Over Her Dead Body(51)
My father was a tournament poker player. He tried to teach me how to play. The rules were easy: three of a kind beats two pair, full house beats a flush, high cards are better than low. Calculating the odds of having a winning hand was also fairly simple. Subtract the cards in play (on the table and in players’ hands) from the total in the deck (fifty-two); everything is a ratio. But good players don’t play the cards, my dad told me. They play the people. The winner is not the person whose cards come up. It’s the person who correctly reads his opponents, knows what their betting patterns are, when they have the cards and when they’re bluffing. As good as I was at counting cards and math, I was a miserable poker player. Someone clearly knew that, because I’d been played to a T.
If I hadn’t been so squeamish about seeing Louisa’s dead body, I might have been suspicious about how efficiently (not) Silvia had wrapped things up. Perhaps I had committed so firmly to acting with integrity, it didn’t occur to me to question anyone else’s. Or maybe I was just a dumb fuck. Whatever the case, my choice not to scrutinize the situation was a catastrophic error in judgment. But catastrophic errors in judgment were not out of character for me. One might say I was an expert at making them and had once again flexed that well-developed muscle.
Of course, there was another reason I hadn’t questioned the authenticity of the message: the idea that someone would impersonate Louisa’s nurse for any reason, including, but not limited to, relaying news of her death, was absolute lunacy. Only a psychopath would do that, and it felt completely out of the realm of possibility.
It was a tough pill to swallow that not only was there a psychopath on the other end of that message, but I’d also just gone on a date with her.
CHAPTER 40
* * *
ASHLEY
I peeled off my tweed suit and crawled into bed. There was no point getting out because (a) it was rainy and miserable outside; (b) I’d just been fired from my job for not showing up today; and (c) apparently I was rich now and didn’t need said job. I guess that’s what you would call a classic case of good news, bad news. Given that I didn’t exactly relish being a tour guide, the good should have canceled out the bad. So why was I so depressed?
Perhaps it was a good sign for my humanity that I felt terrible. A woman was dead. That in and of itself was grounds for sadness. I didn’t know Louisa very well, but she was someone’s mother, someone’s sister, someone’s aunt (my would-be boyfriend’s, to be precise). Granted, it wasn’t very nice of her to deprive her offspring of their inheritance, but it wasn’t my fault that she’d snubbed them. I flashed to how the son had shouted at me in the elevator vestibule. Maybe her kids are monsters and don’t deserve the money?
But even if Louisa had a good reason for sticking it to her kids, why should I be the one to get her money? Just because she’d left it to me didn’t mean that I could keep it. I mean, what would my mom say when she found out I’d accepted another family’s inheritance? She’d never stand for it. So in reality, my good news wasn’t really good news at all.
And then of course there was the fact that my life was a black hole. No career. No day job. No boyfriend. No roommate. Not even a last-resort marriage pact. I literally had nothing and no one. I probably would have stayed in bed all day if it wasn’t for Brando, who reminded me there was still one being on this earth who cared whether I lived or died by doing his pee-pee dance at my bedroom door.
“OK, I’m getting up,” I said, and he literally jumped for joy. I was chilled, so I put a pot of coffee on so it would be ready when we got back, then grabbed his leash and clipped it on his collar.
“You ready?”
He barked—“You bet!”—and I opened the door and stepped out into the afternoon drizzle. Brando pulled to the left, but we were going right today—away from Louisa’s house. Which I guessed was my house now, at least until the lawsuit hit and I was forced to give it back. I didn’t have any misconceptions that Louisa’s children would go down without a fight. And what kind of person would I be if I tried to fight back? Not that I was a pushover. Hollywood was a society of social climbers and backstabbers, and I’d learned how to spar with the best of them. It’s not like the lowly gatekeeper has any way to confirm if Matt Damon personally invited you to that audition or premiere, so why not just say it? And we all lied on our résumés. None of us really know how to ride a horse/speak French/play the violin—we learn when we get cast! So yeah, I knew how to get what I wanted. But this fight felt a little too fraught, even for me.
As Brando pulled me down the sidewalk, I thought about my perilous future. My mom had said I could (should?) go back home, but then what? There were no jobs for a failed actress–slash–tour guide–slash–Saturday Cinderella in Wisconsin. And all my friends were married and in normal-people jobs; it would be humiliating to have to face them now. I had been so confident, so envied when I left. “Don’t forget us when you’re a big star!” they all said. “Invite us to your premieres, send autographed pictures, say ‘hi’ to Tom Holland for us!” “I will!” I’d promised. “And I’ll be sure to give Michael B. Jordan a kiss from you, too!” I’d stupidly joked. But turns out I was the stupid joke.
“OK, Brando, we gotta turn around now,” I said, gently tugging on my dog’s leash. He had his nose in a flower bed and was sniffing up a storm. “C’mon,” I said as I tugged again. My pant legs were getting wet beneath my thigh-length windbreaker, and I was jonesing for coffee, which I imagined was ready now. He finally relented and we turned back toward home. I was so in my head I didn’t see Nathan standing in my driveway until Brando barked to announce his presence.