Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It’s raining as I make my way into the café where Chess and I are supposed to meet for lunch. I had a phone interview that ran long, and by the time it was over I realized I was supposed to be at the restaurant ten minutes earlier.

But I’m here now, and Chess is already seated, a bottle of white wine sweating in a bucket of ice, a basket of bread untouched on the table.

“Sorry!” I call, making my way to her. People turn and look as I go by, and I don’t know if that’s because they actually recognize me, or if it’s just my newly reddened hair. My stylist swore it worked on me, and from the look on Chess’s face, I can tell she was right.

“Em!” she says, standing up and plastering on a smile to replace the grimace I just caught.

“Chess,” I say warmly, wrapping my arms around her. She smells the same, that Jo Malone perfume she likes so much, but she’s traded in all her beige and white for black today, a sleeveless turtleneck sweater setting off her tanned, toned arms.

“Love the hair,” she tells me as soon as I sit down, and I tuck it behind my ears, shrugging.

“I wanted something new before all the TV promo stuff starts.”

Her smile goes a little rigid, but she nods. “That’s smart.”

The Villawill be out next month on HBO, a ten-part miniseries with an award-winning cast, all shot on location in Orvieto. Chess and I got to visit the set last fall. A picture of us posing with canvas chairs, our names emblazoned on the backs, is currently my most liked photo on Instagram—634,932 likes, to be exact—and my Twitter replies are full of exclamation points any time I so much as hint at the show.

But I know it’s not the show Chess wants to talk about today.

The Villahas been out for over two years and is still dominating the New York Times list. We don’t even have plans for a paperback yet since the hardcover is doing so well, but already, there’s that question.

What’s next?

No one has asked about another Petal Bloom book, of course. Petal and Dex will forever be frozen in amber at the end of A Deadly Dig, and I’m happy to leave them there.

The follow-up to The Villa, though … that’s another story. Not a day goes by that I’m not inundated with questions about it. On social media, on my website, in interviews, on phone calls with my new agent, Jonathan.

And now it’s the question I see in Chess’s eyes, a knowledge confirmed when she fluffs out her napkin and says, “So I was thinking it’s time to start planning the next one. That way, we can have a big splashy announcement about the new book just as the show is really heating up. Buzz upon buzz, you know?”

She grins, putting her elbows on the table, her fingers folded as she waits for my answer, and I take a little satisfaction in making her wait. I unfold my own napkin, I take a sip of water. I contemplate the light fixtures for a moment, and then I finally say, “Are you sure we should even try?”

Her hands drop to the table. “What?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her, fidgeting with my napkin. “It’s just … yes, The Villa was a big hit, and honestly, I’m so grateful for it, but maybe it should just be a one-off. What are we going to do, cowrite for the rest of our lives? I mean, it’s not like mysteries are really your thing, you know?”

Her smile goes brittle. “Well, it’s not like nonfiction was yours, but here we are.” She gives a little laugh at that, waving one hand in the air. “We both brought our respective strengths to The Villa. That’s what readers responded to.”

What they responded to was Chess’s name, my writing, and the story we could tell them, but I don’t say that.

“We did,” I agree instead, “but lightning isn’t going to strike twice, let’s be real. And what are we supposed to do, stay at another famous murder house, hope another terrible thing happens that we can write about?”

Chess leans forward, her eyes bright. “Okay, you say that like it’s crazy, but what if we did do something kind of like that? Not with the tragedy aspect, but finding other places where famous murders happened, writing about them, what they meant, why people are still interested…”

What she means is that she’ll find a spot, and I’ll end up doing all the work. That’s how it was on The Villa. Seventy percent of that book is the book I started, me, alone, by myself in Orvieto. Why should I have to share with Chess again?

“That might make us seem a little one-trick pony,” I tell her now, opening my menu. Two years ago, the prices would’ve made my eyes water, but now, I can order two of everything and hardly blink.

At times like this, I feel such a weird mix of emotions. There’s guilt, sometimes. I’d be a monster if it didn’t raise its head occasionally. But mostly there’s satisfaction.

Cut yourself free,Noel had told Mari, and she had.

So had I.

But, as I look across the table now, I wonder how free I actually am.

“Well, maybe it’s something to think about,” she says with a shrug that is clearly meant to be read as lighthearted, but actually looks like she’s having some kind of muscle spasm. “I mean, we’re a package deal these days, right?”

What can I say to that?

I’m not so stupid that I don’t get that a huge part of the appeal of The Villa was me and Chess, best friends since childhood, experiencing this tragedy together. And what we did in Orvieto …

That binds you together a lot more than any pinky promise or friendship bracelet ever could.

It was the only way,I tell myself for what must be the millionth time. It’s practically a mantra by now. Matt was the problem, Matt was what drove you apart, and look at all you’ve done now that he’s gone. Just like Mari. Just like Lara.

But on the heels of that, as always, is the other thought.

If Matt was the problem, why don’t you want to write with Chess again?

The waiter stops at the table, his black vest crisp against his white shirt. “Compliments of the ladies by the window,” he says, holding out a very nice bottle of Chardonnay, and Chess and I both glance over to see a gaggle of women watching us expectantly. They’re around our ages, their clothes chic, their hair expensively highlighted, and when Chess and I both wave in acknowledgment and thanks, they dissolve into excited laughs and chatter.

The bottle opened, our glasses poured, Chess and I look at each other.

She raises her glass, dewy with condensation, the Chardonnay inside a sickly yellow. “A toast,” she says. “To The Villa.”

“To The Villa,” I echo, raising my own glass. “And friendship.”

Chess smiles at that, and for a second, I’m ten years old again, and she’s leaning over my desk, smelling like strawberry-scented markers.

I’m glad I’m next to you.

Then her smile curdles. “To secrets,” she adds. “And partnership.”

And that’s when I know this doesn’t end. Any chance I ever had of freeing myself from any of this drowned in that lake with Matt.

I chose Chess.

And I chose her forever.

I clink my glass against hers, and it sounds like a door slamming shut.

“To us.”

MARI,1993—ORVIETO

No one understands why she wants to come back.

Mari isn’t even actually sure that she understands it herself. It’s just that when she sat in that doctor’s office on Ebury Street and heard those words—inoperable, too far gone, I’m afraid, dreadfully sorry, three months if you’re lucky, less if you’re not—her only thought had been of returning to Villa Rosato, and spending one last summer there.

She won’t get a full summer, she knows. There are no more full seasons left for her. But a week, a week in the sunshine of Italy—that she can have, and so that she takes.

It’s not called Villa Rosato anymore, though. It’s been renamed Villa Aestas, thanks to Lara and her remarkable album, and when Mari hears the travel agent say that over the phone, she has to cover the mouthpiece with one hand while she lets out a sob.

Lara has been gone for more than a decade by then, and of all the things Mari hates about losing her sister so soon, this is the one that hurts the most. How fitting that Lara, the one person it seemed no one wanted there that summer, should be the one to claim the villa in the end.

How she would’ve loved it.

Lara feels so present to her in that house. For the first two days, Mari wanders the hallways and half expects to see her sister around every corner, giggling or sulking, her dark eyes brighter than stars.

Noel is there, too. He slouches on the sofas in her memory, he sings from a rowboat out on the pond, he winks at her from his favorite spot by the fireplace, and there are times she swears she can still smell his cologne, like he’s just left the room.

If Johnnie is still there, she won’t let herself think of him.

But Pierce …

Pierce haunts every one of her steps.

He was not a good man. She can understand that now, at thirty-eight, in a way she didn’t at nineteen. He wanted to be good, but he didn’t know how, and he took his selfishness and immaturity and tried to make them into virtues, not flaws.

But he was young. He was so bloody young. They all were, and they’d made terrible choices, and they’d mucked it all up like young people do, but they had been trying to be something better.

Something bigger.

It’s the memory of Pierce that sends her back to that little desk under the window, that has her pen moving yet again. The real story of that summer, all the ugly bits, but the beautiful parts, too. That night with Pierce and Noel, the first time she heard Aestas.

Mari even lets Johnnie have his goodness, because he did have some, after all. It was there inside him that day by the pond, when he told Mari her hair was gorgeous and he smiled his crooked smile.

She writes and writes until she gets to the last night, the night that ended everything.

Mari has spent nearly twenty years not thinking about that night, but she lets herself remember it all now.

She was sitting at her desk, finishing Lilith Rising, the storm raging outside, and from somewhere downstairs, Pierce was calling her name.

She’d ignored it. The end of the book was too close; she was too close, and what could Pierce possibly want?

The heavy sounds, those meaty thwacks, her annoyance, her If he and Johnnie are fighting again, I swear to god …

And then finishing the book. Writing The End.

She had wanted to share that moment of accomplishment with Pierce, despite all of it, so she’d gone downstairs and walked straight into a nightmare.

Pierce, his beautiful brown hair soaked with blood, the back of his head a ruin.

Johnnie, standing over him with something gray and heavy in his hand, his face splattered with blood, with Pierce’s blood, his eyes almost like an animal’s, blank, uncomprehending.

Everything that followed was a blur. Screaming, running, yelling for Lara, for the police, for Noel, for anyone to help them, as Johnnie just let the heavy sculpture in his hands shatter against the stone floor, before collapsing heavily next to it, his upper body swaying.

In the end, she hadn’t been able to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help her God. She had left out seeing Johnnie there, the weapon in his hands, because, almost absurdly, she’d wanted to at least give him some kind of chance. Wanted him to have to explain why he’d done it, how it had all happened.

That was the part that still tortured her the most. Had Pierce been calling for her because Johnnie had already hit him? Had he just sensed that this fight would be different from the last? What had started it, and how had it progressed to Pierce lying dead in that hallway? If she hadn’t been so focused on finishing her book—the book that had changed her life—would Pierce still be alive?

She’d never know. Johnnie never told, and within six months of his sentencing, he’d hanged himself in his cell.

Mari stares at the blank page in front of her.

She starts to write.

She doesn’t tell the story how it happened. She tells another story, maybe a darker one, one in which she’s the one wielding the statue, she’s the one crushing Pierce’s skull. That’s better, isn’t it? Grander, more important, less.… pointless.

Mari writes and writes, feeling the way she did that night as she finished Lilith Rising, a way she’s never felt again. There have been other books, of course. Four in total, none as good as Lilith Rising, none she’d wanted to share with the world, but this story pours out of her.

When it’s done—when this other Mari in another life has put pieces of the bloody statue in a sleeping Johnnie’s hands and sworn this other Lara to secrecy—Mari expects to stop. Instead, she keeps going.

When Noel died in that plane crash in 1980, Mari hadn’t seen him in three years, and that had just been a quick hello at one of her book signings. Now, she gives them this final meeting in a dark restaurant on a snowy night in New York.

Tears stream down her face as she conjures him up, remembering the way he moved, the way he talked, the way he might have been in those last few months before he died.

They kiss goodbye in the story, just like they never got to do in real life.

And Lara, flighty, mercurial Lara, she makes the moral heart of it all. The one who won’t accept what happened so easily, who, in the end, has the noblest core of any of them.

As for Mari herself … well, she sends her off alone into the cold, because there are times when it feels like that’s precisely what’s happened to her. She has a life she loves, a life she very much doesn’t want to lose, and one much happier than what she implies for this Other Mari. She and Lara had stayed close, had visited each other’s houses nearly every chance they got, until Lara decided to have a little too much fun one night and climbed into her Jacuzzi bath when her blood was full of champagne and Quaaludes.

But there are times when Mari feels like she’s spent her entire life fending for herself, so it seems like a fitting end to this, her own version of her story.

When she’s done, she reads it back over and, for the first time since 1974, she feels something like peace.

She didn’t kill Pierce. Johnnie Dorchester did, in some kind of drug-fueled rage—a sad and stupid ending for both men, and one she’s never quite been able to reconcile.

But if she hadn’t insisted on staying, if she’d let Pierce leave when he wanted to, if she’d gone to him when he called for her …

And she can’t escape the thought that has haunted her as surely as her memories: If Pierce had lived, would there be a Lilith Rising? Would there be an Aestas?

Weren’t those works—wasn’t her life, and Lara’s, too—born from Pierce’s blood?

So, it feels better, letting herself wield the weapon.

Cleaner.

Truer.

But now, she sits in the fading sunlight and wonders what on earth to do with these pages.

It’s an exorcism of sorts, the lancing of a wound. Nothing she’d ever want to publish, but also not something she wants to tuck away in her flat back in Edinburgh.

They belong here, she finally decides. Hidden away, but here nonetheless, an alternate version of the story the house already holds. The house that changed the course of her life, all of their lives, forever.

But she won’t hide all of the pages together.

Together, they tell a complete story, most of it real, some of it not, but nothing about that summer has ever seemed so neat to her.

So whole.

It’s always been a series of fragments, beautiful and horrible, shifting like the light on the water just beyond the villa, hurting her eyes if she looks too close. It feels right, then, to break this story up into fragments. Read the first, and it’s sad, but there are moments of light, of joy, even if the reader senses the clouds rolling in.

Read the second, and now, the story twists. Heroine is villain, villain is victim, and that colors everything that comes before in a new light.

And yet that first bit still stands on its own, another kind of story, another universe of might-have-beens.

That’s good,Mari thinks. That’s how stories should work.

The first chunk of it, she hides in an easy spot, under the window seat where the M Johnnie Dorchester carved in the glass still occasionally catches the light.

The second, the parts detailing her very real fight with Pierce and her very fictional murder of him, those she tucks away somewhere more secret.

Only someone who has read Lilith Rising very closely would even think to look there, and it makes her smile as she pushes the papers into their hidey-hole.

If these are ever found, it will be by a true fan, and what will they do with them?

Mari doesn’t know or care. She’ll be dead by then, after all. She’s hidden them too well for them to be discovered before her inevitable and swiftly approaching end.

Maybe they’ll believe they’ve found the real ending to her story. Maybe they’ll think it’s some deluded piece of fiction. Maybe they’ll toss them in the fire, and be done with all of it.

It doesn’t matter to Mari. She’s done what she can, reclaimed the narrative for herself in a way that makes sense to her, and if it means the world one day believes she murdered Pierce, at least it ensures no one will ever separate them again.

The car comes for her early the next morning, and Mari’s last look at Villa Rosato—Villa Aestas—is of the house shining in the morning light, a perfect jewel waiting for some other story to unfold in its walls.

Mari presses her fingers against the back window, imagining she can still feel the warm stone under her palm.

She’ll be gone soon, but the villa will stand for much longer, she knows, and that means she’s never really gone. Neither is Pierce, or Lara, or Noel, or even Johnnie. They still walk those halls, and soon so will she.

So will others who come after her.

Houses remember.