The Night Visitor (15 page)

Rory grabbed her purse and was storming out. At the doorway, she turned, tossing off the last barb. “Not
boyfriend.
Junior’s my
fiancé.”
She’d held up her left hand adorned with her engagement ring.

“Whatever.”

After Anya’s funeral, Rory had never gone back to her grave. And she’d distanced herself emotionally from Anya while exploiting her image and tragic end to build Langtry Cosmetics.

Rory still wondered what had driven Anya to sometimes be so competitive with her. Had Anya been that insecure? Had they been just sisters fighting, like sisters sometimes do, or had there been something more?

A thought entered her head.
Go find out.
It felt like a command.

33

Rory steadied herself on Tom’s arm as she crossed the living room in Anya’s Hollywood Hills home. They stood before a wall of windows that extended over the edge of a cliff, giving them the illusion of being suspended in air as they took in the city-to-ocean view. Rory could see the living room, reflected in the glass, and a blowup of Anya’s first
Vogue
cover behind her.

Rory raised her arms in a V. “I’m queen of all I see.”

Tom looked at her curiously.

Rory managed to keep a straight face for a second before cracking up.

“Inside joke?” Tom asked.

“Anya used to stand here and say that. Just when you thought she’d meant it, she’d turn and wink.”

“Why didn’t your mother ever sell this place?”

“She talks about it but never manages to do it. The house is the way it was when Anya last slept here. Rosario sends a crew to clean, and the gardeners come once a week.”

Rory saw him looking at a portrait of Anya. When he turned, she sensed there was something he was holding back.

“I’ve been here before,” he said.

“Really?”

“It was just one of her
soirées.
You know I knew Anya casually.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know you knew her that well.”

“I didn’t know her
that
well. She just invited me to a party here. A dinner party. She hired a chef. You know Anya. She invited these different types of people. I think she was trying to turn herself into a Hollywood hostess, mixing actors, writers…”

“Entertainment attorneys?”

“Rory, it was nothing. It seemed pointless to bring up something that would be painful for you.”

“Did you bring a date?”

“Yes.”

“How many times were you here?”

“Just once. Anya had a date. Jonah Donati, the hedge-fund manager.”

“I still wish you’d told me.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” Tom changed the subject. “So, what happened between Anya and Jonah?”

“They were an item when they both lived in New York. He sold his investment fund to another firm for megabucks and moved to L.A. to get into the wine business or write a novel or something. Then Anya sold her apartment in Manhattan and moved to L.A. I think she moved back to take her relationship with Jonah to the next level, but she wouldn’t admit to following him here. Said she was entering a new phase of her life. She’d been approached to do a reality show about modeling. She wanted to start her own clothing line and devote more time to Langtry. Marry a rich man. You know, the sorts of things that aging supermodels do.”

“I imagine she’d banked enough money to retire.”

Rory snorted. “She made top money, all right. Spent it too.” She took a breath. “Anya never told me what really happened between her and Jonah. She brushed it off. ‘We’re just friends. We were never serious.’ ” Rory remembered how Anya had met her eyes, challenging her to say otherwise.

Rory walked to a white-lacquered grand piano. “Anya loved this piano.” She raised the keyboard cover and pressed a couple of keys. “She didn’t play, of course. She hired someone to play for parties.”

Rory ran her fingers across the piano keys and thought about a Valentine’s Day party here that she and Junior had come to. They’d just gotten engaged. She recalled how raggedly handsome he’d looked in his paint-splattered workman’s pants and boots, a distressed leather jacket over a black T-shirt. Locks of his black hair curled over his collar. They’d both gotten a little drunk. Junior had backed her into a corner and nuzzled her neck, tickled her, making her laugh while at the same time she wanted to drag him into a bedroom. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

They’d watched as Jonah Donati had arrived. Anya had almost flown to greet him in a way that was un-Anya-like.

Junior had said, “Your sister’s in love.”

Less than an hour later, they’d seen Jonah leave. Anya had closed the door behind him. Rory had looked up and caught Anya, beautiful and elegant in the midst of her adoring crowd, watching her and Junior. At the time, Rory had thought she’d read disapproval in Anya’s eyes. Thinking back, she realized she’d been operating under her typical MO of feeling picked on by Anya. Now she felt that Anya had been watching them not with disapproval but with longing.

“Where did you go?” Tom asked.

“Thinking about how poorly I knew my sister.”

“She didn’t seem to be the most accessible person.”

“No, she wasn’t.” Rory closed the keyboard cover. “I don’t know why I came here. It’s making me uneasy.”

“Let’s go.”

She wanted to. Being in Anya’s house felt like being in a tomb. She’d hoped for a catharsis, but all she felt was sad and empty.

The waking dreams flickered in the back of her mind, as if plying for her attention. She felt compelled to stay. The feeling was urgent and consuming. “Let me just walk through, and then we’ll go.”

She turned down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Framed magazine covers featuring Anya lined the walls. Anya’s bedroom was surprisingly juvenile, done in white and pink with stuffed tigers everywhere.

“What’s with the tigers?” Tom remarked about the many tiger-themed paintings, figurines, and stuffed toys.

“Anya collected them. Her fans sent carloads of tiger stuff. She donated most of it.”

They entered a room that had been turned into a closet.

“Whoa.” Tom took in the packed racks, shelves, and cabinets.

“Anya was a world-class shopper. She might have even outdone my mother. Plus designers were always giving her things.”

She slipped her hands between hanging evening gowns, struggling to push them apart. “Valentino, Chanel, Armani. We ought to auction them off to raise money for The Other Victims.”

Rory went into Anya’s office. Piles of papers, letters, and five-year-old magazines had been tidied by the cleaning crew. Rory picked up a contact sheet of photographs of Anya.

“These were for Langtry’s Pretty Is campaign. The ads were scheduled to hit the newspapers a week after Anya’s murder. Richie wanted to pull them, but I insisted they run. It was an unpopular decision, but the campaign was a huge success. Marked a turnaround for Langtry. We stuck to the story that it was too late to pull the ads.” She looked at Tom. “Think I was a cold, heartless bitch, capitalizing on the notoriety of my sister’s murder?”

“It was a difficult decision. You’d paid for the ads.”

“Thank you for being charitable, but it
was
a cold decision. I’ve traded on my sister’s murder ever since. So, am I maintaining Anya’s legacy or exploiting it?”

“You’re the savvy head of a major cosmetics firm.”

“That’s exactly how I justify it to myself.”

She picked up a cord dangling from a large-screen computer monitor. “The police took her laptop and tablets.” She sat at the desk and started opening drawers. “And all her cell phones.”

“All
her cell phones? How many did she have?”

“Five or six. She had phones that were dedicated to communicating with certain people. One for this boyfriend or that boyfriend. One for her agent. If she dropped the person, she cleared out all the history and changed the phone number. She could keep communications secret.” Rory waved her hand. “I think it made her feel important.”

As she was looking through Anya’s desk drawers, an image entered her mind. She saw the vintage library table in Junior’s loft. She could see the graffiti that had been carved into the surface by bored school children. On top of the table was Anya’s Birkin bag. Beside it were two cell phones. One had a hot-pink silicone cover. That was the one she used for most of her communications. The other phone had a rhinestone cover in a gold-and-black tiger-striped pattern. A little gold charm of a tiger’s head dangled from a corner. That was one of Anya’s secret phones, one she’d been using a lot in the weeks before her murder.

Looking at Anya’s desk, Rory could see the two phones on Junior’s library table. She felt as if Junior had put the image into her mind. The iPhone in the tiger-striped case felt like the most important thing in the world.

“Rory, you’ve left me again. What are you thinking about?”

She shrugged and lied. “Just thinking about Anya’s Birkin bag. She was on a waiting list forever to buy it. I guess the police still have it in evidence, if it hasn’t been stolen.” She pushed herself up and left the room.

They walked through the kitchen with its professional-grade appliances, which Anya had barely used. Rory went through a doorway into an attached garage and turned on the overhead light. Anya’s vintage Mercedes two-seater, with its hardtop off, was parked in the center. The rest of the space was crammed with the detritus of Anya’s flirtation with different sports and hobbies, racks of discarded clothing inside zippered bags and odds and ends of briefly loved, now spurned furnishings and housewares.

“The keys are in the ignition,” Tom said, looking inside the Mercedes.

“Rosario’s people start it. They might even drive it around to flush it out.” Rory opened the driver’s door and slid onto the leather seat. She breathed deeply but only detected the dusty odor of the garage. Any residue of Anya was long gone.

On the passenger seat was a denim jacket lined in mink. Rory picked it up and rubbed her cheek against the fur. “Just a little knock-around jacket. You know, to throw over your yoga gear.” Rory did a good imitation of Anya’s voice. “I think the workers are playing dress-up and driving Anya’s car.”

Rory got out of the car, taking the jacket with her. She put it on. It was too large. Anya had always been bigger than she, plus Rory had lost weight since her accident. She put her hand into one of the jacket’s pockets and pulled out a lipstick. “Ha. A Langtry lipstick. Mauve-Tastic.” Anya’s favorite shade. In the other pocket were a gum wrapper and a crumpled receipt from a Rite Aid pharmacy. She opened it. “This receipt’s dated two weeks before Anya was murdered.” She read the itemization. “Gum, candy,
InStyle
magazine, and…EPT. That’s odd.”

“EPT? The pregnancy test?”

“Yes. Here’s Anya’s name from her credit card on the receipt. She must have thought she was pregnant.”

“Wouldn’t a pregnancy have been discovered during the autopsy?”

“I don’t know. If it was a very early pregnancy, maybe not. If Anya was pregnant, I’m shocked. She didn’t want kids. She was afraid she’d turn out to be as bad a mother as our mom. Wonder if the father was Jonah Donati. He got married not long after Anya’s murder. Married a cocktail waitress he met at the Sunset Tower. Something was going on with Anya during the weeks before her murder. She was definitely keeping secrets.”

Tom shot a glance at her.

“I’m done,” she said. “Let’s go.”

34

The small cemetery was tucked behind a stone church in an exclusive neighborhood near Pasadena. Anya’s grave was on the crest of a knoll in the shade of a split-trunk elm.

The obscure location didn’t hinder Anya’s fans from finding her grave, as it was littered with tributes. There was a stemware flute, brimming with flat champagne, and an open bottle of Cristal, Anya’s favorite. There were dozens of bouquets, both faded and fresh, with a preponderance of anthuriums, Anya’s favorite. There were stuffed tigers and tiger figurines. There were stacks of letters and handmade signs. Plastic pinwheels on each of the grave’s four corners turned slowly in the light breeze.

“Wow,” Tom said. “A sign at the gate said they clear off the mementos each week.”

“Maybe there’s so much stuff because of the five-year anniversary of her murder.” Rory shakily lowered herself to the grass. On her knees, she moved things from the headstone and started wiping dirt from it with her hand.

Tom kneeled beside her. “Let me.” He wiped the stone with a cloth handkerchief from his back pocket.

The headstone was a rectangular block of black granite, lying flush with the ground, according to the style of the cemetery, with a simple epitaph etched in plain lettering:

ANYA
SOPHIA
LANGTRY

Daughter Sister Friend

Followed by the dates marking the start and end of her twenty-five years on earth. It was an accurate but understated assessment of her life.

Rory pulled off the dead bouquets and stacked them beside the grave. Tom removed cellophane from a dozen pink roses and handed the bouquet to Rory. She poured water from a plastic bottle into a submerged cylinder below the headstone, set the roses inside, and arranged them.

She sat cross-legged on the grass and looked at the headstone in silence. Tom sat beside her, slipping his hand into hers. She plucked a dandelion that had gone to seed. She closed her eyes, as if making a wish, blew the feathery spores into the air, and watched them float away. She looked up through the elm tree’s lacy canopy at blue sky.

After a while, she squeezed Tom’s hand and released it. She reached to pick up a sealed pink envelope that was propped on the grass. It was addressed to “Anya, Supermodel.”

“Think Anya will mind if I read it?” Rory said with a smirk.

She slit open the envelope with her thumb and took out a sheet of pink stationery decorated with flowers. She read aloud: “Dear Anya. You will never be dead for me. You live on in my heart. You are my guardian angel. I feel you watching over me. I am sixteen and a model. I started modeling when I was fourteen, just like you. I’ve been doing department store ads, but I want to go to Paris and do the runways, just like you. When I become a supermodel and people ask me who had the biggest impact on my life, I’ll tell everyone that you did. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Love forever, Ashleigh.”