Sam’s jaw hit the floor like a grand piano falling from a hundred-story balcony.
The Belle Estate was the most beautiful house he’d ever seen. Well worth the trouble and side trip. And if the outside architecture and surroundings weren’t incredible enough, the inside was even more amazing. As the boys and their hosts all crowded into the foyer, dark wooden beams supported vaulted ceilings, glass outer walls reflected the kaleidoscope of flora and fauna from the outside world, and a stone hearth and chimney rose into the apex of the tallest peak.
Come in, relax, forget your troubles, the house seemed to say, and Sam had to admit the house really did seem to invite them in. It even had a pineapple-y scent. And Trey got to live here for free? Lucky fucker.
“You have a really gorgeous home,” Sam said, admiring the myriad artifacts all over the walls. Every surface displayed expensive paintings, African carvings, framed photos, sculpted art, bronze Buddhas, colorful tapestries, handmade musical instruments, and crudely made folk art.
“Why, thank you!” Georgia’s smile beamed brightly.
Her voice drawled with a tinge of a Southern accent that made Sam wonder if she was born in Hawaii or moved here from the South, kind of like how he and Colby had moved to L.A. from Kansas. She did a little twirl with her arms extended. “Mi casa es su casa. I’ll let Trey show you boys around while I prepare some refreshments.”
“Thank you. That would be very nice,” Colby said.
“Yes, thank you,” Nate and Alex added.
After she whirled away, Sam quietly mocked Colby’s politeness. It was always funny to hear him talk formally, considering how laid-back they were with each other. “That would be very nice,” he imitated Colby.
“Shut it,” Colby mumbled.
The boys wandered around the museum-like home, examining every little detail but touching nothing. A lot of the items looked rare and expensive to replace should they break anything, if replaceable at all. Photos of Georgia with Trey were on almost every shelf. Sam kept a lookout for older ones of Georgia with her late husband, but all the pics were recent with Trey.
“This is the living room.” Trey led them into a sunken area padded with a light beige carpet. On the leather sectional was a Gucci bag, opened with all the contents pouring out—lipstick, prayer beads, tissues, hand sanitizer, pill bottle, even a long ladies’ wallet covered in stars and moons…there for any thief to take. Not that they would ever.
Shoes were piled into corners, and desks were covered with notebooks, pens, highlighters, staplers, and cookbooks. As beautiful as the house was, it wasn’t magazine-cover-shoot ready. It definitely had a lived-in look with stuff everywhere, bordering on hoarding.
Sam stopped in front of a wall with more framed photos of Georgia with different people, all of them familiar. “Is that…?” He narrowed his eyes.
“Yep, Barack Obama,” Trey replied.
“What?” Colby zoomed in to take a closer look. “Seriously? Here, in this house?”
“Yep, they’ve all visited. Laird Hamilton, Sylvester Stallone, Vin Diesel, Lucille Ball, several presidents, including Obama, Bush, Bush Senior, Clinton.”
“Duuude…” Sam marveled.
When he looked closer, he realized Colby was right. Each photo depicting Georgia with a celebrity had been taken in the very same house they were standing in. It made Sam want to ask Trey who was Georgia really, this woman he’d never heard of before? What made her such an influencer? But he thought it’d be impolite to pry.
As they crossed into a parlor with Trey leading the way, all four guys turned to give each other silent looks of Holy shit! and Can you believe this place? Quietly, Nate pointed out a masquerade-type mask covered with glued feathers and sequins, the kind you’d see in a Mardi Gras parade, covering a large bronze Buddha bust sitting atop a low mahogany cabinet.
“Symbolic much?” Nate whispered. There was something irreverent about the sight of that party mask covering a sacred religious figure, Sam thought, but kept it to himself.
Alex pointed out a series of paintings in a hallway all with the number 1 in different patterns—1, 1111, 11:11. Van Gogh–style swirls of vivid color surrounded the 1s, and some 1s were embedded deep within the background, making Sam stare at them for so long, he felt like he was being sucked into the painting.
“Bro, come on,” Colby snapped him out of it, tugging on his arm.
Sam blinked. Trey led them into the dining room. The long, fancy table itself was covered in stacks of wilted old paper, most of them yellowing at the edges. Some stacks were thrown askew, revealing lines and lines of text and dialogue all typed in Courier font of the old days. They could’ve been typed with an actual typewriter, they seemed so old.
“Are these the screenplays you guys work on?” he asked Trey.
Trey stared at the screenplays a moment, then began scooping some of them up, “Ah. Yes…” As if suddenly realizing how messy the room was, he tidied them into stacks on the china cabinet’s extended buffet tray. “Sorry, there was a lot to clean up before picking you all up.”
“No worries, man,” Alex said. “Don’t clean on our account.”
“Yeah, it’s not like your house isn’t allowed to look normal,” Colby added.
“Let me show you upstairs,” Trey said, hanging back against the wall this time to let them pass on the way to the stairs, instead of leading the way. He gave them each a wide, plastered-on kind of smile that weirded Sam out. Between the smile, the mustache, and the robotic movements, Sam wondered if Trey even knew how out of touch with modernity he seemed.
“Do you have any questions?” Trey asked in the stairwell, sounding like a tour guide.
“Actually, yeah, if you don’t mind,” Sam said once he’d reached the landing. Four hallways stretched out in different directions like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, or the center hub of Disneyland. “What’s with all the photos of famous people? Is Georgia famous or something? I didn’t want to ask her within earshot.”
Trey threw his head back in an all-knowing, amused way, minus a smile. “Yes, yes, she and Clint met a lot of people over the years because of their connection with Burt Ryder, who used to own this land.”
Burt Ryder? Clint…Clint who?
Sam’s confused face cued Trey to explain further. “Of course you don’t know Burt Ryder. He lived well before your time, a famous, award-winning actor from the fifties and sixties. He died suddenly in 1979, and when he did, he left Georgia and Clint this land, since he used to be good friends with them.”
“Clint being…”
“Oh, sorry. Georgia’s late husband. He died in the nineties. He was a big name around these parts of Kauai.”
“Famous for?” Sam asked, thinking about how many different types of fame there were—movie stars, political figures, idiots in the news for being idiots, big music business stars, social media influencers, spoiled kids of famous parents, and his favorite, self-made YouTube stars.
“Not famous in the celebrity sense, though he was well-known on the mainland because of Ryder Camp,” Trey explained. “More because of his deep history with the land. I’ll tell you about that in a bit. First, come this way.” He was back to leading them down the hallway.
Sam couldn’t decide which part of the house he loved more, the downstairs or the tunneled hallways of the second floor, which gave the impression there’d be secret passageways lurking in any given corner. The floors were wood but in square, hand-laid patterns, instead of planks. Most of the doors were closed, but at the end of one long hallway, a set of big double doors yawned wide open.
Trey stepped into the room and held out his arms. “And here’s where the magic happens, boys,” he said with the stupidest grin on his face.
Of course it was the master bedroom with a huge bed, a custom-made design even bigger than a California king, the sheets all mussed up and pillows tossed, as though there’d been a baby oil wrestling match in it that morning.
Well, that confirmed it—Trey and Georgia were in a sexual relationship.
Sam felt weird staring at the bed and all the mental imagery that came with it, so he forced his eyes in other directions, like the mirrored walls, mirrored closet doors, and mirrored window frames. Not much better, Sam thought. So turn-of-the-century, so creepy, and very, very awkward.
The moment Trey turned his face, Colby looked at Sam, like, What the fuck is wrong with this guy?
“And that’s our view.” Trey showcased the outside world through the wide swaths of glass windows. “Isn’t it grand?”
Grand? What was Trey, seventy years old?
But yeah, in all honesty, it was pretty grand. From the doorway, glowing in the morning sun, Sam could see a plantation of coconut palms, lush undergrowth, and thin, trickling waterfalls surrounding a pool deck complete with rock formations. Just beyond looked like a natural preserve with the great blue Pacific as a postcard backdrop. The mansion didn’t sit directly on sand but rather fifty yards from the beach, so anyone wanting to reach the shore had to take a short hike through a mini forest.
“I can’t believe you live here, man,” Nate said, crossing his arms. “And to think we’re staying on the other side of the island, while you’re here, and we almost didn’t see each other.”
“I know.” Trey nodded. “You almost missed it. Like I said on the phone, only the best come here.”
Sam glanced at Colby. He knew how much he’d hated it when Trey said that on FaceTime yesterday, giving off vibes of exclusivity that bordered on stuck-up. Plus, Sam knew that Colby hadn’t liked Trey after the time they hung with him at the party, though he never explained why, only that the guy needed “a good dose of self-identity.”
Georgia appeared down the hall, brandishing a teak tray with an inlaid design, topped with four tall glasses of lemonade. Sam wouldn’t bet money on it, but he was pretty sure she’d changed into a different, flowing hippie-style dress. “Here you go, gentlemen. Aloha, welcome to the Belle Estate.”
They each took a glass and downed big sips. To Sam, it was probably the best lemonade he’d ever drunk in his life, like the mint juleps his mom’s friends made back in Kansas but with a hint of pineapple, a welcome refreshment after no breakfast or anything to drink since they left the Airbnb early this morning.
“What’s this?” Alex asked in the hall, a few feet from the master bedroom. He stood staring into one of the many bookshelves lining the walls.
Sam peered at a large coffee table–style book called Ryder Camp with a black-and-white image of a young man sporting a beard and a young woman with a flower in her hair on the cover.
Georgia’s super-light blue-green eyes lit up joyfully. “Ah…good eye! That’s the place I was going to tell you about,” she said in her melodious voice. “A real-life hippie commune.”
“Listen to this. This is quite fascinating,” Trey chimed in.
Georgia smiled enchantingly at her, uh…boyfriend. “So, back in the sixties and seventies, this land was owned by my good friend, Burt Ryder, who also happened to be the brother of Elizabeth Ryder, his equally famous movie star twin sister?” Georgia paused for signs of recognition, but Sam had never heard of her, and apparently, neither had Colby, Alex, or Nate.
“They were icons of their time,” Trey added with a serious demeanor. “You should look them up.”
Sam suppressed the urge to roll his eyes.
“Yes, they were, baby. So, anyway, just down the beach from where we’re standing right now”—Georgia reached for the book and opened it up to show them—“used to be a camp that belonged to Burt, and he let his friends live there for free. For ten years, they lived in tree houses, made campfires, sang songs, had their own little church, surfed all day long. Some got married and had babies…”
“Some smoked weed all day long,” Trey added.
“Oh, honey, not some—everyone.” Georgia laughed. As she flipped through the book, Sam caught many images of naked people, free and letting it all hang out. “They lived in harmony with the land, the way that it should be. Or so it was in the seventies.”
“You’re talking about hippies, right?” Nate asked. “People who lived in peace, man?” Nate did the famous “peace” sign, holding up two fingers.
“Yes, hippies, but it goes much deeper than that,” Georgia explained. “They didn’t support the war our country was engaged in at the time, and they were looking for an ‘alternative’ way of life different from the career-house-money-kids way most people lived. A different definition of success. It was truly a fascinating time in American history.”
“A different definition of success,” Colby muttered, staring at Trey. “Interesting.”
“Look it up. Google ‘hippies’ and ‘Berkeley’ and ‘Kauai tree house camp,’” Trey said.
Thanks, bro, we know how to search something on the internet, Sam wanted to say, but he bit his tongue. To Sam, it sounded like hippies were avoiding responsibility, hiding from authorities out here in paradise, but hey, he was no one to judge.
Georgia sipped her lemonade. “Sure, drugs were involved, but there were no rules, yet order was somehow maintained. Only a couple traumatic things happened in those nine years, but bad things happen in any community, right?”
“True,” Alex said. “But no order? No rules? Damn.”
Georgia shrugged. “Hey, but it worked. The photos in this book are rare, compiled recently by the photojournalist who came forward with them. For years, they were considered lost. Anyway, it’s worth a look, whenever you have time.” Georgia flashed her big, toothy grin and hurriedly put the book back on the shelf, cover facing out like it was a priceless addition to her oddball collection.
Ryder Camp sounded fascinating in a history-lesson kind of way, but they were only here for a day, and the ocean was calling their name. Still, Sam figured it’d be a cool thing to research when they got home, especially if “traumatic things” were involved. Maybe they could do a video about it.
As the last in the group to walk out, Sam cast another glance at the book, flipping one more time to the naked people within its pages. Haunting, hollow gazes stared back at Sam from the tree houses and crystal sands. Snippets of innocence frozen in time. One woman looked oddly familiar—a young, gorgeous brunette in the nude, flowers dripping from her long hair, emerging from the ocean like a goddess from the sea.