by Tess Little
“I wanted it,” I whispered, “yes, but not like that. I was never that—”
“Desperate?” Kei offered.
Why weren’t—
“—you there?” Charlie said along with his character.
“Not that desperate,” I told Kei. “Like I said, I was very fortunate.”
“I told you I wouldn’t be,” Sabine answered, cold, from the screen, from the door. She walked toward Charlie, dragging each foot behind her—perfectly synchronized with the figure overhead. “And I thought I told you not to expect the impossible from me. Remember, you’ll only disappoint yourself.”
“I don’t think you could ever disappoint me.”
Sabine laughed with her image on the screen. Then paused. Raised an eyebrow. “And what about you? Are you going to fail me?”
“You know I can’t give an answer to that. I could tell you the chemical formula of lapis lazuli. I could bring you ancient Egyptian glass and ruins from Pompeii. I could make you a liquid gold. But predict our future? No, that would be impossible.” Charlie took Sabine into his arms, swung her body low, almost to the floor. His character overhead was walking toward hers. Placed a finger over her lips. “And if you expect that from me, you’ll only disappoint yourself.”
As his character kissed her onscreen, he bent his real-world head close to hers. She shut her eyes, expectant. The room watched. His lips moved closer.
Then he had dropped her on the floor and was walking away with his middle finger raised.
“Branleur! You…you son of a bastard,” she shouted, and pushed herself up to chase him out of the room. “Je te chie dans le cou! Je te pisse à la raie!”
Jerry clapped his hands with delight.
“Richard’s talent never lay in writing,” Kei whispered in my ear. Richard was sitting on the other couch, Honey’s head in his lap, smoking a cigar. His eyes followed the whooping actors; his free hand played with Honey’s top button. “But it’s fucking impossible to refuse him.”
* * *
—
The sunlight stretched, golden and buttery; it was getting late. As I climbed farther above the city in my rented car, the houses grew scarcer, the white walls gave way to dry grass and ferns. I passed tourists posing for photographs and dog-walkers and dogs. Hikers marched in Day-Glo sneakers, pumped their arms, stretched their muscles.
I knew why I did not feel elated, despite the end to my interrogation. Every subject my mind turned to was a nest of thorns, waiting to snag, to scratch and ensnare. There were the painful memories that the police had dredged up: my marriage to Richard, the lies I had told; the part I had played in preventing a young man from making his escape. There were all of my suspicions raised during the investigation, and then there was the knowledge of what I was returning to: Lillie’s questions about Honey, my inability to answer.
I could see Honey lying unconscious that night. I had seen it. I had been so sure I had seen it when I told the police. But how could I ignore my unease about him?
When Lillie had asked for one good reason not to trust Honey, there was nothing I could say. How could I confess my lie? And even then, even considering everything I knew about Richard, I wasn’t certain that Honey should be suspected. I had been thinking about it all week, in the run-up to my final interrogation session. And there were no conclusions. Honey unconscious; the press allegations.
Maybe, I told myself, my unease was just jealousy—that Lillie had chosen Honey, not me, to heal with, confide in. Lillie had kept her relationship with him secret all these years; she had known it would hurt. And it did. It felt like a betrayal: To find out they were close. To learn that over the past two weeks he had visited multiple times, that she had lied to me—or at least omitted to mention those visits—multiple times. I could not deny that hurt. And there was guilt, and there was shame, because I had been the one to break them apart. I had lied to Lillie when she asked me about the allegations; I had let her side with a monster. Now this was my punishment: their closeness, my helplessness.
Or maybe this wasn’t the origin of my unease. Maybe it was instinct—that something wasn’t quite right. I didn’t know. How could I forget that Honey, far more than any other guest, had reason to wish Richard dead?
Yet Honey was also the guest who loved Richard the most. And there lay the paradox that could not be ignored. Richard was central to each of our lives and we to his. We probably all had reason to wish Richard dead or gone, just as we all had reason to love him, to want him alive. This was the maddening thought: that if only I could view each guest’s love for Richard from the correct angle, the killer’s motive would be blindingly obvious.
I felt no closer to understanding than I had been that morning when I found my ex-husband’s body, touched my fingers to his cold neck.
My time in L.A. had begun with a terrible, brutal event. Instead of escaping, I had fallen deeper into chaos. I had been forced to face my dishonesty and I had lied again. I had spent time with my daughter, but she was further from me than she had ever been. I had researched my fellow guests, but this had only led to more questions, to knowledge of my own ignorance.
Everything was futile.
And so, as I drove back to Lillie’s, I tried to escape myself. I sped over the crests of the hills. I turned the music up until I couldn’t think. I put the roof down so my hair would whip my face. The wind was growing stronger but the air was thick with heat, and so it caressed my bare arms like a bedsheet. Each twist of the road brought a new view, and I was climbing higher and there were no more houses—just the sloping rock and dust to one side, far distance on the other.
* * *
—
“Seriously, man—she’s been creeping around that corner for the last half hour,” said Charlie, not taking his eyes from the tank.
“I’m telling you, honestly, she won’t escape,” Honey said, stretching out on his back in front of the couch. “She knows we’re still here.”
“She knows we’re here, she knows we’re here—and that’s supposed to calm me down?”
The ashtrays were stale, the lights low.
“You’re fucking paranoid. Eat something,” said Kei, throwing a bag of chips at Charlie.
It smashed into his chest. Miguel, sitting next to him, woke up, blinked around for a few seconds, then let his head fall back again.
“If we were all still,” Charlie said, “would she try to escape? Like if we were all asleep?”
Honey thought for a few moments. The music—now a murmur of Ellington—played in his silence. Kei lit a cigarette, perched on the arm of the couch. One leg was cocked—her elbow rested on it, rakish.
“Maybe,” said Honey. “I don’t know how well she can see—I don’t know if she can track our movements and position and shit.”
“Fuck,” Charlie said.
Kei walked over to him, took the chips, opened the bag, and waved it in his face. “Eat something.”
Charlie obeyed her order and began mechanically pushing handfuls into his mouth, crunching them to pulp.
“She can’t stay outside the tank for long, though.” Honey yawned and stretched his arms, then folded them under his head. His shirt had come untucked—a slip of his stomach visible. “Needs water to breathe.”
“But, hypothetically, couldn’t she, like, keep poking her tentacles in water or something?” Kei said, taking a drag. “Hop from glass to glass?”
“She wouldn’t get far,” I said. “They’re just full of alcohol.”
“True.”
I was sitting next to a snoozing Jerry, on the couch in front of the aquarium. I stood so I could observe the creature. Charlie was right: Persephone was propelling herself toward the corner and then back again, like a wildcat pacing its cage. It was an unnerving sight. As she pushed herself forward, her tentacles trailed straight lines behind; she glided over t
he rock bed like a phantom.
“Besides, she breathes through another part of her body,” Honey was saying. “Gills or whatever.”
Persephone came to a crawling halt in the filter-flap corner. Her tentacles lifted and snaked. I walked toward her and, as I neared, saw that she was stroking and circling, with two free limbs, the rock that concealed her escape.
“I wonder if she could get farther if it was raining,” said Kei. “Unlucky fuck to end up here.”
I pulled my gaze away from the beast—Tommo had materialized on the other side of the glass. His shirt was half untucked, in one hand was a bottle of champagne, and he was propping himself up on the tank. I joined him. The creature flinched with my movement.
“Of course,” he muttered. “Of course he wanted to own her.”
She crawled closer, as close as she could get. We watched her and she watched us.
“Why?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
Tommo looked at me. “Why do you think he wanted to own her?”
“Because she’s beautiful? I don’t know. Ostentatious? Exotic?”
“Yes,” Tommo said. “He loves to own lovely things. But that’s not it….”
He looked at her through the glass. He seemed to be lost in thought.
“What is it, then?” I prompted.
“He wanted her because she’s intelligent and dangerous, and it wouldn’t feel thrilling otherwise.” He said it loudly, with a wave of his hand, like I was being dense. “To look at her trapped like this”—he gestured—“every day. He can look at her and know he’s conquered. And it’s not as fun to win over someone less capable. That’s all he cares about, Elspeth.” Tommo tapped the tank. “Winning.”
I didn’t completely agree with this analysis yet couldn’t be bothered to challenge it.
“Do you think she’s lonely?” I asked.
But Tommo was already stumbling away, still talking to himself.
I placed my hand on the aquarium, before the swaying tentacles. Her red-ringed eyes closed. A slip of glass between my forefinger and her suction cups, squashed flat and tight to the tank. It was her hideousness, I thought, that made the creature so beautiful.
* * *
—
When I recalled these late, late-night scenes, as I did many times throughout the investigation, Richard was entirely absent. Kei and I continued talking as she rolled and smoked her cigarettes; Jerry and Miguel were snoring; eventually the films ended and the projector blared blue light. Sabine and Honey whispered in the corner; Charlie stared into the middle distance, with peeled-white eyes. Persephone watched us from her rocky lair. Tommo stumbled in and out, muttering to himself—picking up open champagne bottles by the neck and taking them outside, where he sat on the wall, drinking alone.
I could account for everyone but Richard in those quiet hours past midnight. Was it that my muddled brain had erased him from the record? Perhaps he had simply been silent or elsewhere. Perhaps I was incorrectly placing all of us together in the atrium at the same time.
With each interrogation session, I had strained to recall the slightest scrap of memory. I didn’t think Richard and I had spoken again, alone, after the conversation on the mezzanine where he had thanked me and I had backed away. This seemed odd. There were only nine of us at Sedgwick that night, and the conversations I could recall surely didn’t amount to the hours I’d spent at the party. Maybe dancing whiled the night away—more likely, conversations were lost to glasses and shots.
But I did remember the last thing he told me.
It must have been two or three in the morning when Richard returned from wherever he’d been. We had hauled a wading pool up from the basement. After Sabine’s incessant whines about swimming, Richard suggested someone venture down and take a look. One could have traveled, he said, from house to house, a relic of our daughter’s childhood. Lo, there it was: dusty and grimy, held aloft by victorious Charlie and Sabine. Jerry and Miguel woke up with the cheers.
The unexpected treasure drew us all into the game. We were kids again: brushing off cobwebs and stretching out the large inflatable on the atrium floor. The men took turns blowing it up by lung. It was Sabine’s idea to fill it warm; we sloshed stove-boiled pots from the kitchen, back and forth like ants. Kei squirted in dish detergent.
We slipped into the lukewarm foam, fully clothed. Tommo had found some chilled champagne and we drank it straight from the bottle, not caring when it splashed into the sudsy water. My chiffon blouse ballooned beneath the surface. I remember catching myself staring at it, tumbling, furling.
“We were never well suited, were we, Ellie darling?”
I looked up. Richard had shifted himself beside me. His shirt was undone to the sternum; his hair in wet, boyish curls. I could not think of a reply—no sentence could do justice to our relationship, the pain that lay at the heart of it. And so I didn’t answer. My gaze returned to the water; I drifted my hand through the bubbles, each a globe of its own. Richard pinched my chin, lightly, between crooked forefinger and thumb, lifted my face back to him.
Was it the unexpectedness of this gesture, the presence of the others, or old fears that kept me from throwing him off?
(No, your chin, upward.)
(Like this.)
“You needed someone who—”
“Loved me?” I said.
(Can you feel that? Good girl.)
“Poor darling.” Richard stroked his thumb against my skin.
* * *
—
I veered around the last bend in the road before Lillie’s house, and the memories were still with me. How Richard’s thumb pressed into my chin; the tumble of my blouse beneath the water. The murderer must have been there, in that lukewarm pool, as we laughed and drank and splashed each other. Was it planned? Had they known, sitting there, the crime they would be committing only a few hours later? Or had they acted on a violent impulse?
Lillie was not home. Was she seeing Honey? I almost didn’t want to know. It was too much to contemplate.
I poured myself a glass of wine. Found my computer.
There was a new video in the search results: a British documentary. A fisherman lowered a trap into the ocean—a cylindrical wire cage with a small opening that crabs could crawl through. Once inside, escape was impossible for the crustaceans, with their underdeveloped brains. The camera cut to another part of the ocean: a rocky nook where a giant Pacific resided. It crawled out, then thrust itself forward. The octopus had found the cage.
The creature couldn’t reach the crabs through the wire—the only way to get to them was to enter the trap. It slipped through easily enough, smashed the crab shells, and devoured them in seconds. But then it was stuck. The fisherman was hauling up the trap. The octopus felt around with its arms, trying to understand the shape of the wire cage. The trap was almost at the surface of the sea.
And then the creature found the opening—escaped seconds before the fisherman reached the trap. Only two crab shells and some shards were rattling inside as he lifted it from the water.
I finished my wine. Poured another glass. Waited for the next video to play itself. It was another clip from the same BBC show. This time not a giant Pacific octopus but a small brown one, with polyp-covered, almost leathery skin.
It was resting underwater, and then the camera cut to the land and I could see: The octopus was in a tide pool. One arm, now mucous in the air, slithered out of the water. Then another, and another. The creature was slipping over the rocks, from pool to pool, in search of a meal. It was disturbing: the slicking, mushing sound; how the limbs slid, almost fell over each other, like a bag of wet meat, like entrails.
When the hunter found a crab, the kill was instant. There was a close-up of the octopus’s face as the crab shell crunched. It did not blink. The face was unmoving as it slaughtered.
I s
earched for a phrase: How far can octopuses crawl on land?
It was ridiculous, and yet I could not stop thinking: My arm had been wet that morning. A puddle on the floor. The little brown octopus in the documentary had roamed far, because it could use each rocky pool as a human might use pockets of air when trapped in an underwater cave. Had Richard been the one to suggest the pool, knowing that Persephone could use it to walk on land?
There was something about this wild theory that made perfect sense. If Richard had killed himself in such a spectacular manner, then his would be one of the most famous deaths of all time. His films would be watched across the globe, would become cult classics even if they later faded to obscurity. It would be redemption, a saving grace from the gossip surrounding Dominus. Could Richard do something so selfish to his daughter? Could he so single-mindedly obsess over his own reputation? Would he value legacy over life?
A phone rang, shrill, somewhere else in the house. Lillie had a landline? Instinctively, I followed the sound, and there it was, in the hallway, by the shoes. I had not registered its existence before—it had been silent all this time. Its ringing seemed absurd, misplaced. I stood there, staring at it, knowing I shouldn’t answer but unable to ignore its cries.
Then the answering machine kicked in—the automated message, the beep.
“Lillie”—I knew the voice—“I hope you received my flowers. You know, I understand if you’re not ready to talk to anyone and I’m sorry for your loss, I am, but, listen, I’m calling for your mother, so if you could—”
I picked up the handset.
“Hello?” Miguel said. “Is someone there?”
“How dare you.” My voice was too quiet—I was trying to catch my breath.
“Elspeth? Is that you?”
“How dare you,” I said, stronger now, “call my daughter in the middle of the investigation into her father’s murder. You people. How dare you. Can’t you leave her alone?”