Page 39 of The Last House Guest
“I didn’t.” He looked out at the sea again, like he was thinking something through. “You gave her the tour?” I asked, dragging his attention back.
“Yeah. I did it right then. She had the cash on her, more than I usually would’ve charged, but I wasn’t gonna complain. She asked me to tell her about the islands, all the stories from the charter tours, you know?” He shrugged. “Guess that’s why she came to me.”
These were the islands the locals escaped to when we wanted to get away. Anchoring the boat offshore and swimming the final few meters with the current. One of them had an old cabin, deteriorated and rotted, only the walls left standing, last I saw. But at one point someone had carried in the stone and the wood and made themselves a secret home. Connor and Faith and I spent one evening there, waiting out a storm.
“Where did you take her?” I asked.
“I took her to three. The two in Ship Bottom Cove first, because the tourists usually like to see those. But she wanted one that she could explore herself off the boat, said she’d heard there were plenty of hidden places. So we went to the Horseshoe.” I felt my jaw tensing as he spoke. “I stayed on the boat,” he said, as if he needed to defend himself from the implication.
The Horseshoe was what the locals called the horseshoe-shaped band of rock and trees that at one point had been connected to land by a bar, at low tide—so went the stories. The waves broke over the rise of land you couldn’t see, creating a sheltered cove, which made it a favorite of kayakers and locals alike. Any connecting land had long since disappeared, but we used to tell stories of travelers trapped there when the tide came back in.
“She swam there, though?” I asked, confused. Sadie did not like cold water. Or sharp sun. Or uncertain currents. She did not like being alone.
“Yeah, well, she waded out to it, just had a small backpack with her, figured it held her phone, maybe a towel. It was low tide, and I anchored there, it was easy enough. But she was gone so long, I took a nap. I probably would’ve been worried if I hadn’t fallen asleep. I woke up to the sound of a camera. She was standing over me, in her bathing suit, shivering from the cold.” He ran his hand through the air, like he knew the outline of her. Like he’d committed it to memory.
But none of this made sense. Why would Sadie need to come out here, with Connor? I could’ve told her anything she wanted to know about these spots. I would’ve come out here with her myself. Told her the stories, not only about the history of town but my own. Listened to her laugh at my stories of getting stranded; watched her eyes widen at the time we tried and failed to sneak a boat back to the docks at dawn. The parts of Littleport only I could show her, proving my own worth.Did you get in trouble?I could imagine her asking. Feel my smile as I told her we didn’t. We were kids of Littleport, and you protected your own.
Sadie may have forgiven me for turning her in to her father, but she still hadn’t trusted me—not with this. She’d come here alone. Without telling any of us—something she’d kept secret. Something that would’ve remained that way, if Greg Randolph hadn’t seen her and Connor together.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he said, jaw set. But I didn’t expect he’d tell me the truth, not after all this time. “I don’t know why she took my picture.” He pressed his lips together. “I know better than to get involved with a family like that.” He gave me a look, as if I should’ve understood this, too. “This is why I told the police nothing. Because just one thing—one private tour—and suddenly, I’m dragged into this whole mess.”
“This whole mess? She’sdead,Connor.” My voice broke midsentence.
He flinched. “I’m sorry, Avery.”
“She had yournumber.”
“She called me after. I didn’t pick up. I didn’t like... It was weird, okay? Why she was there, what she wanted with me. Why she took my picture. I couldn’t figure it out. At first I thought you had sent her, but...”
He had an answer for everything. Quick with an explanation—and yet. Sadie was out here in the week before her death. If Connor was telling the truth, what could she possibly have been looking for?
“Can you take me there?”
He narrowed his eyes, not understanding.
“To the island. Please. Will you take me there, too.”
OUTSIDE THE PROTECTION OFthe harbor, the waves dipped, and the spray of the water coated my arms, the back of my neck, as he cut a path to the arc of land in the distance.
There was no way to avoid the past as we got nearer. Time snapping closer as the land mass grew larger. It was the place we’d come seven years earlier, just before the start of the summer season.
Connor had shown up at my grandmother’s house. “Come on,” he’d said. I hadn’t left the house in two days. I hadn’t slept, my hands were shaking, the house was a mess.
When we stepped off the dock onto his father’s boat, I asked, “Is Faith coming?”
“Nah,” he said, “just us.” And the way he smiled, keeping his eyes cast down, told me everything.
Before my grandmother died, it was where things were sliding. Connor and me. An inevitability that everyone could see coming but us. The knowing looks that we’d railed against our entire lives. As we grew older, a playful nudge with a shoulder or a hip, a wry joke and a fake laugh and a roll of the eyes. And then one day he blinked twice, and refocused, and it was like he was seeing something new. I saw something reflected in his eyes—of what else might be possible.
The touch of his hand became more deliberate. A play kiss in front of everyone late that last fall, when we were drinking down on Breaker Beach, while he bent me back, and his eyes sparkled in the bonfire as he laughed. And I’d said,That’s it? That’s everything? That’s what I’ve been waiting for all these years?And took off down the beach before he could catch me, my heart pounding.
When he said, hours later,You’ve been waiting?
So we’d come here with a cooler of beer and takeout from the deli and a blanket, wading out to the island together, gear held over our heads to keep dry. We never got to the food or the drinks because I knew exactly what this was, and there was too much in the lead-up. But I wasn’t capable of feeling anything then, just my own bitterness. A disappointment that, even then, he wanted something from me. How he couldn’t see that I was so far beneath the surface, he might as well have been anyone.
I was a tight ball of resentment when he came over two days later with a lopsided smile, thinking somehow that this fixed everything: not only me but us. Even worse was the new fear I’d only just uncovered, that maybe he liked me this way—watching me slide to the edge and unravel, so he could make me back into the person he desired. It was the beginning and also the end.
