“I’m not trying to get into your business. I got no interest in that. But I raised girls of my own . . . and Win’s a decent kind of guy.” Marilyn watched her. “Does he know you’re spending time with Tristan?”
Only a few minutes into their acquaintance, there was no lying to this woman: Pearl shook her head. Marilyn leaned back, folding her skinny, freckled arms. “I worked for them for three years. Gave the house a light turn twice a month in the off-season, and cleaned regular for them all summer.” She turned her glass on the tabletop. “Not because it was a place I liked to be.”
“I’ve heard things.”
“Whatever you heard ain’t likely to be the truth. I don’t think anybody left alive knows the truth, except that boy.” She glanced over at the wall, where gold-tone picture frames held photographs of a little blond girl who Pearl recognized after a moment as Indigo. Elementary school pictures, her hair in braids or cut painfully short, face full of tender openness, the kind of pictures you wouldn’t want just anybody seeing. “I’ve been making my living cleaning for nearly twenty years now.” She flicked her hand at Pearl. “You know how it is with summer people. After a while, most of them stop seeing you, don’t even notice when you run the vacuum through the room. I’ve seen some things maybe I wasn’t meant to.” Her gaze sharpened. “And you don’t get recommendations by running your mouth.”
“I’d never gossip about this. I swear. No one will ever know we were here today.”
Marilyn raised her brows at Reese. “What about him?”
Reese held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor. Or something.”
“Still a smart-ass. Glad to see nothing’s changed.” Marilyn exhaled, examined them for a beat. “I guess Indigo wouldn’t have asked if she didn’t trust you two.”
Pearl sat forward in her chair, gripping the edge of the seat.
“The reason I told you that I’ve raised girls is because I think most of us women got a gut instinct to mother. Some of us want to mother our men. You can throw your whole life away taking in strays, trying to fix the damage that some other woman did to him while he was still in diapers. Plain truth is, some men are just broken.”
“Is Tristan broken?”
“I never got a handle on what he is. But there’s a piece missing, all right. He might look like a big success, collecting trophies and degrees, but when it comes down to it, he ain’t nothing but a little boy who didn’t get what he needed from the people who were supposed to give it to him.”
“David and Sloane.”
“You hear about black sheep. That was Tristan. Cassidy and Joe, they acted close. Always sharing secrets, had heads for puzzles, games. I remember Cassidy used to plan these scavenger hunts for Joe, get him roaming all over the property and beach, looking for stuff she’d hidden. Tristan wasn’t home much, but when he was, he was alone. I’d have to put off straightening his room until last because he was usually locked up in there. Them other two kids steered clear of him most of the time.”
More otherness, more separation. “I’ve heard things were bad between him and David.”
Marilyn shifted, glanced at the door, as if someone might be peering in through the panes, eavesdropping. “I can’t say what was between them. But I saw David punch Tristan once.”
Pearl stared at her, a little surprised by her body’s sympathetic reaction: tightening stomach, clenching fists. “God. Really?”
“I was cleaning the third floor, the loft. Looked out the window to see Tristan leaving by the back door, David right behind him, carping on him about something. Tristan wouldn’t stop, so his dad pulled him around by the shoulder, popped him one in the eye.”
Reese spoke up. “What’d Tristan do?”
“Nothing. Took the punch. David sort of braced up, like he thought maybe they were finally going to have it out or something. Tristan was taller than his dad, too, old enough to stand up for himself. But he didn’t. He got back through the partying, I guess. Tearing the place to pieces with them other rich kids whenever his parents went away for the night. I’d show up in the morning and find kids still passed out drunk, sleeping it off. Had to flush them out of the bedrooms sometimes. Sent Cassidy’s boyfriend packing once last summer. Never seen a couple kids so embarrassed.”
Pearl rested her elbows on the table, her gaze landing on another framed picture of Indigo sitting on a shelf. This one was a candid, Indigo wearing a lavender snowsuit and pom-pom hat, smiling beside a snowman with the trailer in the background. Pearl thought of what the boys had said about Indigo, how everybody knew her; did Marilyn know about that? “How did Cassidy act that last summer? Did she seem like she was scared at all? Or nervous?”
“She was nervous as a cat, but that wasn’t anything new. Just how she was wired. High-strung.”
“Did you ever see David hurt her?”
“No. Never saw him lay a hand on the other kids. Cassidy had the pressure on her because of her talent, but David seemed real soft on Joe. Maybe it was because Joe was the baby, but he was the only one allowed to be a regular kid. They’d let him bike all around town on his own, go swimming with his friends. I don’t think Sloane cared much either way, anyhow. That woman was concerned with dolling herself up, running up her credit card bill, and parading Cassidy around.” Marilyn took a small sip from her glass, pushed it away as if bitter. “Who knows what really goes on inside a family? All I know is the little I saw. But if you ask me, the real trouble was between David and Tristan, always had been. When the two of them were in a room together, they didn’t hardly speak, but it was like lightning coming, all the time. You didn’t want to be there.”
Pearl leaned on her elbows. “Did you know they were planning on coming back for Christmas break this year?”
“Nope. Not until two weeks before. Sloane called me, asked if I could get the place spruced up, have somebody deliver a Christmas tree to the parlor.”
“Do you have any idea why they decided to come back to Tenney’s Harbor?”
“They didn’t give me reasons, I didn’t ask. Except when I was cleaning the first Sunday they were there, I got the feeling it was the girl’s idea. David was going on about the fact they’d come all this way, so Cassidy better enjoy it while it lasted, something like that.”
Cassidy’s idea. Pearl turned this over in her mind, glancing up when Reese cleared his throat and said, “Do you think Tristan knows who killed them?”
“Couldn’t say. But what you asked earlier, if I was surprised when I heard?” Marilyn shook her head. “Something was going to happen. Sooner or later. I just never thought it’d be anything so awful as that.” She put her hand to her mouth for a moment, then dropped it. “I never thought anybody’d end up dead. Especially not them kids.”
She walked them out and stood on the front step as they crossed the yard. “Reese.” He looked back. “When you see that granddaughter of mine, tell her to get her butt out here more often. Probably been a month since I’ve seen her.”
“Will do.” He and Pearl sat together in the car when Reese said, “She raised her. Indigo.”
Pearl looked up, watching as Marilyn went back around the trailer to her laundry. “Where were her parents?”
“Her dad was never in the picture. Indy lived here with her mom for a few years, with Marilyn helping them out. I guess her mom decided she couldn’t take it anymore, the whole mothering thing. She split. Marilyn’s been it for Indy ever since.”
Pearl tried to think of something to say to play off her surprise, but nothing came, so she started the engine, gazing out the windshield at a single dandelion that had escaped the blades of the lawn mower. She knew what it was like when a family split apart. She had no idea how it felt when neither of your parents wanted you.