Picture Perfect (12 page)

They drove for fifteen minutes in silence, and then Cassie felt Alex kiss the top of her head. “You're probably just nervous about meeting the staff all over again,” he said.

Cassie stared out the window. She knew she was passing trees and roads and flowering bushes, but the car was moving so quickly that the world was just puddled in colors; she could pick nothing out individually. “Yes,” she said. “That must be it.”

 

T
HE HOUSE STOOD AT THE END OF A MILE
-
LONG DRIVEWAY UP A
winding hill in Bel-Air, a white mansion with wrought-iron grillwork and a slate roof. The front porch supported a second-story veranda where floor-length lace curtains blew through open French doors. Roses climbed up a trellis on the left side of the house; heliotrope wound its way up the right. In the distance Cassie could see formal gardens and two smaller houses, little white replicas of the main house. It looked for all the world like a Louisiana plantation.

“My God,” she whispered, hearing the gravel crunch beneath her sneaker as she stepped out of the car. “I can't possibly live here.”

Alex took her by the elbow and guided her up the porch steps. John opened the front door, a magnificent oak panel carved with the head of a lion.

The parlor was an overwhelming room with a cathedral ceiling, a double curved staircase, and rose marble floors. Cassie stared down at her feet, which rested in the reflected pool of light from a multicolored cathedral-style window over the door. Alex's initials spread like a stain over her left shoe and her ankle.

“Cassie,” he said, and her head snapped up. “John has told everybody about your…little problem, and they'll go out of their way to help you today before we go to Scotland.”

Cassie ran her eyes over the line of figures that stood at the bottom of the left-hand staircase like a row of toy soldiers. There was John, of course, who was not only the driver and bodyguard, apparently, but a majordomo of sorts. There was a man with a pastry apron wrapped around his large frame, a young girl in a simple black and white maid's uniform. Another man stood off to the side, as if he was unwilling to be associated with the household staff. He stepped forward and offered his hand. “Jack Arbuster,” he said, smiling. “Your husband's secretary.”

She wondered what in the world Alex needed a secretary for when he already had an agent, a publicist, and a personal assistant. She thought maybe he was in charge of answering fan mail, or paying the utility bills.

“I need to catch up on a few things before you fly out,” Jack said to Alex. He winked at Cassie apologetically.

Alex put his arm around her waist. “Give me an hour,” he said to Jack. “I'll meet you in the library.” As Jack walked off, Cassie followed him with her eyes, trying to see what was around the corner. Tugging her sideways, Alex pulled Cassie past the maid, the cook, and John. “Come on,” he said. “I'll show you as much as I can, and if worse comes to worst I'll leave you with the blueprints till you can find your way around.”

He took her to a library paneled in cherry and filled with first editions of hundreds of British and American classics, pointing out one entire shelf filled with copies of scholarly journals and magazines that featured articles Cassie herself had written. He led her through a dining room whose table could seat thirty, a projection room with a pristine screen and ten overstuffed couches. In the kitchen, she stuck her head in the stainless steel refrigerator and counted the copper pots that were racked above the marble island, and was given a bite-size apple turnover by the cook as a parting gift.

There were six bathrooms and ten bedrooms, each decorated with pale silk wallpaper and French lace curtains. There were three sitting rooms and a recreation center with pinball machines, a bowling lane, a pool table, and a big-screen TV. There was a whole wing she hadn't even seen when Alex brought her upstairs to the master bedroom. He opened the double doors to a suite, comfortably furnished with breezy striped sofas and thick Persian rugs. A stereo was recessed into the wall, in addition to a television and a VCR. Flowers were arranged in bowls on several tables, beautiful blooms that brought out the lavender and blue accents of the room and that, Cassie knew, were not native to California.

“We must spend a lot of time up here,” Cassie said, stepping behind Alex through an adjoining door that revealed a tremendous bird's-eye maple sleigh bed.

Alex smiled at her. “Well,” he said, “we try.”

Cassie stepped up to the bed and traced the whorls in the patterns of wood. “This is bigger than a king-size, isn't it?”

Alex flopped onto the mattress belly-first. “I had it made up special. I have this theory about beds—they're like goldfish bowls. You know how if you keep goldfish in a bowl, they stay the size of your thumb? Well, when you move them into a pond, like we have out back, they grow ten times that size. So I figure the bigger the bed, the less I'll be stunting my growth.”

Cassie laughed. “I think you've passed puberty.”

Alex grabbed her wrist and pulled her down beside him. “You've noticed?”

She rolled toward him, staring at the light beard that already broke the smooth line of his jaw. “Where's my lab?”

“Out back. The little white building—the second one you come to. The first one is where John lives.”

Cassie frowned. “He doesn't stay in the house like Mrs. Alvarez?”

Alex sat up. “We like having the place to ourselves at night,” he said simply.

Cassie walked to the gaping fireplace that stood opposite the bed, then fingered the empty brandy decanter on the mantel.
Aurora
, she thought, and she felt Alex's hands on her shoulders. “It's only for show,” he whispered, as if he could read her mind.

Cassie spun around. “Go earn your keep,” she said, smiling. “If I'm not back in an hour, send out the National Guard.”

When Alex left, Cassie stood at the open French doors, looking out over the suburbs of L.A. and the blue swells of mountains. A gardener she hadn't met was rooting through a bed of fragile lilies, and in the driveway John was polishing the rear fender of the Range Rover. She located her laboratory, just to the left of a profusion of flowers planted in the shape of a fleur-de-lis. Beyond the garden was a white limestone path that led down a sloping hill toward something she could not see.

She flew down the opposite staircase, the one she hadn't walked up, just to see if it felt any different. She walked out the door and tested a rocking chair and the hanging porch swing before running down the limestone path like a child. When she was far enough away from the house to be certain nobody was looking, she spread her arms to the sun and whirled around, laughing and smiling and skipping to beat the band.

There was a landscaped pool with a man-made waterfall that Alex had forgotten to tell Cassie about, and a genuine maze made of thick boxwood hedges. She wandered inside, wondering if she knew her way to the center and out again. The sharp corners of the maze came up quickly as she ran through the narrow aisles, scratching her arms on fresh-cut branches. Dizzy, she let herself sink to the cool grass. She lay on her back, overwhelmed by Alex's house and Alex's grounds.

If a bug hadn't crawled up the inside of her arm, she never would have noticed the stone. She rolled over, which brought her eye-level to the cuttings from the boxwood. Neatly hidden inside the hedge was a small pink slab of rock.

It was not oval, not really; it was too rough-hewn and lopsided for that. Cassie reached under the brambles, feeling the branches tangle around her wrists like bracelets. It was rose quartz, and she had brought it with her all the way from the East Coast. Chiseled crudely on its flattest side were the letters
CCM
and the year
1976
.

She could not remember why she had hidden it under the boxwood in the middle of Alex's maze. She could not remember if she'd ever told Alex it was there. But she realized it was the first piece of evidence she truly believed; the first thing she'd seen since losing her memory that convinced her she had once belonged here.

Cassie rolled onto her back and held the rock on her chest. She stared into the sun until this beautiful world Alex had offered her went black, and then she whispered Connor's name.

 

O
N
N
OVEMBER
1, 1976,
A LITTLE AFTER SEVEN IN THE MORNING
, Connor's father walked into the kitchen where he and his mother were eating cream of wheat and killed them both with a 12-gauge shotgun. Between the time it took Cassie to call the police about the shots and to run through the path in the woods to Connor's house, Mr. Murtaugh had managed to turn the gun on himself.

Connor's father had blown himself clear into the living room, but Mrs. Murtaugh lay on the floor. The back of her head was gone. Connor had fallen nearly on top of her, and there was a tremendous hole where his chest had been.

With a calm born of shock, Cassie sat down beside Connor and pulled him into her lap. She touched her fingers to his lips, still warm. She thought about kissing him, like she had the night before at the graveyard, but could not bring herself to do it.

The police and the paramedics dragged Cassie away from Connor's body. She sat in a corner of the kitchen with a rough wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders, answering the same questions over and over. No, she had not been present at the scene of the crime. No, she hadn't seen Mr. Murtaugh this morning. No, no, no.

Everyone knew how close Cassie and Connor had been, and she was excused from school until after the funeral, but that didn't keep her from hearing the whispers.
They said he pulled the trigger on himself with his own toe. Couldn't get himself a job, and turned to the bottle. Killed an innocent boy like that, in the prime of his life
. At least the problems in her own house she could see coming. Connor's family had been rotting beneath its candy surface, festering where no one could see.

The day of the funeral it snowed. Connor didn't have a will, so his body was disposed of the way his parents' bodies had been; he was cremated. The ashes were blown over Moosehead Lake. Cassie watched as the urn holding Mrs. Murtaugh was opened, then the one holding her husband. When they spread Connor's ashes, Cassie started to scream. No one could stop her; not even when her father clamped a gloved hand over her mouth did the sound diminish in intensity. It wasn't right that for the rest of forever Connor and his father would be mixed together. She wanted them to do it over. She wanted them to give Connor to her.

She felt snow freeze her eyes wide open when what was left of Connor was given to the wind. A breath of gray, insubstantial and shifting like smoke, screened the sky and disappeared just as quickly. It was as if Connor had been a figment of Cassie's imagination. As if he had never existed at all.

She slipped away from the other people paying their respects and, still wearing her good dress and her snow boots, started to run around Moosehead Lake. It was tremendous, and she knew she wouldn't be able to get very far, but by the time she sank to her knees in the snow, gasping, she was a mile away from the site of the funeral. She let the snow melt through the thin fabric of her skirt, cold enough to paralyze. She dug with her fingers into the frozen ground until her nails were cracked and bleeding.

She realized that although she had tried for years to ease her mother's pain, she would never be able to ease Connor's. So she would do the next best thing: she would hurt for him. She carried the piece of rose quartz home with her and sat in the garage near her father's tool chest, using a hammer and an awl to make the headstone Connor hadn't been given. She worked until her hands cramped. Then she curled her arms around her knees and rocked herself back and forth, wondering why, since both their hearts had been ripped out, she wasn't dying too.

 

F
RIDAY EVENING
, W
ILL
F
LYING
H
ORSE WAS SITTING ON HIS NEW
green couch watching a game show and eating a partially cooked TV dinner when the electricity went out. “Shit,” he said, watching the blinking clock on his VCR fade into nothing. He set his plate beside him on the couch and tried to remember where the fuse box was.

It wasn't as bad as it could have been; it was dinnertime, so there was enough light outside to see his way into the basement. The strange thing was that none of the breakers had been tripped. He walked back upstairs and stepped onto the front porch of his house. In the windows next door and across the street he could see a kitchen light burning steady; a mute dog jogging across a TV. It was just him.

He called the electric company, but could only record his address and problem on a voice-mail system. God only knew how long it would take for workers to get the message. So he started pulling candles out of his kitchen cabinets, ugly red egg-shaped ones that a former girlfriend had bought him one year for his birthday. He carried four of them into the living room and lit them with a book of matches he had in his pocket.

As the sun went down, a shadow crept across him. The fringes of the medicine bundle above his head stirred, restless in the quiet. Will listened to the rhythm of his own pulse. There was nothing to do but wait.

 

E
LIZABETH
,
THE MAID
,
CARRIED INTO THE BEDROOM A SUITCASE THAT
was bigger than she was. “Will you need a hanging bag, too?”

Cassie didn't know. “I guess I will,” she said, and the maid immediately turned to leave. “Wait,” she called. She furrowed her brow. “I can't find the closets.”

Elizabeth smiled. She walked through the suite and the bedroom into the short hallway that led to the green marble bathroom. When she leaned her shoulder against the wall, Cassie was amazed to see the wallpaper spring open to reveal a hidden closet. “Yours,” Elizabeth said, and then she did the same thing on the other side. “Mr. Rivers's.”