The Last House Guest

by Megan Miranda

  “Don’t get all sanctimonious on me, Avery. Not you.” His lip curled, and he stood abruptly, pacing the small open deck. We were alone on a boat in the middle of the harbor. I looked around for other vessels, but Connor had picked a secluded area. To anyone else, we were just a blur in the distance, as they were to us. “I told the police this,” he said. “She paid me to take her out once, for a tour. That’s all.”

  “Your number is in her phone. With an asterisk. Try again.”

  He stopped pacing, fixed his eyes on mine. “Once,” he said. “Just once,” he repeated, like he was begging me to understand something more. But I wasn’t catching on. He ran a hand through his hair, squinted at the glare of sun off the water. “She found me on the docks. Called me by name, like she knew who I was already.”

  “She did know,” I said quietly.

  He nodded. “She asked how much it would be to take her on a private tour.” He frowned. “I don’t like to do private tours so much, honestly. Not just one person, and not someone like her.”

  “Like what?”

  He widened his eyes, like I knew better, and I did. “But,” he continued, “she told me a friend had given her my name. I assumed it was you.” His gaze met mine, waiting, and I shook my head just slightly. “You didn’t give her my number?” he asked.

  “I didn’t.” He looked out at the sea again, like he was thinking something through. “You gave her the tour?” I asked, dragging his attention back.

  “Yeah. I did it right then. She had the cash on her, more than I usually would’ve charged, but I wasn’t gonna complain. She asked me to tell her about the islands, all the stories from the charter tours, you know?” He shrugged. “Guess that’s why she came to me.”

  These were the islands the locals escaped to when we wanted to get away. Anchoring the boat offshore and swimming the final few meters with the current. One of them had an old cabin, deteriorated and rotted, only the walls left standing, last I saw. But at one point someone had carried in the stone and the wood and made themselves a secret home. Connor and Faith and I spent one evening there, waiting out a storm.

  “Where did you take her?” I asked.

  “I took her to three. The two in Ship Bottom Cove first, because the tourists usually like to see those. But she wanted one that she could explore herself off the boat, said she’d heard there were plenty of hidden places. So we went to the Horseshoe.” I felt my jaw tensing as he spoke. “I stayed on the boat,” he said, as if he needed to defend himself from the implication.

  The Horseshoe was what the locals called the horseshoe-shaped band of rock and trees that at one point had been connected to land by a bar, at low tide—so went the stories. The waves broke over the rise of land you couldn’t see, creating a sheltered cove, which made it a favorite of kayakers and locals alike. Any connecting land had long since disappeared, but we used to tell stories of travelers trapped there when the tide came back in.

  “She swam there, though?” I asked, confused. Sadie did not like cold water. Or sharp sun. Or uncertain currents. She did not like being alone.

  “Yeah, well, she waded out to it, just had a small backpack with her, figured it held her phone, maybe a towel. It was low tide, and I anchored there, it was easy enough. But she was gone so long, I took a nap. I probably would’ve been worried if I hadn’t fallen asleep. I woke up to the sound of a camera. She was standing over me, in her bathing suit, shivering from the cold.” He ran his hand through the air, like he knew the outline of her. Like he’d committed it to memory.

  But none of this made sense. Why would Sadie need to come out here, with Connor? I could’ve told her anything she wanted to know about these spots. I would’ve come out here with her myself. Told her the stories, not only about the history of town but my own. Listened to her laugh at my stories of getting stranded; watched her eyes widen at the time we tried and failed to sneak a boat back to the docks at dawn. The parts of Littleport only I could show her, proving my own worth. Did you get in trouble? I could imagine her asking. Feel my smile as I told her we didn’t. We were kids of Littleport, and you protected your own.

  Sadie may have forgiven me for turning her in to her father, but she still hadn’t trusted me—not with this. She’d come here alone. Without telling any of us—something she’d kept secret. Something that would’ve remained that way, if Greg Randolph hadn’t seen her and Connor together.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” he said, jaw set. But I didn’t expect he’d tell me the truth, not after all this time. “I don’t know why she took my picture.” He pressed his lips together. “I know better than to get involved with a family like that.” He gave me a look, as if I should’ve understood this, too. “This is why I told the police nothing. Because just one thing—one private tour—and suddenly, I’m dragged into this whole mess.”

  “This whole mess? She’s dead, Connor.” My voice broke midsentence.

  He flinched. “I’m sorry, Avery.”

  “She had your number.”

  “She called me after. I didn’t pick up. I didn’t like . . . It was weird, okay? Why she was there, what she wanted with me. Why she took my picture. I couldn’t figure it out. At first I thought you had sent her, but . . .”

  He had an answer for everything. Quick with an explanation—and yet. Sadie was out here in the week before her death. If Connor was telling the truth, what could she possibly have been looking for?

  “Can you take me there?”

  He narrowed his eyes, not understanding.

  “To the island. Please. Will you take me there, too.”

  * * *

  OUTSIDE THE PROTECTION OF the harbor, the waves dipped, and the spray of the water coated my arms, the back of my neck, as he cut a path to the arc of land in the distance.

  There was no way to avoid the past as we got nearer. Time snapping closer as the land mass grew larger. It was the place we’d come seven years earlier, just before the start of the summer season.

  Connor had shown up at my grandmother’s house. “Come on,” he’d said. I hadn’t left the house in two days. I hadn’t slept, my hands were shaking, the house was a mess.

  When we stepped off the dock onto his father’s boat, I asked, “Is Faith coming?”

  “Nah,” he said, “just us.” And the way he smiled, keeping his eyes cast down, told me everything.

  Before my grandmother died, it was where things were sliding. Connor and me. An inevitability that everyone could see coming but us. The knowing looks that we’d railed against our entire lives. As we grew older, a playful nudge with a shoulder or a hip, a wry joke and a fake laugh and a roll of the eyes. And then one day he blinked twice, and refocused, and it was like he was seeing something new. I saw something reflected in his eyes—of what else might be possible.

  The touch of his hand became more deliberate. A play kiss in front of everyone late that last fall, when we were drinking down on Breaker Beach, while he bent me back, and his eyes sparkled in the bonfire as he laughed. And I’d said, That’s it? That’s everything? That’s what I’ve been waiting for all these years? And took off down the beach before he could catch me, my heart pounding.

  When he said, hours later, You’ve been waiting?

  So we’d come here with a cooler of beer and takeout from the deli and a blanket, wading out to the island together, gear held over our heads to keep dry. We never got to the food or the drinks because I knew exactly what this was, and there was too much in the lead-up. But I wasn’t capable of feeling anything then, just my own bitterness. A disappointment that, even then, he wanted something from me. How he couldn’t see that I was so far beneath the surface, he might as well have been anyone.

  I was a tight ball of resentment when he came over two days later with a lopsided smile, thinking somehow that this fixed everything: not only me but us. Even worse was the new fear I’d only just uncovered, that maybe he liked me this way—watching me slide to the edge and unravel, so he coul
d make me back into the person he desired. It was the beginning and also the end.

  Connor anchored the boat offshore now, turning off the engine. Both of us looking at the mix of tree and rock and pebbled shore before us instead of at each other.

  I pictured Sadie standing here, in her wide-brimmed hat, deciding to strip herself down and wade out to the island. The goose-bump prickle over her skin. The red-pink tone where the cold touched her flesh. The softness of her feet on the crude shore. The determination that had brought her to this moment.

  I pulled my shirt over my head, and Connor narrowed his eyes.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “The tide is up. You’ll have to swim,” he said.

  But I continued undressing, and he looked away, opening the bench seat and pulling out one of the orange flotation devices. We’d stripped down to our underwear in front of each other a hundred times since we were kids, whenever we were out on the water. I’d never felt self-conscious about it until he looked away. Never used to think of myself in comparison to Sadie until I saw us both through Connor’s eyes.

  I grabbed the orange flotation device hastily and jumped straight in, the shock of cold seizing everything up to my rib cage as my toes brushed the rocky shore.

  “Okay?” Connor called from above. I must’ve let out a gasp.

  I had to slow my breath, just to relax the muscles around my lungs. “Fine,” I said, using the flotation device as a kickboard, letting the current push me the rest of the way to shore.

  * * *

  IT HAD BEEN SEVEN years since I’d stepped foot on the island, though I could always see it in the distance on a clear day: a copse of dark trees. The terrain was rough in person. A rocky beach giving way to the hard-packed dirt and the green of the trees. The horseshoe shape created a small protected cove, so kayaks would often stop here to rest. But there were no other boats here now.

  There was evidence of people who had been here, though—glass bottles half buried in the rocks that lined the dirt and roots. A log that had been dragged over and fashioned into a bench at the edge of the brush. There was an overgrown trail from back when the island had a dock.

  I shivered as I walked the path that I imagined Sadie taking. My steps in her steps. The thorny roots, the sharp edges of rocks, the branches reaching for her legs.

  I felt a prick on my shin, saw a bead of blood rolling toward my ankle, nicked from a loose vine. Connor said Sadie had been in her bathing suit. Would she have kept going, barefoot and bare-legged? Her unmarred skin, the fact that she couldn’t even stand walking barefoot on hot pavement—I couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t imagine what would have driven her here in the first place.

  She had a backpack, a camera—did she think there was something here worth finding? A secret worth holding? Did she see something she shouldn’t have while she was here?

  The terrain was too unyielding. She wouldn’t have kept going, not if she didn’t have to—but Connor said she’d been gone a while. In her bathing suit, with a backpack.

  I stopped walking. Or was it something she was bringing? Lots of hidden places, she’d told Connor. That’s what she was looking for.

  A safe place to hide something of her own.

  I traced my steps back to the clearing, spun around, my eyes catching on the makeshift bench once more.

  The log had been partially hollowed out, and I dropped to my hands and knees beside it, peering inside. There was moss growing on the underside, insects and things I didn’t want to think too hard about. But I reached my hand into the dark and felt the slickness and rustle of plastic. I shuddered, imagining what might be inside.

  It scraped against the base as I pulled it out. There was a layer of sludge and grime covering the surface, but it was a plastic freezer bag, airtight and watertight. Maybe someone’s trash but maybe not.

  I wiped off the mud with my bare hands, opened the top, and saw a brown wooden box inside, like something that would hold a necklace. It remained dry. I dragged my hands against the edge of the log, trying to clean them. Then I opened the top of the box. Set in the midst of the maroon lining was a silver flash drive, cold to the touch.

  The trees rustled in the wind, and I looked over my shoulder, feeling the chill rise up my neck.

  Sadie had been here. I could feel her, in this same spot, opening her backpack, pulling out this bag. I could see her reaching an arm into the hollowed log, nose scrunched, eyes pinched shut, holding her breath.

  Why, Sadie?

  Why here? Why across the expanse of a sea, inside a log? What sort of fear could’ve driven her here—to this level of secrecy? Where the walls of her home were not enough? A place, I had once thought, with no locks, no secrets.

  I wished I had something to hide this inside now. Pockets, clothes, a way to keep it for myself. But there was no way to swim back to the boat, no way to keep it hidden without Connor seeing. He’d told me the truth, at least—maybe not all of it, but enough to get me here. To her.

  He wouldn’t have brought me here if he truly had something to hide, right?

  * * *

  CONNOR WAS WATCHING AS I waded out toward him, holding the freezer bag on top of the flotation device.

  “What’s that?” he asked, reaching a hand down for me.

  “Not sure.” I dripped water onto the boat, shivering, and looked for a towel, but Connor already had one out on the bench for me.

  “Is that hers?”

  “Not sure,” I repeated, leaning over him for the towel. “There’s a flash drive inside, though, and I can’t figure out why else it would be out here.”

  His hand touched my stomach, and I flinched. But his fingers didn’t move. His gaze was fixed on the spot just above my underwear, on the inside of my left hip. I stepped back, shaking him off, and he frowned. “Why do you have that?”

  I looked down to where his gaze was focused. “It’s a tattoo, Connor.”

  “It’s the same as Sadie’s.”

  My stomach twisted, and again I wondered if he was playing me. How he would have noticed that so clearly if he’d seen her only the one time.

  Once, just once, he’d said. As she stood over him in her bathing suit. “I know. We got them together.”

  Sadie was all pale pink skin that freckled in the summer. She was wide-brimmed hats and oversize sunglasses and SPF 50 in every lotion she used; a collection of freckles on her forearms that almost looked like a tan from a distance. I was a color that bordered on olive, even in the winter, like my mother. I never had to worry about the summer sun this far north. The only similarity between me and Sadie was the color of our eyes, a shade of hazel. And this ink, binding us together.

  But Connor was shaking his head. “But why that.”

  Sadie had picked it. Drove us out to the shop the day she returned, our second summer. “Incomplete infinity,” I told him. Because there was nothing that lasted forever. The ends of the symbol stretched toward each other but never met. The curved line, looping with promise, truncating at a point—so I couldn’t look at it without feeling a yearning, too.

  Connor’s head drifted to the side as he leaned even closer. “All I see is the letter S.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Dusk began to settle on the ride back. All I could think about, with the thin towel wrapped around me, was the shape of the tattoo. The shape of the S of Sadie’s necklace, left behind in her room in Connecticut. The gold edges lined with diamonds, digging in to my palm.

  Do you trust me? she’d asked when she found me waiting for her on the bluffs. And I did. What other choice was there? I had been adrift and alone, and then I chose something else. I chose her. That day, she drove us straight up the coast to the tattoo parlor. She’d had the design ready, something she had thought about all winter, I had believed. Something that would be permanently etched onto both our bodies, bonding us together—for infinity, or as long as our bodies should last.

  How many times had I felt another person tracing the lines,
told them with confidence: Nothing lasts forever. Meaning: Not you, not me, not this.

  I believed it had bonded me not only to Sadie but to my place in the world. Given me a purpose, a reminder.

  But the necklace. The one I’d found when Bianca caught me in Sadie’s room—I strained to see it clearly in my memory—the looping S, the edges curling toward each other—

  Connor cut the boat sharply to the right, so I had to grip the railing. All that remained were Connor’s warning words—and this creeping realization that maybe I had branded myself not with a promise of who I would be but who she was from the start.

  I gripped the jewelry box tight in my hand as we veered away from the mouth of the harbor, where the water funneled and calmed all at once. We were heading north, toward open sea.

  “What are you doing?” I called to his back, but my words were swallowed up by the wind.

  Connor kept the boat heading diagonally, and as the sun dipped below the bluffs in the distance, I knew exactly what he was doing. He cut the engine abruptly, and I leaned forward from the change in momentum. Not Connor, though. He never broke stride as he walked across the boat, dropping into the seat beside me.

  My ears buzzed from the change of equilibrium—the sudden stillness, without the raging wind. We were at the whim of the current, the creaking of the hull below us as we moved untethered in the waves. In the distance, on the bluffs, one house grew brighter as the sky turned a dusty blue, plummeting to night.

  “I remember sitting here at night with you,” Connor said, feet up and crossed at the ankles. “So I think if anyone should be asking questions here, it’s me.”

  I gestured my free hand toward him, trying to keep it from shaking. “It was a long time ago, Connor.”

  “So,” he said, “was it everything you imagined?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not like that.”

  “No? It’s not everything you hoped it would be?”