Tessa says, “One of that hotness is dead.” Now her voice has an edge. “Remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. That’s all you’d tell me, though.”
Tessa is a wretched storyteller—unless the story is about lost shoes and music fests and Walgreens. If it’s Jules asking, Tessa usually tells, but obfuscation is such a habit with her that she leaves things out and doesn’t know she’s doing it. “Troy was a—”
“Troy? Was that the other twin?”
“No, the other twin was Mitch.” Tessa doesn’t mind Jules interrupting; she finds the interruptions a welcome relief. “Troy was our foster father. Lorraine was his wife. Troy was a professional motocross racer.”
“Motocross?” Jules says, scissoring bandages and gauze. “Like motorcycles?”
“Right. He was on the road something like three hundred twenty days a year.” Tessa’s body shifts around in the folding chair, as though the story’s a cocoon she wants to be free of. “But when he was home, it was like a different house.”
“Different how?”
“Lorraine was a bitch, that’s how. No, not like that. She didn’t hit, she yelled. A lot. A lot a lot. But when Troy was home, she was a saint. It was so bizarre.”
“Why would a bitch take in foster kids?”
Tessa laughs bitterly. “Functional adults don’t take in fosters. No, that’s not true. Very few functional adults take in fosters. Jules, I didn’t sever my jugular here—I think you’ve cut enough gauze.”
“Let the nurse work, control freak. So, what? She yelled Mitch to death?”
“No. Troy taught Mitch and Brian motorcycles whenever he was home. Riding, repairing, racing. It was crazy. They were ten years old, racing hunks of junk in the fields behind the house.” Tessa pauses, maybe so Jules can ask a question.
Jules doesn’t.
“They built a ramp,” Tessa says. “I helped. They started doing tricks.”
Jules tapes the bandages. She’s slow about it. She watches her work and not Tessa’s face. Tessa doesn’t like being watched.
Brian is attacking the grease on his hands with a kitchen towel. The towel has red stains on it, most likely cherry coulis. One cannot rule out the possibility that the stains are not cherry coulis. He goes to the swinging door and peeks out at Tessa and Jules across the ballroom. He lets the door swing shut and watches Henri direct the sous--chefs through desperate slicing and spicing of volatile fruit. Justin pulls a rack of dishes from the dishwasher, and Brian, tossing the towel aside, goes to the sink. He starts rinsing red--soiled plates and bowls.
“You don’t have to do that,” Justin says. “You can go find Tessa if you want.”
“They’re girl--talking. I don’t mind.” He arranges rinsed dishes in an empty tray.
“So,” Jules says, after a long silence, “he died doing a trick in the backyard?”
Tessa shakes her head. “They dropped out of school when they were sixteen and joined the circuit. The Domini Twins.” Her eyes sparkle, half sarcastically. “They did things the sport had never seen. This one, they’d—” Tessa stands up and sits on her left foot. “They’d swap motorcycles in midair. It was terrifying. They brought me on tour whenever they could. Whenever it didn’t mess with school. They were nuts about me staying in school, Brian especially. He and Mitch set up a college fund for me. That’s how I got through UCLA with zero debt.”
Jules raises her eyebrows. “So Mitch died—doing one of those tricks with Brian?”
“No,” Tessa says. “The most flips anyone ever did in midair was two. A couple of weeks before my eighteenth birthday, Mitch makes an announcement he’s gonna do three. Three midair rotations.”
The Killer gets out of the secret elevator on the seventh floor and returns to Room 717. He’s wearing plastic bags over his shoes, secured with rubber bands above the pant cuffs. He must have gotten them from a cleaning closet to avoid dripping more blood on the carpet. He goes to the bathroom in Room 717 and rinses his knife. There’s blood on his coveralls and his mask. He gets into the shower fully clothed.
Jules says, “And Mitch—”
“He under--rotated going into the third turn. He landed on his back, crushed his spine from the midthoracic all the way up to C3. He was alive for about five minutes, after. Brian got to him, got to talk to him. I wasn’t there—I was in school.”
“God. Could he talk? Did Mitch say anything?”
Tessa doesn’t seem to hear. “I begged Brian to quit. At the funeral. I literally got down on my knees, crying, screaming. He got on his knees, too, and he hugged me as tight as he could.” Tessa doesn’t seem to be in the ballroom anymore. Her voice is far away. She isn’t crying or screaming; it’s as if doing neither highlights how loudly, back then, she did both. She doesn’t notice when Jules applies a last piece of tape and simply holds her hand. “He told me no, he needed to keep it up. Not only that, he had to do the triple rotation. He said he didn’t have a choice.” Tessa jumps like she hears a door slam and pulls her hand out of Jules’s.
She considers the bandage for almost a minute. Nods her thanks.
Jules nods in return and says nothing.
The Killer sets his mask over the shower door. It hangs there like flayed skin. The bathroom window is open, and the pulsing--red sun is nearing the sea, turning the water violet, throwing soft golden light. A blob of Caucasian giant is all that can be seen. The Killer folds his rinsed coveralls over the shower door and shuts off the spray. There is a second pair of coveralls hanging on a hook, where the bathrobes usually are. The Killer’s bare arm reaches around and pulls the clean pair inside. His arm is sleeved in tattoos—a melt of mauve and black ink, unidentifiable as any kind of design.
The same golden light bathes the ballroom. Its entire west wall is windows. They back the bandstand, ending at the two doors—storage room to the right when facing the bandstand, kitchen to the left—that split off to make the room’s overall shape an octagon. Tessa is walking toward the kitchen with a clutch of bloody paper napkins. Jules is walking toward the storage room with a cheap folding chair in each hand. She got the folding chairs from the long table, where the representatives of Destin Management Group’s fund--raising arm sat to write the descriptions of the silent auction items. Tessa was doubtlessly pissed that the folding chairs remained in the dining area.
Jules opens the storage room door. Her bloodcurdling scream fills the ballroom.
CAMERA 34, 33, 31, 12, 59
Justin drops two clean plates. By the time they shatter, he’s almost out of the kitchen.
Brian beats Justin across the ballroom, to the storage room, holding a soapy glass.
Tessa beats them both to where Jules is gaping at the storage room floor.
“It’s cherries,” Tessa says, laughing, and puts her arms around Jules in an anomalous show of affection, before Justin arrives and takes over. “It’s canned cherries, Jules. A pallet must’ve leaked.”
There are rooms in Manderley Resort that do not have security cameras. Not many, but a few.
Jules is laughing now, too. “Cherries?” she says, her nails buried to the cuticles in her husband’s biceps.
“Cherries,” says Tessa, grinning at Brian, who seemed primed, in running toward Tessa, to leap between her and any danger. It was a giveaway in his posture—canted forward, reckless but with a goal. It was in his face—panic, thick and animal. He’s still trying to make it subside. He’s breathing hard, shoving shaking hands into his jacket pockets. He remembers the soapy glass when his right hand won’t fit. He looks at the glass like an embarrassment.
Brian grins back at Tessa but says, “Cherries? You sure?”
“What else would it be? Hey, Henri?”
Henri, also attracted by Jules’s scream but disinclined to run, is in the doorway of the kitchen.
Tessa asks him, “Could you spare a sous--chef to clean this up? There’s a mop spigot in here. It won’t take five minutes.”
Henri puffs up like a cranky bird. “We are all busy.”
Tessa doesn’t puff. She doesn’t need to. Her voice does all the work. “This room isn’t food storage. It’s speakers and extension cords for the stage. I count at least two--dozen pallets of cherries in here. I understand you have a system for the pantry, but you can’t put your overflow in with electrical equipment, and this is why.” Her eyes, too. Her eyes can be depthless when she wants them to be. “It’s your mess. Clean it up.”
Her eyes were depthless when she stared past a straining neck, palmed a contorting shoulder blade, ran another hand down perfect vertebrae to a strong ass, and cupped. Stared at the ceiling, where she was seeing someone she wished were with her instead.
She looks at Brian. Stares, really. Her hips move like a clock’s third hand. Brian looks back at her. He’s put the glass as low by his side as he can, humiliated to be holding it. He licks his lips. Tessa bites her lower lip.
This has lasted three seconds.
“What else would it be?” Tessa says again, turning to Justin and Jules. They shrug, disinterested in that particular question, but Jules’s mouth is an intrigued little moue and Justin pumps his eyebrows at Brian, as if to say, Well, well. Brian doesn’t notice. He’s making room as a sous--chef squeezes by. The sous--chefs all look alike, which is counterintuitive, as all four of them have dyed hair and elaborate tattoos and strange piercings. Their efforts to appear distinct from one another have accomplished the opposite: they are a mass. And an individual split off from the group—receding, now, into the storage room—is androgynous, anonymous, forgotten amidst his tribe’s collective desperation to be remembered. Running water is heard.
“Blood,” Brian says. Does he say it so Tessa will turn to him again? If so, it works. “She thought it was blood. Looks like it.”
Justin says, “And the cherries are clots and brains! Ehh--heh-heh--heh!”
Jules smacks his arm. She’s snorting. “Shut up, Cryptkeeper.”
“Nobody even remembers that show,” says Tessa in solidarity.
“You do,” Brian says. “You loved that show. You’d make me tape it and then watch it with you once the house was asleep.”
Jules and Justin are quiet. Tessa turns her head, slightly but conspicuously, to regard the sun over the ocean. Brian taps the soapy glass against his outer thigh. There’s the tink of glass against denim, the swsshk of a mop on sticky tile.
“Mademoiselle?”
Tessa says, “Yes. Henri, what’s up?” and takes long strides to where he stands in the kitchen doorway.
“The phone,” Henri says sullenly, “it calls for you.” He releases the door when Tessa props it open with her boot heel.
She pushes the intercom button on the wall--mounted phone; it’s right inside the kitchen, bright red. Tessa insisted on the kitchen phone being red, so as to cut through confusion in a real emergency. She said it would be a pity if Manderley burned down because the phone blended with the wall. “This is Tessa.”
“The floor’s clean down here, pumpkin. Thought I’d tell you.”
“Excellent. Thanks, Del.” Tessa checks her watch. “Where’s Vivica? The big ballroom cleaning’s tonight.”
“I had her do a walk--through when she got here, and she found a stain on fifteen.”
“Stain? Where on fifteen?”