“She always sounds so charming when you talk about her,” I said.
Bridgette faced me. She was perfectly made up, every hair, every eyelash in place. “As I was saying, it doesn’t matter if you like it, or if people like you. It just matters that they believe in you. This séance was your idea. You need to stop whining and get out there and play your part.”
She’s right. I realized. This is just a job. Like cleaning houses. Just a way to make money. “Okay,” I said.
But that didn’t mean I was going to make it completely easy for her.
She was turning to go when I spoke again. “He said he got together with Aurora the night she disappeared. Something about her kneeling right where you’re standing.”
Bridgette winced but regained her composure quickly. “Why are you bringing that up?”
“He said she told him no the first time and fought him, but he was sure that she liked it.”
“Stop,” Bridgette said. “This is absurd.” Her voice was calm, but her eyes had begun darting around like she was looking for a way to escape. “Whatever happened, it happened to Aurora not you. It’s none of your business.”
“He grabbed my ass and said maybe this time we’d get around to that.”
“Stop talking,” she said. She was still smiling, but her back was pressed against the door, hard.
“She was just a girl,” I said to her, unable to keep the horror out of my voice. “Your cousin was only fourteen. And he just stood here and told me he used her against her will, and you not only don’t seem to see anything wrong with that, you’re trying to cover it up.”
Her fingers had gone to the clasp on the door, and they were shaking too hard to work it properly. Yet her voice was still even. “Stop,” she said breathlessly. “Aurora was no innocent girl. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You have to stop.”
“Or what? You’ll send him back in here? Maybe this time you’ll watch.”
“Shut up!” she said, finally raising her voice.
As she got more agitated, I got calmer. “How many more girls are you going to let him get away with hurting?” I asked, my voice level, cold. “How many more, Bridgette?”
Bridgette stood sideways against the door, her face away from me. “I didn’t know about him and Ro, okay? I would have warned you. Her. Whatever.”
“But you know now. Are you still going to date him?”
“It’s not that simple,” she said.
“When was the last time you saw your cousin alive?”
She frowned. “I already told you. I saw her and Liza leave together a little after the party started. Why do you care?”
“What was she wearing?”
“I don’t know. This is—”
“Does he like it when you fight too?” I asked.
For one moment I saw such a portrait of bleakness and despair on her face, I wanted to hug her. And then before my eyes, the pieces of Bridgette, the careful puzzle pieces of her identity, slipped back into place, and she looked exactly how she always looked. Perfect. Varnished.
“She was wearing a trench coat,” she said finally. Her voice quavered in the middle despite her efforts to control it. She straightened her shoulders and smoothed the front of her jeans. “This conversation is over. I’ll expect to see you downstairs in no more than five minutes, and I’ll expect you to act like nothing happened.” She clutched her purse and slid out the door, shutting it with a click behind her.
I stared after her a moment and realized I felt better. I hoped it wasn’t because I’d made her feel worse, but I couldn’t be sure. And, as she pointed out to me, I shouldn’t care.
I climbed out of the bathtub, decided the new less-buttoned cleavage on my cardigan was not completely obscene, and left the bathroom. Maybe it was a defense mechanism, but I wasn’t thinking about what Stuart had done to me as I left. I was thinking about how badly Stuart reacted to having his pride injured.
And about the fury in his voice when he’d called Liza a “snotty bitch.” It had been, well… murderous.
CHAPTER 27
Coralee was sitting on the bed in the master bedroom outside when I came out. She sprang up and rushed toward me.
“You’re sure you’re fine?” she said.
“Yes.”
She held me at arm’s length and examined my outfit. She straightened the necklace I was wearing—a silver chain with the heart and the arrow dangling from either end—frowned at the missing buttons on my sweater, nodded, then stepped back. “Do you have anything to say about the incident?”
“Only that Stuart needs to watch where he puts his hands.” I stopped. “Are you filming this?”
She smiled and tapped the big floral broach she was wearing.
I held an open palm in front of my face. “I’m done for the day.”
“We’ll talk more at the spa tomorrow,” she said. “Steamy confidences in the steam room.”
I moved past her and descended the stairs back to the main floor. The big room got quiet for a moment as I came in, and then everyone started talking again, with a little too much animation.
Stuart was leaning against the bar talking to one of the caterers, and every now and then he’d cast a mean glance in my direction. Huck had managed to corner Bain and, based on his hand language was trying to sell him on either a huge night club concept or a new kind of shammy.
From the snippets I could overhear, the room was divided into two factions. Those, like Coralee, who thought the séance had been gnarly (apparently another catchword contender) and that Madam Cruz was amazing, and those, led by Bridgette, who thought it was a scam and the medium was a fake.
The only thing I knew was that I wanted to leave. As though sensing it, Bridgette came over and moved to steer me into conversation with Jordan, but we’d only gone two steps when she smiled brightly and said, “Grant. Hey. What did you think of that?”
Grant looked from her to me, then back to her. “We sure had some spirited fun,” he said, keeping it deadpan.
Bridgette gave a tepid smile. “Clever.”
Grant turned to me. “Do I stand a ghost of a chance of making you laugh?”
I tried to look skeptical. “Maybe if you keep trying.”
Bridgette detached herself from my arm. “I’ll leave you two.” She gave me a discrete nod of encouragement, as though indicating that Grant was someone Aurora would have spoken to.
We watched her cross the room toward Jordan and Scar. When she was out of earshot, Grant said, “How are you doing?”
How would Aurora be doing? “Okay,” I said. “That was weird. Kind of cool.”
“Yeah it was,” he agreed. “Do you think it was Liza?”
“How could it be?” I asked. “She’s dead.”
He looked intrigued. “So you don’t believe in ghosts?”
I shook my head. “Do you?”
He pressed his lips together and nodded once. “Yes and no.” Then, like he was making up his mind, he said, “Want to get out of here and go have some fun?”
My first impulse was to thank him and then go home, but before the words were out of my mouth, I knew that was wrong. That was an Eve answer. I took a deep breath and gave the right—the Aurora—answer. “Depends what you have in mind,” I said.
“I was thinking we could go do some ghost busting.”
I felt myself stiffen. “Not another séance.”
He snickered. “No way. Hands on. With gear.”
“What kind of gear?”
“Really? That’s going to be the deciding factor for you? You get the opportunity to ride along with a ghost-busting legend, as well as a prime chance at coaxing out the long version of my life story since you’ve been gone, and you want to know what you get to play with? Forget it.” He sighed dramatically. “I remember when my company would have been enough.”
I chuckled, and I realized that for the first time, my laugh was genuine. I could see what had drawn Aurora to him. “No wait, please. I??
?d love to go. I mean, since you’re a legend.”
“You won’t be sorry,” he assured me. “I’ll get the car and bring it around the back. Unless you want to make an appearance for the four major news networks and two gossip shows camped on the lawn.”
I shook my head.
“Give me ten minutes. And if it’s okay with you, keep it under your hat. I don’t want the others to get jealous.”
“You mean you don’t want Coralee to know you’re leaving early.”
“You always did put such a sinister spin on my actions,” he said with mock exasperation.
I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair where I’d left it when I came in, stole a second of Bain’s attention from Scar’s cleavage to wave goodbye, and slid out the back door of the house.
It was warm out there and quiet. I stood on a flagstone patio that was separated from the road by a low mound where the scrub brush had been left to grow, so that the patio seemed to melt into the landscape. There was a sleek-lined table with four chairs and three oversized pots of glossy-leafed lemon plants. A half moon hung low in the sky, and a warm, dry wind slipped by me, making a noise like rattling paper. I took a deep breath and smelled wood smoke.
I remembered Uncle Thom talking about wildfires, but it made me think of a different fire. A different city, the smoke of chimneys lit for the first time in the fall, and I heard Nina’s voice asking, “How do you know which way they’re going?”
The leaves on the tree we’re sitting beneath are startlingly bright yellow. Occasionally one of them will drift down in front of us, or on the front lawn of the house we’re looking at. Its chimney is puffing out wood smoke, and Nina is sitting next to me in the new purple parka I’d found for her, the sleeves rolled up because it was too big.
We liked this house especially because they never closed the blinds and they had a big TV and they tended to watch things with a lot of kissing. Tonight, though, it was an action movie, with people going back and forth across the screen, sometimes running, sometimes on horseback. The game was to make up a story to fit whatever we were watching, so tonight’s story was about some people who were running away from the bad guys who wanted to turn them into dainty handbags.
But Nina had been moody all day, and when she got like that, she was full of objections. “They could be going home. How do you know they’re running away from something and not to it? They both look the same on the outside. It’s all running.”
“The theme music,” I’d told her, feeling pretty clever. “That’s how you can tell.”
She’d looked at me somberly for longer than I expected and finally said, “You are going to need a better answer than that.”
The memory brought back the timbre of her voice and the tickle of her hair on my chin as I put her to bed that night and the feeling of belonging to someone, mattering to someone, having someone whose first smile in the morning was for you. Someone who slipped their hand into yours when they were scared and trusted you to make them feel better. Someone who knew you, the important things about you, and loved you anyway.
Maybe it was the effort of having to play Aurora all day, or maybe it was the memory, but without warning I began to cry.
“Is it possible to feel homesick if you have no home?” I could hear Nina asking.
Yes, I wanted to tell her. It was. I missed her so much. I ground my fingers into my palms to get myself to stop crying, but I couldn’t.
I would rather have been me, with her and nothing else, than Aurora and all the money in the world. Standing under the stars, with a house full of people behind me and a crowd on the lawn clamoring for even a glimpse of me, I felt more alone than I ever had in my life. More alone than when my mother left me. More alone than when I’d first ended up on my own. And more scared.
What had I done by agreeing to this? What could I have been thinking?
“Here,” a hand roughly shoved a pack of Kleenex at me, and I recognized the shadowy form of N. Martinez in front of me.
I took it, slid a tissue out, and mopped my eyes and nose. “Thank you.”
I turned to face where he was, but it was so dark I couldn’t see him, only his outline. He seemed so compact, contained, that I had pegged him as being wiry, but now in the moonlight I was struck by how broad his shoulders were, how powerful and well-muscled his arms.
He said, “Have you ever considered reevaluating your life choices?”
Just like that. Boom. Not one for small talk, N. Martinez. I took a step forward, so we were standing side by side, but not looking at one another. “Just because you don’t like me doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with my life.”
He shifted slightly as though my proximity made him uneasy. “I was more thinking about you. About how I’ve had to watch you cry in secret twice in two days.”
Talking to him was like catching a glimpse of yourself in a magnifying mirror, all imperfections and blemishes. “Sorry if it bothered you. No one said you had to stick around here.”
He ignored that and said instead, “If you were my sister, I’d be concerned.” The authentic feeling in his voice touched something deep inside me. Something unfamiliar and scared—and suddenly eager to get out.
No, I told myself. Stop. My voice sounded haughty, harsh to my ears. “I’m not your sister, am I? I’m no one’s sister. I don’t have anyone to be concerned about me. And I don’t need anyone. I don’t want anyone.”
There was a pause. “Okay.”
“I’m fine,” I said coldly.
He brought his hand to his mouth and cleared his throat. “You bet.”
I turned to face his outline. “Stop acting like you know me or my life. You don’t know anything.”
There was a long silence. When he spoke, it was so quiet I had to lean in to hear it. “I know you aren’t used to people being nice to you. But you were, once. And despite whatever secrets you’re carrying around that tarnish your vision of who you are, there’s a part of you that knows you still deserve kindness.”
I felt like I’d been punched.
For a moment my mind reeled with absurdities. I saw myself at a state fair eating things on skewers with him, saw us walking together through an arch of trees whose leaves were changing colors, pictured picnics near a mountain stream, watching the sunset from a deck overlooking a pond, watching it rise over the red tile roof of a European town. I wanted to tell him things, tell him how I didn’t speak for a year when I first got into foster care, tell him about Miss Melanie and the Durlings and who Eve Brightman really is. Was. I felt a wave of longing roll out of me, but not the way it usually did, diffuse and sad. This was hopeful, as though it had been coaxed out by a whispered promise.
Don’t do this, a voice in my head screamed. Don’t even think it. You’re making it up. This man wants nothing to do with you. He’s a police officer; he’s trying to win your trust so he can learn things about you. Things you can’t afford for him to learn. If he finds out the truth about you, who knows what will happen? Even if it was different, you know what you are doing here, and no one, especially no cop, has a place in that. Aurora would never have had anything to do with him. And you can’t afford to have anything to do with him either.
I drove my finger nails into my palm, forced a hard laugh, and said in my most brittle voice, “I can’t imagine why you’d think I care about your cheap cop psychology.”
He went very still.
“Wait,” I said, wanting to take it back. I reached out and laid my hand on his forearm, and as my fingers touched the solid muscle there, I felt something like an electric shock ricochet through me. “I didn’t—”
He moved his arm away. “Your ride,” he said, nodding toward the street where Grant sat in the driver’s seat of an idling white Ford Bronco. I hadn’t even heard it pull up. “You should go.”
I hesitated a moment longer than I should have before walking down the hill toward Grant’s car. Right before I got in, for some insane reason I turned to wave goodbye.
N. Martinez was standing where I’d left him, his hand over his arm where I’d touched it, rubbing it as though to erase any trace of me.
Of Aurora, I corrected myself. But that didn’t matter. I could never be anyone but Aurora Silverton to him.
I felt like a hand was closing over my heart. Damn him. Damn N. Martinez.
CHAPTER 28
“What was that?” Grant asked as I slid into the passenger seat of his car. There was a slightly petulant curl to his lip.
“Nothing,” I shook my head. “Just a police officer giving me some advice. He suggested I rethink my life choices.”
“You’re not tied up with him or anything, are you?” he asked, cruising toward the police barricade.
I noticed the silver VW I’d seen in Phoenix parked behind Bain’s Porsche. I must have been wrong about it not being Stuart’s style. “Tied up?”
“Enamored of the law. The thing is, what we’re about to do? It’s a tiny bit illegal. Is that going to be a problem for you?”
“Have we met? I’m Aurora Silverton. The only problem with what you just said is the ‘tiny bit’ part.”
“I’m serious. You can’t tell anyone about it. If you squeal, the whole squad will get in trouble. It’s all for one and one for all. If you’re friends with cops, that’s okay, but you can’t be part of the ghost-busting team.”
I thought about the way N. Martinez had looked at my hand on his arm, like it was somehow sullying him. “I am not friends with cops,” I told him definitively.
He gave me a suspicious glance in one direction, then in the other. “I believe it,” he said. He held out his hand. “Welcome to the team. Now buckle up because we’re going to take back the night, one ghost at a time.”
As we drove down to the flats, I said, “You mentioned something about your life story?”
“That was an idle threat.”
“No, I want to know.” I touched his arm. He looked down at my hand, differently than the way N. Martinez had, then back at me. He looked intrigued.
“We’ll see,” he said. He handed me a camera. “Take that and start spotting.”