The Rich and the Dead (23 page)

Here she was, lost once more, without any idea how to escape.

She had gotten into the car not knowing where she was going, but when she pulled up to a tiny bungalow with roses curling around the white lattice fence, she wasn't really surprised. She should've known she'd end up here. It was a little after nine, and the windows of the house glowed with an amber light. Lila saw a woman standing at the window, deep in her own thoughts. The woman's face looked very similar to her own.

“Hi, Mom,” she whispered from the front seat of her car.

Lila ached to knock on her mother's door, to feel her mother's arms around her, to hear her voice and smell her perfume.

In less than a year from this moment, Lila's mom would die, a husk of herself, all alone. Tears flooded Lila's eyes. Her obsession with finding the Star Island killer had blinded her to her mother's failing health. She hadn't been with her at the very end, when it was most important.

Now, through this strange series of events, she was in the past, and her mother was alive again. But Lila couldn't undo the thing she regretted the most. If she knocked on that door and thrust her future self into her mom's life, who knew what would happen?

Her mother's head disappeared from the window. Lila got out of the car and crept around to the back of the house, smelling the fragrant jasmine bush that her mother had planted a week before Lila was born. And there was the tree swing that she and her sister had fought over when they were children, still hanging from the large oak in the backyard.

Lila knew her mother would be sitting on the living room couch with her feet up, reading a book, which she'd done every night for as long as Lila could remember. She tiptoed up to the window and watched her mom for a while, careful not to be noticed. She smiled every time her mom smiled at something in the book. She took in all of her—the warmth; the quick, intelligent eyes; the strength of her. This was as close as she would allow herself to get, and it was both wonderful and acutely painful to be so near and so far away.

After about an hour, Lila watched as her mom stood up and walked from room to room, turning off the lights, then retreated to her bedroom.

“Good night, Mom,” Lila said aloud. It didn't matter what she said. There was no one there to hear her.

CHAPTER 24

T
HE DRIVE BACK
to Star Island felt like an eternity. Lila kept the car's top down so that the cold December air would help her stay awake and alert, though it was bordering on unbearable. To keep warm she blasted the heat, enjoying the simultaneous fever and chill that glided over her skin.

Her phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen and pressed Ignore. Dylan. She wasn't sure how to talk to him knowing what she knew. How could she not warn this amazing man about the awful future that awaited him? So, for the time being, she decided it would be better for both of them if she stayed silent.

Her mind kept switching between thoughts of Dylan and thoughts of her mom. The memories, both joyous and sad, crashed over her like waves, ready to drag her under and swallow her whole. Seeing her mother again had been as excruciating as it was comforting. But that just about summed everything up these days—a mix of pain and pleasure. Lila felt that, no matter what she did, it was somehow wrong.

“Wherever you go, there you are,” Lila said out loud as tears popped quickly into her eyes. It was a saying that her mother often repeated, always with a knowing smile. And, as usual, her mother was right. Lila had traveled farther than anyone had thought possible, she'd traveled back in time, and yet here she was, still blind to the same things, struggling in the same ways, failing to solve the same case. Even though she'd created a whole new persona for herself, she had never felt the burden of her own failings more than right at this moment.

As she drove, she realized that she needed to get away from Camilla Dayton's life and distractions in order to clear her mind. She needed to be away from Effie. She needed to take a break from maintaining this exhausting facade.

W
HAT DO YOU
mean you're leaving for the weekend? Where are you going?” Effie asked. It was Saturday morning, and Lila was putting several bags into the trunk of her car as Effie watched with a stunned look on her face. “I thought we'd go to Fisher Island today. I made plans for us.” There was a whiny desperation in her voice, mixed with more than a hint of annoyance.

“Some of my old friends from the city are in Key West for the weekend. They invited me down at the last minute,” Lila lied easily to Effie's pouting face. “I'd invite you, but they said the place is small and kind of shabby.”

“Oh, and here I was worried that you didn't have any friends. I've gone all-out introducing you to mine—to every damn person in this city. But clearly it would be too much to ask for you to let me meet anyone you know.” Effie paused, looking at Lila with her eyes squinted and her lips pursed.

Lila knew Effie was trying to bully her out of going, but she needed the space. Not to mention that it was hard to really feel pushed around by a hundred-pound blonde wearing a rhinestone bikini.

“It sounds like you don't really need my help anymore.” Effie sniffed.

“You know, I think you're right, Effie,” Lila said as she slammed down the trunk lid and got in the driver's seat. She was tired, but more than anything, she was fed up with being polite when she didn't need to be. She was here for a reason, to solve a case, and nothing in the world mattered more than that. Every moment she wasted on Effie's feelings, she was standing in her own way. In less than one month the Star Island killer would strike. If she didn't uncover the killer's identity, then this whole ordeal would be for nothing. “I'm not as helpless as you think, Effie. Never have been.”

“Really, I beg to differ. You'd have nothing if it weren't for me. Nothing. But anytime I ask you for anything, you're busy.”

“You know that's not true, Effie. I feel like all I do is repay you for generosity I've never asked for. It's like you give me things just to keep me on a goddamned leash.”

With that, Lila shut the car door and drove away, not even looking in the rearview mirror to see Effie's angry face. As she was heading south, Lila was surprised to find herself still dwelling on their fight. She was genuinely hurt by what Effie had said. She shook her head. She needed to stop thinking of Effie as a friend, and remember that she was just a means to an end.

That part about visiting New York friends was a lie, of course, but the Key West bit was true. Key West, that perfect slice of weirdness, was just the escape hatch Lila needed to hide away, take stock of the case, and grab some perspective back from this long, tumbling fall down the rabbit hole she'd been on for the last couple of months. She'd booked herself a few nights in a cozy cottage, painted robin's-egg blue, on a sleepy street in Old Town. Now she raced toward it in her Maserati as if her life depended upon it.

Just as he'd said he would in their e-mail exchange, the owner of the cottage left the key under the large rock beneath the honeysuckle bush to the left of the white picket fence. As she brought her bags into the cottage's foyer, Lila exhaled with relief. It was relaxed and ramshackle, a little musty and a lot beachy. Unlike in the Star Island home she'd recently made her own, none of the furniture was worthy of being featured in
Architectural Digest
and none of the art hanging on the walls was “important.” It was perfect.

The cottage was two stories, with a spartan kitchen and a tiny backyard canopied by magnificent palm trees. Lila picked the largest of the three bedrooms, on the second floor, to set up her office. She could sleep anywhere, but what she needed was space to think. In the large bedroom, she carefully removed the few pictures from the wall and moved the spare furniture to the center of the room.

Most of her information was on her computer or on Teddy's thumb drive, but she felt that the evidence, in its digitized form, was keeping its secrets hidden from her. On the long drive south to Key West, she'd stopped at a big box store to purchase a printer, which she set up now on the dining room table. Late into the night, she printed up hundreds of pages of documents and pictures while slowly sipping bourbon, with the windows thrown wide open so that she could feel and smell the humid ocean breeze.

When most of the printing was done, Lila moved to the bedroom on the second floor, making several trips up and down the stairs, hauling stacks of printed pages, photographs, and pages torn from her notebooks. On each of the four walls, she created a makeshift bulletin board, with every victim getting a third of one wall.

On the north wall, she put Effie Webster, Meredith Sloan, Vivienne Hunter.

On the east wall: Javier Martinez, Theo von Fick, Fernando Salazar.

On the west wall: Neville Crawley, Sam Logan, and Rusty Browder.

On the south wall: Chase Haverford, Adebayo “Johnny” Oluwa, and Khaled Fathallah.

Then she stood in the center of the room, regarding it all. The members of the Janus Society, with their messy lives—their pasts, their presents, and their futures—were all there, in fragments taped up on the wall. These twelve people had been her constant companions for more than three years, so much so that each face and each story felt as familiar to her as her own. Yet there was a riddle at the core of all of it that she couldn't solve. Why would someone murder this group of philanthropists, these people who gave so much to those in need? And who could the murderer be?

Lila was so absorbed in her thoughts that she startled when her cell phone rang. It was Effie calling. Lila didn't want to answer the phone at all, but she knew ignoring Effie would just make everything between them all the worse.

The moment she forced herself to pick up the phone, an assault of deafening sound greeted her. “Camilla? Camilla?!” Effie shouted over the loud hum of voices and throbbing club music in the background. Lila figured she was at one of her usual haunts, letting men buy her round after round of custom-made cocktails.

“You won't believe what I just heard,” Effie squealed. She sounded high.

“Tell me.”

“You made that offer on the house forever ago, right? And even though Meredith calls you, like, ten times a day, nothing's happened, right? Now I know why. It's Alexei Dortzovich's fault. He just closed on the house this morning! Can you believe it?”

In truth, Lila had known she'd never get the place. She'd put in low offers and followed up with even lower counteroffers. She'd requested various inspections and made inquiries about a million little ridiculous things just to keep dragging the process out. Lila was stalling and Meredith knew it.

That someone else bought the house was no surprise, but the fact that Alexei had swooped in and purchased it was perplexing. After the Star Island massacre, Lila had interviewed every person who was on that island on the day of the murder, and she'd investigated every single person who owned a home there—but Alexei was never interviewed.

“Hmmm . . . that's curious,” Lila said.

“Why aren't you freaking out? I mean, that's your house! And what does that hideous Russian need with yet another mansion? It makes me sick. And not to sound too paranoid, but,” Effie said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, making it difficult to hear her over the pounding techno playing in the background, “I think Alexei is, like, obsessed with me. You've seen how he hits on me. And he's always totally staring at me. Now he's going to be living right next to me all the time? I'm seriously worried he's stalking me, Camilla.”

As Effie continued to share alcohol-fueled speculations, Lila paced back and forth in the room, looking at the walls.

“I mean,” Effie said, “the Russians are just so tacky. I'm not being racist or anything.”

“I don't think Russians are a race, Ef.”

“Whatever. You know what I mean. It's like the more garish the better with those guys. Am I right?”