Page 57 of The Last House Guest
“You have a key?”
She rolled her eyes. “You tell the visitors to leave the key in the mailbox. Nobody comes forhours. Not the best business practice, Avery. Can you blame me? I wouldn’t be surprised if there were others. You know how people get in the winter.” She stared directly into my eyes, daring me to deny it. Reminding me that I once was one of them, and she knew exactly what we’d done together.
I was thinking about the other properties, the signs of someone else. Not just the gas leak here but the shattered screen of the television at Trail’s End; the evidence of someone inside the Blue Robin; the candles lit all around the Sea Rose. How many more were there? “You made a copy of other keys, too, didn’t you?”
She shrugged again. “Sure, why not?”
I pushed open the kitchen windows, just in case. To me, this place would always be dangerous. “Is this because of Parker?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed, the skin pulling tight around the edges. Her teeth snagged at the corner of her lip, but she shook her head. “Fuck him.”
Still angry, then. And now in the position to do something about it. “I know you were there last year. At the party. I know you got in a fight with him.” I stepped closer, around the kitchen island. “I know you broke the window.”
Faith took a step back, her hand going to her elbow on instinct. There was a scar there from the surgery. I stopped moving, and she eyed me carefully.
“I was angry,” she said, staring back unflinching. As if that feeling bonded us together. As if we were the same. “He’s an asshole, but you probably already know that.” She looked to the side. “We’re all supposed to know that, right? We’re supposed to know better.” Then she fixed her eyes on mine, and I understood. How you could get pulled into the orbit of one world, thinking you had a place in it, even if you weren’t fully part of it.
“What happened between the two of you?” I asked.
“Parker Loman happened. You should know, right? Waltzed into the bed-and-breakfast like he owned the place. I knew who he was, had seen him every year, but suddenly, he saw me.” She smiled at the memory. “That first summer, it was fun, keeping the secret. But then he showed up withherthe next year.”
“Luce.”
She waved her hand, as if the name were inconsequential. Put a hand on her hip and leaned in to it. “He didn’t stop, you know. Kept telling me it was a mistake, bringing her to town. That he didn’t want her there anymore but couldn’t just send her home... He came to see meeven then,that night. Dropped his supposed girlfriend at the party and came to see me.”
I could believe it. The way he’d stood over me in the bathroom with Luce somewhere outside. Sadie’s words—that he could and did get away with everything. How he needed it, the idolization of Parker Loman.
“So you were tired of being a secret?” I asked.
“I thought it would be fun to play the secret out in public. More at stake, you know? He got so mad when I said I’d see him at the party later. Like there were some rules that I didn’t know about. He thought he was calling all the shots. But he’s not. It’s not just his decision. We argued about it at my place, but then he said he had to go. Another car pulled into the lot of the B&B, and it spooked him. He said he didn’t want to beseen.” She shook her head. “Seriously, even the thought of being seen with me was too much... Well, it didn’t seem so fun anymore.”
Parker Loman, living so many lives. His lies, then and now, so effortless. Did he know, all along, it had been her? Did he suspect her of sneaking around, causing damage to the properties, and was keeping quiet to save face? So he wouldn’t have to admit he had been seeing a local who had lost her mind?
“But you followed him,” I said. “To the party. Luce saw you there, you know.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Well. I didn’t go over right away. Spent some time stewing in my anger. But then, yes. I followed him. I knew where he was going. Where you all were. Though I didn’t expect Connor.” Her eyes widened. “This town convinces you all you’re better than you really are.”
“Faith,” I said, and she jarred back to reality. “You’ve been destroying his properties to get back at him?”
“I’m not that petty. A woman scorned.Really,Avery?” She strode through the foyer, threw open the front door, and gestured down the empty road. I stepped out front, looking into the trees, but I didn’t see anything. “Do you know what’s happening here while you act like Grant Loman’s little puppet? Do you know what’s happening to the rest of us as you watch him buy up more and more and more?”
I shook my head, because I didn’t. I knew Grant’s accounts deeply. Knew his hopes and aspirations for this place and my role within it. I knew people had been pissed when I sold my grandmother’s house to him, but I did not know what Faith was talking about.
“I finished my degree this May, and I come back home to work, and I discovered the B&B is totally in the red. Not just a little. Like unsalvageable. My parents took out a second mortgage for the expansion a couple years back, thinking they could recoup it with the new units. But we can’t. Not with all the other options out there.” She looked out the window. “We were supposed to expand here, did you know? We put a bid on these properties, were going to have this be an annex of the main building. But we didn’t get them. The properties are all under contract, some LLC.” Her upper lip pulled up past her teeth.
“I’m not working for them anymore. Believe me, I—”
“And you.” She stepped closer, fixing her anger on me. Walking down the front porch step, forcing me back in the process. “You, this complete fuck-up...” She cringed, then shook her head to herself. “I’m sorry, but you were. This completenobody. Now you’re running the show? When people like me, who do everything right, get the degree, serve their time—we come back here to nothing? Excuse me for doing something about it. I’m just trying to reclaim what’s mine.”
“By what?” And then I understood. She was trying to spook the visitors. Hit the Lomans’ bottom line where it hurt.Ourbottom line, as far as she was concerned. I didn’t know whom she was angrier with—them or me. Or maybe everything was all tied up together, feeding off one another. Me, the person who had hurt her physically; Parker, the one who had broken her heart; the Lomans, destroying her future. Everything broke here.
“Have you been up there? At the Lomans’?”
She threw her hands in the air, as if it were all so obvious. “I’m just trying to find something. Anything. I just want something I can use. I want them out of here.” She was trembling then. “I wantedyouout of there. It isn’t fair.” Her voice broke on the last word.
The nights when the electricity had gone out and I’d believed myself alone. Footsteps in the sand, the back door left open, and the feel of someone in the house with me. The flashlight on the bluffs. “You could go to jail,” I whispered. “They could ruin you.” The truth, then. They could ruin anyone.
She sat on the first step, looking down the undeveloped street, legs stretched out in front of her and crossed at the ankles. “Are you going to tell the police?”
