The Guest House (6 page)

M
eg Wright pulled out a handful of Nilla wafers from the box and spread them out on the table in front of her. From the time she was little, she’d always eaten them the same way: always in pairs, flat sides together. Arranging them so was oddly comforting, the ritual almost as calming as the taste of the cookies themselves.

She didn’t know why she’d been feeling so nervous lately. No, she did. George and her mom were getting married. The big gallery show in LA her mom wanted her to attend? That was actually going to be the ceremony. Her dad would freak. She knew he would. God, he still nearly choked just saying her mother’s boyfriend’s name—this news of their engagement (and planned wedding!) would send him into full-blown cardiac arrest. Or worse, he might just curl up like a pill bug and not say a word. Meg wasn’t sure which response scared her more.

It had been hard enough staying with him that first summer after the divorce. He’d moped around. He’d cooked mushroom omelets in the middle of the night. Half the time Meg got the feeling he expected her to make him feel better, and the other half he fished for information about what her mother was doing in New York, and whom she was doing it with. Meg had hated lying to him, but she’d hated even more seeing his expression when she’d told him the truth.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t have her own things to be pissed off about! It wasn’t as if she was crazy about George, but she didn’t hate him. The truth was—and she would never have said this to her father—George was actually pretty cool. He didn’t freak out if she wanted a glass of wine or if she brought a guy home after school. He treated her like an adult, while her father—Meg stared woefully at the Nilla wafers in her hand—still bought her the same cookies she’d been eating since she was five.

She loved her father more than anything, but sometimes he held on so tight she couldn’t breathe.

Meg heard the sound of the truck rumbling up the driveway, then the slam of the driver’s door. Owen came inside a few moments later, carrying a pizza.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, setting the box down on the table.

Meg frowned at it. “I thought you said we were getting dinner from that new noodle place?”

“Since when don’t you like Russo’s mushroom pizza?” Owen asked, sliding into the seat across from her.

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” she said with a small shrug, wondering why she even bothered to bring it up. “I just thought we could try something, you know,
different
.”

He flipped open the pizza box, releasing a fragrant burst of warm, spicy air. Seeing the glistening lumps of sausage on one half, Meg gave her father a disapproving look.

“I swear I told them no meat,” Owen defended quickly.

Meg served herself a slice. “And you wonder why I worry about leaving you and your rapidly increasing cholesterol levels here alone.”

“I’m not alone. Did you ever call your mom back?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Honey, I’m not alone. I have you and your aunt and your grandma. . . .”

“You’re alone
here
. And you get mopey.”

“I don’t get mopey,” he argued.

“
Dad
. You get ridiculously mopey.”

“Hey, I don’t want to talk about me,” he said, dropping a slice onto his plate. “What about you? You still haven’t told me about this last semester, about your friends, what you’ve all been doing down there in the big city. Come on; enlighten your old man.”

Meg’s heart thundered at the question; she was unsure of how to answer. After his tailspin over her wine comment, the truth was out of the question. Just the week before she’d come here, Wiley and Emma had opened Wiley’s parents’ liquor cabinet after school and made them all Cosmos. Meg had downed three and then sneaked Ty Anderson back into her room at midnight, where he’d stayed until five the next morning.

She reached absently for the last two Nilla wafers beside her plate and sandwiched them. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. “We do the same things as we did last year. Go to the movies a lot. Go shopping. You know. The usual.”

Her phone chimed on the counter. Owen glanced at it, frowning. “What’s your mom want now?”

Did it never occur to her father that it might be someone else trying to reach her? “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Meg said, glancing longingly at the phone, wondering what Ty had written back to her earlier text.

“Mom said you’re looking at Barnard.”

“
She
is,” Meg said, aware of how despondent her answer had sounded. The truth was that lately, and unbeknownst to either one of her parents, Meg had been scanning the Web sites of colleges much farther away, University of New Mexico and UCLA.

“You still want to take a day to see Tufts this summer, don’t you?” Owen asked, and his expression was so bright and hopeful that Meg didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d let her mother talk her out of applying to Tufts last month.

“You bet,” she said instead.

“And maybe we could go to the aquarium. See the penguins.” He reached for another slice. “God, you haven’t been there since you were in middle school.”

Meg nodded agreeably. “Sounds great, Dad.”

•   •   •

T
he first time Owen saw George Schneider—which was at the art council’s fifty-dollars-a- head reception at the Osprey House—his immediate thought was that the visiting artist looked nothing like Heather had described him.

In the weeks leading up to the big event, Heather had been buzzing about the arrival of the painter she’d worked tirelessly to bring up from New York, the man whom the art council, of which Heather was vice president, had commissioned to create the mural in the library’s newly built wing. She’d said he was forty-five; he looked easily five years younger. She’d suggested he was heavy; he wasn’t, a fact made glaringly apparent by the snug knit shirt and tailored pants he’d arrived in. “You should know that George is terribly reclusive,” Heather had explained, prepping Owen on the drive over to the reception as if George Schneider were the Dalai Lama. Another lie: the man was as gregarious as a game-show host, greeting Harrisport residents like old friends, particularly the women, Owen noticed on more than one occasion—an observation that had been met with an irrational degree of outrage from his wife. “George isn’t like that,” Heather had claimed on the ride home. “And how would you know? You hardly spent two minutes with him. I was counting on you to be my escort, and you spent the whole time holed up with Keith Poole talking business!”

A clever tactic, Owen had thought bitterly in the days after Heather had announced her love for Schneider: turning the tables so that Owen would think he’d failed her on some level that night. As if his antisocial behavior were an offense equal to her infidelity.

Owen had lost a wife so Harrisport could gain a mural. Was it any wonder he never visited the library anymore?

Now climbing the stairs after shutting down the house for the night, Owen paused to glance at his daughter’s door at the very end of the hall. He was lucky; he knew that. Plenty of teenage girls spent their summers goofing around on the beach, mixing with boys who were too old and too reckless, wanting to grow up too fast. Despite the high-end, puffed-up city life Heather had relocated their daughter to, Meg had retained her small-town ways, and he was grateful for it. So long as he could keep the Caroline Michauds at bay, Meg would be fine.

I
n the still darkness, Cooper Moss shifted on the mattress, hot in nothing but a pair of boxers. The dormer sashes were as high as they’d go, but no breeze came through the screens. He’d found a fan in the garage, one of the old tanks he remembered as a kid that had lived atop dressers all summer long, and he was relieved to find it still worked, even if the blades were as loud as a propeller plane.

Staring up at the sloped ceiling and drawing in deep breaths of moist, warm pine, he could have been twelve years old again. The endless nights he’d lain awake under these eaves, listening to Hudson and his friends outside on the lawn, recently stumbled back from the beach, or holed up in one of the guest bedrooms, their laughter sailing down the hall with the faint smell of pot smoke that Hudson had told him was just candle wax, and for the longest time Cooper had believed him.

But he wasn’t twelve; wasn’t even close. His thirtieth birthday was two months away, and the house was silent, empty. No one to walk in on in the bathroom, no one to snake past on the stairs. No laughter, no fights. It was obscene, he thought. This much space for one person. As much as he loved the old house, he wasn’t sure his coming here to postpone its sale was in its best interest.

Of course, what Cooper was
really
doing in Harrisport was stalling. He had five months to come up with a first draft of a new book for his editor or be in breach of his contract. It wasn’t an unmanageable timetable—he’d written two drafts of his first novel in that time, but that manuscript had been inspired, a piece of his heart. He might have said the same about the books that had come after it. But after three Tide McGill mysteries, he was growing tired of his editor’s favorite beach-bum detective. He longed to write new characters, new settings. He hoped he’d find fresh ideas in coming back to Harrisport, but in the single day he’d been here, it seemed all he’d conjured were familiar pieces of his youth.

Like Alexandra Wright.

It had been great seeing her again. Cooper would admit he’d worried she might have had a change of heart once she’d arrived. He would have understood if she had, if the old house was too haunted for her to bear, but she’d seemed confident, not at all hesitant to step inside when he’d held the door open for her. He’d wondered whether she’d have remembered his part in that final evening in the guest house after Hudson had broken off their engagement, the kiss he, Cooper, had stolen when he’d taken her home. He
hoped
she might have remembered but he doubted it. She’d been so crushed by the heartbreak of Hudson’s dismissal—not to mention thoroughly drunk—Cooper suspected she barely remembered him there at all, let alone his ill-timed kiss.

The truth was, Cooper had never paid much attention to her those first few summers—but why would he have? When he was thirteen, girls and all the drama they seemed determined to stew in could never compete with the lure of books and the ocean. Alexandra Wright had been just a breezy, barefoot girl his brother couldn’t keep his hands off of. Then came the night Cooper found her at the guest house, a loose dory that had needed mooring before it floated out to sea.

It had been unusually stormy that last summer, raining in long stretches, relentless sheets that had filled the house with a terrible damp, sour and mildewed, like someone fanning out an old book every time a room was opened. Strangely, unfittingly, the bad weather had ceased when Laurel had come that final week in August, the arrival of Hudson’s new fiancée brightening more than the sky. Their mother’s blue eyes—up until then perpetually narrowed with displeasure—had relaxed the instant Laurel took her seat at their dinner table. But even at eighteen, Cooper could see Hudson didn’t want Laurel Babcock the way he’d wanted Alexandra Wright; he could see how infrequently his brother’s hands strayed toward Laurel, hands that had sought out Alexandra like vines.

The years had been kind to her. She was still beautiful, maybe more so, her body more lush with age, her confidence firmly settled. But there was no question she wasn’t the same carefree young woman he remembered, the one who’d dared Hudson to meet her on the roof to watch the fireworks that one Fourth of July. She’d become guarded, careful. And yet, looking upon her today in the great room, Cooper had felt a startling rush of compassion and desire, as fierce as the one he’d felt sitting with her in his father’s Porsche that August night.

Truthfully that night had been the first tear in his relationship with Hudson. He was so angry that his older brother could have dismissed her so cruelly, so disgusted that Hudson could have led her along when he’d never had any intention of marrying her. Cooper had overheard the discussions between his father and Hudson in the weeks before, the details of Hudson’s proposal to Laurel Babcock planned out as strategically as a company merger. Alexandra had been blindsided.

How the confessions had poured out of her that night. Cooper had tried to capture every word, as if he’d known he might be the guardian of her sorrow for a very long time. There were pieces of that night in novels he’d written—pieces of her too.

Yet for all the intimacy of that one evening, as clear and fixed as it was in
his
memory, she’d not shown an ounce of recognition—or discomfort—in his company today. She’d looked at him with a pleasant detachment.

No, Cooper thought with a rueful smile, if she did remember the kiss he’d boldly—and badly—delivered, it bore little significance to her.

He turned toward the window, reaching back to lace his hands under his head. What would Hudson think to know he’d seen Alexandra again? Would he care? Probably not. Cooper couldn’t understand then—and still didn’t—how his older brother could turn off feelings like a gas range, twist from a rolling boil to a simmer, then out entirely.

“You’re too honest, for one thing,” Hudson had informed him when Cooper was sixteen. “You don’t have it in you to be smooth, and frankly you have to be if you want to make the most of it.” When Cooper had pressed Hudson for an explanation of what “it” was, his older brother had grinned broadly and said only, “You’ll see.” In time, Cooper had.

There had been many women he’d wanted over the years, but few he’d wanted with that deep, youthful hunger, that reckless breed of lust that could drive him around a track at full speed. Alexandra Wright had been one of those few. Now she was here. And so was he.

Almost asleep, Cooper heard the crash of a door. He bolted upright and fished around in the dark for his shorts, tugging them on as he began down the hall.

Vandals, he thought. Probably just town kids messing around. He should have figured. All the summers they’d come back to find the remnants of winter visitors, local teenagers so crazed from cabin fever that they’d stormed the house, camping out on the porch, or the bolder ones finding their way in through a second-floor window, only to be evicted when the caretaker came around for his weekly checkups on the property. Small as Harrisport was, there was no way everyone in town had caught the news of his return.

He was grateful for the rush of air against his sticky skin as he walked down the corridor to the stairs, in no hurry and feeling no fear. He could have called the police, could have even picked up his smart phone just in case, but he didn’t see the point. This was how he knew he was old, he thought as he marched easily down the steps; he was more concerned about the kids he’d find than in their finding him.

He came down the servants’ stairwell and felt the wall for the light. Throwing the switch, he bathed the room in a flickering yellow and sucked in a startled breath to find his father’s college roommate standing at the counter with a hand clenched at his breast pocket.

“Uncle Jim?”

James Masterson released himself and laughed. “I’m just glad I got this on solid ground,” he said in his familiar drawl, patting the bag of groceries beside him. “Five seconds earlier and we’d be mopping up my old friend Bushmills with a towel.”

Cooper grinned. “Then squeezing that towel into a pair of glasses, right?”

“Yes sir,” said Jim, tugging out the bottle. “This is hundred-dollar bourbon.”

Jim gestured to Cooper’s lack of a shirt, then pointed to the ceiling and chuckled. “I sure hope I didn’t get you in the middle of something.”

“There’s no one here but me.”

“For now, anyway.” Jim brandished the bottle. “Join me?”

“Sure. I’ll see if I can find us a couple of glasses.”

Cooper crossed to the butler’s pantry and jerked on the overhead’s chain, squinting against the bare bulb’s harsh light. He surveyed the scattering of leftover glasses and dishware in the cabinets, a pale collection compared to the deep, tidy rows of goblets and china he recalled from his youth.

“Sorry for scaring you, son,” Jim called. “Your brother was supposed to tell you I was coming up.”

“Hud and I don’t talk much,” Cooper answered, his fingers drifting wistfully over the mismatched lineup, finally landing on a pair of juice glasses.

“So Florence tells me.”

Cooper tugged the light off and exited the pantry to discover that Jim had already taken a seat at the breakfast table.

“How in the world did you find this place?” Cooper asked, pulling out a chair for himself and setting the glasses down. “It’s hard enough in daylight.”

“Oh, I’ve been here before,” Jim said, pouring them each a generous serving and handing one to Cooper. “Your daddy brought me here for a month the summer after our senior year at Duke. It was to be our last big hurrah before joining the ranks. Cheers.”

“Cheers.” Cooper clinked his glass against Jim’s and they each took slow sips. Cooper watched the older man a moment as he swallowed his bourbon, thinking he hadn’t aged. Jim Masterson still managed that same crooked smile, the same boyish mop of curly hair, almost all white now—the only evidence to indicate his years.

Jim set down his glass and sighed. “Okay, here’s the bad news: Your mother doesn’t want to wait till September to put it up for sale.”

Cooper nodded. “I figured she’d say that. So much for my summer plans.”

“Now hold on.” Jim raised his palm. “I wouldn’t pack up just yet. Between you and me, it’s not going to happen as fast as Florence thinks. I can tell you right now we’re weeks away from getting this listed. Have you seen the guest house yet? The last report from the caretaker said it suffered water damage over the winter. We’ll have to see to that repair—and who knows what else,” Jim added, glancing warily around the room.

“You know how she gets, Uncle Jim,” Cooper said, sitting back. “She’ll be on the next plane with a team of Realtors if you tell her that.”

“She’s welcome to try. But I know more about the market than she does, and I know this house won’t sell for nearly what it’s worth, looking like this. But enough about her . . .” Jim sat forward, tapped the table affirmatively with his glass, and said, “When do I get to read the next Tide McGill mystery?”

“I’m not sure.” Cooper rolled his glass in his palm. “I’ve been thinking maybe Tide needs to take a vacation for a little while. Maybe let someone else’s story fill the pages.”

“Any ideas?”

“None I’m particularly excited about.” Cooper studied his last sip before downing it. “I’m hoping something here will inspire me.”

“Or some
one
.” Jim winked. “I bet there are a few old flames here you might like to start a fire with again, am I right?”

“Hardly.” Cooper pushed his glass at Jim for one more pour, his last, he decided as he watched Jim fill it to the top. Hot or not, he’d sleep well now. “No, I think you have me confused with Hud.”

“Your brother did do some damage in this town, didn’t he?” agreed Jim. “I was more like you. Too nice for my own good, frankly.”

Cooper smiled. “Oh, I’m sure you made your mark on a few hearts.”

“Pencil marks. Easily erased, I assure you.”

“I never really knew any girls in Harrisport,” Cooper said. “Most of the people we ever knew here were summer people like us. They came when we came and left when we left. I
did
ask Alexandra Wright to photograph the house for the historic registry application. You probably never knew the Wrights. They’re a local family. Builders.”

“Oh, I knew ’em.” Jim grinned, his gaze drifting wistfully toward the window. “Your daddy was in love with Edie Wright a long time ago. Though she was Worthington then.”

Cooper frowned. “You must be thinking of Hud and Alexandra.”

“No, I’m thinking of your daddy and Edie,” Jim said firmly, glancing up to see Cooper’s dubious expression.

“Dad never told me about that.”

“He didn’t tell a lot of people. Heck, I probably shouldn’t have, either,” said Jim, winking as he corked the bottle, “so let’s just forget I did and call it a night.”

“Oh, no sir.” Cooper tugged the bottle from Jim’s hand and set it back on the table. “This is a writer you’re talking to. You don’t just drop a bomb like that on a writer and call it quits.”

Jim chuckled as he rose. “Sorry, son. This old man’s up way past his bedtime.”

“Fine,” said Cooper, rising too. “But be warned: I’m not letting you off the hook. There’s a story there, and I plan to hear it.”