The Last House Guest (ARC)

by Megan Miranda

  “When was that?”

  She tipped her head. “Last September. Well, technically, that night. The night of the party.”

  “What?” I saw her again, leaving the upstairs bedroom. That wild look in her eyes. Had he dumped her right then? Or had it been her?

  “We got in a fight that night, but that was just the last straw. The thing that makes you say it, you know?”

  I’d heard them from the bathroom. The bang against the wall. I dropped my voice. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Parker? No. It was nothing like that . . . He opened the door to leave, and I slammed it shut.” She shook her head. “I just wanted the truth for once. I was so sick of the lies.”

  “But I saw you. At the service.” Standing beside him, watching me. He’d leaned down to whisper in her ear, and she’d flinched, turning away—

  “Yeah, he asked that—Well, he said it wouldn’t look good if we’d broken up the same night his sister died.” She rolled her eyes. “Can you believe it? Even then they were thinking of how things would look. We agreed to keep up appearances until after the service, after everything wound down and I started my job.” She gestured around the room. “Mostly, we just sort of . . . drifted after. There was nothing left to say. I’ve gone out of my way not to cross paths with the Lomans since. So far, I’ve succeeded.”

  “I thought you . . . Well, they seemed to really like you. You seemed to like them.”

  She laughed then, unexpectedly. “Sure. They seem like a lot of things.” She chewed the inside of her cheek, considering me. A nervous habit I’d never noticed before. “Have you ever played chess?”

  My father had, but his set had disappeared after that first move, and I didn’t know how to play, really. “You think they’re playing a game?” I asked.

  She ran her hand back over her hair, down the ponytail. “I think they are the game, Avery. Bishops and knights. Kings and queens. Pawns.”

  I lost the thread, lost the metaphor. “You think you were a pawn?” Or maybe it was me she was talking about.

  She pressed her lips together, not answering. “They will sacrifice anything for the king.”

  I remembered what Grant had taught me—that you had to be willing to risk in order to win. That you had to be willing to part with something. You had to be ready to lose.

  “The family is so screwed up,” she continued, her voice barely above a whisper. “They hate each other.”

  “No . . .” I said unconvincingly. Thinking: They close ranks. When things go wrong, they cover. Setting Parker up to take over the company. Moving Sadie’s career. Guiding their lives. But I’d also witnessed the animosity between Sadie and Parker. There was no way Luce hadn’t noticed. I thought it had stemmed from jealousy, from the expectations of their parents—a typical sibling rivalry—but maybe I was wrong.

  “It’s all fake,” she said. “Imagine the lengths they must go to, all of them, to make you believe. Everything’s fake. Nothing’s real.”

  But Luce had pointed the finger at me. Detective Collins told me so.

  “You told the police I was obsessed with Sadie.”

  She took a deep breath. “That detective . . . he was looking for something. And I didn’t want him to see it in me. He kept asking for every move I made. Where I was, every second. It’s so hard to remember every moment. What you did, what you saw . . .” She closed her eyes, but I could see them moving underneath the lids. “What was I supposed to think, though? When I arrived last summer, you were really not pleased to see me there. It wasn’t a lie, what I told him.”

  “I just didn’t know you would be there,” I said. “No one told me, either.”

  She twisted the coffee cup in her hands, took a long sip, then dropped the rest in the trash can beside the desk. “I thought you were after Parker at first. But then I saw—the way you and Sadie were. I don’t know what happened between the two of you over the summer, but yes, I told the police. It was a humiliating night for me, and I was sick of replaying it. And then Sadie, God. I just wanted to get out of there.” A shudder rolled through her as she finished speaking.

  “You mean there was a reason they might focus on you?”

  Her mouth was a thin line. “No, not me.”

  Parker, then. She meant Parker. Parker’s involvement would drag her down into the mess. The way you could pull someone up into a different world but also pull someone down. It was a lesson we’d both learned from the Lomans.

  Luce shrugged on her white coat. Clipped on a name tag. I thought about the ways we dressed to present ourselves. How we slipped into another disguise, another skin. How we shifted our appearance in ways to say something to one another. Luce now: I am a person who will help you. Or: I belong here.

  She looked at the clock once more. “Is this what you came for? Is that enough?”

  “Someone killed Sadie. That note wasn’t hers.”

  She stared at me for a long time, her hands frozen on her name tag. Finally, she smoothed her hands down the side of her lab coat. Lowered her voice. “Are you asking if I think one of them could’ve done it?”

  Wasn’t I? Wasn’t that what I was here for? “You knew better than me how they were.” I cleared my throat. “You saw how all of them were.” I was too close to see clearly. And, as she’d told me the day we met, she’d known them longer.

  “I did.”

  “I think Sadie wanted to get out of there. I think she found something out about her family.” I glanced to the side, leaving my part out of it—that whatever she had found wasn’t tied only to her family but to mine. The theft, the payments—how it was all connected, and I was a part of it.

  “I don’t know that she wanted to leave, exactly,” Luce said. “I think she just wanted to be seen, like Parker was. He needs it, you know, from everyone around him. The idolization of Parker Loman.” She rolled her eyes. “But Sadie was never having it.” A little star protégé. A junior asshole. “Her teasing, it got under his skin. I’d never seen Parker’s look turn so dark as when Sadie pushed him. It was always something. She kept teasing him about his scar. I didn’t think it was that big a deal. We were all young once.” She touched her eyebrow, shrugged. “But she wouldn’t let up. Said, Oh, tell Luce about your wild youth. Parker gets away with everything. What was it again, a fight with two guys? A fight over some girl? He would stay silent, but she’d keep pushing. Say something like, Parker, your next line is: “You should see the other guy.” Or do I have it wrong? Come on, tell us. Or, The sins of his youth. Locked away forever.”

  I could see Sadie doing it, the expression on her face. Digging and digging until something snapped. Parker can get away with anything. She hated him. Of course she did. The life she could never have, even growing up in the same house, with the same parents, the same opportunities.

  “Why did you break up, then? Were you afraid of him?”

  “No, I wasn’t afraid. I was pissed.” She looked to the side and sniffed. “It’s embarrassing. That night. The window. Remember?”

  I held my breath. Held perfectly still.

  “I was inside looking for Parker. But I finally saw him through the window. I smiled. I remember, I smiled.” She shook her head to herself. “Until I saw that his hands were out. He was talking to another girl, trying to get her to calm down. And the look on her face . . . I know that look. Anger, yes, but also heartbreak. And then she picked up one of those standing pillars around the patio and swung it at his head.” Luce swung her arms as if holding a bat—demonstrating or remembering. My mouth dropped open.

  Her mouth quirked into a smile. “That was my look, too. He ducked out of the way, but it hit the glass, and, well, you saw. She meant to do it. She was going to hurt him. She was so, so angry . . . Later, when I confronted him, he claimed it was over long ago. That she couldn’t let it go. But come on.” She flexed her fingers. “I wanted the truth. No more li
es. You don’t wait until the very last day of summer and attack someone about something that happened a year ago. She was so angry, angry enough to hurt him right then.” Her throat moved. “That whole place . . . it’s like you walk into it, and it’s a world unto itself. Nothing else exists. Time stops. You think you can do anything . . .” Then she refocused on me. “You didn’t know? I really thought everyone was in on the joke but me.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t know.” I had no idea what Parker did when he was off alone.

  “Parker begged me to leave her out of it. And I only did because I didn’t believe then that he could’ve hurt Sadie. We were together most of the night, and then there was that note . . . I didn’t believe he’d really hurt her. But I don’t know anymore. The more time that passes, looking back?” She shook her head.

  But I was barely listening. I was picturing the girl out back with a pillar held like a bat. Running through a list of faces I’d seen at the party. Rumors I’d heard or imagined about Parker. “The other girl, did you know her name?”

  “No. But I knew who she was. I’d seen her before. Curly hair, sort of brownish red. Worked at that bed-and-breakfast, the one we went to for brunch sometimes.” She choked on her own laugh. “He brought me right there during the summer, paraded me around, the sick fuck. I figured, after, that’s why he wanted to park there. That’s what took him so long to show up at the party. So he could see her first.”

  I stepped back just as the door swung open. An older woman in a floral dress stood there, half in the entrance, door balanced on her hip. She looked between us. “Is everything okay?” She must’ve sensed it in the air, the tension, the danger of this moment. A name tag was clipped to the front of her dress. The secretary, then.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Avery?” Luce’s voice faded away as the door swung shut behind me. I moved fast, practically running down the hall. I pushed through the closest exit, into the crisp morning end-of-summer air, sucking in a deep breath.

  Goddamn Connor. He knew. The girl he was arguing with in the shadows—the one who’d swung a pillar at Parker. I saw them through the cracks in the window, near the edge of the yard—her face just out of frame. He saw it happen, and he lied. Choosing his allegiance, then and now.

  I could see her perfectly, that girl in the shadows. Knuckles white. I pictured the look in her eyes as she stumbled backward. Could see it clearly, in a way I never could before. Fear, yes, but anger, too.

  Faith. It had been Faith.

  CHAPTER 24

  I sat in the car outside the hospital, my hands shaking. Pulling out that sheet of paper with our names, unfolding it again. Adding one more name to the end of the list:

  Faith—9 p.m.

  She’d been there. Sometime after Parker had arrived but before the window had been broken.

  I could barely focus on the drive home, feeling nothing but a white-hot rage surging through my bones.

  If the case was reopened, like I believed, the police were looking at a person who had been at the party. They were looking at that list of names again.

  But there was one more name. A name the police didn’t even know about. Someone who wasn’t even supposed to be there.

  CONNOR KEPT CALLING WITH a frequency that I found alarming. I had watched each call come through, listened to each ring until it went to voicemail. But then it would start up again a few moments later, and I started to worry that something had happened. Sadie’s dedication was the next day. I wondered if the investigation had changed anything. The next time the phone started up, I answered on speaker. “Hello?”

  “Where are you,” he said by way of greeting.

  “On my way back. Is everything okay?” The coastal highway was much emptier heading north on a Monday, so much different than the Sunday commute out of town.

  “I was worried. You said you would call, and you didn’t.”

  “Sorry. I started driving straight after talking to Luce.”

  A pause. “What did she tell you? What did you find out?”

  No longer curiosity but a test, and I couldn’t tell where his allegiance remained. “Oh, I’m sure you already know.”

  A stretch of silence, everything unraveling between us in the gap. “No.”

  “You didn’t know Faith was the girl who broke the window?” I came up fast on the car ahead of me, veered around it without pausing. I had to slow down, calm down, but my fingers tightened on the wheel. “You didn’t know she was fighting with Parker Loman and took a swing at him?”

  “No. No. I mean, I saw her there. I knew she was upset. I knew she was there to confront Parker, but I told her to leave. I sent her home. Jesus, she was furious with me, probably still is. Accused me of being a traitor. She didn’t know why I was there.”

  “Well, you missed it. The fight. She was pissed and took a stone pillar to his head. She missed Parker and hit the window instead.”

  “Listen, Faith wouldn’t hurt someone . . .”

  His words trailed off, and in the gap of silence, I laughed. “But I would, isn’t that what you mean?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “She swung it at his head.”

  “The window wasn’t even broken, right? She probably didn’t swing it that hard. Maybe she just wanted to scare him. Let him know she was upset.”

  “Give me a break, Connor.” As if that were the narrative he wanted to believe about both Faith and himself. That he had not latched himself on to two girls from his youth, each of whom had the power to harm, to rage. Because what did it mean for him that he saw something in the both of us that he liked—that he loved?

  “You don’t know her anymore, she’s . . .”

  “She’s what?”

  “Smaller, somehow. Like she surrendered and gave up.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Faith.” Not the girl I used to know, sneaking in houses with me, speaking her mind, fearing nothing—the perpetual bounce in her step. But I remembered how she looked when I saw her at the B&B the week before, quiet and reserved. The clipped words, the fake amicability.

  But she could harm. Oh, she could harm.

  Bend until you find that point. When you’re low and sinking faster, and so you do something, anything, in a drastic move, just to get it to stop. The fuck you rising to the surface. The scar from Parker’s fight. The violent shrug of Connor’s arm. My hands connecting with Faith’s shoulders. The surge as I felt our shift in balance—the fulcrum on which so many lives were balanced.

  “Listen, I’m out making a few deliveries, but let me talk to her first. Let’s get together. Let’s—”

  “No, Connor. No.” I would not wait for Connor. Detective Collins clearly had the two of us in his crosshairs. Connor had told me as much—that the detective was asking questions, not only about Connor but about me. And I’d just discovered that Connor’s allegiance did not lie with me. If I wanted the truth, I’d have to get there myself, before it was too late. “I’ll know the truth when I ask her. I’ll know.” Same as how Connor and I could still read each other even after all these years. The things we wanted to keep hidden but couldn’t. Faith couldn’t lie to me. If I asked her, if she’d hurt Sadie—I’d know.

  “And then what?” Connor asked.

  I didn’t know. Couldn’t answer honestly. Faith or Sadie. My past or my present. “Promise me you’ll let me talk to her first.”

  “We’re too old for promises, Avery.” He hung up, and I pressed my foot on the gas, picking up speed as I veered off the highway.

  I WASN’T PAYING ATTENTION as I eased my foot off the gas, coasting back down the mountain roads toward the sea. Didn’t see the approaching hairpin turn and braked too late—the momentum swinging the back of my car off the edge of the pavement, the entire car teetering slightly left. My stomach dropped, and I jerked up the emergency brake. My hands shook, my p
ulse raced, and it took until the surprise of another car—a honk as it swerved past—before I could focus again.

  How easy that would’ve been, I realized. Death never something I had to look for but something that sneaked up when I wasn’t watching. How easy it must’ve been for my father, drifting asleep on the mountain road, my mother beside him, my grandmother in the back. The dark road, the dark night. Honestly, I was surprised it didn’t happen more often.

  It was a miracle, it seemed, that so many of us made it this far and kept going.

  I took a few deep breaths, then drove back toward the downtown of Littleport. In the distance, the sun hit the surface of the water, and my stomach dropped. I passed the turn for Hawks Ridge on my left, with its stone pillars and iron gates. Then a road to the right—forking off toward the place I grew up, with the one-level homes that backed to the woods, and a view of the mountains. In front of me, the road sloped toward the sea and the center of downtown.

  The streets weren’t as congested as they were on the weekend, and I could pick out a few familiar faces as I passed. I knew Detective Collins was somewhere out here, looking for me. Waiting for me. Because he believed that I had wanted to be part of Sadie Loman’s world, and that when she was set to cast me out of it, I wanted her dead.

  They knew what I was capable of when I was angry.

  The sea in the distance looked calm. I steered the car back up the incline, past the police station on top of the hill, toward the Point in the distance, and the lighthouse.

  The lot was half full, and my wheels slowed on the gravel drive. As I exited the car, I could hear the crash of the waves against the cliffs beyond the wooden fence. The shocking power of the ocean. A reminder that one place could become both a nightmare and a dream.

  Watching a family empty their luggage from the car beside me, I almost missed it: a woman walking from behind the B&B into the woods. Down the path I’d raced the year before.

  It was the speed at which she moved that made me follow her. That hair, wild and untamable, piled in a ponytail high on the top of her head. The quick glance over her shoulder, like she didn’t want to be seen.