Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

“Petal still in peril?”

I look over the top of my laptop at Chess. We’re sitting in the formal dining room, a room we haven’t eaten in once in the week since we’ve been at Villa Aestas, but which we have repurposed as a sort of working space.

Well, Chess is working. Earbuds in, tiny cup of espresso at her elbow, her fingers clacking away on her extremely expensive and whisper-thin laptop. I don’t think she’s stopped typing from the moment we sat down.

Meanwhile, I have … opened a Word document.

And we’ve been in here for nearly two hours.

“Always,” I reply, not adding that I’m beginning to think I’m the one actually in peril these days. If I can’t finish this book while we’re here, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’d thought getting out of my house, situating myself in a brand-new space, would be all the jump-start I’d need to finally finish this damn thing, but so far, no good. I have maybe two workable chapters, and just got an email from my editor, Caleb, this morning with a less-than-gentle nudge asking how the book was coming along.

Worse, there was an email from my new fancy attorney’s bookkeeper, a reminder that I still owe part of last month’s bill and a link to how I can “easily pay and catch up!”

No book, no money, I remind myself, but I’ve never worked well under stress, so that’s not exactly the most helpful thought.

Not for the first time, I wonder if I should just tell Chess what’s going on with Matt and the divorce. Just how much Matt is looking to take from me. She’d understand, I know she would, and she’d hate him as much as I did for it.

But then it would just be another thing in the Litany of Things Going Wrong in My Life, and I’m tired of being that friend. The sick one. The divorced one. The one fighting to hold on to what, to Chess, is probably a negligible amount of money.

Poor Emily.

Chess stops typing and looks up at me, her head tilted to one side. “Are you just not feeling it?” she asks, because of course she saw through my chipper response, of course she knows I’ve been over here reading celebrity gossip for the past hour or so.

Sighing, I lean back, the ancient dining room chair creaking. “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I first started working on the books when I was living with my parents and feeling really stuck. They were an escape, and now … now it’s like I need an escape from them.”

That sounds overly dramatic out loud, so I shake my head. “Or maybe the series has just run out of steam, you know? Nine books is a lot. Maybe it doesn’t really merit a tenth.”

“Plus, Dex is Matt, so writing him must blow.”

Surprised, I close my laptop, leaning my elbows on the table. “You could tell?”

Chess gives me a look that’s somewhere between affection and pity. “Sweetheart,” is all she says, and I roll my eyes at myself, burying my face in my hands.

“It was so obvious, wasn’t it?”

“You were in love,” Chess replies. I can’t see her, but I can hear the shrug in her voice. “I mean, I never got it, but you clearly were.”

That makes me look up. She’s still typing, her eyes now on the screen, but the earbuds are out. She’s wearing another one of the seemingly endless linen outfits she brought here, not a wrinkle in sight. Maybe rich people have some special kind of linen the rest of us plebes don’t have access to. That’s the only explanation I can think of.

“I thought you liked Matt,” I say. “I mean, you two talked on the phone and texted and stuff. You even took him golfing in Kiawah, even though you hate golfing.”

It had actually been surprising how quickly Matt and Chess had become friends. A good kind of surprising, like it was something I hadn’t even known I could hope for. It was nice seeing two people who were so important to me take an interest in each other. It made me feel … I don’t know, special I guess. It helped that they had things in common. They both cared way too much about college football, resulting in flurries of texts on Saturdays in the fall. And they were both foodies, both admirers of slick cars.

But sometimes I thought their connection was even deeper than that. They were alike at a molecular level, too. Both ambitious, driven. Sometimes more than a little self-centered. And like Chess, Matt moved through the world like everything was going to fall into place for him—and maybe because of that, it did.

Thing is, while that’s a great trait in someone you love and who loves you, it’s pretty fucking terrifying in someone who is now pitted against you.

Chess pauses again. I can hear her manicured nail tapping against her laptop. Finally she sighs and says, “I did like him.”

Her green eyes meet mine across the table. “But I didn’t think he was right for you.”

“Maybe you should have said something,” I tell her. “Could’ve saved me some heartache, and also several thousands of dollars.”

“Would you have listened?”

I think back to when I first met Matt. It wasn’t a grand moment or an adorable meet-cute, not the kind of thing they make rom-coms about, but that had made it, and him, feel all the more real and grown-up. He worked at the same accounting firm as my dad, and when I’d occasionally go in to help with phones or filing, he was always there, smiling at me from his desk, smelling good when he passed by, remembering that if he grabbed me a coffee, I liked almond milk.

I’d been struggling at home, driftless. Matt seemed so sure of who he was and what he was doing—another way he reminded me of Chess. And even though I hated to admit it, he was the one who’d seen me reading stacks and stacks of cozy mysteries and said, “I bet you could write one of those.”

Like I said, it’s not exactly heady stuff, but it had been … lovely. Easy. Matt was steady, he smiled quicker than anybody I knew, and he had a sixth sense for when I needed something. I’d be working away, thinking that a cup of tea might be nice, and boom, there it would be at my elbow. And I liked that my parents adored him. How even my oldest brother, Brandon, who liked basically no one, still thought Matt was “a good dude.”

Maybe it’s a little pathetic that at twenty-three, I still wanted my family’s approval, but it had mattered to me. Brandon and my middle brother, Stephen, were both lawyers, my other brother, Tyler, was in med school, and I was still at home, still figuring it out. So it felt good, seeing the way their faces lit up whenever I brought Matt over.

And I liked being part of a twosome.

Matt and Emily.

Emily and Matt.

“I wouldn’t have,” I admit, and Chess gives a firm nod.

“Anyways, you’re both better off now,” Chess says, returning to her work, eyes drifting back to the screen, and I give an angry bark of laughter.

“Okay, but we don’t actually give a fuck if Matt is ‘better off’ or not, right? We hope Matt loses his hair and becomes the first person to contract a fatal case of chlamydia.”

Chess stops typing and looks up at me, a mix of pity and disappointment on her face.

“If you want to receive the good things the universe has for you, Em, you can’t have ugly thoughts blocking the path. We have to let go of pain and resentment if we want the gifts we deserve.”

I stare at her, waiting for her to break character, for her serious expression to melt into a typically sly Chess Chandler smile that lets me know all this is bullshit, that she knows it’s bullshit, just the stuff she sells to the public. Not to me, not to her best friend.

But there’s no break.

She watches me with this oddly benevolent expression, like she’s waiting for me to tear up or have some kind of epiphany.

“Well, thank you for that advice,” I say slowly. “Anything else? Although I should warn you if the next thing you ask me to do involves the words ‘helter-skelter,’ I am out of here.”

Chess’s mouth thins, and if the skin of her forehead could wrinkle, it would. “I’m serious, Em. You have to let go of this shit.”

She turns back to her computer, typing even faster now. “And for the record,” she continues, “I’m actually pretty good at giving advice. I actually kind of know what I’m talking about. Or maybe you think ten million people are wrong, I don’t know!”

“I know you’re good at this kind of thing,” I say, stung and honestly a little surprised at how pissed she is. “I just didn’t realize it was…”

“What?” she asks. The typing stops.

“Real.”

Now it’s her turn to stare at me. We hold each other’s gaze for about three heartbeats, and then she just shakes her head a little. “Okay,” is all she says, and I sigh, putting both palms on the table and pushing myself up from my chair.

“I think I need a break,” I say, and Chess may be irritated with me, but at least she doesn’t use the opening I just gave her to point out that I haven’t actually done enough work to require a break.

“Giulia is bringing lunch in about an hour,” is all she says in response, and I nod, leaving her to her furious typing.

Problem is, once I’m out of the dining room, I’m once again unsure what to do with myself. I could take the car into Orvieto—we still haven’t done that, happy to hide ourselves away in the villa—but that would require going back into the dining room and asking Chess where the keys are, and we clearly need a little space from each other right now. I’m already a little waterlogged from consecutive afternoons spent by the pool, and obviously writing is not on the agenda.

Instead, I find myself drifting back upstairs to the little library and picking up Lilith Rising from where I left it on top of the shelf.

The cover looks even more lurid today, and I snort softly. Thirty-five years old, almost thirty-six, and I’m about to hole up with a scary book because my friend hurt my feelings.

I find a good spot for that kind of Peak Seventh Grade Wallowing, a window seat tucked into the upstairs hallway, and I fold myself up, an undeniable thrill running through my fingertips as I turn to the first page.

Houses remember.

“Good opening line,” I murmur. “Well done, Mari.” Opening lines are important, after all, which makes them the hardest part of the book sometimes. And Mari came up with that one when she was just nineteen.

I keep reading.

Lilith Risingis a good, old-fashioned haunted house book, so it builds up that dread about the setting right away, and I’m deep into Chapter Two before it clicks.

Somerton House sat on a small rise overlooking a quaint and peaceful village, and Victoria liked to spend afternoons on the window seat at the top of the stairs, watching the lawn slope into trees, watching the trees give way to rooftops.

She was there on the summer afternoon it all began, sitting on that same seat with its faded green cushion, a small tear in the left corner, stuffing spilling out in a way that made her think uncomfortably of wounds. It was raining, as it hadbeen nearly every day that week, and Victoria watched the water slick down the glass as (with a diamond ring pilfered from her mother’s jewelry box just that morning) she stealthily scratched a “V” in the right corner of the furthermost pane.

I put the book down, a chill rippling through me. The cushion I’m sitting on isn’t green, and it definitely isn’t torn—for the kind of prices people paid to stay here, I doubt anything that isn’t pristinely Shabby Chic is allowed. But the view from the window does look over the lawn, and the lawn does eventually become trees, and past those, I can make out the tops of a few buildings.

This is Italy, though, not the English countryside, and the description isn’t super specific. Still, looking at the view from this window and reading the view described in the book, I keep imagining Mari Godwick sitting in this same spot almost fifty years ago, a notebook on her raised knees, scribbling down the story that will one day become one of the most famous horror novels in the world.

I lift the book again, ready to read on, and as I do, my eyes drift to the windowpane.

And there it is.

I put Lilith Rising back on the cushion, leaning forward.

At first, it just looks like a flaw, a smudge even, but I reach out and touch the corner of the pane with my finger, tracing the shape etched there.

Not a V.

An M.

MARI, 1974—ORVIETO

“Do you like it?”

Mari sits at the end of the bed, her cotton floral nightgown sliding off one shoulder as the last note Pierce played seems to hover in the air between them.

He’s reclining against the headboard, guitar cradled in his lap, his hair a wreck, and Mari thinks she’s never been more in love with him. Not even that first night he kissed her in the back garden of her father’s house.

By then, he’d admitted that he was married, and she had known that this was wrong and probably headed for disaster. But she hadn’t cared.

And in moments like this, when it’s just the two of them in their perfect cocoon, she doesn’t regret any of it.

“It’s gorgeous,” she tells him now, crawling forward on her knees and placing her hands on either side of his face. “Absolutely gorgeous.”

Pierce smiles, leaning in to kiss her softly. “You think everything I play is gorgeous.”

“Because it is,” she replies, and then she’s scooting closer, wishing the guitar weren’t between them.

Luckily, Pierce must want the same thing because she hears the twang of the strings as he places it on the floor, and then his arms are around her, their bodies pressed close.

Italy has been good for them, just like she’d hoped. A bedroom at the end of a long hall, not next to anyone else, no worry that Lara could hear them from her spot on the sofa on the other side of the thin walls of their flat. A comfortable bed, and time. That was the thing Mari craved the most, the thing she felt she and Pierce never had enough of, had never had enough of.

From the very first, every moment had been illicit and stolen, and while that had been exciting, she’s grateful for the luxury of togetherness.

“I’ve missed you,” Pierce murmurs against her neck, pushing the strap of her nightgown down, and she presses her forehead to his.

“I’ve been here the whole time.”

He looks up at her, his eyes so blue in that pale and serious face. “Have you?” he asks.

She knows he’s talking about Billy. How losing their baby turned her into a ghost for months on end. But that memory belongs to cold gray England, not to this sunny bedroom in Italy, and she pushes it away even as she pulls Pierce closer.

“All right now, plenty of time for that later!”

There’s a loud rapping at the door, and Mari looks over her shoulder to see Noel standing there in the doorway.

“It’s not even noon, you heathens,” he says, and Mari scowls at him, pulling her nightgown back up her shoulder.

“Closed doors mean something, Noel,” she says, and he gives one of those elegant shrugs she’s seen so many times over the past few weeks since they arrived.

“Not in my house they don’t.”

“It’s not your house,” she reminds him, but Pierce is already getting up from the bed, reaching for the pair of worn jeans crumpled on the floor.

He’s naked, but Pierce has never been the slightest bit modest. And why should he be when he looks like a marble statue come to life? All pale skin and hard muscle, and Mari’s eyes can’t help but drift longingly over him.

But when she glances back at the door, her face suddenly hot, she sees that Noel is also looking.

He doesn’t even try to hide his interest, his gaze frankly assessing, the corner of his mouth ticking up.

And when he notices Mari watching him, that smirk blooms in full.

Winking at her, he once again thumps the door. “Allons-y, Sheldon! I’m actually in the mood to make music for fucking once.”

Pierce finishes buttoning up his jeans and shoots Mari a sheepish look, pressing a kiss to her forehead before dashing out the door, guitar in tow.

Mari sits in the middle of the mattress, the sheets still warm from Pierce’s body, and wraps her arms around her knees, thinking about that look Noel gave Pierce, wishing the feeling unfurling in her was something as simple as jealousy or irritation.

It’s not, though. It’s something altogether more interesting and complicated than that, and Mari tucks it away, a thought to poke at later.

She showers and puts on one of her favorite dresses, a lilac A-line with a gauzy white scarf around the waist, then heads downstairs, expecting to hear music. She hopes Pierce plays Noel the song he played for her this morning. The melody was gorgeous, and what Noel could do with it, lyrically …

If Pierce could actually produce a song, or several, with Noel Gordon, if Pierce could be a part of Noel’s comeback, their entire world would change. There would be money, there would be opportunities, and there would be that precious commodity again, time. They wouldn’t have to hustle to simply make ends meet, and Pierce wouldn’t have to say yes to every gig on the off chance that the right person from the right record company might be in the audience.

Noel Gordon can do that for them.

But there’s no music playing when she goes downstairs. In fact, there’s no one around at all. She’s standing in the front hallway when she hears a distant shout from outside.

It’s a warm day, the sun blanketing the lawn, and Mari immediately sees the source of the noise. It’s Noel, standing up in a little rowboat out on the pond, declaiming something while Pierce sits on the bench, oars across his lap, laughing up at him.

So much for music, apparently.

There’s a small dock out over the pond, and Mari can see Lara sitting at the end of it, dangling her feet over the murky green water. As Mari watches, Lara calls something out to the two men in the boat, her hands cupped around her mouth, but either they can’t hear her or they just ignore her.

Lara’s hands drop. So do her shoulders just the littlest bit, and Mari feels that tug in her gut, that feeling that she needs to go out there, sit with Lara, make her feel less awkward and alone.

But Jesus Christ, she doesn’t want to.

It had become almost immediately clear that whatever Lara thought her relationship to Noel was, Noel did not see it the same way. They weren’t sharing a room, for one thing, Lara tucked away upstairs with Pierce, Mari, and Johnnie while Noel claimed the largest bedroom downstairs as his lair. Mari doesn’t doubt that Lara still occasionally finds her way into that room and into Noel’s bed, but she gets the sense that it’s more out of convenience on Noel’s part than any real desire.

And it makes her sad how even that seems to be enough for Lara.

“Mari!”

She turns to see Johnnie sitting on the lawn, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He waves at her cheerfully, and, relieved, she goes to sit beside him.

The grass prickles her legs through the sundress she’s wearing, and she shades her eyes with one hand, wishing she’d brought some sunglasses.

Reading her mind, Johnnie pulls his own pair off his face, handing them to her. “Here ya go,” he says, and she takes the glasses with an embarrassed little laugh.

“You don’t have to,” she says even as she slides them on her face, and he shrugs.

“Want to.”

She’s been at Villa Rosato for two weeks now, and Johnnie remains something of a mystery. He has a guitar—Mari has seen him with it, although she hasn’t heard him play—and she still wonders what Noel meant by “entertainment director.”

And while Noel has called him his friend, the relationship between them seems more contentious than anything else. Noel loves his barbs and quips, but the ones he throws at Johnnie seem especially pointed, that current of cruelty she picks up when he speaks to Lara shooting through each word.

She thinks again about Noel’s eyes on Pierce’s body this morning and feels her face flush. Is that it, then? Is Johnnie Noel’s lover?

But then she’s gotten used to these sorts of men. Boys, really. She used to see them at her father’s house, and she sees them in her flat now. Eternal outsiders, drifting on the edge of a group, but never firmly inside of it. Drawn to the lifestyle of art and freedom (and yes, also sex and drugs). There one week, gone the next. Johnnie has that air about him, that slightly hazy quality like she could blink and he’d suddenly vanish.

There’s another shout from the pond, this one from Pierce as the boat tilts precipitously to one side. Noel is still standing, his arms spread wide, his head tilted back to the sky. He’s wearing a pair of sunglasses with bright blue frames, a cigarette clenched between his teeth, his smile positively wolfish. Mari sighs.

“He came and got Pierce out of bed so they could write,” she tells Johnnie. Gesturing at the cavorting on the pond, she needlessly adds, “But this doesn’t really look like writing to me.”

Johnnie nods, clearly weighing his words. “He’s not always like this,” he finally says.

When Mari only looks at him, he laughs, pushing his dark hair out of his eyes. “Okay, he is, but the thing with Noel is that there are always … levels, you know? General baseline of Noel-ness. Some days he’s at a four, others at a ten.”

Mari understands that well enough. Pierce is always Pierce—dreamy, passionate, in love with the world—but there are times when those qualities seem more overwhelming than others, or somehow out of balance.

“Is he—” Mari starts, and then stops, her tongue thick in her dry mouth. “That is, are … are the two of you—”

“Are we shagging?” Johnnie asks, squinting at her, and Mari hopes he assumes that the pinkness of her cheeks is due to the sun.

Some rebel you’ve turned out to be, she chides herself. Can’t even ask a simple question if it involves sex.

“Well, I wasn’t going to put it so bluntly, but I guess that’s what I was asking, yes,” she says, drawing her knees up and tugging her dress over them.

Johnnie laughs, reaching up to ruffle his hair, so black it’s nearly blue in the sunlight. “We’re friends. Kind of.”

“Why only kind of?” she asks, noting that this is not really an answer to what she asked. Out on the pond, Noel shucks off the flowing white shirt he was wearing, letting it drop carelessly into the water.

“He doesn’t trust me,” Johnnie says. He nods out at the pond. “Thinks I’m some sort of spy.”

Mari laughs. “A spy?” she repeats, incredulous. “For whom?”

Johnnie shrugs. “Depends on the day, really. Sometimes it’s for the record company or Tom, his manager. Sometimes it’s for his ex. The day before you lot turned up, he went on quite the epic rant, accusing me of phoning Arabella in the middle of the night, reporting back on what he’s doing. I told him, ‘Mate, I’ve never met your missus, and even if I had, I doubt she’d be all that interested in hearing that you’re drinking yourself to death and fucking Italian birds.’”

Mari actually has met Noel’s ex-wife. Or rather, not-yet-ex-wife, because as far as she’s heard, there’s no divorce, just a sort of extended separation, with Noel in Europe, and Arabella living with her parents in their country pile in Devonshire.

She was pretty, Arabella, if desperately serious. Mari had only exchanged some pleasantries with her at a party in Mayfair, the sort of thing that she and Pierce were usually not invited to, but one of Pierce’s old friends from Eton had insisted they come. All in all, it had been a boring night, Pierce sliding back into the person he must’ve been before she met him: rich, slightly posh, drinking too much, and talking too loudly.

Mari had hung on the edges of the room, and that’s where she’d found Arabella Gordon. She remembered wondering how on earth two such different people had ever decided to get married, but now that she knows Noel a little better, it makes sense in a strange way. He’d probably needed the calm solidity that had been radiating off the petite brunette, and Arabella … well, who wouldn’t want to be the one to tame the wild Noel Gordon?

Hadn’t taken, of course.

Looking at Noel now, draped at the end of the rowboat, shirtless and very clearly flirting with Pierce, Mari wonders how Arabella could have ever thought it would. “S’ppose the next thing will be that I’m working for the papers,” Johnnie continues, leaning back on his hands. “Or the government. He comes up with some wild shit, let me tell you. If he put half as much thought into his music as he does into wondering who’s keen to fuck him over, he’d have three albums out already.”

Lara has perched herself on the end of the pier now, her bare feet dangling in the water. She’s singing something Mari vaguely recognizes, a Judy Collins song Lara was obsessed with a few months ago. Lara’s always had a lovely voice, pretty and clear, strong enough that Pierce has invited her onstage a few times to sing with him.

The song carries across the grass, and even though Lara’s giving a good performance of someone singing solely for the pleasure of it, it’s clear this is another attempt at drawing Noel’s attention.

It’s not working, from what Mari can tell, and next to her, Johnnie makes a sound of disgust, ruffling his hand over his hair as he sits up. “Anyway, this is the first time I’ve got you to myself since you got here, don’t want to talk about bloody Noel.”

Surprised, Mari looks over at him and realizes for the first time that his face is a bit pink, too, even beneath his tan.

“Is it completely inappropriate to tell you how gorgeous your hair is in the sunlight?” he asks.

That was the last thing she expected him to say, and now she searches Johnnie’s handsome face for some sign that he’s just taking the piss, but his expression is so serious it almost breaks her heart.

She’s suddenly aware of how young he is.

He’s still older than you,she reminds herself, but she’s not sure anyone has ever felt as old at nineteen as she does now. She seems to have already lived a thousand lifetimes, has lost her family, lost a child, and it’s aged her. Maybe not in her face, but her soul feels heavier, and she can see from Johnnie’s face that his soul is as light as air.

It’s nice, having a sweet boy look at her, paying her compliments about something as mundane as her hair.

The first night she’d met Pierce, when he’d come by her father’s house and ended up staying for hours, talking music and art and philosophy, Mari had walked him to the door, her heart beating so hard she was sure he could see it, already so infatuated with him she could barely see straight.

They had paused there just outside the house, cloaked in shadows, and Pierce had cradled her face in his palm, his eyes moving over her face. “How have I gone this long without knowing you?” he’d murmured, and she’d felt that, too. That every moment up until that one had been wasted, but now they’d found each other and life could truly begin.

Pierce still says things like that to her, and while they thrill her in their own way, she realizes she’s missed this kind of mindless flirting, the kind that girls her age are supposed to engage in.

Girls her age should be sitting in the grass with charming boys, hearing how pretty their hair is. Girls shouldn’t be sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with married men, running off to Europe, holding a baby that coughs and coughs and burns so hot.…

It’s a dark memory for such a bright day, so she does her best to shake it off.

“Thank you,” she says to Johnnie, giving him a little smile. “And you may, by the way. Tell me my hair is pretty.”

“Gorgeous,” he corrects her, and there it is, that slightly cocky, winning smile. “I said it was gorgeous.”

“That’s fine, too,” she says. And even though there’s no real racing pulse, no frisson of sexual tension, despite how handsome Johnnie is, that little moment by the pond warms her for the rest of the day.

Later that evening, after they’ve all finished dinner and begun to drift to their own corners of the house, Mari picks up her notebook from where she’d left it in the front drawing room to see a small piece of paper sticking out.

The edges are ragged, and with a little bit of dismay, she realizes the page was torn from this same notebook, leaving a jagged place halfway through the mostly blank pages.

The window seat,the note reads. In the glass, at the bottom.—J

Curious, she climbs to the second floor. There’s only one window seat in the house, and it’s in the upstairs hallway, halfway between the room she shares with Pierce and the staircase. It’s a cozy spot, one she’s used for reading several times already, even though the cushion is torn and every time she gets up, she seems to have little bits of stuffing stuck to her legs.

It’s dark in the hallway. The villa has electricity, but there are no lamps up here, certainly no overhead lights. There are candles all over the place, though, piles of thin tapers messily stacked on top of end tables, tucked into corners of bookcases, stuffed into drawers, matchbooks usually close at hand.

Mari moves to one of the little tables lining the hallway now, and sure enough, there’s a candlestick and a matchbox from some club in Rome.

Setting her notebook down on the table, she feels like a Gothic heroine as she lights the candle, laughing at her own reflection in the window.

Her face looks so white and so serious, her red hair drifting around her shoulder, the flame flickering, and she leans down, careful to keep her hair away from the fire.

It takes her a minute to find it, but then she sees it, the four carefully etched marks in the glass.

An M.

It’s sweet, Mari thinks.

It’s simple.

Her fingers trace the shape as she imagines Johnnie sitting up here, scratching it into the glass with … what? Probably a razor blade, a pocketknife.

But as she looks at it, she imagines something else, something more romantic. A ring, maybe. A diamond ring, stolen from a jewelry box.

And then she catches sight of her own face in the window again. A girl. A girl in a window seat, scratching an initial with a stolen ring.

Mari places the candle in one of the brass sconces lining the hallway, picks up her notebook, and arranges herself on the window seat.

She had left the pad with those two words scrawled across it—Houses remember—back in London, but she writes them again now, and this time, they don’t sit there alone on the paper. Other words follow. There’s a house, and there’s a girl. Victoria. She’s come to this house with her family for the summer, and she doesn’t know it yet, but this will be the summer that changes everything. Although, maybe she does sense it. Maybe that’s why she scratches her initial on the glass, wanting to leave her mark on this place that will leave its mark on her.

When Mari gets into bed, it’s nearly three in the morning, and she has ten pages of her notebook filled, and something buzzing, fizzing inside her chest that wasn’t there until now.

The next day, Johnnie finds her out near the pool, her notebook on her lap, her pen scratching across the paper.

“So?” he asks her, and she startles, her brain still stuck in the fields of England, in Victoria’s world, not her own.

It takes her a second to come back to herself, but by then, Johnnie is already losing some of his bright smile, his feet shifting awkwardly. He wants to sit on the end of her chair, she thinks, but isn’t sure if he’d be welcome.

“Did you see it?” he asks. “In the window?”

She’d actually forgotten about it. Not the letter itself—that had started her writing, after all—but the intent behind it, who actually did it and why. From the moment she’d started to write, that little detail had become hers, infused with the meaning that she wanted to give it, and she wonders if this is how Pierce and Noel feel when they write songs.

Powerful. In control. Possessive.

“I did,” she says to Johnnie now, making herself smile even as her fingers itch to make her pen move again. “It was really sweet, Johnnie, thank you.”

“Sweet,” he repeats. It’s the wrong thing to say, clearly, but she can’t make herself take it back.

It’s a fucking initial carved into glass,she thinks, irritation making her uncharitable. Pierce blew up his entire life and mine so we could be together, did you really think that one letter would impress me?

But still, she keeps smiling and he eventually nods, sort of shuffles off, and finally, Mari is alone again.

Well,she amends as she starts to write. Not really alone.

She has Victoria now, after all.

[INTRO MUSIC FADES OUT]

BEX: Hiiii, my lovelies! Okay, so as you may have noticed, our music selection was a little different today. That was your first hint. A hint about what we’re gonna talk about on this fine evening. Or morning or afternoon, I guess, I don’t know when you’re listening to us blather on.

KALI: I mean, the title of this episode pretty much tells them what we’re talking about, so …

BEX: I know! But I was trying to be mysterious, god.

KALI: Sorry!

BEX: Always fucking up my attempt at setting a mood, Thompson, I swear.

KALI: I’m just pointing out that the very nature of podcasting doesn’t really allow for surprises when it comes to the subject of said podcast.

BEX: [pause] Okay, that’s fair. Anyway! What you just heard was a snippet from a song called “Sister Mine,” by one Lara Larchmont, and it’s from the album Aestas.

KALI: If you have never heard or seen the album Aestas, please go to your mom or grandmother’s house right now, because it’s there. Promise.

BEX: If you ever came home from fifth grade and found your mom listening to music and crying in her den, it was probably Aestas.

KALI: [laughs] Who did not come home from fifth grade to find their mom crying in the den, I ask you?

BEX: [laughs] Well, now that we’ve made things sufficiently dark, let’s continue with the official breakdown, shall we? [clears throat] Here we go, the formal bit. “In the nearly fifty years since the so-called ‘Villa Rosato Horror’”—

KALI: Jesus Christ, did people really call it that?

BEX: They did! Everyone was, like, extremely extra in the seventies, I guess. Anyway! “In the nearly fifty years since the so-called ‘Villa Rosato Horror,’ there have been other, more shocking crimes involving famous people, enough so that the events of July 29, 1974, are almost forgotten. There were no splashy prestige TV miniseries about it or true-crime classics written detailing what happened outside of Orvieto that summer.

MAYBE it’s because the murder itself was so grubby and unglamorous, or maybe it’s because the people involved all went on to much bigger things. Mari Godwick wrote Lilith Rising, one of the most famous horror novels of all time”—

KALI: Scary as shit.

BEX: And Lara Larchmont’s Aestas is a folk-rock classic on par with Tapestry.

KALI: Sad as shit, as established.

BEX: [laughs] And of course Noel Gordon, despite being dead for decades, is still one of the most recognizable rock stars in the world.

KALI: Hot as shit.

BEX: Facts.

KALI: No printers, just fax.

BEX: [laughs, clears throat again] “But the Villa Rosato Horror, or, as some insist it should be called, the Villa Rosato Tragedy, is worth revisiting. The major players all agreed they could barely remember that night, and the accused murderer swore he was innocent. There were lurid tales of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll mixed in with darker rumors of the occult.”

KALI: Oh yeah, people in the seventies and eighties fucking loved to think the devil was involved.

BEX: Loved! It! Could not get enough of that devil guy.

KALI: And Mari wrote a devil book.

BEX: Oh my god, you are stepping on me again, we’re gonna get to that!

KALI: I prematurely deviled, and I’m sorry.

BEX: You should be! Okay, let me finish with my big line and thesis of today’s episode: “With all that tension, all that drama in one house, is it really so far-fetched to think that maybe the Italian courts didn’t get this one right?”

KALI: Ooooh.

BEX: I know! I’m making big claims right up front!

KALI: I am intrigued by your thesis, and wish to know more.

BEX: And so you shall. So, as always, let’s start with the victim and the ten-second backstory. Victim! One Pierce Sheldon, age twenty-three, musician, apparently really talented, but something of a douche.

KALI: What level of Summer’s Eve are we on here?

BEX: Extra strength, for sure. In 1971, he’s married, he’s already got a kid, and then he meets Mari Godwick because he … I don’t fucking know, he just meets her, and, like, he is sprung. Just immediately sprung, totally crazy about her, and she feels the same way about him because she is sixteen fucking years old.

KALI: Ew.

BEX: I mean, I, too, would have run off with a married man when I was sixteen provided that married man was, like, on a fucking CW show or something. Tenth-grade me, absolutely risking it all for Jensen Ackles, so I get it for Mari, but still, Pierce, ya gross.

KALI: I kind of like this actually. It’ll be less sad when he dies at least? Won’t bum out our listeners too much?

BEX: Exactly. Also, not only did he leave his wife and, like, abscond to Europe with a literal child, he also took her stepsister with them! Who was also sixteen! Pierce! What the fuck!

KALI: I get that we can’t exactly endorse murder on this show, but I’m not gonna lie, hearing about this dude makes me feel … a little murder-y?

BEX: For. Sure. Which is now where our murderer comes in.

KALI: Our alleged murderer.

BEX: Right, our alleg—but he was convicted? So, I don’t think we have to say alleged?

KALI: Good point. Our convicted murderer, then.

BEX: Yes, our convicted murderer, one John Dorchester who apparently everyone called Johnnie.

KALI: Awww, Johnnie. Like he was in the T-Birds.

BEX: [laughs] Yes, Johnnie. Poor Johnnie. This was a bad summer for you, bro!

KALI: Just a real shit show of a summer vacation for good ol’ Johnnie.

—transcript of Episode 206 of Two Girls, One Murder: “When in Rome (Don’t Do Murder)”