The House Guests Read online

  “I said Georgia.”

  “Okay...” She remembered he had thought Georgia was a good idea when they’d talked before. She hoped she was worrying for nothing. “And you didn’t send him a photo or anything, did you?”

  Will was silent.

  “Will!”

  “I sent him the one you took of me in front of the library in Blayney. He says I look like my dad.” Will cleared his throat. “Now I know my dad’s name, and I know I look like him.”

  “You shouldn’t have sent a photo.”

  “Why not? It was taken in another state, so he won’t know where I really live. I didn’t have a lot of photos to choose from. My mom doesn’t keep any.”

  Amber didn’t keep photos? Something felt wrong. Savannah just couldn’t put her finger on what.

  “He wants me to visit,” Will said. “He wants me to go to West Virginia and meet him.”

  She began to worry. Spring break had just started in Tarpon Springs. Theoretically this would be a good time to leave. “You’re not going, right?”

  “Of course not. I told him that I have school and my foster parents are strict and wouldn’t let me. He said he could talk to them, but I told him it would be better to wait until I’m eighteen.”

  “What else have you told him about your life?”

  “I hate lying. So I’ve told him some true stuff. Like what I’m studying in school, and what I like to do. But, you know, I keep wondering why I have to lie in the first place? What’s the problem with just telling him who I really am and having him talk to Mom? Maybe they could work things out.”

  “You don’t know what things, Will. She’s not being honest, and now neither are you.”

  “I’ve been thinking, maybe I could meet him somewhere else. Like back in Blayney. On neutral ground. Mom would never have to know.”

  “There are five million things wrong with that. All he has to do is ask around once he’s there, and when nobody’s ever heard your name, he’d know you were lying.”

  Will was sucking on his bottom lip. “I want to know about my dad. I’m never going to learn anything from Mom.”

  From the beginning, the search for Will’s family had been academic for Savannah, a puzzle to solve, like a murder in a juicy novel. The reader worked out the solution right along with the police detective, like partners. Case closed at the end after hours spent together.

  She had expected Will to maybe get a few answers and then move on. She had never realized that straight-arrow Will would be willing to lie to the mother he adored in order to meet the uncle he never even knew he had.

  “This might be getting out of hand,” she said, after thinking it over. “The sheriff’s not going away anytime soon. He’ll be there in West Virginia when you’re older, right? Maybe you ought to just put this on hold.”

  “And maybe I don’t want to.”

  “I’m starting to get worried.”

  “Don’t. But when it comes down to it? This is my decision, and from this point on, you can step out of it. You don’t have to think about it. I’m grateful to you for getting the ball rolling, but I can handle things from here on out.”

  Savannah wasn’t sure that was true. After all, she knew from experience that families could do terrible things to your head. She thought about the way she’d blamed her father’s death on Cassie and almost pushed her away forever. Love, loyalty, lies. They were all mixed up somehow, and she hoped when she was older, she’d be able to separate them. Getting older had to be good for something other than drinking and voting.

  “I just want the best for you,” she said.

  “I want the best for me, too. So don’t worry.”

  But she was worried. “Don’t shut me out, okay?”

  “Tell me about California.”

  She hoped they could come back to this later. Will might not want her involved now, but she had to find a way to make sure he stayed safe.

  As they finished the drive to Tarpon Springs, Will’s uncle wasn’t mentioned again. But Savannah didn’t stop thinking about him.

  43

  SAVANNAH HAD ALWAYS LOVED seafood so much that even the dead fish prank hadn’t ruined it for her. Cassie knew she would want it for her homecoming dinner, or maybe one of the Greek meals she’d grown up with. To cover both, she bought plump fresh shrimp right off the boat to bake in the homemade tomato sauce she was preparing now. She would top the dish with feta and mint and serve with crusty bread she’d bought at a Dodecanese Avenue bakery. She’d learned the recipe at Yiayia’s knee, helping to make it on weekends when she hid out at her grandparents’ house.

  She’d grown up with addiction. How could she have been so blind to signs of it in her own husband?

  Amber had offered to help with dinner, and now she was at the refrigerator pulling out ingredients to make a Greek salad. Baklava was already finished and resting on the counter. For the last few minutes she and Amber had been working side by side but staying out of each other’s way, because by now they knew each other’s movements.

  Amber joined her at the counter with fresh cucumbers and tomatoes. “Eventually you’re going to tell me what happened in New York. Will’s not going to be home with Savannah for at least another hour. We have time.”

  Cassie had spent the past two days absorbing what she’d learned, and Amber had been slammed at work. This moment felt as right as it could.

  As Amber listened, she told her about each step of the trip, ending with the confrontation at Ivy’s apartment. She didn’t add Ivy’s parting comment, that there were things Cassie still didn’t know. Until she knew what Ivy had been referring to, she wasn’t ready to share.

  “You should have seen her apartment,” she finished. “It’s obvious she was raking in money from somewhere other than Riverbend.”

  “Do you think she’s behind your financial problems? The thousands we know Mark paid her are only a small part of what’s missing, right?”

  While Cassie was gone, Amber hadn’t found anything else incriminating in the bank statements, although she hadn’t had much time to dig.

  “Ivy claimed I won’t find anything else that I can trace to her. She was so smug about it.”

  “This has to come as a huge shock.”

  “That my husband was a drug addict? That my best friend was hiding it? That my new friend was setting me up for blackmail?” She tried a smile and failed. “I’m not just feeling sorry for myself?”

  “Mark was one of thousands of people who get addicted from perfectly legitimate pain prescriptions. It happens a lot more than people know. It must have been so hard for him.”

  Cassie hadn’t graduated to sympathy yet. She was still grappling with the lives he had destroyed. “He was stealing drugs from patients, Amber, leaving them in pain. How despicable is that?”

  “You don’t know that part’s true. Ivy’s an untrustworthy source. But even so? Addiction can rob people of everything good and virtuous.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “There’s a lot of it in the restaurant industry. Late and long hours, low pay so people have to work more than one job. Easy access to alcohol and drugs, and partying in the kitchen to pass the time. I’ve seen my share up close. Maybe I was lucky I had Will waiting at home every night, because I was never tempted. But sometimes I felt like the only person on the floor who wasn’t having fun.”

  “Tell me that’s not true at the Kouzina.”

  “Not with Roxanne around. She ran into it in her restaurant in Virginia, so she knows what to watch for.”

  “Why didn’t I know what was going on? Why didn’t I see it?”

  Amber considered. “I didn’t know Mark, but I know what you’ve said about him. For all the good they do, a psychiatrist knows how to manipulate people. Who better than somebody who’s paid to get inside your head?”

  Cas
sie was afraid Amber was on target. “Whenever I tried to express concerns, somehow the problem always became about me. If I got upset at being analyzed, that became his next target. Eventually I doubted myself instead of him.”

  “The curse of the helping professions. But by the same token that must have made it hard for Mark to get the help he needed. Because he knew how to fool people who were just like him.”

  “They have programs designed to help medical professionals, but Fletcher, and whoever else was in on this, didn’t want him under scrutiny. They didn’t want bad publicity.”

  “Can you really say for sure that Fletcher was at fault? Because in the end, isn’t it the addict who has to commit to change and find the best way to make it happen?”

  “I’m just so furious right now at everybody, I don’t know. And, you know what? Everybody’s getting off scot-free.”

  Beside her Amber finished peeling the cucumbers. “Is that how it’s going to be? If nothing else, isn’t Ivy going to sell whatever drugs she steals from her next place of employment? She has a beautiful apartment to keep up, and you said it yourself. She’ll get another job when she wants one, maybe in a setting where she’s surrounded by people even more desperate.”

  “Remember the story of Pandora’s box?”

  “You’re afraid if you report her, everything will come back to haunt you and Savannah.”

  “It could.”

  “Is keeping everything a secret to protect a dead man’s legacy worth it?”

  Cassie had asked herself the same thing, but hearing it asked by someone else was worse. She felt a stab of anger. “Do you want to talk about secrets and lies? Because I’ve told you mine. I’m struggling with this, but how about you? You’re keeping your own Pandora’s box locked tight. You think I haven’t figured that out?”

  “Of course you have.”

  Cassie’s anger slipped away as quickly as it appeared. “It’s clear you’re afraid. You know what else is clear? Every day I expect to wake up and find you gone.” She hesitated before she plowed ahead. “I’m so tired of secrets, Amber. Did you do something in your past and you’re afraid it’ll come back to haunt you? That you’ll end up in jail?”

  “Are we going to play Twenty Questions? Because that would be my first no.”

  Cassie heard a way into Amber’s story. “Okay, then you’re running from someone in your past. A man.”

  “And that would be my first yes.”

  “Will’s father?”

  Amber was silent. Cassie thought the game had to end right there. “We’ve done enough prep. Let’s take iced tea out to the lanai. I’m sorry I pushed.”

  “Anybody with an ounce of self-preservation would have done it a long time ago.”

  “I didn’t want to scare you away.” She glanced at her friend and saw she was on the verge of tears.

  Amber spoke before Cassie could apologize again. “I don’t want to talk about this, but things have reached a point where I have to stop making choices for you.”

  Cassie was more worried than mystified, but she left the sauce to simmer and went to the refrigerator to get the tea. A few minutes later they were sitting by the pool. Neither had taken a sip. Instead Cassie held the glass against her cheek. The temperature was in the low eighties, but luckily the humidity was comfortably low.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” Amber said at last.

  “As early as you have to and late enough that you won’t still be explaining when Savannah and Will arrive.”

  Amber put her head down, as if she was too tired to hold it erect. Or too ashamed. “I haven’t had much experience doing this.”

  “Travis doesn’t know?”

  “Only one other person knows, and it’s not Will.”

  “I’m not going to ask you to move out once you tell me. You already said you aren’t running from the police. That would be hard.”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t running from the police. I said I didn’t do anything in my past that would land me in jail. But a sheriff is pursuing me. Darryl Hawken, the sheriff of Croville County, West Virginia, where I grew up. He’s been hunting me since high school.”

  Cassie gave a soft whistle. “Not Kentucky. Not Arkansas.”

  “I’ve never lived in either place. I just sound like I might have. Darryl couldn’t put me in jail, but he would love to put me under it.”

  Cassie knew Amber was feeling her way, so she saved the rest of her many questions. “Go on.”

  Amber stared over the pool to the yard beyond. The lanai was backed by a wide retention pond and a snowy egret with dinner on its mind was at the edge searching for a likely candidate. Amber watched in silence until the egret launched itself at the water and then retreated to fly away.

  “From what you’ve told me,” she said, “our childhoods weren’t terribly different, although my parents neglected me mostly from inertia. I had a roof over my head and food to eat, and sometimes my mother was home in the evenings, but she rarely talked. The thing that saved me? I loved school. And I joined 4-H, more to have someplace to go, but later because there were adults in both places who paid attention to me.”

  She angled her body so she could see Cassie. “I hated being a teenager. I hated everything about myself. So I tried to be somebody else. You know Helia, Savannah’s friend? That’s who I was. I dyed my hair black, wore Goth clothes and heavy makeup. It was a disguise. I wanted people to leave me alone.”

  “Did it help?”

  “I guess not, because eventually this boy I’d known forever started paying attention anyway. He was Darryl’s younger brother. Every town has its criminal elements, and Chaslan is quiet and ordinary, but it wasn’t immune. His family lived just outside town on acres they owned for generations. His cousin cooked meth in a shack in the woods with a loaded shotgun pointed out the window. His father was a handyman and preyed on people too old to know they’d been fleeced. My own father was no saint, but he used to talk about Billy’s family.”

  “Billy?”

  “Will is named after Billy.”

  “I’m glad Darryl wasn’t his father.”

  Amber looked away before she began again. “My father warned me to steer clear of any Hawkens. They were all black sheep, but none worse than Billy’s uncle. And the thing is?” She gave a humorless laugh. “Back then Billy’s uncle was the sheriff, corrupt as all get-out but electable because he gave the people who controlled the town whatever they wanted. That’s how his family members got away with everything they did.”

  Cassie realized she was shaking her head.

  “Apparently it’s a family dynasty,” Amber said, “because Darryl Hawken is the present-day sheriff.”

  “Do they elect sheriffs in West Virginia?”

  “Yes, with term limits. In this case Darryl is hoping to move on to the House of Delegates. From what I can tell from the internet, he might succeed.”

  “I’m assuming Billy was different.”

  “Night and day. Billy told me once that he learned how to be a good person by doing the opposite of everything his father and uncle did. And his mother was a good woman, just married to the wrong man. She was good to Billy. He took after her side of the family, slighter in stature, gentler, and he loved books. His father thought Billy was worthless, but Darryl? Darryl was his personal creation. He absorbed everything his father taught him. He bullied Billy when nobody better was around. Billy learned to stay out of his way and how to placate him if necessary.”

  Cassie wanted to know where Billy was now, but she knew that would come when Amber was ready.

  “I’ll spare you the love story.” Amber’s eyes filled with tears, and she swallowed hard. “It wasn’t a simple high school romance. We saw everything that was missing from the rest of our lives in each other. We could talk about everything and did. With Billy I could dream about a real fut
ure, and so could he. We were good students. We saw college scholarships on the horizon, maybe not to top-tier universities, but somewhere away from our families. We were going to head there together, marry, earn whatever extra money we needed and then settle far away.”

  Obviously, nothing had worked out that way. Cassie lay her hand over Amber’s and squeezed without saying anything.

  Amber managed the ghost of a smile, and she didn’t remove her hand. “One evening in the fall of our senior year, Darryl talked Billy into going to a convenience store where he claimed he was meeting a friend who could buy beer for them. Darryl graduated the year before, and he was working for his uncle doing nothing good. Billy called me. He said not giving Darryl a chance to pick a fight was his best choice. I was supposed to meet him for a late-night picnic so we worked out details. He promised he’d buy soft drinks and chips. The rest of what happened I’ve put together myself. When they got there, Darryl told Billy to wait in the car. Then he went inside and robbed the store. When the clerk resisted, he shot him.”

  She closed her eyes. “I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he was trying to prove something, or get Billy involved so he could hold it over him. Because instead of following Darryl’s instructions, Billy went into the store to buy what we needed. He got there just in time to see Darryl in a ski mask holding a gun on the clerk. The clerk struggled and pulled off the mask, and Darryl killed him.”

  Cassie squeezed Amber’s hand even harder.

  “Darryl ran out and drove off without Billy. Billy didn’t know what to do. He knew he couldn’t go to his uncle. Either he wouldn’t believe him or he’d bury the evidence. And Darryl was his brother. I’ve thought about this for so many years, Cassie. Why did he go home, knowing what he did, knowing what kind of man Darryl was? My best guess is that he was afraid I would show up at the house for the picnic, and Darryl might be there packing a bag. He didn’t know where Darryl had gone, but I do know he thought Darryl would get out of town, and that would be the last anybody would ever see of him in Croville County.”