The Cipher (17 page)

109

MELANIE SMELLED PINE
and knew they were close.

The scent of the trees had been etched in her mind during childhood weekends up at Squam Lake. Her family came up to the Smylies' cabin every Fourth of July and Labor Day. The dads would pair off and head out on the boat, the moms would pair off and have drinks on the deck. Melanie and Smiles would swim out to the floating dock, a tiny wooden platform that had seemed like its own world. Then she and Smiles had paired off for real, and they would come up here alone in the winter, spending nights snuggled under a quilt by the fire.

Melanie rolled her window down. “God, I love this air.” It was always a bit cooler at Squam Lake—cooler and clearer and always with a hint of pine.

Jenna followed suit, rolling down her own window and breathing in.

“Wow, nice.” Melanie wondered if Jenna was just humoring her and decided it didn't matter.

Her company had settled Melanie down even while she explained the gory details of Andrei Tarasov's suicide on the Smylies' front lawn. Jenna hadn't broken in with her usual commentary on whatever stray thing happened to float, butterfly-like, into her brain. Instead she sat in the passenger seat for the two-hour ride, nodding encouragement while Melanie went on. She'd explained how, years after Tarasov's death, he had become the subject of odd emails between Smiles's stepmom, Rose, and his birth mother, Alice, who had abandoned him when he was two. It all had something to do with a letter that Alice had left for Smiles to read when he turned eighteen.

“Holy crap, Mel,” Jenna said at one point. “I
knew
it was going to be about the Russian guy. I didn't want to say anything, but it was so weird that you'd stolen his file. Anyway, keep going . . .”

Something about Jenna's naked fascination won Melanie over. She was lapping up the story with the same titillated delight with which Melanie purchased copies of
Us Weekly
more frequently than she cared to admit. She let her guard down and told Jenna about her expedition to Tarasov's old house and getting warned away by the pale cop with the cherry-cough-drop breath.

“Strange,” Jenna said, and that about summed up Melanie's feelings on the subject as well.

Then she got to the most disturbing part, the part that had been consuming her since the start of this whole thing. She told Jenna about Rose's emails to her dad. The first one, while he was in Saint-Tropez, and then the second one shortly before the car accident that killed Rose. Melanie watched Jenna closely. She held off any suggestion that her dad might have been involved in Rose's death, wanting to see if Jenna would draw the connection.

“But you don't . . .” Jenna stopped herself, turning away and taking in their first glimpse of Squam Lake through the trees. The last bits of afternoon sun sparkled on the water.

“Don't what?”

“Nothing.”

So yes, she had made the connection. And Melanie hadn't even mentioned that her dad was an expert mechanic, spending countless weekend hours underneath his Aston Martin, oiling up his Maybach. Fraying a brake line would probably be nothing to him.

“I remember that accident,” Jenna said from far away.

Rose's death had been the talk of Kingsley for a few days last spring. Melanie had gone to the funeral in a nine-hundred-dollar dress she bought at Neiman Marcus for the occasion, and which had felt tainted ever since. The next day at Kingsley, Melanie faced a siege of questions about the accident, the funeral, and most importantly whether anybody famous had shown up. She resented the attention, knowing people were only curious because Rose's death happened to tangentially involve Mr. Smylie. But by the end of the week, everyone at school had moved on, and Melanie wanted to scream:
That's it? Don't you want to hear about the white lilies at the wake? Don't you want to know what the governor said? Don't you care about Rose anymore?

“You've
got
to be joking,” Jenna said. She was leaning forward in her seat, the better to stare up the length of the driveway. Her eyes had grown to the size of softballs. “You said
cabin
, Mel, not
palace
.”

“It's pretty swank, huh?” Melanie had forgotten what it was like to see the Smylies' place for the first time.

Jenna was right:
Cabin
didn't do it justice.
Fortress
was more like it, if a fortress could be clean and modern and inviting. A wide concrete chimney anchored the right side of the house, surrounded by boxy configurations of glass and wood. One of the box shapes—Mr. Smylie's office—jutted forward, hovering in midair over the driveway and the three-car garage beneath it. The bed of pine needles covering the drive softened their approach. Melanie parked in front of the garage doors and turned to Jenna, whose eye condition looked permanent at this point.

“This is nothing. Wait till you see the Pollock.”

Jenna didn't care about the Pollock.

Melanie showed it to her right off the bat—a massive, ugly, gorgeous thing that the great Jackson Pollock had painted in his trademark abstract style. The painting hung high on the living-room wall, which rose to a vaulted ceiling striped with wooden beams. Even up there, the painting drew the eye with its crazy splotches of gray and blue and orange. They suggested some messy but beautiful drama that Melanie wished, somehow, she could experience herself one day. If somebody painted her life, it would be pure impressionism: soft, orderly, muted.

The painting held her like a magnet as it always did, long after Jenna got bored and went up the spiral staircase to explore.

“You have
got
to be joking,” her voice boomed from the second floor. “A claw-foot tub? A
claw-foot tub
!?”

Melanie smirked and waited in the kitchen. She raided the pantry and came away with ramen noodles and an unopened bag of cookies, hopefully still good. By the time the water was boiling, Jenna had come back downstairs, breathless and yammering about the wonders she'd seen: the fireplace in the master bedroom, the oak-paneled walls, the view of the lake. And of course the claw-foot tub. Melanie let Jenna get it out of her system and pushed a bowl of ramen across the distressed-wood table.

“Crap, and a Viking stove, too,” Jenna said as she took in the kitchen. She managed a bite of her noodles before she continued. “I can't believe the way you live, Mel,” she said, waving at the house like a game-show hostess showing off a prize.

The statement probably would have annoyed Melanie a few days ago, but now she almost wanted to hug Jenna. She sat across from Melanie in a summer sweater with little knobs from the hanger sticking up at her shoulders. Jenna had probably tossed the outfit together in a rush, pulling the special sweater from deep in her closet. There was something sweet about it that touched Melanie—like Jenna was interviewing to be her friend.

“This is how the Smylies live, not me,” Melanie said.

“Oh, come on.”

Melanie looked up from the table. “Okay, fine,” she said after a second, and they both cracked up.

Emboldened, Jenna leaned in conspiratorially. “If I said something really bitchy, could you, like, not hold it against me?”

This oughta be good
, Melanie thought. “Yeah, sure.”

“You know everyone's jealous of you. Pretty, smart, everything else. I mean, I know I am. I blabber nonstop around you like you're some crush.” Jenna swirled her fork through her noodles, suddenly shy. “But, you know, I've always sorta wondered why you don't have more friends.”

It was a bit of a blow, hearing that from Jenna. But it wasn't unfair—Melanie was always a bit off by herself. “I don't know. I guess I've spent a lot of time doing what other people want me to do, and other people don't fill out your social calendar for you.”

Jenna pushed her bowl away. “I'm such an idiot. You invite me up here and I'm, like, psychoanalyzing you. Here, hold on a second, let me just train a bunch of lights on you and give you the third degree, okay?”

Melanie laughed despite herself.

“I think I left my waterboarding supplies out in the car.” Jenna was on a roll now. “Mind if I bust those out later and torture you properly?”

Melanie spat out some of the water she'd been drinking. It was hard to say whether she actually found Jenna funny or if it was just the relief of escaping her own thoughts. It was nice to stop obsessing about car crashes and suicides for a minute.

“I'm actually really glad you came,” Melanie said.

“Me, too. So . . . what are you going to do about Smiles and this bizarro letter?”

“Let's figure it out later.” Melanie suddenly felt the long morning catching up to her. “I'm gonna crash for a half hour if you don't mind. The lake is super pretty right now if you want to go down for a walk.”

“Sure, I'll be fine,” Jenna said, and then her eyes brightened. “Oh my God, would you care if I took a bath in that tub?”

“Go for it.”

Before the words were out of Melanie's mouth, Jenna was hurtling up the spiral staircase, overnight bag in hand.

As soon as Melanie lay down on the sofa, she knew it was pointless. Her dad called it being “too tired to sleep.” It happened to him after late nights at the office. He'd come home and go through a whole wind-down ritual that usually involved Red Sox highlights and a glass or two of Cabernet; only then could he go to bed. Melanie would sometimes hear his heavy footsteps on the stairs in the middle of the night, and the sound of them would comfort her like a blanket.

She tossed the quilt off herself, crossed the zebra-hide rug of the living room, and returned to the kitchen for a glass of water. Through the window above the sink, the lake shimmered in the sunset. She had an idle thought about swimming to the floating dock alone for once, seeing how the world looked out there without Smiles at her side. She checked her phone out of habit, but he'd never called back.

She took the long way back to the living room, looking in on the lonely rooms of the house with the sounds of the tub filling audible from upstairs. Mr. Smylie's office had always seemed too important to enter. She stood at the doorway and remembered the last time the families had been up here together. Mr. Smylie had spent a lot of time in this office, finishing his book,
The Transparent Innovator
. The title was scrawled on a cardboard box on a chaise longue directly across from Melanie, next to an oversize globe.

It felt wrong to cross the threshold, but underneath the book's title, the box said
Pictures
. That was too much for her to resist. She tiptoed across the floor, plunked down on the chaise, and pried open the box flaps. Inside were three copies of the manuscript with varying amounts of red pen scrawled across them. Melanie flipped one open at random and smoothed her hand across a heavily marked page, amazed as always by Mr. Smylie's clean penmanship. His writing was like the fake handwriting on advertisements: pleasing to the eye, startlingly clear.

She pulled the manuscripts out and found three sets of pictures underneath. Each set was enclosed with a sheet of paper and bound up in rubber bands. The first sheet said
Final Cut
, the second said
Maybe
, and the last said
No
.

The maybes were the biggest group. Melanie unwrapped them and laughed out loud at a picture of her dad with long hair. His face was plump and boyish, his hair grown out in an awful grunge look, complete with flannel shirt. She flipped through pictures of Mr. Smylie—giving a business talk, pushing a five-year-old Smiles on his bike, unveiling the Alyce logo outside the company headquarters—and stopped on another picture of her dad. It had been taken in a Harvard dorm. He was playing a game of foosball with Mr. Smylie, twisting his then-thin body as he made a shot. It wasn't how young he looked that surprised her, or even how athletic he'd been. It was the joy on his face.

Melanie didn't think she'd ever seen him so genuinely happy. It might as well have been another person in that picture, and it reminded her again that she didn't really know her dad.