Never Have I Ever(53)

The sign was the same, scrolling metal words hung on a wrought-iron gate, purely decorative, permanently open. When I was a teenager, Waverly Place was the “it” neighborhood, but it had aged. The houses were large and probably still overpriced, but the wealthiest people in town now were building on prime lots overlooking the bluffs.

I crossed into the neighborhood itself, and though years had passed, it all felt so familiar. I recognized houses where other Brighton kids had lived or I had babysat, and the carpool pickup spot on Maple Drive.

Maple intersected with my own old street, Clearwater. I kept my gaze deliberately forward as I crossed over. My parents’ former house was on this block, and two blocks farther on would be the Shipley home. I had no desire to see what trees were still standing or if the paint colors had changed. I didn’t want to be here at all.

I drove directly back to Rainway Street, though I almost went right past it. I was looking for the back of the neighborhood, but the woods were gone. Rainway had houses on both sides now. The newer ones were smaller and more homogeneous, brick-fronted with an array of coordinating pastel colors on the HardiePlank sides.

I turned onto Rainway, and there was my old classmate Shelley Gast’s house. That put me two blocks down from where the dirt road had once run. I could feel myself getting close. It was like driving into a vortex, being pulled toward a dark center. The air became sharper, more electrical, as if the place itself had sentience and judgment. All the little blond hairs on my forearms rose, and my hands prickled on the wheel, as if they had gone to sleep. I stopped exactly on the spot, in front of what had been Mr. Pratt’s house, a white Colonial perched up high on a hill.

When Tig and I came roaring out of the woods in the Ambassador, Mrs. Shipley’s little car had skidded all the way across the street and partway up the slope, tearing gashes in Mr. Pratt’s manicured grass. The crash had awakened both the Pratts. Mr. Pratt was the one who’d called the police.

I got out of my Subaru, my legs shaking so hard I wasn’t sure they’d hold me. I realized I was hungry. So hungry. I hadn’t eaten yet today, and I had mostly pushed last night’s dinner around my plate. Once I noticed the feeling, it became huge, almost omnipresent. To be this savagely hungry felt almost righteous, a dark sensation close to pleasure. It made me remember I deserved to be this empty.

I closed my eyes, made myself breathe slowly. I was not that girl, and I was here on business.

I looked around. On the old side of Rainway, the lots were much larger. To the right of the Pratt house, the hill subsided. I could see the windows of just three more houses, which meant only these four had a clear view of this spot.

The Pratts had already been quite elderly at the time. Even their grandkids had been grown then, so Roux was not a Pratt. The house next door to them had been for sale, I remembered. Empty.

Could Roux have been a squatter? Not a child of privilege at all but a runaway, ten or twelve years old, camped out in the empty house?

It didn’t ring true. It wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. Waverly Place houses had alarm systems, plus a private security company drove around checking for interlopers.

The next house was Jesse Cannon’s old place; he’d been a Brighton kid, the youngest of three boys. No sisters. That left one house, sand-colored brick with a roofline that rose into three peaks.

I had no idea who had lived there back in 1991. I stared at the windows, and they stared back like empty eyes. It was the last house on the block. After it, Rainway curved.

I walked close enough to read the numbers on the stone mailbox: 226. I’d have to call my local lawyer, the one who’d long ago worked with Boyce to set up the bogus foundation that had paid off Tig Simms. He could dig through the records at the courthouse and find out who’d owned the place in 1991. I had to get to Divers Down and then pick up my baby. I didn’t want to keep Luca waiting so long that it became suspicious.

Still, I lingered by the mailbox. Why not simply ask? My stomach growled audibly inside me, like an animal. There was no harm in asking.

I climbed the steps to the porch and rang the bell. It pealed out Westminster Quarters, fronting like Big Ben. My mother had installed a bell like that, grand and clear, in the Boston house.

A woman came to the door. She was older than I was, tricked out in the kind of all-white resort gear that costs more than a night at a really good resort. She was as expensive-looking as her clothes, ash-blond highlights concealing any hint of gray, her face lightly and expertly made up. Like Roux, she’d had some work done, but she was older and hers was showing. The plump skin of her cheeks and forehead didn’t match her neck.

“Yes,” she said, eyebrows arched, pre-impatient, as if I were holding out a booklet about hell or vacuum cleaners. Waverly wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that tolerated door-to-door anything.

“Sorry to bother you, and when I’m such a mess,” I said. I touched my hair, apologetically. “I just came from yoga. But I was passing by and . . . well, I grew up here. I was trying to find my house. It’s so confusing, with all the new builds.”

“You grew up on this street,” she said with a healthy amount of skepticism.

My old Subaru, visible behind me on the road, was surely not helping, and neither was my baggy jacket. It did look like a pool cover-up, damn Roux for being right.

“Yes. Near Shelley Gast’s place. Shelley and I went to Brighton together. If I could find her house, I’m sure I could get to mine. I walked that route a million times when I was a kid.”