Another time, another place, it could almost have been entertaining. Probably would have been, Paolo thought. He reached behind him, stretching as far as he could from his position at the corner of the dining table, to the refrigerator. He managed to pop the door and felt inside for a can of Diet Dr Pepper. Paolo studied the faces of each housemate as he drank.
Candace, upright and hostile, a contrast to her normal laid-back, jokey demeanor. Grace, struggling to keep her feelings in check. This must be great for her; a moment of intense relief—the most hope she’d had in years: Lucasta Jordan-Long could save Grace’s father from execution. And yet, Grace was pale with anxiety. John-Michael, somber and pensive, as he often was, had taken the sixth place at the dining table and was slowly chewing on a piece of celery. Maya’s caginess. She seemed fretful, presumably worried about Dana Alexander.
Should I be worried, too? Paolo thought.
It was impossible to drag his own mind too far from the lurking horror of his own recent past. A secret fresher than any of theirs, one that still hovered at the fringes of Paolo’s thoughts, every waking minute. The simple pleasures of life were a distraction. Even the tingling burn of his left upper arm, still hot to the touch, took him away for only a minute. Every time he tried to dismiss this memory it felt more and more impossible, grinning like a death mask at every opportunity.
“How much do you think Ariana knew about us?” he asked abruptly.
It wasn’t his secret that Ariana was trying to find but could she expose him anyway? What would his own housemates think if they knew, these girls who Paolo realized he was proud to call his closest friends? What if right now he were to stand up and tell them about how he’d hustled Jimmy out of a car, had sex with the idiot’s mother, and then left the woman for dead, alone, in the canyon?
“Enough,” Lucy replied. “More than enough that we gotta be careful.” For a moment, her eyes locked with Maya’s. “Too bad that you gave her the goods on every last one of us,” she said in bald accusation.
A burning silence followed. Then Maya turned to Candace. “Maybe you shouldn’t have made out with Yoandy Santiago. We warned you from the beginning he was Kay Alexander’s boyfriend. Now it’s just another reason for Dana to get mad.”
Paolo watched the expression on Candace’s face shift from incredulity to sheer indignation. “Oh, that’s it, we are so done,” she hissed. “I guess you never really stopped spying?”
A deep, beet-colored flush spread across Maya’s face. “You were talking in my bedroom, which is where I actually sleep. So I stood outside for a few seconds, waiting for a good moment to walk in. I wasn’t going to say anything about you and Yoandy. It has nothing to do with me.”
“No, you were just gonna write it up in your lousy, stinking report to Alexander,” Candace snarled.
Maya raised her voice. “Is there something wrong with your hearing? Didn’t I already tell you that I stopped doing that?”
“Oh gee, thanks for saying you wouldn’t spy on us anymore, Maya, thanks for rediscovering the meaning of ‘friend.’”
“Maybe we should all just chill?” Lucy said. She was making a pretty obvious effort to remain calm herself. “Sugar, you’re in no place to accuse anyone of anything. Okay, so you were forced into it by your mom’s boss. We get the picture. You still spied on us. Own it.”
“Look, Maya,” John-Michael followed up, reasonably, “not one of us here is gonna win any kind of prize for how we’ve handled everything difficult that’s happened in our lives. But it turns out that out of all of us, you’re the one who’s still taking orders from Mommy. The rest of us, y’know, we’re trying to be responsible, like adults.”
“But we’re not adults,” Maya said emphatically. “And driving a car, cooking and shopping and cleaning and paying the rent—that doesn’t make you one. Making good decisions, the kind you make with actual freedom—that’s what makes you an adult. And as you’ve cleverly pointed out, John-Michael, unlike the rest of you, I do not have freedom.”
“We’re supposed to take life coaching from a liar and a spy?” Candace said. Her voice was laced with sarcasm. She tilted her chair back so violently that it tumbled to the floor with a crash, and Candace narrowly managed to avoid toppling over with it.
Paolo stood up, blocking her route out of the kitchen. “Candace,” he began. But she pushed him aside with surprising force, shoving hard against his left arm. The tattooed skin burst with a hundred hot stings. “Oww, dammit, Candace, what gives?”
Grace stood, too. “I agree with Lucy—we need to calm down. Maybe take a time-out. This is getting intense.”
“You got that right,” Candace said, fuming. “I’m out of here. Grace, you coming with me?”
It was a pointedly exclusive invitation. Reluctantly, Paolo stood aside, watching Grace depart with her stepsister. He placed three cool fingers across his burning tattoo and turned to Lucy. But Lucy’s eyes were on Maya, who was next to stand up. “I could use some air, too.”
“You want some company?” John-Michael asked Maya.
“At least as far as the Starbucks,” she replied. She’d turned pale in the last few moments, yet Paolo noticed that she seemed surprisingly calm given that John-Michael had just called her a child. Yet there she was, chewing thoughtfully on a fingernail. “I’m gonna get a Frappuccino,” she said to no one in particular.
Maya and John-Michael were walking out a minute later. Finally, Lucy faced him. Paolo’s hesitant smile became awkward. “Just us then,” he said.
Lucy hadn’t shifted from her position at the table. She looked very tired, but managed a halfhearted grin. “Yup.” She went to the sink and turned on the hot tap. “I guess I’ll clean up some dishes. Since none of you lazy-ass jerks seem to know how.”
“In that case,” Paolo countered, “I guess I’ll go dig up some weeds in the yard. Since none of you lazy-ass jerks seem to know how.”
Storage space in the house was precious, so the three garden tools that he’d picked up at the hardware store more or less lived in Paolo’s Chevy Malibu. He trudged out through the front door and around back. Since the house faced the beach, the road where Paolo parked his car was in the rear. John-Michael had left his car there earlier on, some ways down the road since most evenings it could be difficult to find a spot close to the beach.
Paolo popped the trunk and grabbed the shovel and the long-handled lawn weeder.
As he returned, he approached the house from the rear, where a low gray concrete wall surrounded the yard. He was about to step over the wall when Paolo noticed that the French door was already open. He opened his mouth to call out to Lucy. Then he saw something that stilled the air in his lungs. Instinctively, he moved to one side. Carefully, Paolo rested the long-handled weeder against the wall. He sidled up to the French doors, peering inside, cautiously staying out of sight.
There was a man in the living room. He was about five feet nine, stocky with thin graying hair and wearing a faded, black leather bomber jacket over slacks. He had his back to Paolo and seemed to be talking to Lucy. The man’s overall stance seemed relaxed, not particularly threatening.
And yet, even though Paolo couldn’t see Lucy, he could hear it in her voice.
Terror.
“Who’ve you told?”
The question sounded casual. Paolo didn’t recognize the voice. Lucy was having difficulty replying. She was stammering even before she’d gotten started.
“I . . . I don’t know why you—”
“Enough,” he said, cutting her off. He reached into his pocket. Lucy recoiled, knocking against the fallen dining chair. He spoke calmly and sounded almost weary. “We can do this the easy way. Or not.”
The man was pointing a gun straight at Lucy’s stomach.
Paolo flipped the shovel into position as if to return a serve. One glance at the space between him and the man and he’d computed the precise path, exactly as if a ball were arcing across the net toward that spot.
“Okay, kid, time’s a-wastin’.”
Paolo took a deep breath and ran, barging through the open French door and into the house.
The man spun to his left, the gun in his right hand. It fired, a muffled sound—phhooott. The next shot never came. Paolo’s shovel was already swinging, a powerful forehand. It cracked against the man’s skull. Paolo watched the man’s eyes widen. Just for a second, they bulged. Fingers locked in the trigger, the man’s arm fell. His gun hand slammed against the floor.
Paolo stood paralyzed, blood pounding hard in his head: a roar. He could hear nothing else.
After a few seconds, he regained control over his muscles. He lowered the shovel and raised his eyes to Lucy. She stood, rigid with horror, hands by her side, her mouth open, eyes wide, staring, her breath coming in heavy, labored gasps.
Finally, Paolo turned reluctant eyes onto the fallen man. He could see now what a slight, unimpressive figure he was. In his late forties, a cheap haircut, worn shoes, a brown-and-white plaid shirt tucked into charcoal-gray cotton slacks.
Lucy seemed to emerge from her own paralysis. “Is . . . he dead?”
The man lay immobile, eyes staring just the way they had as Paolo’s shovel had connected with the left side of his face. Paolo glanced at the underside of the shovel. There didn’t appear to be any blood. But the sight of the dent in the man’s head made Paolo’s insides clench in cold, churning dread.