Ghost Flower (18 page)

“S
o, the party,” I said when we’d crammed my six shopping bags and Bridgette’s four into the trunk of her white BMW convertible. “Why didn’t you tell me that you and Bain were probably the last people to see your cousin alive?”

“Stop saying that,” she said, adjusting her sunglasses. We pulled out of the lot and into the sunshine. “First, because that is completely not true. There were ten people there—”

“Nine,” I said, remembering the photos at the police station.

“Whatever, nine. And second because you two—I mean Liza and Aurora—left the party by themselves before any of the rest of us. Not to mention Liza died miles away.”

For some reason I decided not to tell Bridgette about hearing the poem in my head in the police station or seeing—whatever I had seen—in the dressing room. Instead I said, “What about Ro’s secret boyfriend?”

She nearly swerved into the red Honda next to us. “What are you talking about?”

“The one with the floppy brown hair and the big hands?”

The color left her face. “How did you find out about Aurora and Colin? The police couldn’t have told you about that.”

“No, you did. Just now.” I looked up. “Light!”

She slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a shuddering stop in the crosswalk, and turned to me. “I don’t like these games you’re playing.”

“And I don’t like yours. If you won’t tell me things, I’m going to have to dig them out. How do you expect me to be your cousin if you leave out crucial things like whom she was dating?”

“I didn’t know they were dating. I’d heard rumors, but I didn’t believe it. I’m still not sure I do.”

“It’s true.” I pulled the photo strip out of my pocket and held it toward her. “This was taken the week before she disappeared.” She glanced at it, then pulled up her sunglasses to glance at it again. The light changed. Cars honked behind us.

She flipped them off, dropped her glasses back over her eyes, and, still looking at the photo strip, stepped on the gas. We’d gone about a block at sixty miles per hour when she leaned on the horn and veered across three lanes of traffic and into the parking lot of a strip mall. She threw the car into a space in front of a dollar store and turned it off.

I peeled my fingers off the door handle. Given everything I knew about Bridgette I’d expected her to be a strict speed-limit-traffic-signal-inside-the-lines kind of motor vehicle operator. “Do you drive that way all the time?”

“I learned one summer from a taxi driver when we were in Greece,” she said like that was an explanation. She made no move to get out of the car. She pushed her glasses up onto her head again and held the photo strip close to her face as though she were trying to see through the hash marks. She let it drop, leaned back in her seat, and closed her eyes. “So it was true.”

If her driving had surprised me, her reaction to the photo surprised me even more. She seemed genuinely upset, like my showing her the picture had depressed her.

“You really didn’t know about it?” I asked.

She shook her head, her eyes still closed. “We—Aurora and I—we weren’t that close. When Bain told me—” She let out a deep breath and opened her eyes, and I was shocked to see tears there. “Poor Aurora.” She shook her head and cleared her throat. “And poor Colin.”

“Who
is
Colin?”

“Colin Vega. He—he was my year in school. A basketball star. Headed to Dartmouth.” She tapped the photo. “Where did you get this?”

“It was in Ro’s sock drawer. Kind of hidden but not very hidden. You said their relationship was super secret, but Bain knew.”

“What makes you say that?” she demanded, suddenly on the defensive. S
he feels guilty about something
, I thought. That was where the sadness had come from, or at least part of it, I was sure.

“You just said Bain told you,” I explained evenly.

She relaxed a little and made her voice deliberately casual. “That was after Aurora disappeared.”

It didn’t add up. There was something she wasn’t telling me. I decided to push. “Even if he didn’t know about them dating, he knew Colin.”

“Of course.”

“Then how come when I showed this picture to him he said he had no idea who it was?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and her brow tensed like she’d suddenly gotten a bad headache. “The face is pretty scratched off. And he probably figured there was no reason for you to know.”
She opened her eyes, but she wasn’t meeting mine. “That it wasn’t likely to come up. Since no one knew, and Colin’s not around anymore.”

“Why would Aurora have kept this secret?”

“The Vega family and ours have this longstanding—thing.”

“Like a feud?”

She nodded. “Something happened when Colin’s mom and my dad were in high school, and the families have been at odds since then. We talk about how the Vegas have a terrible temper, and they talk about how the Silvertons are unethical schemers.”

“Wow, that’s hard to believe,” I said.

“No, the Vega temper really is notorious,” she assured me, apparently oblivious to my sarcasm. “I had to stop being a cheerleader when Colin made the basketball team because my parents didn’t want to run into his at games. It has eased a bit recently. We’re members of the same country club, but restaurants in town still try not to take reservations from both families on the same night. And all of Grandmother’s lawyers and bankers know if she hears they are working with the Vegas, she’ll fire them.”

“That sounds tough.” I made no attempt to sound like I meant it.

“It is,” Bridgette said, again ignoring, or not detecting, the sarcasm in my voice. “Very Montague and Capulet. That’s why it was so hard to believe they might be going out. And why they wouldn’t have risked letting anyone know. On the other hand, it probably made him more appealing to Aurora. Another way to flout the Family.”

It dawned on me now that Bridgette had been using the past tense to talk about him. I felt an uneasy knot in my chest as I asked, “Did he die too?”

“N-no,” she answered slowly. “He’s alive. He just moved away.” She was gazing at the photo strip pensively. “He left right after
Aurora disappeared.” Still thoughtful, she said, “From what you can see of Aurora’s face, they look happy, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They do.”

She ran her finger over the pen marks. “I wonder what changed.”

“It can be hard when you have to keep a big part of your life secret,” I offered.

“Yes,” she agreed. She seemed withdrawn into her own head for a moment, and then she said brightly, like she was reciting something she’d read in a waiting room, “But secrets can also keep things precious. Private. That’s what can be hard for people to understand. It can be nice to have something you don’t share with the world.”

It was so odd being with her. Sometimes she was likable, and other times she was—Bridgette. “Sure.”

“Who are you to judge anything?” she demanded, angry and defensive. She shoved the photo back at me. “I’d keep this somewhere no one can find.”

“Your brother said the same thing.”

“Did he? That’s one thing we agree on then.”

“Why?”

She looked at me sharply. “If you start flashing pictures around, people are bound to start asking questions. Remember, you’re only here temporarily. The more inquisitive people become, the more likely they are to uncover what we’re doing. And the last thing we need is for you to attract the attention of the police.”

“Right,” I said. I believed what she was saying, but I was still certain there was more to it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t completely successful at keeping the skepticism out of my voice.

She eyed me closely. “I don’t know what
inspired
you to show up here a week before we’d planned, but I would suggest that from
now on, you do what I say. I would hate for things to get messy for you.”

The threat was a deliberate undertone in her voice, for some reason I wanted to make her spell it out. “How exactly would they get messy?”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a Prada wallet. “Like if I were to turn this in to the police.” From behind a black American Express card, she pulled my Eve Brightman ID.

I’d been waiting for this moment, I realized, ever since I’d come back from playing tennis with Bain and found it gone. It was almost a relief to have it out now. “If you did that, I would be forced to tell everyone about my deal with you and Bain.”

“Of course,” she said, nodding. “But I doubt they would believe it. Besides, even if people did believe your crazy story, you don’t really think that piece of paper you’ve got hidden beneath your mattress with the note on it about paying you one hundred thousand dollars would hold up, do you? When obviously you must have fished it out of the garbage from the Starbucks you were working at?”

The night Bain had been in my room—he had been looking for the note to see where I’d put it. My face must have registered my surprise because she laughed. “Oh, you did think the note would work. That’s sweet. Anyway, even if people did believe your story, you’re still the only one of us breaking the law. And the only one liable to be punished.” She slipped the Eve Brightman ID back behind the black credit card. “But there’s no reason for any of that, is there? Just do what I tell you to do, and this will all work out fine.”

Fine for who?
a voice in the back of my mind asked.

Just like that, her personality flipped again. As though we’d gotten something nicely settled, she popped off her seatbelt and gave
me a conspiratorial smile. “Come on.” she pushed her door open. “I’m going to introduce you to one of the best things in Tucson.”

I gazed around the strip mall. One of the stores was closed, one of them was a Middle Eastern café and hookah lounge, one was the dollar store, and one was a holistic bookstore. Before I had a chance to guess which one hid the best thing in Tucson, she’d dragged me toward the dollar store and said, “Treasure hunt. The goal is to find the choicest item in the store. The winner pays.”

I raised my eyebrow. “You’ve been in the dollar store?”

“Everyone needs to let off steam somehow.” She smiled. “See what I mean about keeping some things private? It’s my guilty secret.”

“What if we don’t agree on what the
choicest
is?”

“The cashier will break the tie.”

It sounded fair. It also sounded like she’d done it before. I stopped her as she’d set the door chime tinkling. “You haven’t bribed the cashier, have you?”

She laughed aloud. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a real Silverton.”

I thought I had it locked with a wind-up chicken that pooped candy eggs and came in a box labeled Watch Chicks Get Laid with Authentic Motion®, but the Fur You
^™
fake fur beard to keep your face warm while you skied NOW FOR TODDLERS OR PETS that Bridgette uncovered was the clear winner.

If you had told me that I could enjoy spending time with Bridgette, or that she had a sense of humor, I wouldn’t have believed it. But she surprised me. Away from the Family, she was fun. Normal.

It never occurred to me that this could all be part of a larger, and more dangerous, scheme.

I was paying with money she gave me, since I had none, when my phone buzzed with a message from Coralee, saying that the
séance would take place that night at nine
P.M.
at the same model house that had hosted the party three years earlier.

When I told Bridgette about it, she said, “A séance. No thank you.”

“Why?”

“Three reasons: one, ghosts do not exist,” she said. “But bad press does, and a séance is like a magnet for it in this town. Two, there is no way Althea will possibly consent to you going. And three, even if you go, there is no guarantee everyone else will.”

As it turned out, she was right about one of those things.

“I
’ve never been to a séance,” Bain said, steering his Porsche up the hill toward the Sunset Canyon Estates where the Event (as Coralee was calling it) was going to be held. “I doubt it can top what’s already happened. I’m not sure which is more remarkable, Althea agreeing to let you go or Bridgette agreeing to go to an event planned by Coralee.”

By the time Bridgette and I had gotten back from the mall, Coralee had not only e-mailed Jordan North asking for Althea’s permission for the séance, but had also managed to get the matriarch to agree to a whole schedule of events, including a spa day with some of Aurora’s classmates the next day and a joint appearance at Tucson Days Fair on Tuesday.

“I’ll be glad not to have you around the house,” Althea said at dinner that night, her tone suggesting that the mere sight of me was upsetting to her.

It was worse when Althea reached her hand across to take Bridgette’s wrist and said, “At least I have one good granddaughter.”

Bridgette momentarily looked shocked, but she recovered
quickly. “Of course you do, Grandmother,” she said. “I’ll never leave you.”

Bridgette, Bain, and their parents had joined Althea and me for dinner in the massive dining room of Silverton House. The long table that ran down its middle could easily have seated thirty, but the six of us were huddled at one end.

The room itself was extraordinary with a coffered ceiling and blond wood panels I knew had been imported from a monastery in France by Sargeant after the First World War. Evening sunlight filtered through a pair of tall stained glass windows he’d taken from the same place, turning the walls into a jewel-tone tableau of saints and angels. Given what I’d seen of the Family, it made sense that the Silvertons would turn something others held sacred into a place to satisfy their appetites.

I focused on the reflections on the walls, the way that the breeze through the leaves of a tree outside seemed to fan the Virgin Mary, rather than on the unexpected stab Althea’s words had given me.

Why did I care? Why did it matter to me that this woman didn’t like me? Everything I’d been learning told me she and Aurora had lived in a state of uneasy détente, their only interaction sparky, never sweet. But it confused me—how could people who had so much, and spent so much time talking about the Family, be so cold to one another?