The Last House Guest(17)

THE DONALDSON FAMILY HAD been staying at the Blue Robin, the location of the last Plus-One party. This wasn’t the first time I’d been back since then, but I never lingered for long. I kept my walk-throughs brief and efficient between visitors. There was too much, otherwise, to remind me.

This wasn’t the scene of Sadie’s demise, so the police had left it well enough alone. But it would always be the place I’d been the last time I could imagine her alive. Where I was waiting for her final message, the last thing she wanted to tell me:

No one understands.

I’ll miss you.

Forgive me.

I would never know exactly what she had wanted to say. Though the police had tried to find her phone, the GPS had been deactivated for as long as I’d known her—a leftover suspicion from her teen years that her parents were tracking her, watching her every move. The phone had been offline when the police tried to reach it, most likely lost to the sea when she jumped.

There was a path that wove through the trees from the B&B to the overlook, passing right behind the Blue Robin. I could take my car just as easily, looping back down the drive to the next turnoff, but I didn’t want to alert anyone that I was coming; I didn’t want anyone to notice my car and ask what was going on.

I walked the same path I’d raced down nearly a year earlier, following Parker and Luce. Racing toward something we had no ability to stop. In hindsight, I knew that Parker shouldn’t have been driving. None of us should have. The night had blurred edges, as parties often did for me. Bits and pieces came back to me in surprising flashes during the questioning, morphing into a stilted time line of things I had said or done, seen or heard.

Standing on the front porch now, I could almost feel the people on the other side—the heat, the laughter—before everything had turned.

The Donaldsons had followed protocol, leaving the house key in an envelope inside the mail drop beside the front door. Not the most secure method, I knew, but it was all part of the act. Part of the story we told about this place. There were a lot of obvious dangers in Littleport, despite the claims we made to the contrary for the tourists. A safe place, we told them, and technically, if you looked at the crime statistics, that was true.

But there were other dangers. A car on a dark, winding road. A slick of ice on the sidewalk. The edge of the cliffs, the current, the rocks.

The mountains and the water; the cold in the winter; the complacency of the summer.

The near-misses that were never reported: the hikers who went missing (found two days later), the woman who fell into a gorge (she managed to call for help, but she was lucky she had her phone), the kayakers who got pulled in by the lobstermen, one after the other, all season long, misjudging the current and panicking.

And there were more, the ones we pretended didn’t exist.

The house still smelled of breakfast when I stepped inside. They’d left their dishes in the sink, soaking in the water, even though they were supposed to load up the dishwasher before the cleaning company came in.

I couldn’t see it at first, the signs of someone else, like Detective Collins had said. The chairs off center in the dining room, probably from the Donaldson family. Same with the dirty fingerprints on the surfaces and the corner of the living room rug, flipped up and inverted.

But then the smaller details came into focus: The upside-down cushion on a couch, like someone had removed the cushions and replaced this one the wrong way. The legs of the dining room table no longer lining up with the indentations on the throw rug beneath. I didn’t think the Donaldsons would’ve had any cause to rearrange the furniture.

I circled the house, running my fingers along the windowsills, the door frames, checking the locks. Everything seemed secure. I stopped at the second window facing the back, a little sleeker than all the others. It had been replaced sometime after the Plus-One party, because there was a spiderweb of cracks running through it. An accident the night of the party, the risks of inviting a cross section of the population into your home.

I had ordered the replacement window myself. Now I ran my fingers around the edges, slightly thinner, with a sleeker lock. It was in the locked position. But it was a newer model than the other windows, the latch so narrow I wasn’t sure it fit properly. I lifted from the base, and the glass slid up with no resistance, lock or not. I cursed to myself. At least I didn’t have to worry about someone with a key.

In the meantime, I needed to confirm that nothing of ours had been taken; we didn’t use much of value to decorate the rentals, but best to do a quick check anyway. With the way the cushions were turned up, it seemed like whoever had been in here was looking for hidden valuables. In a place without a safe, that’s what the guests are known to do: Put laptops between the mattress and box spring. Leave jewelry in the bottom of drawers, stowed under clothes.

The door to the master bedroom at the end of the hall was closed, but I figured that was where anything of value would’ve been hidden—where someone would’ve gone looking.

As soon as I opened the door, I got a whiff of sea salt and lavender. A candle left burning on the white wooden dresser. Forgotten when the Donaldsons checked out. There weren’t any rules expressly forbidding it, but it made me second-guess having candles in the house. I blew out the flame, the wisp of black smoke curling in front of the mirror before disappearing.

The drawers had each been emptied of any clothes inside, and there was nothing left behind on the bathroom surfaces. The queen-size bed was unmade, with just the white quilt crumpled at the base. I opened the chest at the foot of the bed, where we kept extra blankets, and the scent reminded me of my grandmother’s old attic, stale and earthy. A spider scurried across the top blanket, and I jumped back, goose bumps forming on my arms. These blankets had probably remained untouched all season. They needed to be run through the wash, the entire chest cleaned out with furniture polish and a vacuum—there was one last family scheduled for next week.