The Thinker, who microwaved a Smart Ones frozen dinner (Twombley’s, the beef stroganoff) and folded the mouth of his mask to slurp plastic forkfuls (he has been eating right behind me for the past four minutes) taps at his phone.
The Killer receives the Thinker’s message, jumps up, and minces excitedly out of Room 1409. He still closes the door with stealth. He unlocks the door to Room 1408. Brian and Tessa don’t see him. He’s around the corner from the passing elevator. They’re too intent on each other, anyway.
“It was nothing you did,” Brian says. “It wasn’t you.”
“It’s not you, it’s me,” Tessa mocks. She’s wiping her eyes and nose, furious with herself for crying.
“It wasn’t either of us.” Brian inhales deeply. Exhales. “It was Mitch.”
“Oui?” Henri says. “I help you how, Monsieur Franklin?”
Henri takes his plate and bowl to the dining area. The dining area is open, visible from the living room and kitchen. This is why it is inferior to the dining area in the penthouses. The regular penthouse, Room 1801, has a dining room around the corner from the kitchen. It is a separate space. The kitchen in Room 1801 is likewise divided from the living room by a breakfast bar and a tastefully placed fainting couch, its foot pointing to a tucked--back staircase, which ascends to a spacious bedroom. In the deluxe penthouse, there is, upon entering, the kitchen to the right, the living room to the left, and straight ahead, a winding staircase that leads to a sumptuous, panoramic view of the ocean and the interstate, Los Angeles’s smog turning improbable colors in the far distance. The bed is a Tempur--Pedic king and a half.
Henri favors an austere place setting: crystal water glass containing light ice and Pellegrino to the left of a wine goblet, silver ice bucket with a chilled chardonnay ready to decant, a single fork, a single spoon, a good knife.
The Killer, in his haste, forgot his knife. He waits until Henri has set his dinner to the most flattering angle.
“I dine now,” Henri says as the Killer approaches. “You make funny at me when I fin—eh!”
The Killer throws Henri far from the table. Henri tumbles over the living room sofa. The Killer takes the knife out of the place setting, being careful not to upset any other aspect of the place setting. He goes to Henri, who is spinning in an attempt to get up, like a round beetle flipped on its back. The Killer grabs Henri’s thick, dark, curly hair and draws the blade across his throat slowly enough to relish the act, but quickly enough that he can drop the bleeding--out chef, speed--walk to the kitchen, discard the knife in the sink, wash up, take a new knife from the wooden rack beside the blender (Manderley Resort fully stocks the penthouse and luxury room kitchens; the regular rooms do not have kitchens, they have only coffeemakers; breakfast on the nineteenth floor is delicious and not at all affordable), and situate himself in the dining chair, napkin in lap, steam still rising from the cuisine, the first forkful of which—he chooses a bite of cordon bleu and half a broccoli floret (Henri steamed some broccoli as a side)—he pulls the chin of his mask away from his mouth to eat. The Killer nods, approving.
Blood from Henri’s carotid artery sprays the living room like a leaking fire hose. He reaches for the wound with the raw human instinct to stanch the blood flow. He makes no sound, as his vocal cords have been cut. Henri falls on his left side. The oven dings. The Killer’s head tilts. He goes to the oven, cracks the door, searches the counters. He puts on an oven mitt, moves the peaches to a lower rack, and sets the oven dial to “Warm.” He is returning to the dining area, when he retraces his steps and looks in the freezer. A pint of top--quality Belgian ice cream, vanilla flavored, stands alone on the shelf. The Killer all but skips back to his seat and resumes eating. Henri gurgles his last.
“What?” Tessa said—twice—to Brian’s obscure confession that “It was Mitch.”
Brian said, “I have to tell it all at once. I can’t—I can barely do it at all, but I know I can’t do it in pieces. The pool’s private, right? Nobody will interrupt us there?” Tessa managed one nod, and now they ride the last few floors down in silence. Brian appears ready to jump out of his own skin and run away. Tessa seems to wish she could dissolve into the elevator’s glass wall. She cleans her eyes and cheeks of tears, but more keep falling. When the elevator descends through the foyer’s ceiling, she jabs the intercom button, dialing the extension for the ballroom.
“The lobby chandelier’s dusting up again. Del, do it the easy way, please. No ladders.”
Jules’s voice rejoins tinnily, “Roger that, Captain.”
Brian points at the speaker. “Those two seem happy.” He says it like it’s a test.
Tessa doesn’t answer, except to look at Brian with a cocked eyebrow: Really?
Brian nods. Tessa passed.
The elevator settles on the first floor and dings open. Tessa walks. Brian follows. They pass the check--in counter, moving westward. They pass the information desk. They are bound for the large door opposite the hotel’s main entrance. They are walking away from a parking lot full of vehicles that could take them far from Manderley.
Jules speaks to Delores, presumably informing her of the need to dust the foyer’s chandelier. Justin’s acquired a cart to hold the dishes no longer required in the more florid place settings.
The Killer is eating his soup second. Philistine.
CAMERA 7, 64, 7, 4, 12
Tessa and Brian appear on the dunes. Her right boot heel gets stuck in the sand, and she lurches. Brian reaches out to help her, but she slaps his hand. He says something. He says something else. Tessa ignores him.
The rear fa?ade of the hotel is virtually identical to the front, though it seems flatter, duller. This is because no one who exits the hotel from the west would possibly bother looking at the hotel itself. The view is too fine. It’s the well--worn panorama on millions and millions of calendars, screensavers, and posters with inspiring quotes: sky meeting sea in a melted crayon box of colors and a sugary foreground stretching infinitely to either side. It might still strike some as boring, as any other beach. Except there is the pool.
What most would guess to be part greenhouse and part rock formation—a mound of rough boulders and smooth glass, the limestone winking in the dregs of gone sunlight—stands short and stunted and lovely in the most natural of ways. Tessa is saying something, probably telling Brian about how she scouted locations for Manderley, about this cave and how shore accretion as a result of elsewhere’s erosion had exposed it, about how she took one look at it and knew.
Only the sound of the ocean can be heard. It’s a beautiful sound. It’s the sound of life. The sun has set, and the waves are red. It is nine twenty--five p.m.
Tessa holds the pool entrance open for Brian. He walks in.
“My God,” Brian says.
Outer Santa Barbara has suffered terribly from the accretion and erosion of its shore. This limestone cave may have once been the habitat of sharks, orcas, rays. It was dry when Tessa scouted it. It now glows green from moss that is nurtured by the hot humidity in the greenhouse. The mosses eat bacteria. Water tumbles down striations of rock through a pump system that pulls water straight from the Pacific. The pool is self--sustaining, self--cleaning, mostly self--lighting. Exactly one thousand round ten--watt bulbs are strung above the pool, woven into a net beneath the glass ceiling, like tiny moons. The pool is roughly fifty yards by ten, sparsely surrounded by comfortable chairs and a few granite tables with benches, but Tessa bends and unzips her boots, steps out of them, and sits at the edge of the deep end, dangling her feet in the water. The deep end is very deep. Twenty feet.
Brian sits beside her. He leaves his boots on, his feet out of the water. “It’s kind of dangerous, isn’t it?” he says, looking at the daggers of rock.
The answer is: Yes. Yes, it is dangerous.
Tessa says, watching her bare feet glow green, “Talk, Brian.”
The Killer is spooning ice cream onto the peaches. It’s dark in Room 1408. He doesn’t turn on any lights. He shuts off the oven instead and crosses the hall to Room 1409. The Thinker told him to, by text message. Room 1409 has a north--facing window. Looking up from, say, the pool, one would not see a light on the fourteenth floor if the light was in Room 1409.
The Killer props pillows against the headboard and loses patience with using a spoon to slice the peaches. He retrieves his knife from the end of the bed and slices his dessert with it instead. He looks like a child trying to transcribe an addition problem with an enormous novelty crayon.
Jules and Justin are still changing place settings; only now they’re on opposite sides of the ballroom.
Delores is—where is Delores?
Brian has been staring at the water. At Tessa’s feet, like soft green animals in the water. One of Brian’s knees is flat to the limestone floor. His other knee is bent, a notch for his elbow. He’s angled toward Tessa. He is, it looks like, sitting comfortably. But his demeanor makes one wonder if there has ever been a man more acutely uncomfortable in the history of time.
“You remember—,” Brian says. It comes out craggy, and he clears his throat. “You remember when Mitch broke his leg?”
“Which time?” says Tessa.
“Oh yeah.” Brian laughs, airily. “No, the second time. While we were on the road.”
Tessa nods.
Brian puts his head to his upright knee. “Tess, look. Tess, it’s something I really can’t explain. I can explain part of it. I can explain what happened. But—I’ve never tried telling somebody what it’s like, being twins. It’s not like you’re a twin. It’s like you’re both. You’re never alone. It’s impossible to really be alone. And that’s so great, but sometimes, you just want to be you. You want to want what you want.” He laughs again. “I knew I’d cock this up.”
Tessa says, “I do get it.” She’s looking at him like he’s certifiable. “As close as anybody can, I get it. When Mitch broke his leg the second time . . .”
Brian’s mouth assumes the shape of an awful taste. “The doc prescribed him painkillers. It was a bad break. He was in pain, and he ran out of painkillers. He refilled the scrip.” Brian peeks at Tessa out of the corner of his eye. “How many blanks are you filling in?”
Tessa’s pale.
Brian takes her hand, and she lets him. “Mitch wanted to stay on the circuit, even injured. He was riding injured. It was aggravating the leg, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He wasn’t feeling the pain, see. He figured he was fine.”
“He seemed fine. Whenever I saw him—”
“Whenever you saw him, he’d cut his doses. He got good at it really fast. I’ve learned since that it’s pretty easy with pills—to figure out how much you need to be normal, how much you need to fly, how much isn’t near enough anymore.” Brian lets go of Tessa’s hand. His teeth are bared, as if he’s under the ministrations of an invisible torturer.
Tessa takes her feet out of the water, making a woosh--patter sound. She moves closer to Brian and cups his jaw. “Say the rest.”
Brian’s voice is steady, but it’s too hard, brittle. It wants to break. “It’s pretty easy with pills. It’s a lot tougher with heroin.”
Tessa’s hand drops from Brian’s face.
“There’s every kind of drug you can think of on the circuit. Plus about fifty you can’t. You know—you knew Mitch, how he was. He found something he loved, and he wouldn’t give it up. He couldn’t. I’d talk to him about rehab, and he’d laugh at me—not in a dickish way, in a sad way. He’d say he had it under control, but he knew he was lying. He knew what he really meant was more like, ‘There’s no point, Bri.’ ” Brian’s throat squeaks on his own name. His head falls forward to Tessa’s shoulder. Before Tessa can reach out, he’s sitting straight again, straighter. Speaking more quickly. “When he announced he was doing the triple, I tried to talk him out of it, Tess. I tried. You have to believe me. I even went over his head, I went to Troy. I told Troy about the drugs, but he brushed it off. Said Mitch was gonna make history. The promoters said the same thing.” Brian looks nauseated.
“Slow down,” Tessa says.
“I can’t. I’ve gotta get this all out, or—I didn’t understand why, what this bug up his butt was about the triple. I asked him, I said, ‘Mitch, do a fucking double,’ because that was high--risk enough. A single is high risk. But Mitch told me he’d been offered fifty grand, so he had to do it. And that made no sense. I knew his finances were a mess, but I was covering him.” Brian’s mouth opens to say more, but his voice stalls. It croaks. His words won’t come out.
Tessa says, “What can I do?”
Brian closes his eyes, takes her hands, and places them on either side of his throat. He holds them there. “Our bank accounts were separate. But I forgot we set up your college money in a joint fund.”
Tessa transforms, slowly, into a close imitation of Munch’s The Scream.
Brian doesn’t see the transformation. He doesn’t want to. “I forgot until Mitch under--rotated on the second turn going into the third, and I could see, and everybody could see, how he was going to land, and it occurred to me right then—Oh yeah. Tess’s college money.” Brian opens his eyes and takes in Tessa’s profound and boundless horror. Brian takes it in like he deserves it, because, “I should have thought of that earlier. I could have told him we’d make it up. I’d make it up. But he didn’t want me to know, cuz that was the worst thing either of us could have ever imagined doing. We promised you. We told you you’d go to college on us. We swore it, and Mitch was so proud we could do that for you. The day we showed you the paperwork—remember? Your seventeenth? You and me and Mitch at the Lone Spur Grill. You cried, and you never cry.” Brian takes a handkerchief—a handkerchief?—from his jeans pocket and dries Tessa’s face. “Mitch told me that night—before he fell asleep, he told me he was going to marry you someday. And then about a year later, he’s dying on a dirt ramp because he drained your college money down to nothing. He drained it to nothing, and then he borrowed to put it back and he drained it again. And he’s dying, and he’s looking up at me, his big brother—by eight minutes, but still his big brother—and he’s telling me, ‘Make it up, Bri. You gotta make it up, okay?’ And he keeps saying that and saying that, and I’m telling him I will but he needs to hold on, we’ll make it up together. But then his breathing gets short, and before it gets so bad he can’t talk anymore, the last thing he says to me, the very last thing is—‘Don’t tell Tess.’ ”
Tessa makes an appalling noise. A child in a sadist’s strong grip might make this noise. She covers her mouth with both palms. Tears fill and flood. Her complexion is hectic with color.
Brian is nodding at her, but he keeps talking, like his words are rocks and speech is their momentum down a hillside. “The promoters didn’t even wait till after the funeral. They quoted me a hundred grand to do the stunt. The day before the wake, remember? Remember that call I got when you were helping me pick out what he should wear?” Tessa looks down at the glowing green stone. “I wanted to tell you. Tess, you can’t know how badly I wanted to tell you.” He takes her shoulders. She stares at the stone. “You were the only person who felt him being gone like I did. You were the only other one who knew how good he was, how he wasn’t just some fun--time jerk. He was more than a party; he was good. I knew—Mitch didn’t know, but I knew—you could handle hearing it, the whole truth, and you’d come out the other side still loving him, exactly the same as before, better. Tess, you’ve gotta look at me for this last part. I swear on Mitch’s grave, it’s the last time I’ll make you look at me ever again, but please, please do it.”