“Name?” he asked, pen poised over a Styrofoam cup.
“Avery.”
His hand hovered for a second before he resumed writing, and I wondered if he’d heard something. Knew something.
“Well, hey there.” A woman’s voice from a table against the brick wall. It was Ellie Arnold, smiling like we were friends. She was sitting across from Greg Randolph, who grinned like he was in on some joke. There was a third man hunched over the table with his back to me.
The teenager handed me my credit card, and the third man stood as I approached. And then I understood: It was Parker Loman, empty cup in hand.
“Avery,” he said, and then continued past. As if I were an old plot point. As if I were just someone caught living on his property when I shouldn’t have been there; as if I weren’t his sister’s best friend, hadn’t worked with him for years; as if he hadn’t kissed me two nights earlier.
It was a skill of the entire family, creating the story and owning it. Sadie herself, welcoming me to the Breakers. And now Parker, probably spreading this new story about me. I wondered if everyone at the table, behind the counter, out on the docks, knew that I had just, an hour ago, been fired.
Still, I almost felt bad for him, thinking about what his own father said of him. Parker had been robbed of the chance to want something badly.
Ambition wasn’t just in the work. Ambition, I believed, was tinged with a sort of desperation, something closer to panic. Like a dormant switch deep inside that could be forced only by necessity. Something to push up against until, finally, you caught.
“Here, have a seat.” Greg Randolph pushed Parker’s now empty chair with his foot, the metal scraping against concrete. I perched on the edge, waiting for my order. “How’ve you been?” he asked, grin firmly in place. “I mean, since Friday.”
The teenager behind the counter called my name, and I excused myself for my drink. It was something mixed with caramel, steaming hot, a spice I couldn’t place. When I sat down again, I ignored his last question.
Greg gestured toward Ellie. “We were just talking about the party next week. Will you be joining us at Hawks Ridge?” He tipped his head to the side, and I took a sip. The Plus-One party must be at his place this year. Hawks Ridge. A group of exclusive estates set on a rise of land closer to the mountains, with a distant view of the sea.
“Probably not,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” he said, fake-sighing. I knew why I was wanted. For the drama, for the scene, so someone could say: Look, Avery Greer, can you believe she showed her face? So someone could corner me with a shot of liquor and say: I know a secret about you.
“It won’t be the same,” Greg went on, stuffing the last bite of a messy muffin into his mouth. “First Ellie, now you,” he added, even as he was chewing.
“You’re not going?” I turned to Ellie, surprised.
She shook her head, looking down at the table, then pressed her pointer finger to a crumb on the table, dropping it onto her plate. “Not after last year.”
Sadie, I thought. Finally, someone with the sense to know this was in bad taste. Another year, another party, as if nothing at all had changed.
No one else seemed to know the truth: that one of them had done something to Sadie.
“It was an accident, love,” Greg said to Ellie, voice low. “And I have a backup generator. The power’s not going to go out up there.”
“Wait. You don’t want to go this year because you fell in the pool?” I asked her.
She cut her eyes to me, sharp and mean. “I didn’t fall. Someone pushed me.” Angry that it seemed I had forgotten her claim, and I had. Last year, I’d thought she was being overdramatic, wanting attention, like Sadie had warned. But nothing about that night was as it seemed.
“Sorry,” I said.
But even Greg Randolph wasn’t having it. He smirked as he raised the cup to his lips. “Probably bumped into you in the dark, by accident.” And then to me, in a fake whisper, “She had quite a bit to drink, I seem to recall.”
“Fuck you, Greg,” she said. “I remember just fine.”
Everything was shifting, then. My memory of that night: The lights going out, the power grid tripped. A commotion. A scream.
Did someone leave in the chaos? Was someone coming back?
I pushed back from the table abruptly. “I have to go.” I had to talk to someone else who had been there, who had seen everything. Connor, maybe. Except he didn’t understand all the intricacies. The ins and outs of the Lomans’ world.
But there was someone else. Someone who was there. Who saw everything. Who was dangerous, I thought, in the things they had noticed.
And who, after all of that, did not come back.
CHAPTER 22
Sadie once said she never knew whom to trust. Whether someone wanted to be her friend because of what she stood for. Whether they were drawn to the girl or the name. That life I’d watched from outside Littleport. The promise of something.
She had loved a boy once, at boarding school. She told me about him that first summer, like she was whispering a fairy tale. But he lived overseas, and after graduation they had broken up; he did not come back for her. I heard other names over the years, during college. But never with that same fervent whisper, the gleam in her eye, the belief that she loved and was loved.
I’m lucky I found you, she’d said at the end of that first summer.
I believed it was I who was the lucky one. A coin tossed into the air, one of hundreds, of thousands, and I had fallen closest to their home. I was the one she had picked up when she needed one.
How lucky I had been to find this girl who looked at me like I was someone different than I’d always been. Who sent a gift on my birthday or just because. Who called when I could hear other people in the room, or late at night, when I heard just the silence and her voice. Who confided in me and who sought my opinion—What do we think of this?
She had become my family. A reminder, always, that I was no longer alone, and neither was she. I knew better than to trust that anything so good could be permanent, but with her, it had been so easy to forget.
Every summer, year by year, I was all she needed. And then Luciana Suarez was there.
WHEN I JOINED THE family out back at the pool that first night as they toasted to summer, every time I looked across the way, I’d find Luce watching me back.
She told me she’d known Sadie and Parker for years, that their families had been friendly since they were teenagers, though none of them had gone to school together. As if to let me know that her relationship with the Lomans superseded my own, based purely on the factor of time.
Luce had just finished up her master’s degree when she arrived with the Lomans at the start of the summer. She’d put off the starting date of her new job until mid-September. She was moving anyway, she’d said. Out of graduate housing, closer to the hospital where she’d be working as an occupational therapist.
She’d told me everything I needed now. I only had to spend ten minutes looking through the staff directories of several local hospitals in Connecticut before I landed on her name—Luciana Suarez, office hours Monday to Friday, 8:30 to 4:30.
I mapped the hospital, found a nearby hotel, booked myself the cheapest room I could get in a hotel chain I was familiar with—all from the front seat of my car, which felt as permanent a place as any.
I didn’t even stop at the Sea Rose before heading out of town. All I had with me were the items in my purse—the paper with the list of names and account numbers, and Sadie’s flash drive. I left behind the boxes, the bags, my laptop, the keys. Maybe leaving was for the best, anyway.
I could imagine someone finding those items next season, if I never returned. Wondering what had happened to me. The rumors about that girl who was obsessed with the Lomans. Who must’ve had something to hide.
The
same way we had crafted a story about Sadie—a person who wanted to die.
It was a thought that had me calling Connor again—just so someone would know—but his phone kept ringing. I debated not leaving a message, knowing how it would look, but there was already evidence of the calls. Detective Collins had seen us together.
There was nothing incriminating about tracking down the truth.
“Hi. Didn’t see you on the docks this morning but wanted to let you know I’m heading out of town.” I didn’t know how much more to say—about the payment and the bank accounts on the flash drive in my purse. I didn’t know whether to trust my instincts or him. But Connor knew my grandmother. He knew my family. And he was always, always better at this part—at looking again and seeing something new. “I was trying to find out which bank the accounts were from.” I took a breath. “I discovered that one of the accounts,” I said, “belonged to my grandmother.”
And then I drove out of Littleport—through the crowded streets of the downtown, rising up and away from the harbor; winding through the mountain roads, the pavement cut like switchbacks in sections; through the greenery and the barren roadsides, nothing but trap shops and ice cream shops and gas stations with a single pump—until the highway.
I headed south, like everyone else leaving town, sat in the traffic heading back to the cities, until we connected with 95 and the roads opened up in Portland, highways splitting off in various directions, like a spiderweb.
It was dinnertime when I pulled in to the hotel parking lot in a town that looked like every other town I’d passed through on the way. Connor had left me a voicemail, which I listened to while sitting in the car, as if there were someone who might be eavesdropping.
“Just back at the docks and got your message. Call me when you get this. No matter what time.”
THE HOTEL ROOM WAS standard, simple, a box room like a thousand other box rooms all across the country. I had forgotten how everything about Littleport carried a reminder of where you were, even the motels up and down the coast, with the seashells and the candle votives floating in sand. Lobster traps refurbished to create benches and artwork. Nets and buoys decorating the lobbies of restaurants farther inland, even. Here, there was nothing but ivory walls and a generic flower painting.
Maybe this was how to do it. How to live a life of even-tempered safety. Where nothing harms you, but nothing thrills you. Where you have risked nothing.
It took this—stepping outside Littleport and looking back in—to see my home through the eyes of a stranger. To finally get a sense of my mother when she was my age. Not what made her stay but what made her stop in the first place.
In Littleport, we had become addicted to the extremes. No matter where you found yourself, you adapted to the highs or you adapted to the lows. Everything was temporary, and so was your place within it. We understood that. It was always there, in the force of the sea and the rise of the mountains. In the crowded chaos of summer and the barren loneliness of winter. The sweet sea roses dying, the quick foot of snow melting. Everything marked a passage of time and another chance for you within it.
I called Connor back once I was settled in my room. When he picked up, I heard noises in the background, like he was out somewhere. “Is this a bad time?”
The noises drifted away. “Just a sec,” he said. I heard the sound of a door squeaking closed.
“Are you out?” How could he disregard everything happening for a night out with friends right now? He’d told me to stop looking, and apparently, he’d gone right on with his life.
“No, I’m not out. I just got home. There was a party at the apartment next door. People out in the hall.”
“Oh.” I didn’t even know where he lived anymore.
“God, listen.” His voice dropped lower. “That detective was around the docks when I left, and then when I came back. He’s been there all day. And he asked if I’d seen you.”
“What did you say?”
“What do you think? I said no. But he saw us together yesterday and wanted to know what that was about. I told him, you know, old friends catching up. None of his business.”
I leaned back against the headboard, bent my knees, staring at my reflection in the mirror over the dresser across the way. “He thinks it’s someone at the party, Connor. That it’s one of us. And then I find my grandmother’s account listed on that flash drive, and I don’t know what to think.”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Connecticut. Talking to someone else who knows the Lomans.”
“You should’ve waited. I would’ve come.”
“Connor,” I said, because we had to be honest with each other here. Everything was temporary, and so was this. An alliance of necessity, because we had found ourselves tied to either end of it. But something that would drift apart again as soon as we were free of it. “I’m here to talk to Luciana Suarez. Better if it’s just me. You said she saw what happened that night at the party, right? With the window?”
Silence. I heard the sound of something popping, could picture his jaw shifting back and forth, and suddenly, I held my breath. Wondering whether I had put my trust in the wrong person, if my instincts were wrong. “Let me know what she says,” he finally answered. His voice low and chilled.
“Of course,” I said. Though if he could read the tone of my voice as well as I could read his, he would know that this was a lie.
CHAPTER 23
The last time I’d seen Luce was at the service in Connecticut. When she’d been watching me closely. I wasn’t sure when she and Parker had broken up—or why. There was the fight at the party, but they appeared to be back together by the service. I didn’t know whether it was truly a break, as Parker said, or if something else had caused the split.
I was up by five-thirty, with nothing but my thoughts for company. Inside my purse was that folded-up sheet of paper with the details of the party.
Me—6:40 p.m.
Luce—8 p.m.
Connor—8:10 p.m.
Parker—8:30 p.m.
I kept working through the events of that night, trying to see something new. Wondering whether each person was truly accounted for the entire time.
After we had all arrived, there was the game with Greg Randolph; Luce showing me the broken window; the power outage and Ellie Arnold falling—or pushed—into the pool; Parker helping me clean the bathroom after; then his fight with Luce upstairs; and Connor, heading for the exit, until I pulled him back.
And now, at seven-thirty in the morning, I was already at the side door to the hospital medical center, waiting for them to unlock. The gentle automated click, and I was in.
I found her office down the white maze of halls. Her name, on a sign on the door, along with three others. Though the hours were posted from eight-thirty on, I knew she’d have to show up sooner than that.
I saw the shadow first—no footsteps—rounding the corner. Then a woman: rubber-soled flat shoes, dress slacks, a blue fitted blouse. Hair pulled back and clipped low, coffee in one hand, phone in the other. It was Luce. She stopped as soon as she came around the corner, still looking down at her phone, as if she could sense something off. Something out of place.
She looked up and blinked twice, her face giving away nothing.
“Hi,” I said.
She kept looking, like she wasn’t sure who I was.
And then something seemed to register—putting me in context, dragging out the memory. “Avery?” she said. She looked over her shoulder, as if I could’ve been waiting for someone else.
“I was hoping to find you before office hours.” I tapped the sign on her door, a reminder that I was just following public information. “I was hoping to talk to you.”
“Is everything okay?” She stepped closer, and I wondered if she was talking about Parker. Whether they were still close and now she was worried abou
t her boyfriend—the fact that they were just on a break, or maybe not a break at all. Maybe she had just stayed behind for work, and Parker had lied. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Yes. No, I’m not sure. Sadie’s dedication ceremony is this week, you know? Parker’s there. And the investigation, it’s not as simple as it seemed after all.”
She tucked her phone into her purse, took out her keys, opened the door. “I didn’t think it was simple from the start.” She held the door open for me with her back foot, beckoning me inside as she flipped on the overhead lights and dropped her bag behind the front desk. It was a small office, a scattering of chairs along the wall across from the reception desk, and a hallway with several open doors, visible from where we stood.
She checked her watch. “We probably have ten minutes before the secretary arrives. She’s always early.”
I kept staring at her, which made her frown. But it was just the surprise of her. She appeared so different than the person I’d met the previous summer, in white capris and gold jewelry and perfect hair curled beneath her collarbone. I figured I must seem different to her as well, outside Littleport. The town itself made people something more. That was why the visitors went there. Surrounded by the mountains and the ocean, you became more than you were elsewhere. Someone who could cut a kayak through the breakers; someone who’d hiked to the top of a mountain, looked out over the forest of trees, straight to the ocean, believing you earned every aspect of it. Who could be home in time to drink champagne over lobster that evening. Someone worthy of everything the place had to offer.
Luce glanced once toward the closed door, clearing her throat. I was losing her now that she had time to think things through. To realize I must’ve found her name, driven half a day, just to be standing here in front of her.
“When did you last speak to Parker?” I asked.
That seemed to focus her attention, because her eyes widened slightly, her breathing picked up. Almost as if she were afraid. “We haven’t spoken much since we broke up.”
The Last House Guest (ARC) Page 20