Through the window above the sink, she surveyed the wide deck, the patio table, and the half dozen chaise lounges rimming the pool, three on each long side. The two towering palm trees stood like gangly sentinels just beyond, the signature of the hilltop estate Paul had dubbed Twin Palms even when it was nothing more than a blueprint. Beyond that, the craggy profile of Mt. San Gorgonio rose in the near distance. She loved this view, even with the mountain obscured by the yellow-brown wildfire haze. She’d designed the kitchen window to perfectly frame it, and envisioned a view much like it long before she had the means to afford it. Now she savored it, maybe for the last time, believing the life she’d imagined was nearly over.
Ding!
The unlit cigarette still in hand, Shelby turned toward the familiar sound of Chloe’s phone signaling an incoming message. She couldn’t imagine her daughter had gone to bed without it. Chloe usually fell asleep with it in her hand, and often began texting and poking and liking and otherwise digichattering the second she woke up. But the funeral had been a day-long stressor for them both, and her daughter had trudged upstairs exhausted not long after they got home.
Ding!
The phone wasn’t on the far counter where they kept the chargers, but Chloe’s purse was on the breakfast table. Shelby set down her cigarette and turned off her lighter, the nearest burner on her six-burner stove. The blue flame disappeared back into the vast, brushed-stainless beast.
For the past year, Shelby had tried to walk the difficult line between responsible motherhood and her daughter’s need for independence. She made a point of getting to know Chloe’s close friends and their parents, occasionally snooped at her browser history on the home computer and her tablet, peeked into bedroom drawers while Chloe was at school. She’d been proud of her restraint the day two months ago when she found a prescription for birth control pills tucked into a pocket of her high-school agenda book. Chloe was, after all, seventeen. But her daughter rebuffed gentle queries about who she’d been seeing, dismissing archaic words like “dating” and “boyfriend” with a contempuous roll of her eyes. Backing off seemed like the right thing to do at the time; Chloe was just following her mother’s cardinal rule about avoiding an unwanted pregnancy, a talk they’d first had the day Chloe got her period. But now Shelby wondered.
Ding!
Shelby reached for the purse, a distressed-leather shoulderbag Chloe had picked up on El Paseo during one of their Palm Desert shopping trips. Its mouth yawned open, exposing a knot of teen debris. Gum. Blush. Tic-Tacs. The phone had to be in there somewhere; she could see its touchscreen glowing somewhere near the bottom. Shelby dug in, at one point pushing aside what she first thought was a tube of eyeliner. It was thin and metallic blue, and she pulled it out to take a closer look. It smelled of cannabis oil. An electronic vaporizer.
Christ. When had Chloe started that? What other secrets did she have?
She set the device on the table and continued to dig, finally pulling the phone from the depths. She entered the number of their street address; Shelby used the same password to unlock her own phone. The screen opened to Chloe’s Instagram account.
Shelby had sat out that particular phase of the digital revolution. Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, YikYak—who could keep up? But she knew how to scroll.
The just-posted photo had been uploaded by Chloe’s friend Ashlyn. Shelby didn’t recall seeing Ashlyn at the memorial service, but assumed she was there. The two girls were practically inseparable, and had been since middle school. The photo was taken from the back of the church and captured the awkward moment when her daughter leaned from the aisle into a pew to hug a striking young man, the one who’d introduced himself afterward as Mario Esparza. Ashlyn’s typed message was both cryptic and distressingly clear: “sexyashgirl wonders if #horndog @chloedweeb can at least wait til the funeral’s ovr to get some? #nympho #domenow”
Shelby scrolled to the next photo, a picture of the ravaged buffet table that Chloe herself had taken and posted at the end of the reception. The photo after that was a shot of the same buffet, untouched and sumptuous, just before the guests began arriving at the Los Colmas Country Club. Despite Shelby’s warnings about oversharing in the electronic universe, her daughter was reflexively posting a running commentary of her life, image by image, for god-knew-who-all to see. But Chloe was no different than anyone else her age.
Shelby flicked her finger up the screen and days and weeks of posted images flew past. Unknown friends in high school landscapes. Cryptic messages full of account handles and code and hashtags and gibberish. A shot of a coffeetable in an unfamiliar home, its surface crowded with beer cans, bottles of Captain Morgan rum and Jose Cuervo tequila, exotic glass and ceramic bongs. They told the story of the life her daughter led somewhere off her mother’s radar. Shelby scrolled on with a mix of dread and resignation. She’d been a kid once, too.
One of the images jumped out as it flashed past, a glimpse of strobe-lit flesh against a dark background. Shelby stopped and scrolled back, centering the photo on her daughter’s smartphone screen for a closer look. Six weeks before, the phone’s camera had caught a shirtless Mario Esparza at night. His smile was magnetic, but his hair was slicked and his upper torso glistening, as if he’d just climbed out of a pool. The waistband of his boxers defined the bottom edge of the image, and it was entirely possible that was all he was wearing. Chloe had taken and posted the photo, writing: “chloedweeb Oops, #mrmuscles got wet. Mmmmm.” Her words were followed by a happy face emoticon, winking.
Seventeen going on twenty-five, Shelby thought. Hoo-boy. She sure hoped her daughter had filled that prescription.
Shelby started to put the phone back in her daughter’s purse when a detail from the troubling image stopped her. She looked closer. The smartphone camera’s flash had caught the rough edge of something to the young man’s left, a pale gray, vertical surface that entered the frame near his hip and bent out of the frame somewhere above his head. Shelby zoomed in tighter. The surface was flecked with sparkles and etched with indecipherable words and initials. She zoomed closer, only to see the details dissolve into nothing. She backed it out and looked again, and immediately recognized the surface as that of a graffiti-scarred granite boulder, the one at a once-remote spot in the foothills where generations of local high school kids had gone to party, the one where so many had memorialized their good times and summer loves.
The one beside a secluded, disappearing pond.
38
Shelby was upstairs looking for Boz when she heard Chloe’s scream. She rushed to the window of her bedroom and was relieved to see her daughter standing in her pajamas, alone at the edge of the backyard pool. Her daughter cupped one hand over her mouth and flapped the other arm like a wounded bird. She screamed again.
Shelby prayed as she ran down the stairs.
Ten minutes before, Chloe had stumbled into the kitchen to find the contents of her purse spread across the kitchen table. Shelby said nothing as her daughter calmly gathered up her things and returned them to the shoulderbag. When she was done, all she said was, “Nice, Mom.”
“I feel like I hardly know you,” she said.
Her only child glared. “About as well as I know you.”
To break the standoff, she’d asked Chloe to help her find Boz. His food and water bowls were still full, and that was unusual. For a creaky, fourteen-year-old golden, he still ate well. On hot days like this, he sometimes stood chest deep on the pool steps, or lay in the shallow water on the top step. At his most energetic, he swam a few tight circles and struggled back out to shake. He had a few favorite hidey holes in the house and yard, but Shelby had checked all of them and still couldn’t find him. Chloe headed outside as Shelby climbed the curving foyer staircase to check upstairs.
When Shelby rushed up, Chloe’s hand was still covering her mouth as she stared into the pool’s deep end. She pointed to a golden patch against the pool bottom far below the undulating surface and wailed, “Oh God oh God oh God.
”
Shelby looked closer. The dog was on its side on the bottom, its long fur shimmering in the late morning sunlight and swaying like a small patch of golden seaweed in the pool’s deep currents. A band of gray encircled his white muzzle. She also could see something else beside him, sitting flat on the bottom near the drain. She tried to make sense of it through the wind-rippled surface.
“Oh baby,” she said, pulling Chloe into a hug.
Chloe sobbed into her mother’s shoulder as Shelby studied the rippling image. When she stopped, Chloe said: “He had trouble climbing the steps the other day after he swam. Maybe with his arthritis he couldn’t get out?”
The wind slowed for a moment, then stopped altogether. The pool’s surface smoothed. Shelby stood at the edge and felt her world start to spin. Chloe looked down as well.
“What is that?” Chloe said.
In that still instant, Shelby knew. It was “Flight,” submerged amid a tangle of ropes that also looped around the lifeless body of their beloved dog.
It was an anchor.
Shelby turned Chloe away from the pool and walked her back toward the house. How the hell was he getting in?
“Mom? What’s going on?”
Chloe pulled away. Tears had left trails down both sides of her face, but sudden anger had replaced grief. “What the hell is going on, Mom? Who would do that?”
Shelby had no answer.
“Who would do that to Boz?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
When Shelby tried to push on into the house, Chloe grabbed the sleeve of her robe and spun her around. “What aren’t you telling me? What is going on?”
Shelby stood mute in front of her daughter. What could she possibly say that would make sense of this?
“I’m calling the police,” Chloe said.
Shelby stepped between Chloe and the open slider. “You can’t.”
“Bullshit,” Chloe spat. “It’s the same thing that happened to Dad. This is seriously fucked up.”
“Stop. Watch your language.”
Chloe stood trembling. Fright? Rage? Both? Her dog’s death clearly was hitting her much harder than her father’s. “Watch my language?” she screamed. “Watch my fucking language?”
“Chloe—”
“You don’t want to call the police? After somebody drowns our dog?”
“I can’t—”
“You promised me. You said you’d tell me everything.” Chloe grabbed Shelby by the shoulders and shook her. “First Dad. Now Boz?”
Shelby’s world spun faster. She tried her best to pull away, to run into the house to hide from her daughter’s anger, her secret shame, and a one-time fantasy who could enter her life at will, but whose name and face she might never know. There was nowhere to hide, though. Nowhere at all.
She retreated and collapsed into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Her daughter followed, not bothering to close the slider against the outside heat, and took the chair across from her. Chloe shoved her purse and phone out of the way.
“The truth, Mom. Everything. Now.”
39
Richard Holywell returned Starke’s latest call while Starke debriefed Kerrigan in her office. He’d turned off his cell, but when he checked messages he found the latest volley of voicemail ping-pong from Kerrigan’s ex. The phone number he left this time was different than the home number Starke had in his notes, probably his office, so he knew the next call might actually connect.
Starke gathered his thoughts. Should he return the call again? He retreated to a conference room down the hall that had a door, closed it, and dialed. It rang only once before a woman picked up.
“UltraSharp Digital. Please hold.”
He recognized the company name from the couple’s divorce documents, but wrote it down next to Holywell’s name and circled it. When the receptionist returned, he asked for Holywell.
“One moment please.”
The next voice was different, male, but just as efficient: “Mr. Holywell’s office. This is Gerard. How may I help you?”
Starke cleared his throat. “Richard Holywell, please. My name is Ron. We’ve swapped phone messages couple times on his home phone, and he asked me to call him here.”
Basically true. There was an officious rustling of papers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Holywell is in a meeting at the moment. May I ask what this is regarding?”
Starke made a choice. He was a big believer in listening to the universe if it was trying to tell him something. He’d felt queasy about contacting Kerrigan’s former husband in the first place. Three missed connections was a sign.
“No, no message,” he said. “And please tell him to disregard my previous messages. No callback necessary. Would you do that for me?”
“You sure?”
“Yep. Thanks.”
Starke felt lighter when he hung up. He’d just have to find another way to deal with Nurse Ratched.
Back in his office, he stared at his notebook for a moment before opening the file containing Kerrigan’s divorce papers. Thumbing through the pages, he found one of the early filings that described UltraSharp Digital, Holywell’s business. He tried to make sense of the corporate description.
UltraSharp was “a tightly focused Santa Monica-based subsidiary of Pei Lan Electronics,” which the document described as “a multinational leader in the field of computer hardware and technology” based in Taiwan. Holywell was president of UltraSharp, but Holywell’s phrasing made clear that, in the grand scheme, he considered his company an insignificant node on a far more glorious mother ship.
Funny thing about contesting assets in a community-property state, Starke thought. Men are never more eager to downplay their success. And based on his willingness to resurrect the gun incident at their home, Holywell wasn’t shy about protecting his assets.
Starke closed the file, set it in the middle of his desk, and wheeled the task chair around in front of his desktop computer. He pulled up the Google search screen. He was picking up another faint signal from the universe, and wanted to check out a hunch.
40
As Shelby told her story, Chloe sat with her arms folded across her chest, staring into a middle distance between the kitchen table and the cooking island. Even with everything Chloe already knew about the problems in her parents’ marriage, Shelby could almost feel what was left of her daughter’s remaining teenage innocence crumble and fall away. The story Chloe was hearing now was something she never could have imagined.
“It really started that night last summer, that night with the gun, right there.” Shelby pointed to a spot on the kitchen floor. “In my mind, that’s the exact place and the exact moment my marriage ended. Nothing was ever going to be the same.”
“It never was,” Chloe said, eyes still focused on nothing.
“Until then, it had been just a goof, a flirty conversation with this guy I’d met online,” Shelby said. “We’d been talking for months, and I could tell he was falling in love with me. I encouraged it, baby, because I needed to feel loved. But that night with your father, that tipping point, that’s what set the whole thing sliding.”
“I don’t get it.”
“After that happened, I told him everything,” Shelby said. “Everything. Dad’s drinking. The violence. The other women. How I was sure your dad would’ve killed us both that night last summer if I hadn’t unloaded the gun. I let my anger pour out. He just listened, like he always did. That was the most seductive part of it—he really seemed to care. That’s when it all turned a corner. When I was done, he asked me how I wanted it to end. That’s when I let myself imagine, let him imagine, a day when your dad was just… not around. I wished there was a magic wand to make the pain go away. He asked if that was what I really wanted. A few weeks later, Dad disappeared.”
Shelby saw no need to tell her the rest, how she’d seen the brutal final act on screen, as it happened.
“So you don’t know anything about him?”
“You have
to understand, baby, for me he was a fantasy. I didn’t want details. Reality ruins fantasy. If I knew he was tall or short, or fat or skinny, or rich or poor, then I couldn’t create him from scratch. He couldn’t be what I needed him to be—this perfect man, always willing to listen, to empathize, to be there for me. I didn’t really want to know. He seemed to know that.”
Chloe finally turned enough in her chair that Shelby could see her vacant eyes. “So even if you wanted to tell the police, you don’t know anything?”
Shelby nodded.
Chloe started to cry. “But all that time you were telling him everything about us?”
Shelby swallowed hard. “He knew enough to find Dad. He knows where we live. He knows I’m the only person who could possibly link him to what happened, and he’s trying to make sure I don’t tell anybody what I know. Which is pretty much nothing anyway. So what would be the point of me telling the police about Boz? Plus, after he did what he did, I said some things…. I made him angry. At least this way—”
Chloe stood up. She was furious in a way Shelby had never seen before. “Mom, he got into our house. The alarm system was on, and he still got in.” She pointed through the glass doors out to the pool. “He killed our dog. He could do the same to you if he wanted. To me. He’s not gonna go away.”
Shelby buried her face in her hands. “I can’t believe this.”
“Even I know not to hook up online with strangers,” she said.
“We didn’t ‘hook up,’” Shelby said, standing so she was face to face with her daughter. “I was never unfaithful to your father.”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “That’s sooo pathetic.”
Shelby heard the sound first, the sharp report of flesh on flesh. Chloe’s head snapped to one side, then slowly rotated back. Her cheek was red with the imprint of her mother’s palm, and only then did Shelby realize what she’d done.
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