Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  “Kill her.” I fail to keep the disgust out of my voice.

  He gives me a sideways look. “Don’t get like that. For chrissake, isn’t that what you’re getting at, here? Waving that gun around? Because, darling, we’re not going to be able to just let her go. She’ll go straight to the police.”

  “I’m aware of that.” But he shrugs, skeptical, as if he can’t quite envision me as a murderer. And I wonder, with a jolt of panic, if this is the gaping hole in the plan, after all: the plausibility of me killing in cold blood, if I needed to.

  Snowflakes are catching in his eyebrows; he wipes his face violently with the arm of his coat. “Jaysus, this fucking snow.” He stumbles and rights himself. “Just so you know, you can’t just shoot her, either. It’s going to have to look like suicide, yeah? Good news is that her family is barmy—her mum offed herself, and there’s that schizo brother of hers. No one’s gonna question it.”

  “You already had it figured out, then. How you were going to do her in.”

  “Sedative in the martini, knock her out, string her up from the staircase. Boom: She hung herself. Hell, I thought maybe I’d even talk her into doing herself in. She’s halfway there already, the loony git.” He kicks petulantly through another hillock of snow. “That plan won’t work now. We’ll have to come up with another way. An accident, maybe. She fell in the lake and drowned?”

  The lake appears out of nowhere, a black void suddenly opening up at our feet. Vanessa is waiting for us on the edge of the shore, her hands jammed in her pockets, pale face moonlike in the dark. Her hair is so full of melted snow that it’s starting to freeze into icicles around her face.

  “There.” She points to a stone boathouse, just a few steps farther down the shore. The building huddles there in the trees, buried in snow, waiting.

  * * *

  —

  Michael kicks the snowdrifts from the threshold of the boathouse so that we can pry the door open (the wood splintering under his grip) and then we’re standing inside, out of the storm. The interior is cavernous, a damp stone cathedral. The lake softly laps at the dock under our feet; there’s a rustling coming from up in the eaves. Something huge looms above us in the dark: a yacht, battened down for the winter. The silvery script along its side reads Judybird.

  Michael and I stand staring dumbly up at this strange apparition. Then there’s a terrible grinding sound that echoes off the stones and sends me reaching for the gun. But when the spotlights click on overhead I see that it’s just the rusty boat-lift hydraulics, slowly lowering the yacht to the lake’s surface.

  Vanessa stands at the edge of the boathouse, her hand on a switch, watching the Judybird sink down, down, down, until finally it’s back in the water and rocking gently in its own wake.

  “How about that,” Michael mutters.

  I’ve got the gun out again. I keep it loosely trained on Vanessa as she walks around the yacht, unsnapping the protective canvas cover sheathing the back of the boat with surprisingly steady hands. She heaves the cover to the side of the deck, wipes dirt from her cheek, and then turns to us.

  “You coming?”

  We climb aboard.

  * * *

  —

  The Judybird isn’t an enormous yacht, as far as yachts go, but it’s obvious that it was once a fairly impressive boat, all polished wood and chrome. Neglect has done a number on it. On the Judybird’s upper deck stuffing oozes from cracks in the leather upholstery, and yellow stains mar the paint along the bridge. The aluminum safety bars that line the prow are rusty. An orange lifeboat lies deflated on the lower deck, its wooden oars scattered across the stern.

  What kind of people just leave their yacht to rot in the dark? I wonder. Such wasteful decadence. A familiar coil of resentment unspools in my chest and I seize it: Use your anger. I hoist the gun even higher. My hand isn’t sweaty anymore.

  A few feet from where we stand in the stern, there’s a door; and when Vanessa opens it, we can see a staircase vanishing down into the darkness. The boat’s cabin. A rank smell—mold, rot, forgotten things—rises up through the open door.

  “There are two bedrooms down there, plus a living room and a galley,” Vanessa says. “The bedroom on the right—that’s where the safe is. Just above the vanity, you press the wooden panel and it swings open.”

  Michael turns to Vanessa. “What’s the code to the safe?”

  “My mother’s birthday: 092757,” she says.

  He peers down the stairwell. “It’s dark. Is there power down there?”

  “There’s a light switch, at the bottom of the stairs.”

  He swivels his head and looks at me. “I’ll go check it out. You keep an eye on her.”

  He takes a step down the stairs, ducks his head to avoid the low doorjamb, and lifts his phone over his head. The flashlight sheds a thin blue light into the hallway below. He hesitates, takes one more step—my pulse is going wild—and another and he’s clear of the door and that’s when I kick Michael square in the rear.

  He pitches forward, falling down the remaining steps—I catch just one flash of his expression of shock, illuminated by the tumbling light of his phone—and then Vanessa is beside me, heaving the door closed and shoving an oar through the handle to jam it shut.

  Vanessa and I stand on the deck staring at each other, motionless, just listening.

  There’s a groan, and then a howl of anger. “Bitches!” His voice is muffled. I hear him running up the steps, a lopsided gait—he probably twisted his ankle—and then I can hear him banging on the other side of the door. “Fucking let me out!”

  His Irish lilt is finally gone.

  I turn to Vanessa. She’s breathing heavily, her fingers clawing at the skin on the back of her hands, leaving bloody welts. “Will the door hold?”

  “I think so?” She doesn’t look convinced.

  It’s a relief to finally put the gun down, to shake out my shoulder and flex my palm until the circulation comes back to my hand. “OK,” I say to her, “let’s go.”

  * * *

  —

  Vanessa finds another switch in the boathouse wall and the rolling door at the far end of the building starts to rise, creaking and groaning in its track. Halfway up, the door gets stuck—maybe from ice, or maybe it’s just rusted shut from lack of use. Vanessa’s eyes go wide with alarm, and I think, Oh God what now, but then the door shudders and lifts free. In a minute, we are peering straight out at the lake, where the snow is coming down so thick you can barely see five feet in front of you.

  Another little lurch of panic, as Vanessa fishes a key from a drawer in the cockpit and turns it in the ignition and nothing happens; but when she tries it a second time, the engine kicks to life and roars. The Judybird vibrates in its berth, like a dog straining at the leash.

  She turns off the lights on the boat, and we motor slowly out into the storm.

  I can hear Michael slamming around the locked chambers belowdecks, screaming curses. The oar in the handle shudders, but holds. He starts banging on the ceiling, making the fiberglass vibrate under our feet.

  “You OK?” I ask Vanessa. She sits in the cockpit, steering straight out into the veil of snow like she’s done this every night of her life. She’s eerily calm now.

  “Oh, I’m fine! I’m great!” But I can see how tightly she’s gripping the wheel, the welts on her hands purple and raw from the cold. “You? You were so convincing, but it also looked like you might lose your lunch back there in the kitchen.”

  “I almost did,” I say. She laughs, a giddy little trill, although I wasn’t trying to be funny. I wonder whether she is completely disconnected from reality, or if she’s just in denial about what’s happening. Michael thumps once—hard—directly underneath her chair and her eyebrows shoot up, then settle back in place.

  Vanessa drives straight out into the dark, and
I pray that she knows where she’s going, because I can’t see a thing ahead of us. When we’re clear of the dock and a little ways out into the lake I turn around to look back at the lights of Stonehaven, but the shoreline has vanished entirely behind a curtain of snow. We might as well be on the moon.

  After a few minutes, Vanessa stops the boat. How far out into the lake are we? Maybe a half mile? I can’t tell, but it’s certainly far enough. In the short time that we’ve been out in the storm, a layer of snow has accumulated on the boat’s exposed surfaces. Down belowdecks, Michael has finally gone quiet, so when Vanessa cuts the motor an eerie stillness falls over the Judybird. The boat slaps up and down in the waves and Vanessa turns to meet my eyes and everything is so quiet. It feels like the calm before the storm; except that the storm is already raging all around us, snow coating our hair and catching in our eyelashes and melting on our freezing hands.

  I think about what is supposed to come next.

  * * *

  —

  “You need to go to the police,” I had said to her. “They’ll arrest him. Maybe there’s already a warrant out for his arrest, somewhere.”

  I sat on the bed in Vanessa’s room at the Chateau Marmont. My heart was bruised and hollow. The long day had left me with nothing but this one conviction: I did care about the mess I’d made. I cared enough to help Vanessa even if she didn’t realize that she needed me to do it. I cared enough to help her, even if it hurt me.

  Vanessa clutched the neck of her hotel bathrobe tight around her neck, covering the vulnerable hollow of her throat. “I already called the police,” she said. “They laughed at me.”

  “Right, but now you have me. I’ll testify against him.”

  She blinked at me. “But wouldn’t that mean you’d be implicated, too? As an accessory?”

  “In all likelihood.” I nodded and I swallowed, because that—another decade to add to my upcoming prison sentence—was what I had come to terms with during the drive from Echo Park to the Chateau Marmont. I was prepared to be noble, to take my lashes, to finally do the right thing. But she was already shaking her head, dismissing the idea out of hand.

  “No. No police. No big trial. No publicity. Think about it—Vanessa Liebling, taken in by a hustler? It’ll be everywhere, Vanity Fair, New York magazine, all the blogs. My whole family history dragged out into the light for everyone to gawk at. I’ll be absolutely destroyed. Benny, too. And then my baby, she’ll grow up and find out everything about who her father was. I can’t do that to her. She can’t ever know she’s an O’Brien; she has to be a Liebling.” She must have noticed the baffled expression on my face—that was what she was worried about?—because she shrugged, straightened up a little. “All I have left is my name.”

  “OK, then. We go up there and confront him together. Two against one, maybe he’ll leave on his own accord.”

  She shook her head again. “You said it yourself, he’s not going to just leave because we’ve asked him politely, is he? I think he’s fully capable of violence, don’t you? You should have seen what he did with my great-uncle’s sword.” The tendons of her neck worked up and down. “Besides, even if he does leave, I’ll still have to spend the rest of my life hiding from him—no way could I ever be online, because what if he somehow figures out that we have a kid together? He’ll come back, he’ll use her to get at me.” One of her hands crept to her stomach, cupped it protectively. “You know it’s true. Nothing is ever going to stop him as long as he thinks he has power over me.”

  She leaned in closer to me. She blinked at me, her breath sweet in my face. “We have to do something drastic. We have to show him that he can’t mess with us. We need leverage, something that will really scare him.”

  Silence fell on the room. Below, in the courtyard, a group of teenagers giggled in the hotel pool; a wineglass shattered on stone. I looked over to the console by the door, where I’d left the bag I’d brought with me: a paper lunch sack, stuffed with papers.

  “I think I might have something,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  I pick up the gun again and point it at the door while Vanessa creeps forward and removes the oar, then flings the door open. We both flinch, waiting for Michael to explode out the door. There isn’t anything dangerous down there—at least Vanessa didn’t think there was—but who knows what could be repurposed into a weapon? A lamp, a fork, a coffee table.

  Instead, we see him sitting there at the top of the stairs, blinking out at us from the dark.

  He stands, his eyes moving from the gun in my hand to the lake beyond my shoulder, likely trying to pinpoint exactly where we are. Then he steps out onto the deck, his shoes squeaking in the snow.

  “So, what now?” he snarls. “You gonna make me walk the plank?”

  Vanessa and I look at each other. I recall Vanessa’s shivery whisper as she sat beside me in the hotel room last night, the fragility of her voice undercutting the darkness of her plan. (Vanessa, the privileged heiress, a natural con underneath it all.) First he has to think you’re on his side, so that he drops his guard, she said. I’ll figure out a way to get him out of the house and down to the boat. Out on the lake, he’ll be vulnerable. Out there, we’ll be in control. But here’s the thing: He has to think we are capable of killing him.

  “It would probably be easier just to shoot you,” I say now.

  “This is madness.” He shivers, blows on his hands, looks imploringly at Vanessa. “You could’ve just let me go, for chrissake. I’m no threat to you.”

  Vanessa moves a little, so that I’m standing in between him and her. “I’m not so sure that’s true.”

  “You, then.” He turns to me. “Shit, Nina. You’ve given me a good scare. So, OK, you win. Take me back to Stonehaven and I’ll go away. Let’s just the both of us forget that we ever met this loony bird and her tomb of a home.”

  “Shut up!” Vanessa screams at him. I can hear her breath accelerating, hot little puffs just behind my ear, she must be near hyperventilation; and I think, Please pull yourself together.

  He ignores her, flaps his hand at her as if she’s an annoying little gnat that can be dismissed with a wave.

  Meanwhile, I say nothing, and he must sense that as an opportunity—after all, I am still the one with the gun—because he keeps talking, his voice hoarse and dry. “You don’t need her. I have money hidden away, we could share that.” And then: “Why are you siding with her anyway? She hates you. You hate her!” Finally, creeping closer, his voice soft and cajoling (the same voice that has seduced more women than I can count, coaxed them away from rationality, spun them into self-doubt—now finally turned against me): “You love me. I love you.”

  I am hypnotized, half-frozen, but this finally jolts me back to life. “Love? Hardly. You called the cops on me. You conspired with my mother. I was just another mark you could use to your advantage.”

  He laughs. “OK. Touché. But murder is a whole different playing field, my love. Do you really have it in you to kill me, for God’s sake?”

  “Do you?” I reply.

  He doesn’t answer. The wind has picked up. His breath billows in ghostly plumes around him as he squints at me through the swirling snow.

  I feel Vanessa’s hand pressing gently against the base of my spine. Go on.

  “Look: We could kill you, if we wanted to,” I say. “But here’s what we’re offering you instead. We’re going to drop you off at the Chambers Landing pier, and you can make your way into town by yourself from there. You will leave Tahoe entirely, as soon as the roads clear. You will not return to Stonehaven, or make any kind of contact with Vanessa or me, ever again. If you do, we will send copies of these to the police.”

  At this, Vanessa reaches into her parka, and retrieves a paper sack from the inside pocket. She holds it out in the air between us all, and then—as if unclear what else to do—she
simply lets go. The bag falls to the deck; and out slide the documents that I found hidden in the bathroom of Michael’s condominium.

  In the pile are fake identity papers that date back a dozen years: passports, driver’s licenses, bank paperwork, government IDs. There’s a passport for Lachlan O’Malley in there; but also one for Lachlan Walsh, and another one for Brian Walsh, and one for Michael Kelly with stamps from several South American countries. Driver’s licenses for Ian Burke, Ian Kelly, Brian White, all with the same familiar face but different states of origin. There are even two marriage certificates in the pile—Arizona and Washington, neither with names I recognize—and a University of Texas college ID for Brian O’Malley dated 2002. In the photo, his hair is in a buzz cut and he’s wearing a muscle tee.

  “Fuck me.” He leans over to study the pile, his chest rising and falling.

  “And there’s this, too.” I fish a small tape recorder out of my jacket pocket. “I recorded everything you said on the walk down to the boathouse just now. About your exact intentions for Vanessa. Behave yourself, or the police will get that, too.”

  “Blackmail, eh?” His eyes slide up to meet mine. “That’s a new one. Your mom teach you that trick?” He smiles, as if amused, but I can see the tightness in his lips, the churning behind his eyes.

  On the very top of the pile of IDs, now dusted with snow, is the passport for Michael O’Brien that we found in the oatmeal box. He leans down to pick this up, wipes the snow from it, and gazes thoughtfully at the photo. I wonder what he’s seeing as he looks at his one true self.