

  I didn’t mind leaving Vegas behind. We’d been there two years—an eternity in our lives—and I’d hated every minute of it. There was something about the overwhelming heat of the place: the way the relentlessly beating sun made everyone laconic and mean, the way it drove you into the sterile embrace of air-conditioning. The halls of my high school smelled chronically like sweat, sharp and animal, as if the entire student body was living in a constant state of fear. Vegas didn’t feel like a place that anyone should actually live. Even though our apartment building was miles away from downtown, in a cookie-cutter stucco development that could have been torn from the sprawl of any western suburb, the shadows of the Strip still fell on our neighborhood. The whole city seemed to turn toward the money pit at its center: Why would anyone live there if they weren’t hustling for a quick buck?

  My mother and I had lived in the airport flight path and every few minutes you could look up and see the planes arriving, the transient hordes coming in for Mega Fortune and margaritas-by-the-foot. “Suckers.” My mother dismissed them, as though these suckers weren’t the whole reason my mom and I were there in the first place. Every night, she parked me in front of the TV and drove down to the casinos to try to rip those suckers off.

  But now we were headed to genteel Lake Tahoe, land of vacation homes and summer people and vintage wooden ski boats. “I found a place in Tahoe City, on the California side of the lake,” my mother explained as we drove. She had tied a scarf over her blond hair, movie-star style, as if she was sitting behind the wheel of a vintage convertible rather than a Honda hatchback with spotty air-conditioning. “It’s classier than South Shore, where the casinos are.”

  God, I wanted to believe her. We were going to be classy. And as we drove over the summit and then descended into the lake basin, it did feel like we were shedding our old selves, trying on new, better identities. I was going to be a scholar—I closed my eyes and imagined myself walking across a stage with a valedictorian scroll in my fist, Harvard inked on my cap. And my mother—well, she was going to be working the legal side of the casinos, which was a major achievement in itself. I studied the pines and let myself believe that the long list of places where we had lived might finally finish here, in a quiet mountain town where we could fulfill some previously missed potential.

  Call me naïve. You wouldn’t be wrong.

  Tahoe City, it turned out, wasn’t a city at all, but a woodsy little town that fronted on the lake. The town’s main drag was a lazy stretch of hamburger restaurants and ski rental shops, real estate agencies and art galleries selling mountain landscapes daubed in thick paint. The Truckee River spilled out of the lake at the south end of town, weaving its leisurely way down the mountain toward the distant valleys, its current dense with tourists in rubber boats and inner tubes.

  Nor was our new home an apartment: It was a cabin, on a quiet street that backed up to forest. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it—with its cheerful yellow paint, river-stone chimney, and window shutters with hearts cut from their centers, a promise of the happiness to be found inside. The front yard was a carpet of pine needles, softly rotting underfoot. The cabin was better maintained on the outside than the inside—the living room was dark and the carpet smelled like dust, the kitchen Formica chipped and the bedroom closets missing their doors. But every interior surface was covered with knotty pine, which made me feel like we were chipmunks, nesting inside a tree.

  We arrived at the beginning of June, just as the speedboats were coming out of winter storage and the boat ramps were backed up to the main road. Those first few weeks, I would walk down to the lake in the mornings to watch the boat boys throwing the rubber bumpers out over the ends of the piers, like fat squeaking hot dogs, and the restaurant owners pulling the sun umbrellas out of storage, killing the brown widows that had nested in the folds. At eight A.M. the surface of the lake was glass, so clear in the shallows that you could see the crawdads creeping along the silty floor below. By ten, the wakes from the speedboats and water-skiers would turn the surface into an icy chop. The lake was filled with snowmelt. It wasn’t really warm enough to swim in, not without a wet suit. Still, you couldn’t walk down the pier without some summer kid doing a cannonball off the end. They’d climb out a few minutes later, goose-pimpled and pale.

  I didn’t swim. I spent the summer on the shore, perched on a rusty lawn chair that I’d found abandoned in the sand one day, working my way through the reading list that my new school had provided me. The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tortilla Flat and A Lesson Before Dying. I was alone most of the time, but I didn’t mind: Friends were an afterthought for me, they always had been. Every evening, my mother girded herself in a spangled cobalt cocktail dress with a slit so high you could almost see her panties, and a name tag—Lily—pinned into her cleavage. She’d drive the forty-five minutes across the border into Nevada, where she’d serve watered-down G&Ts to poker players at the Fond du Lac Casino.

  I remember her elation the first night that she came home with a paycheck, like a child with a new toy she couldn’t wait to show off. I woke up to the smell of cigarette smoke and rancid cologne and there she was, sitting on the edge of my mattress, an envelope in her hands. She waved at me. “A paycheck, honey. So legit, right?” She ripped it open with gusto and pulled out the frail piece of paper, but something in her face colla
psed a little as she read the number on the check. “Oh. I didn’t realize they’d take out so much for taxes.” She stared at it for a while, then straightened up and smiled. “Well. I knew it was all about the tips. One guy tonight, he gave me a green chip for one drink. That’s twenty-five dollars. I hear once you get assigned the high-stakes tables, the players sometimes tip in hundreds.”

  But I heard something in her voice that worried me: a soft flicker of doubt about the path she was taking for my sake. She tugged at the collar of her dress and I could see the pale skin of her cleavage, rubbed red and raw by the sequined trim. I wondered whether the reason that my mom hadn’t been able to hold a real job until now was not because no one would hire her without a high school degree and a résumé, but because she didn’t really want to be hired.

  “I’ll get a job, too,” I reassured my mom. “You shouldn’t work at the casino if you hate it.”

  She stared down at the check and shook her head. “No, I should. It’s for you, baby, so it’s worth it.” She reached out and smoothed my hair against the pillow. “Your job here is to study. I’ll figure out the rest of it.”

  I started at North Lake Academy the day after Labor Day, the same day that the summer crowds vanished back down the mountain. The roads were suddenly empty of luxury SUVs; no more lines for brunch at Rosie’s. My mother drove me to school, still bleary-eyed and mascara-smeared from her late shift the night before, and as we pulled into the entrance she made a move to park and go in with me. I put a hand on her wrist before she could pull the keys from the ignition. “No, Mom. I can do this myself.”

  She stared out at the stream of kids pouring past our car, and then flashed a smile at me. “Of course, baby.”