The Obsession (9 page)

“I haven’t told anybody, but look, other people can do research, especially now that the movie’s such a big hit. Hell, lots of kids who don’t read go to the movies. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to finish school. I’m going to go to college.”

“I won’t tell anybody, right?” He shoved his glasses back up his nose. “It’s just between you and me, okay? I want you to tell me the story. Hold on.”

He held up a hand, edged closer with his glasses sliding down again. He just took them off.

“From your point of view,
your
story, Carson. We can keep where you live and all that out of it. I won’t tell anybody—and that’s a lot, right, because I want to be a journalist and this is a really big story. But I’ll hold back some details.”

He picked up his glasses, sat back, pushed them on. “I don’t have to do that.”

“My mother just died.”

“Yeah. Otherwise I wouldn’t have put it together. I don’t tell anybody, and you give me the whole story—first person. We’ll go out a few times, somewhere quiet, and I’ll record your story. It’s a big deal, and if I do it right, it could land me an internship at the
Times
. You’ve never talked to anybody, not Simon Vance, not the scriptwriter, the director, the actors. Your father did. Your mom, too, but not you. I did my research.”

They were friends—she thought they were friends. He’d been with her when she’d found her mother. He’d called the ambulance. And now . . .

“Simon Vance and the screenwriter beat you to it, Chaffins. Nobody’s going to care.”

“Shit, are you kidding me? Everybody’s going to care. Look, we’ll meet up. You can come to my place during the day, after school. My parents will be at work, and nobody has to know. I gotta split. I’ll text you when and where.”

When he rushed off, she sat a moment, a little stunned, a little sick.
Why was she surprised? she wondered. Because she’d thought he was, at least a little bit, a friend? Should she be grateful he hadn’t already published what he knew in the school paper?

The hell with it, she thought. Just the hell with all of it.

She got up—before someone could sit down and try to comfort her—and made her way back to the kitchen. She could slip into the storeroom from there for the belated alone.

But Harry was right behind her.

He pointed to a stool. “Sit.” And sat himself on a stack of boxes. “Now tell me what that boy said to upset you.”

“It wasn’t anything.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

She jerked back. He never used that sharp, angry tone. “Harry.”

“We’re going to stop lying to each other. I knew your mother was lying about going to the prison, about keeping in contact. I knew, and I kept it from Seth. I didn’t tell him because it would upset him. And that’s a lie. Omission is a lie.”

“You knew?”

“And maybe if I’d said something . . .” He rubbed his tired eyes. “We’ll never know.”

“We knew. Mason found out and told me. We didn’t say either.”

“Well, where did all that get us, baby? Look where we are now. No more lies, no more omissions.” He leaned forward, took her hands. His eyes, so blue against the caramel, held that innate kindness he showed her every day. “When Seth asked me about taking you, your brother, your mother into the home in D.C., I said of course. But I thought, It won’t be for long. Of course we have to help—Seth needs to help his family—but they’ll get on their feet and get their own in, oh, six months or a year. I could open our home for a year. I did it because I love Seth.”

“I know you do.”

“What I didn’t count on was falling in love with you. With Mason. With your mother. That’s what happened. When we talked about selling the house, moving to New York, I didn’t do it just for Seth. I did it for all
of us. Because we’d become a family. You’re my girl, Naomi. Same as if we were blood. I mean that.”

“I love you, Harry. I do, so much.” The tears came then, hot but clean. “I know how much you’ve done for us, all you’ve given us.”

“I don’t want to hear about that. I could tell you what you’ve done for me, what you’ve given me. I bet it balances out pretty square. What I want, and need, I think what we all want and need from today on, my baby, is truth. Let’s start right here. What did Anson say to put that look on your face?”

“He knows who we are. He heard some of the police talking, and he figured it out. He wants to be a journalist, and he wants the story. From me.”

“I’ll have a talk with him.”

“No, sir. No, Harry. What’s the point? He knows, and you can’t make it so he doesn’t. He said he wouldn’t say where I—we are, would leave out some details, but—”

“You don’t trust him. Why should you?”

She thought of Mark’s hand sliding down to her butt, of Chaffins’s blind ambition. “I don’t trust anybody but you, Seth, and Mason.”

“We can put you and Mason in private school.”

“It’ll just happen again. We can move again, and it’ll happen again. Mama’s gone, and it was hardest on her. We couldn’t protect her from him or herself.”

“Nobody’s going to hurt my baby girl.”

“I thought he was a friend. But nobody stays your friend when they find out who you are.”

“If they don’t, they weren’t worth your friendship.”

“But how do you know, ever, who is?” She remembered the card the policewoman who looked like she could play one on TV had given her, and took it out of her bag. “Detective Rossini.”

“What about her?”

“I think, maybe, she’s a friend. He smokes pot—Chaffins—sells it a little, too.”

Harry sighed. “Naomi, I understand peer pressure and the need for experimentation, and this isn’t the time to—”

“I don’t do drugs. Neither does Mason.” She frowned at the card as she spoke. “He wants Harvard and the FBI—Mason won’t take any chances with that. Chaffins wants Columbia, and the
New York Times
. It wouldn’t look good for him to get arrested for possession, maybe suspended from school.”

Harry’s eyebrows lifted. “Blackmail?”

“That’s what he’s doing. I’d be ratting him out to the cops—and I’m not proud of it. But I think Detective Rossini would go have that talk with him, and it might work, long enough for me to write the story.”

“What? What story?”

“I’m not as good a writer as Chaffins, but I can do this.” It came to her, like a lightning flash on a hot summer night. “If I write the story—as Naomi Bowes—and sell it, maybe even to the
Times
, he’s got nothing. I just need some time, and Detective Rossini could get me that. I write the story, like Chaffins said—from my point of view. And then he can’t. No one would care after that what some jerk writes about me. Mason? He won’t care.”

“Honey, are you sure?”

“No one’s going to do this to me, to us. I’m sure.”

“Talk to the detective. If you decide this is really what you want to do, well, we’re going to be behind you.”

—

S
he went back to school, forced herself to continue with the yearbook committee, the school paper. She ignored the furious stares from Chaffins—and completed the crap assignments he handed her. Because whatever Rossini had said to him kept him quiet, and she could comfort herself that in four months, he’d graduate and be out of her life.

After the Oscars, where the screenwriter for
Daughter of Evil
took home the gold, and the now-fifteen-year-old actress who’d played Naomi Bowes walked the red carpet in Alexander McQueen, after the movie-tie-in release of the book hung for sixteen weeks on the bestseller list, the
New York Times
ran a three-part article on consecutive Sundays.

She wasn’t at all surprised to receive an angry email from Anson Chaffins.

First you sic that cop on me, now this! You’re a lying bitch, and I’ll tell everybody who you are, where you are, what you are. I gave you the idea. You stole my article.

She wrote back only once.

My life, my story, and I never agreed to your
deal
. Tell anyone you want.

But he didn’t tell anyone. On her own she sent Detective Rossini flowers as a thank-you. She changed her email address, her phone number, and buckled down to focus on her schoolwork, her photography, and her family.

She told herself she’d put the past in the past now, where it needed to stay. And she’d really begun her life as Naomi Carson.

Ends and beginnings—there are no such things.

There are only middles.

ROBERT
FROST

Sunrise Cove, Washington State, 2016

I
t hadn’t been impulse. Naomi assured herself of that as she roamed the rambling old house on the bluff. A little rash, maybe. A gamble, absolutely. She’d taken plenty of gambles, so what was one more?

But holy shit, she’d bought a house. A house older than she was—about four times older. A house on the opposite side of the country from her family. A house, she admitted, that needed work. And furniture.

And a serious cleaning.

An investment, she told herself, wincing at the grimy kitchen with its dated appliances—surely older than she was—and cracked linoleum floor.

So she’d clean it up, fix it up, paint it up. Then she could put it back on the market, or rent it out. She didn’t have to live there. That was a choice—something else she’d made plenty of before.

It would be a project. Something to keep her busy when she wasn’t working. A home base, she considered, and tried the faucet of the chipped porcelain sink.

It coughed, banged, and then spewed out fits of water.

A home base with bad plumbing.

So, she’d make a list. Maybe it would’ve been smarter to have made a list before buying the house, but she’d make one.
Plumber
went straight to number one.

Gingerly, she opened the cabinet under the sink. It smelled a little dank, looked dingy, and the ancient bottle of Drano didn’t inspire confidence.

Definitely find a plumber.

And a whole bunch of cleaning supplies.

She blew out a breath, pulled her phone out of a pocket of her cargo pants, opened an app.

Hire plumber
went on first.

She added more as she wandered back out, through a dining room with a wonderful fireplace of carved black wood. A chimney sweep. Did people still become chimney sweeps? Somebody must inspect and clean chimneys, and since there were five fireplaces in the old house,
chimney sweep
definitely went on the list.

Why had she bought a house with five fireplaces? And ten bedrooms? And six and a half baths?

She wouldn’t think about that now. Now she’d work on what to do about it.

The floors were solid. They needed refinishing, but the real estate agent had really sold the wide-planked ponderosa pine. She could do some research, see if she could refinish them herself. Otherwise,
flooring guy
.

And then there was
tile guy
—would that be the same person?

What she needed, Naomi thought as she started up the creaky stairs, was a contractor. And bids. And a plan.

What she needed, she corrected, as she stood on the landing where the hallway shot left and right, was her head examined. How the hell could she manage a house this size, and one in this shape?

Why in God’s name had she tied herself to this remote dot of land in Washington State? She liked to travel—new places, new views, new ideas. Just her and her equipment. Free to go anywhere. And now she had this anchor of a dilapidated house weighing her down.

No, it hadn’t been impulse. It had been lunacy.

She walked past dingy walls and, okay, gorgeous old doors, by far too many rooms for one solitary woman, and felt that old, familiar pressure in her chest.

She would not have an anxiety attack because she’d been an idiot.

Breathing slowly, deliberately, she turned in to what the real estate agent had billed as the master.

It was big and bright, and yes the floors needed work, and the walls were an awful faded blue that looked like cloudy pool water, and the old glass slider needed to go.

But she pulled and tugged it open on its rusted runners and stepped out onto the wide, sturdy deck.

And this was why, she thought as all the pressure lifted into sheer bliss. This was why.

The inlet, deep gleaming blue, curved and widened, split around knots of land green with the earliest whispers of spring. Shorelines climbed up, upholstered with trees, as the water traveled out through a narrow channel into deeper blues. In the distance just west, mountains rolled up against the sky to back a thick forest of green shadows.

And straight out, beyond the inlet, the channel, the knots and knuckles of land, spread the deeper blue of the sound.

Her bluff wasn’t particularly high, but it afforded a pure, unobstructed view of water and sky and land, and for her, an indescribable sense of peace.

Her place. She leaned against the rail a moment, breathed it in. She’d known it was her place the moment she’d stepped out here on that breezy February afternoon.

Whatever needed to be done to make the house habitable would be done. But no one could take this view, this sense of
hers
away.

Since she’d left her equipment downstairs, she took her phone, switched to camera mode. She framed in a shot, checked it, took another. She sent it to Mason, Seth, Harry—what she listed in her contacts as
My Guys
—with a simple message.

This is why.

She tucked her phone away, thought the hell with lists. She was going into town and buying supplies. She’d figure out the rest as she went.

The little town made most of its living off the water with its marina, dive shop, the kayak and canoe rentals, the fish market. On Water Street—naturally—gift shops, coffee shops, restaurants, and the Sunrise Hotel faced the curve of the marina with its bobbing boats.

She spent a couple nights in the hotel when she’d followed her nose into Sunrise Cove. She’d wanted to add to her portfolio of stock photography, beef up her portfolio of fine photography, and had found plenty of studies for both.

She’d caught sight of the house—just a piece of it—outside her hotel window, and found herself amused and intrigued by the way it angled away from the town, its people, toward the water and the wood.

She’d wanted some photos of it, had asked for directions. Before she knew it, she was heading out to what the locals called Point Bluff with John James Mooney, Realtor.

Now it belonged to her, Naomi thought, and parked in front of the grocery store.

A few hundred dollars later she loaded up food, cleaning supplies, paper products, lightbulbs, laundry detergent—which was stupid, as she didn’t know if the old washer worked—plus a basic set of pots and pans, a coffeemaker, and a vacuum cleaner she’d purchased at the neighboring hardware store.

She’d also gotten the name of a contractor from both places—the same name, so obviously a popular guy. Deciding there was no time like the present, she called him then and there, made an appointment to meet him for a walk-through in an hour.

She headed back, pleased it took a solid ten minutes on winding roads to reach the house. Far enough away for privacy, close enough for convenience.

Then she opened the back of her 4Runner, looked at the haul, and swore the next trip in she’d make a list.

That list, she realized when she started unloading groceries, would have included cleaning the refrigerator
before
buying food to go in it.

By the time she’d cleaned it, filled it, and started out for the next load, she saw the black truck winding up the road toward her.

She slipped a hand in her pocket, closed it over her pocketknife. Just a precaution.

The truck pulled up. A man in a ball cap and sunglasses leaned out one window. A big black dog with a polka dot bandanna leaned out the other.

“Ms. Carson?”

“That’s right.”

“Kevin Banner.” He said something to the dog that had its head retreating before he got out of the truck.

She judged him early thirties, sandy hair curling out from under the cap. A good strong jaw, a compact build. He held out a hand.

“It’s nice to meet you.”

Workingman’s hand, she thought, and relaxed. “Thanks for coming.”

“I heard somebody from back east bought the place. It’s something, isn’t it?”

“It’s something.”

He grinned, shifted his weight. “It’s been sitting empty about ten years now—I guess Mr. Mooney told you—since Mr. Parkerson died, and Mrs. Parkerson had to let it go. They ran it as a B-and-B for more than twenty years. She just couldn’t keep it up, and ended up moving to Seattle to live with her daughter. Rented it out for a while here and there, but . . .”

“A big place, a lot of maintenance.”

He hooked his thumbs in his front pockets, rocked back on his heels as his gaze traveled over the long rectangle of building.

“You got that. I threatened to buy it a while back—it’s got history and that view—but my wife threatened to divorce me. Now maybe I’ll get my hands on it, and get to keep my wife.”

“Let’s take a look. Is your dog okay in the truck?”

“She’ll be fine.”

The dog rested her head on the dash, sent Naomi a soulful look.

“I like dogs. You can bring her if you want.”

“Thanks. She’s a good dog, used to job sites. Come on, Molly!”

The dog leaped straight out of the window, landed neat as a gymnast, then pranced over to sniff Naomi’s boots.

“Nice jump, pretty girl.” When Naomi stroked Molly’s head, the dog did a full-body wag.

“Maybe you can give me an idea what you’re looking to do.”

“Bring it into the twenty-first century. I don’t mean the look,” Naomi added. “But the plumbing, the lighting, the kitchen, bathrooms. I’m hoping a lot of it’s cosmetic,” she said as they started inside. “I can paint and handle simple DIY, but there’s a lot of clunking and hissing when you use the water. And I don’t know if it’s safe to use any of the fireplaces. I considered tackling the floors myself—refinishing—but realize that would probably take me two or three years.”

“Windows?”

“What about them?”

“Replacing them with double-paned, low-E glass, that’s going to be more energy efficient, and while it costs now, it saves you in utility bills. It gets drafty in here during the winter.”

“That can go on the list, and we’ll see.”

“I’m going to want to take a look at the wiring, make sure it’s safe and up to code. We can look at the chimneys, make sure you’re good there. You want to keep them wood burning?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

The dog wandered around, sniffing, exploring. It struck Naomi that Kevin did nearly the same.

“You’ve got some fireplaces upstairs, right? If you don’t want to haul wood upstairs, you could think about gas logs on the second floor.”

“That is a thought—cleaner.”

“You thinking of a B-and-B?”

“No, I’m not. Not right now.”

He nodded, made notes, muttered a little to himself as they toured the first floor. When they came to the kitchen, he took his cap off, scratched his head, fixed it back on again.

“I’m going to tell you straight, this kitchen’s a pure gut job.”

“If you’d said different, I’d wonder why everybody I asked recommended you.”

“All right then. Now I’m betting the hardwood runs right on through, under this ugly-ass linoleum.”

“Really? Do you think so?” The idea balanced out against the notion of needing to replace a zillion windows. “Can we check?”

“If you don’t mind me messing up a corner.”

“You can’t make ugly-ass more ugly.”

He chose a corner, pried it up with his own pocketknife. “Oh yeah, got your ponderosa pine.”

“Hot damn. Take this crap up, sand, refinish, seal, right?”

“That’s what I’d do.”

“That’s what I want.”

“All right then.” With his sunglasses hooked on the breast pocket of his T-shirt, Kevin ran steady hazel eyes over the space. “I can work up a couple designs for you in here.”

“I’ll take a stab at it. I haven’t designed a kitchen, but I’ve shot plenty of them. Photography,” she explained. “For catalogs, websites, stock photos.” Hands on hips, she walked the room, imagined it down to the bare walls and floor.

“It’s roomy, and that’s a plus. I’d want an island, good size, for prep and for eating. I don’t want sleek, but I don’t want country either. More contemporary rustic, so dark cabinets, glass-fronted, go light on the countertops, figure out an interesting backsplash, and have fun with the lighting. There’s room for double wall ovens there—I don’t know what I’ll do with double ovens, but my uncles swear by them. Gas cooktop and a snappy exhaust—like a focal point. Farm sink under that window, and that bathroom’s awkward anyway. Take that out, make it a walk-in pantry. And get rid of this poky little back door. Open it up to that deck, that view. Big-ass double doors—full glass, no panes.”

He’d been making notes, nodding, but looked up now.

“Ms. Carson?”

“Naomi.”

“Naomi. I love my wife.”

She sent him a careful smile as she turned. “That’s good.”

“I fell for her when I was sixteen, and didn’t get up the courage to ask her out for nearly a year. I might still be thinking about kissing her for the first time if she hadn’t taken that bull by the horns, so to speak. I was twenty-three when we got married—she took that over, too, or I’d be working up the nerve to ask her. We got two kids.”

“Congratulations.”

“I’m just saying I love my wife, and I tend to move slow in some areas. But if you and I had a longer acquaintance I’d kiss you right on the mouth.”

“Should I anticipate that for later?”

He grinned again. “It could happen if you keep realizing my hopes and dreams. It was taking out that skinny door there that did it. It needs the view. Why have that view, and keep it outside? If you let me take out that wall there, I’d give you open concept into the dining room. It would make it more of an entertaining space. Living room’s at the other end of the house, but you’d have this area here so people could gather when you’re cooking.”

“It could go on the list.”

They went through, bottom to top, and then Kevin went out for his tape measure and went through it again.

By the time he’d finished, she’d put her supplies away and poured them both Cokes. They drank them on the front porch, watching the sun burn its way down through the trees.

“I’ll work up an estimate. You might want to be sitting down when you read it over.”

“I already got that picture.”

“Once you do, we can talk about priorities, what you want done right off, what can maybe wait some. I can give you the name of a good landscaper while you’re reeling from estimates.”