“But I have credit cards!”
“How would you pay them with no money?”
She didn’t know. “I could get cash advances . . . ?”
“You could never catch up. Soon—and we’re talking months—they’d cut off your credit, and you might even end up with a judgment against you.”
She tried to smile. “If I went to jail, that would solve the whole problem of housing and board.”
“I don’t think you want that.”
“No,” she agreed. “I don’t.”
“So thank your lucky stars you have this money. Invest it. Don’t touch it, apart from a few thousand to start you off. Get a job—any job you can, Alexis—and look for a place to live that’s eight hundred dollars a month or less. That’s my best advice to you.”
The reality of what he was saying started scraping the surface of her nerves and slowly chipped deeper and deeper. “So you’re really serious? I need to have a roommate?”
He nodded. “At least one. Given your budget, you might have to live in a group house.”
It was a horrible prospect. She’d had a couple of friends in college who shared a rambling Victorian place on Pratt Street. Every room smelled funny, the floors were warped, and the bathrooms and kitchen were too filthy to act as either bathrooms or a kitchen.
“I see.”
“Look in today’s listings under ‘housing to share,’ ” Benny went on, a little more gently. “The less you pay, the more you can save and the more likely it is that your nest egg can grow into something that can give you a comfortable retirement.”
“When?” she asked hopefully.
“In about thirty-five years.”
She looked him in the eye. “This is really the truth, right?”
He looked right back at her and gave a single nod. “It’s the truth. It’s not the perception of an elitist financial manager. It’s the facts, according to a guy who had to share a house with six other people through graduate school and for two years afterwards.” When he said that, she really felt the fear tremble through her. He knew exactly what he was talking about. It was the straight truth, and he wasn’t sugarcoating it.
“Eight hundred a month,” she echoed.
“Or less, if at all possible.” He gave her a kind smile, but it was clear he was finished with his pro bono advice session. “Be very careful with your money, Alexis. Spend as little as possible; save as much as you can. Believe me.”
As if that weren’t stressful enough, when Lexi returned home, she found a contractor’s truck in the driveway and the front door standing wide open.
It probably would have been wiser for her to stay in the car and call the police, or at least enlist a brawny male friend, but she was so inflamed that someone was in her house that she marched up to the door and threw it open.
It struck something solid on the other side.
Something that cussed.
She peered around to see a guy with wavy brown hair and one squinty blue eye. The other was covered by his hand. There was a measuring tape on the floor.
“Do you always enter a house that way?” he asked, removing his hand to reveal a matching blue eye and a slightly reddened forehead.
“I do when there are strangers here who shouldn’t be,” she snapped, reaching into her purse for her phone. She closed her hand over the metal and took it out like a gun. “Who the hell are you?”
“Mrs. Henderson?”
“Funny, you don’t look like her.”
He touched the tender spot over his eye and winced. “Okay, you’re not Mrs. Henderson. Who are you?”
“That’s what I asked you, and if you don’t give me a damn good answer right now, I’m calling the police.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Bad call there, Blondie. A criminal would have that phone out of your hand in no time flat. You could use a little basic self-defense education. But to ease your mind, I’m Greg McKenzie. I own the contracting company you hired to renovate in here. That is, assuming you’re the daughter Mrs. Henderson warned me I might run into.”
“Stepdaughter.”
“Actually she made that distinction, too. And she said you’d have attitude.”
Lexi’s jaw dropped. “She said I’d have attitude?”
“I believe her exact words were, ‘Ignore her when she takes an attitude with you.’ ”
Lexi fumed. “Do you have a work order? Something to prove you were really hired?”
“I have the key.” He indicated the open door, then pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. “And this.”
Lexi looked. It was a printout of an e-mail from Michelle’s private account, instructing Greg@McKenzieRenovations on all the things she wanted done to the house, including widening the front entrance—which must have been why he was standing there with a measuring tape when Lexi came in—and knocking out walls to turn Lexi’s room and the one next to it into one large master bedroom with views of the street, the fields next door, and the pool house out back.
There were also instructions to work as early or late as they needed to, to ensure that the work would be well under way, if not finished, by the time she returned.
No need to validate further.
This was exactly the kind of thing Michelle would do.
Lexi looked around at the foyer. She’d come through this threshold almost every day of her life, pushing open the solid oak door and crossing the wide expanse of Mediterranean tile to the wide stairway that led to her room—the one place that had been her safe haven for twenty years.
Now it was going to be Michelle’s.
And God knew where Lexi would be.
Obviously Michelle didn’t give a damn.
“Get out,” Lexi said suddenly.
“Sorry?” Greg had just picked up his measuring tape and looked at her with surprise.
“You heard me. Leave. I still live here, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re trespassing. Until I’m gone, you’re going to have to get out.”
“What, you mean for like fifteen minutes or so?”
“Try days. You can come back next month.”
He shook his head. “Sorry, Blondie, but I’ve got a crew starting here tomorrow. Unless Mrs. Henderson tells me to call it off, we’ll be here at six A.M.” He shrugged. “Meanwhile, I’m going to finish what I’m doing, so if you’ll excuse me . . .” He shut the door and opened the tape. Then he gave her a quick, sympathetic look and said, “Sorry.”
Lexi had never wanted to hit someone so badly in her life, but she knew this wasn’t his fault. She also knew he had the right to do his job because he’d been hired by the actual owner of the house, as distasteful as the idea was to her.
Wordlessly, she walked away from him, up the nineteen steps to the second level. She paused in the hallway, noting—for the first time, really—how Michelle had slowly replaced Lexi’s mother’s colonial-style furniture and mirrors with tacky, gilded crap that looked like it belonged in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house instead of here.
Michelle had taken over like a virus. Like black mold. There was no way to eradicate either one of them, and even if she could, Lexi would still not have a place to live.
This was a serious situation for her. Much as she wanted to turn away and pretend everything would be all right, she had to face the fact that she needed to get out of there, no matter how entitled she felt to it as her home, or else she would lose the few things she did have.
Including her dignity, if she ended up having to sleep in the streets.
8
Camp Catoctin, Pennsylvania
Twenty Years Ago
“She’s asleep,” Holly said to Nicola from the bottom bunk.
It was after midnight, and Lexi, Tami, Sylvia, and Brittany were all sound asleep.
“Now’s our chance to make our move.”
“What move?” Nicola asked.
“You know.”
Lately, she’d gotten the feeling Nicola was more sympathet
ic toward Lexi for some reason, so she was cautious in referencing her at all. But she wanted some sort of satisfaction in the matter of Holly and Nicola v. Lexi, so she couldn’t just let it go.
“It’s our chance to get back at her,” Holly whispered.
“Who?” Nicola asked groggily.
“You know who,” Holly rasped, then, when Nicola looked down over the side of the bed, gestured directly toward Lexi.
“Oohhhh!”
“We have to get back at her,” Holly said.
“How?” Nicola sounded doubtful, which made Holly feel doubtful.
“I don’t know, but there’s got to be something.” Her eyes kept falling on the diamond ring hanging from Lexi’s bedpost like a gargoyle. Did she dare take it?
Actually, come to think of it, did she dare not take it? Lexi had been horrible to both her and Nicola for weeks—it would totally serve her right to lose the one thing that seemed to matter to her.
Even though it was too big to be real and was obviously a big, fake Barbie “diamond,” made of cheap glass and hung on an ordinary gold chain, like you’d find at the mall.
It was the gesture that mattered at this point, though. Not the actual value. Stupid Lexi treated that thing like it was a good-luck charm, clutching it at night or gazing at it when she put it on the post. One day, Holly had even noticed Lexi just sitting there, winding the chain around her fingers and sighing. It was weird.
“Let’s hide that stupid ring of hers,” Holly suggested. Saying the words out loud made the idea even more exciting.
Nicola gasped. “It’s worth a fortune!”
“Maybe. If it were real. But there’s no way it is!”
“I don’t know. . . . That could be, like, major theft.”
“Come on, your dad sells insurance on this stuff.” Holly’s whisper was getting so loud, Nicola couldn’t believe it wasn’t waking anyone up. “Do you think it’s real?”
Nicola looked down and angled her head so she could see the ring.
“Look how huge it is,” Holly prompted. “Like no one would notice she’d taken a real diamond that size.”
Nicola didn’t know a lot about insurance values, but she had heard her dad talk about the importance of keeping a supervaluable piece under lock and key, like in a bank safe-deposit box.
“You’re probably right,” she agreed. Strange that Lexi would be so attached to it.
“I am. Let’s get it.” Holly threw back her covers and tiptoed over to where Lexi slept.
Nicola kept a nervous eye on the door. “Hurry.”
Holly stepped away from Lexi’s bed to whisper, “The chain is hooked around the post, so I can’t loop it over.”
“Unfasten the chain!”
“Good idea.” Holly went back and worked for a moment, moving her pudgy fingers on the cheap chain until, after a minute or two, she held up the ring.
Nicola gave her the thumbs-up and beckoned her outside into the muggy night, surprised at her own boldness in this exercise, which she knew was wrong.
The night was still, the air so thick, it felt like they were standing under water. The only sound was from crickets, frogs, and the cicadas in the woods.
It was as if they were the only two people on earth.
It was exhilarating.
Then . . . overwhelming.
“What now?” Nicola asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we can’t just stand here with it!”
“I know! Let me think.” There was a pause; then Holly added, “You think, too. Where can we hide it?”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“After everything she’s done to us? After all the names she’s called you? After what she did to you at the dance? This is the perfect way to get back at her. Let her feel upset and insecure for a few hours.”
“And then give it back to her?” After Holly’s reminder of how awful Lexi had been, suddenly Nicola felt disinclined to do anything nice for her.
Holly shrugged. “We can put it back where we found it, like, tomorrow night or the next. Like it was never gone.”
Nicola sucked in her breath. “Oooh, I like that! Like it was never missing! She’ll think she’s going crazy! And so will everyone else.”
“Exactly. But what do we do with it in the meantime?”
“Last year, Carrie Freedman lost three dollars, and they got everyone from her cabin to stay there and empty their pockets and suitcases and everything else until they found the money.”
“And did they? Find the money, I mean.”
Nicola nodded. “It was sopping wet, in the toilet.”
“Yuck.”
“I know!”
“That won’t work in this case.”
“It didn’t work in that case, either.”
“So what should we do? We need the perfect hiding place. Someplace we can find again easily but where no one else would ever think to look.”
“And it can’t be our sock drawers.”
“No, obviously not.”
Nicola frowned. “I have an idea. . . .”
Holly leapt on it. “What?”
“I’m not sure it will work—”
“What is it?” Holly kept her voice low, but she was beginning to fear that someone would hear them and come out and find them with the ring. “Close by?”
Nicola nodded. “On the bridle trail. There’s a robin feeder—really high up in the air.”
“You mean like a birdhouse? With little compartments in it?”
“Yes. It’s in a clearing that used to have a house—it’s kind of creepy because you can see some of the stones from the house still. Someone lived there, and now it’s just . . . like it wasn’t ever there. Except for the birdhouse still is.”
This was great. Perfect. “Let’s go. Do you know where it is?”
“Totally. Every time we go out riding, we take the same stupid trail. I could find it in my sleep.”
“Good thing, since we’re not on horses. Show me the way.”
They walked through the small field beside the cabins and into the dark woods. The good thing about Camp Catoctin was that it was pretty small overall. It was fairly easy to find your way around, even in the dark.
The bad thing was that it was hard to feel far enough away from other people because of the small campus. There was no such thing as “alone” at Camp Catoctin.
“I wonder if we should have taken something better than this,” Holly said after a few minutes. “Since it’s fake, I mean.”
“Nah. It doesn’t matter that it’s fake. She’s all wrapped up in the idea that everyone thinks it’s real.” Nicola snorted. “She must think we’re pretty stupid to believe her.”
“Well, some of us are. Tami, Sylvia . . . they probably believe it’s the Hope Diamond.”
Nicola paused for a moment, then confessed, “I sort of thought it was, too.”
“We all did,” Holly reassured her. “At first. But come off it—why would she hang something that was supposedly that valuable up by her bed every night? If it were real, she’d keep it under lock and key. She wouldn’t leave it hanging out there.”
Nicola thought, then nodded. “We look pretty stupid for believing her.”
Holly shrugged. “Either that or she believes it herself and we’re the only smart ones.”
Nicola considered that for a moment before shaking her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “One thing about Lexi: She isn’t that good a liar. She’s a lot of things, but she’s not that good a liar. I think she really took it from her stepmother.”
“Boy, I bet her stepmother hates her.”
Now Nicola shrugged. “She sure seems to hate her stepmother.”
They made their way through the thick darkness, startled by every noise and giggling after every startle. It was exciting and exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. But as time wore on, the excitement and exhilaration began to fade. As the blackness of the night seemed to close beh
ind them like a zipper, Holly was left with only the terror.
“Are you sure you know where you’re going?”
“Pretty sure.” Nicola’s voice was thin.
Holly stopped. “Pretty sure?”
“Well, it goes a lot faster on horses.”
Holly looked around fretfully. “And you’re usually riding in daylight. What are we going to do if we can’t find our way out? What if we walk and walk and walk and it keeps being more of this and we never get anywhere and we just die here in the dark woods?”
“Stop it! We’re not going to die, and if worse came to worst, the sun would come up and they’d come find us.”
“Yeah, because Brittany would tell them we were missing? She hates us!”
“It’s not up to her anyway—” Nicola stopped. “I think that’s it ahead.”
“Where?” Holly couldn’t even tell where ahead was.
“I think that’s the clearing.” Nicola took her arm and started moving forward at an alarmingly brisk pace. “See?”
“No!”
“Jeez, Holly, calm down. Do you see that light patch ahead? Look up. You can see where the trees thin and you can see the sky.”
Holly looked. “I think so.”
“That’s it! The robin house is really high in one of the trees.”
They tripped through the thicket, finally bursting, breathless, into the clearing.
“The robin house is right over there.” She pointed over to two o’clock and picked through the clearing. “Don’t go over there, by the way.” She pointed behind Holly. “Louis Corel puked there earlier.”
“Great.” Holly looked up the length of the trees. She couldn’t see exactly where the robin house was, but the trees seemed to go up forever before she finally saw sky. “By the way, who’s going to climb up to hide the ring?”
“I will!” Nicola didn’t hesitate.
“But what if you get hurt?” Holly tried to picture herself making her way back through the woods to get help. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.” She was sure it was a bad idea. A really, really bad idea.
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