I waved back, which meant I had to let go of the kimono, which meant it fell open, revealing the little black one piece underneath. It seemed awkward to cover myself, so I just let it hang open.
I wondered if I could retreat now, go back to the house and hide.
No, I told myself. This guy might know something about Violet.
Right. I was playing a role here, trying to infiltrate this elite system of rich snobby people. I had to adopt a completely different demeanor. I forced myself to relax, thinking of the women that I had watched come and go at the Wainwright house when I was a young girl. They always seemed breezy and unaffected. Even their smiles indicated they were interested in something else and didn’t have time to interact.
So, I approached the man, putting on one of those half-smiles. The breeze came off the ocean, pushing my hair into my eyes, into my mouth. I shoved it away, trying to look casual, but feeling annoyed. “Nice morning for a walk, hmm?” I said.
He came to a stop in front of me. “Yes. Sure.”
Silence.
Damn it, I needed to make small talk. I needed to bring the topic of conversation to Violet somehow. I racked my brain. “You live around here?”
“Just renting for a few months,” he said, pointing over my shoulder down the beach.
I turned to look in the direction, but all I saw was more strategic greenery to separate my private beach from the rest of the coast.
“You can’t see it from here,” he said.
“Oh, of course.” I laughed a little.
He dog-eared a page in his book and closed it, looking awkward.
“You shouldn’t do that,” I said.
He looked up at me, eyebrows raised.
I fingered my kimono. “Fold the pages. It makes them rip, and then…” I laughed again. “Sorry. It’s your book. You should do whatever you want.”
“I guess I’d do better with a bookmark,” he said. “But they always fall out and then I can’t find my spot again.”
“Yeah, that’s a problem,” I said. “Do you like to read?”
He nodded. “I like to have something to do while I walk. Walking’s boring, but they say it’s good for you.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Quiet again.
I stuck out my hand. “I’m Emilia Farrow.”
He took my hand in his. “Jonah Fletcher.” His hand was warm. “Your name sounds familiar.”
“Uh, I have a blog?” Then I felt like an idiot. He wouldn’t know about my blog. I wondered if I should have created some fake identity for all this, pretended to be someone else. But no, because everyone would remember me, considering my sister had spent so much time in this world.
“What kind of blog?”
“Cooking,” I said. “Recipes and things.”
“Not much of a cook myself.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, my sister, she, um…” I looked away.
“The girl who drowned,” he said in a different voice. Then he flinched. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Did you know Violet?”
“Never met her,” he said. “She was the help, right? Worked for the Wainwrights?”
“The help,” I repeated.
He cleared his throat. “Sorry. She was an employee?”
I took a deep breath. Be sophisticated and unruffled, I ordered myself. “She was.” I gave him a smile. “Would you like to take a break from your walk and come inside? I could make coffee.”
He turned and looked at the house and furrowed his brow. “You, um, this is your house?”
“Well, it’s not mine. I don’t own it, or… I mean, someone’s letting me stay here, but I’m the only person who is staying here, so it’s practically my house.” Inwardly, I groaned. I really thought I would be better at all this. I should have simply said yes.
“None of my business, I guess,” he said, turning to look out over the water. “Uh, I don’t think I have time for coffee this morning, but it’s very kind of you to offer.” He turned back, and he was smiling again—well, what seemed to pass for a smile on his face.
“Oh,” I said. “Another time.” He was a snob, then? Maybe he didn’t want to have coffee with the “help.” But I kept my expression unaffected.
“Definitely.” He started to walk again. He gave me another little wave. “Nice meeting you, Emilia.”
I watched him go. I really didn’t like him. It was kind of unfortunate that he had such broad shoulders, considering he was such a jerk.
* * *
I called Phin when I was reasonably sure that he was home from his shift at the hospital. Since he’d gone in early, I thought that might be around dinner time. Sure enough, he answered.
“Hey,” he said. “How’s the lap of luxury?”
“You took my car.”
“I did. I had to get to work at the hospital.”
“Well, bring it back,” I said.
“Then we’ll have the same problem,” he said. “I’ll just have to take it back to get to work tomorrow.”
“You could pick me up, and then take me back to our apartment—”
“You’re ready to come home? Good, because I don’t know what the heck you think you’re doing there.”
“I don’t want to come home,” I said. “I could just drop you off and take my car back here. I might need transportation at some point. I’m stranded out here.”
“How horrible,” he said. “Stranded in paradise.”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, help me out here. Bring the car.”
“Okay, Mila, we actually need to have a serious conversation about this. You can’t go live in that house and play Nancy Drew.”
“Why not?” I said. “Anyway, I see myself more as a mature Veronica Mars. I want to kiss Jason Dohring.”
“Oh, well, that’s a given,” he said. “But I seem to remember that everything turns out crappy for Veronica Mars all the time. It was a very depressing show. That’s why it got canceled.”
“Whatever,” I said. The show had been one of my favorites back in high school. “Let’s not have this conversation. You just bring me my automobile, por favor.”
“If I come and get you, you should come home.”
“Why?”
“Because… people don’t give people houses on the beach and closets full of clothes for nothing. Whoever this Host guy is, he wants something from you, and we don’t know what that is.”
I was quiet, because he probably had a point. There had to be a reason I was in this house, wearing these awesome clothes, and cooking with premium ingredients. Ostensibly, it was to find out what had happened to Violet, but the person who paid for this house wouldn’t have done that out of the goodness of his heart.
“Mila?”
“I hear you,” I said quietly. “I guess this probably is dangerous. But… I don’t know, maybe it’s worth it. Maybe I owe it to Violet’s memory, you know?”
“We’ve had this conversation a bunch of times,” said Phin. “You have to stop blaming yourself. What happened to Violet was an accident—”
“Except, what if it wasn’t? What if she really was murdered?”
“Yeah, and you know who would know that?” said Phin. “The murderer. I bet that’s who lured you to that house.”
“Well, how would that make sense?” I said. “I mean, here I was, minding my own business, not a thought in my head that Violet was murdered, and then the killer tells me she was, thus casting suspicion on himself where there was none?”
“Maybe he doesn’t care about suspicion, because he’s just going to kill you.”
I swallowed. Suddenly, I had a strange certainty that someone was behind me. I turned, slowly, from where I was leaning up against the kitchen island. I didn’t see anyone. I began to walk around the house, sweeping every space with my gaze, looking for something amiss.
“Hey, are you still there?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I’m here.”
“So, what do you say? Will you come home?”
“Just get my car out here,” I said.
* * *
But by the time Phin had gotten there, I’d searched the house from top to bottom, and I hadn’t found anything suspicious. I turned on the television downstairs and did my best to convince myself that I was being silly.
Then I started working on dinner. So, when Phin walked in the door, I was busy stirring risotto on the stove. It wasn’t often I found really great imported Arborio rice, after all.
“What are you doing?” Phin, for once, was not in his scrubs, but regular street clothes. He took off his sunglasses and tucked them into the pocket in his t-shirt.
“Cooking,” I said.
“I thought I was taking you back home.”
“Yes, after dinner,” I said. “I’ll drop you off and bring my car back.”
“I brought my car,” he said. “I didn’t figure it mattered if I was taking you back.”
“Well, that’s fine,” I said. “I’ll pick up my car when we go back, then.”
“And come back here? When there’s a murderer trying to kill you?”
“We don’t know that,” I said. “There are other reasons that someone might have set up this house for me.”
“Like what?”
“Like… I don’t know… he wants me to sign a contract to be his kept woman slash sex slave,” I said, thinking of my earlier search for cameras.
He gave me a withering look.
“Oh, let’s not fight,” I said. “I bet you’re hungry, anyway.”
He came over and peered over my shoulder. “Risotto?”
“Uh huh,” I said.
He sighed. “Fine.”
I beamed at him.
After dinner, Phin seemed resigned to my staying and said he’d stay with me that night to make sure I was safe. I said fine, but I wanted my car.
So, we drove back to the apartment, and I picked up a few things, like my laptop so that I could post a blog if I wanted, and then we both headed back to the beach house in separate cars.
Phin didn’t have to be in to the hospital until around noon the next day, so we stayed up late drinking very expensive wine that we’d found in the house and then fell asleep in the same bed again.
Back when we were in college, we used to sleep that way a lot. Phin had an apartment off campus—a studio without anything resembling a full-size couch—and I lived in the dorms. My roommate had a very obnoxious boyfriend who she was constantly having sex with. Staying with Phin was easier than going back there.
Phin didn’t mind either, because he said people thought we were a couple, which gave him more game, because the guys on campus thought he was straight, and that was apparently really hot.
“Now, don’t be horrified,” Phin would say after explaining this. “It’s not that gay guys want to fuck straight guys. It’s that they want to be fucked by straight guys.”
Whatever the case, Phin and I had been attached the hip for a long time.
I drifted into a wine-drenched sleep, sure that I was going to feel wretched in the morning, which wasn’t good, considering the Wainwright party was tomorrow.
But the minute that I fell asleep, I began to dream.
It was the same nightmare I always had.
I was in a dark, small space with Violet, and we were holding hands.
Outside, somewhere beyond us, a woman was screaming.
Violet and I cowered, clutching each other.
There were tears in my eyes.
And then I recognized where we were. It was the closet under the steps in the Wainwright house. I looked up above my head and there was a pull-chain for the single light bulb that lit the place. It was dark, but now I could make out the shelves, with their cans of food and boxes of cereal.
“No, please, no!” screamed the female voice.
Violet buried her face in my shoulder.
I woke up.
I expected the dream to fade out, the way it usually did. I had this nightmare a lot, but I never remembered it. Not for the first time, I tried to fight to keep hold of the details, expecting them to float off the way they usually did.
I climbed out of bed and hurried down the steps. I went out onto the beach and looked up at the shadowy outline of the Wainwright house roof.
And the details of the dream seemed to grow even more solid in my head.
There. This had all happened up there.
A cool breeze came in off the ocean.
I shivered.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next day, I didn’t feel quite as hungover as I thought I would have, probably because I slept late. When I woke up, Phin was rushing around to get out of the house and get to the hospital, because he was going to be late.
I took a nap in the afternoon, and then when I woke up, I began getting ready for the party. First, I took a long, long shower in the amazing shower in the house. It had one of those wide, circular rain water shower heads. It really did feel like warm rain caressing every part of my body. The bathroom was already stocked with the best soaps, shampoos, and beauty products money could buy, including an assortment of makeup in the drawers of the sink in hues that complemented my skin. Not that I was ready to put on makeup yet.
I brushed out my hair instead, and pinned it up out of the way. I’d deal with styling it later. Before I did that, I needed to figure out which dress I was wearing.
There were four ball gowns hanging in the closet. The red strapless I’d been ogling before, a silver tea-length with spaghetti straps and beading on the bodice, a long, black sleek thing with a V neck, and a midnight blue dress with a full, poufy skirt.
I tried them all on.
Inside the closet there was a three-way mirror, and then a mirror behind me as well, meaning I could see myself from all angles, which was utterly gratifying.
All of the dresses looked better on me than I would have predicted, but I was quite surprised by the black dress. I typically wouldn’t have gone for something so simple, because I felt like my body was so flat and thick and boring that I needed something a bit exciting in my clothing. But the dress was perfect for me. The deep V neck exposed enough of my cleavage to make it look as though I had some, and the line of it gave the illusion of my having a waist. In that dress, I felt elegant and sexy. I was wearing it, and I was never taking it off.
Actually, I hadn’t thought of that before. Could I take things out of this house when I left? Or would the guy who had set this up object to that? I wondered what he was like, who he was. Maybe he didn’t want to keep me for sex, maybe he’d been involved with my sister. When he found out she’d been murdered, he—
Went to the police, right? That’s what any rational person would do.
I sighed.
I liked the dress. I wanted to enjoy that, not worry about whatever creep had set this all up.
Even though I had vowed that I was never taking the dress off, I had to in order to get ready. I needed to do my hair and makeup.
Most of the women coming to this party would have hired someone to at least style their hair if not their makeup as well. I was going to have to make do with doing it myself, so I went for simple elegance—sweeping my hair into a side bun.
Then I started on my makeup, which I also kept understated and clean. I didn’t do anything too dramatic, just enough to smooth out my imperfections and accentuate my eyes and lips. I didn’t wear makeup too often since I worked at home.
Back before Phin was a medical resident, we went out more, and then I got dressed up and did my makeup, but he’d been busy lately. I could have gone without him, but I wasn’t the kind of person who could go out all on my own, and I always felt awkward calling up my other friends. We were getting to that age, anyway. Almost everyone was either married or engaged or in a serious relationship or having a baby. To be fair, maybe none of us was going out much anymore.
Anyway, that only made this more exciting.
Well, terrifying and overwhelming and possibly life threatening, since I had no idea why the person who rented this house wanted me at this party, but…
It was exciting too. There’s always something a little exciting about getting dressed up in a pretty dress and going somewhere.
But once I was all dolled up, I was faced with a bit of a quandary.
How was I going to get to the party? I was close enough to walk, but it was eighty degrees outside and humid. Furthermore, the Wainwright house was uphill from me. And I’d have to walk along the road, where cars would probably be pulling up to go to the party. Unless, of course, I wanted to walk on the beach, which…
Actually, maybe that was the way to go.
I didn’t want to drive. Most everyone else at a party like this would be having a driver drop them off and then go away somewhere to be summoned later. There wasn’t likely to be parking, and it seemed abundantly stupid to drive next door.
But if I kept my skirts out of the sand, and I carried my shoes, I could walk on the beach. The only problem might be having sandy feet, but they probably wouldn’t get too sandy if my feet weren’t wet. It would be cooler with the breeze coming off the ocean as well.
Besides, there was something whimsical and devil-may-care about doing it, and I wanted to appear aloof and carefree. I needed that armor to interact with these people.
* * *
My plan worked fine. The only thing that I hadn’t really considered was that I had to climb about ten flights of stairs outdoors to get to the Wainwright house. It was cooler near the water, what with the breeze from the ocean and all, but it wasn’t actually cool. By the time I got to the top of the steps, I could feel some sweat on my forehead, and I hoped my makeup was not melting off.
When I stopped to brush the sand off my feet and put on my shoes, I checked my reflection in the compact mirror I’d brought it my clutch purse.
I actually looked fine. Maybe that expensive makeup really was worth it.
I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath. From this vantage point, I was in the back of the Wainwright house. The house owed its style to modern architecture. It had an asymmetrical roof, one side of the triangle longer than the others. There were about five layers of stories, but they all looked like sleek black slabs stacked unevenly on top of each other. The house was formidable and glossy. It looked like a museum, not a home.
Her Sister's Secrets Page 4