The Last House Guest(20)

Through the glass, Connor was arguing with someone in the shadows. I shifted my perspective, trying to see, but his image through the window fractured into a dozen pieces against the night sky.

He looked in my direction, and then he stepped away, out of frame. I closed my eyes, breathing in slowly. “We should cover it up,” I said, “so no one gets hurt.”

I knew we kept a first-aid kit in the master bathroom down the hall, along with athletic tape. The tape seemed the best option, both as a deterrent and a stopgap until tomorrow.

But the door to the master bedroom was already locked. “Dammit,” I said, slamming my hand into the wood, the noise echoing through the narrow hallway. I hoped it made them jump.

“Guess Sadie was right not to have the party at their house,” Luce said.

I sighed. “It’s fine,” I said. Even though I had felt the glass under my fingers ready to give way. It was one push from shattering, from really injuring someone. I had been prepared for someone to end up in the pool before the night was out. Expected a couple spills, a stain that would have to be professionally treated, maybe. But I had not been expecting any real damage.

A woman raised a red cup in the air. “To summer!” she said.

Luce raised hers in response, then spotted someone across the room—Parker, I assumed. She left me standing there alone, at the entrance to the dark hallway.

No one seemed to notice when I slipped out the front. When I circled to the side of the house, breathing in the solitude. Nothing but trees and the muffled sound of people inside.

I wasn’t the only one out here. A twig cracking, a brittle leaf crunching, the rustle of fabric coming closer. “Hello?” I called. And then: “Sadie?”

She moved like that. Light on her feet. Sure of herself. Not likely to pause for the sake of anybody else.

But the woods fell silent after that, and when I pulled up the flashlight on my phone, I saw nothing but shadows crisscrossing the darkness.





SUMMER


?????2018





CHAPTER 6


I sat there on the edge of the bed as the seconds ticked by, staring at the phone in my hand.

Sadie’s phone, which the police never found. Sadie’s phone, presumably lost to the sea, torn from her hand when she jumped, or tossed into the abyss in the moments before.

If Sadie was alone that night, how did her phone end up here?

Now I pictured the dots lighting up the message window, imagined her final text:

Help me—

There was a creak from outside the bedroom, and I stood quickly, my heart pounding.

“Avery? You in here?”

I slid the phone into my back pocket as I walked out of the room, down the short hall. Connor was standing in the middle of the front foyer, looking up the staircase instead. “Oh,” he said.

“Hey, hi.” I couldn’t orient myself. Not with the phone in my back pocket and Connor before me, in the house where we’d all been when she died.

I was caught half a step behind, because Connor and I no longer had the type of relationship where we spoke to each other or sought each other out. And now that he was standing in the room with me, it seemed he didn’t know what he was doing here, either.

He was dressed for work, in jeans and a red polo with the Harlow family logo on the upper-left corner. Even so, Connor always reminded me of the ocean. His blue eyes had a sheen to them, like he’d been squinting at the sun for too long. The saltwater grit left behind on his palms. His skin twice as tan as anyone else’s, from out on the sea, where the sun gets you double: once from above and once from the reflection off the surface. And brown hair streaked through from the summer months, escaping out the bottom of his hat. He’d always been thin, more wiry than strong, but he’d grown into the sharper angles of his face by the time we were in high school.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He didn’t speak at first, just stood between me and the front door, looking me over. I knew what he was seeing: the slacks, the dress shoes, the sleeveless blouse that transformed me into a different person with a different role. Or maybe it was just the way I was standing, frozen in place, unsure how to move—like I had something to hide. And for a moment, I could only hear the detective’s questions: What about Connor Harlow? Would you know his state of mind last night?

Connor frowned, like he could tell what I was thinking. “Sorry,” he said. “The door was open. I saw your car at the B&B when I was making my delivery. Mr. Sylva told me what happened. Everything okay here?” He looked around, taking in the downstairs.

“Nothing’s missing,” I said.

“Kids?”

I nodded slowly, but I wasn’t sure; I thought we were talking ourselves into something. If not for the presence of the phone I’d just found, it was the most logical explanation. Something we were all too familiar with here. In the off-season, we had a youth problem. We had a drug problem. We had a boredom problem. An inescapable, existential problem. We would do anything to pass the winter here. It was a bigger problem if it was bleeding over into the summer.

We had all peered inside the homes in the off-season. Curiosity, boredom, a tempting of fate. Seeing how far we could get and how much we could get away with.

Connor and I knew as well as anyone. He and Faith and I had stood at the base of the Lomans’ house one winter long ago, me on his shoulders, climbing onto a second-story balcony, shimmying through a window of the master bedroom that had been left open. We didn’t take anything. We were only curious. Faith had opened the freezer, the fridge, the bathroom cabinets, the desk drawers—all empty—her fingers trailing every surface as she moved. Connor had walked the rooms of the unoccupied home, not touching anything, as if committing them to memory.