Chương 2
“Yes.”
“And you let us drive all this way.”
I stared at her.
“You banned me from coming to my own house.”
“You never told us it was yours.”
“You never asked.”
“Because why would we ask you who owns a rental?”
“That is becoming a pretty important question.”
Brooke’s eyes narrowed.
“Did you set this up?”
That accusation hurt more than it should have.
I had known she would find a way to make herself the victim, but knowing somebody’s habits does not make them painless.
“I didn’t send you here.”
“Then how did Mom get the code?”
Nobody spoke.
That was the first moment the situation stopped being funny.
I looked at Mom.
She looked toward the ocean.
“Mom,” I said.
She adjusted the brim of her straw hat.
Harris’s posture changed slightly.
Not dramatically, but enough for me to notice.
“Mrs. Ellison,” he said, “where did you obtain the entry code?”
“It was given to me.”
“By whom?”
“A friend.”
“What friend?”
She pressed her lips together.
Brooke stepped toward her.
“What friend even knows Mara owns this place?”
Mom turned on me instead.
“You could have changed the code.”
My stomach tightened.
I had changed it.
Twice.
The current code had existed for only eleven days.
I had set it to my birthday because I was tired of forgetting random numbers, and because almost nobody besides me had access to the property system.
My housekeeper had her own code.
The maintenance company had temporary access when scheduled.
My property manager, Elise, had administrator privileges.
Nobody in my family should have known 198507.
Not even because it was my birthday.
Mom had always insisted my birthday was July ninth.
I was born after midnight on July tenth.
The discrepancy had become one of those ridiculous family arguments that survived because nobody cared enough to kill it.
But the keypad required six digits.
The code was 198507, the year first and then the month, not my full birthday.
Someone had not guessed it.
Someone had seen it.
“Where did you get the code?” I asked.
Mom’s confidence finally cracked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“You’re humiliating this family over a house.”
“No, Linda,” Aunt Cheryl said quietly.
Everyone looked at her.
Cheryl rarely challenged my mother in public.
She rubbed sunscreen into the back of one hand although there was no sunscreen on it.
“You told me your friend owned this place.”
Mom’s head snapped toward her.
“You said she owed you a favor,” Cheryl continued.
“I never said that.”
“You absolutely did.”
Brooke lowered her phone.
“Who is she?”
Mom said nothing.
I stepped past her and entered the foyer.
The house smelled like lime cleaner, sunscreen, and the onions Kyle had apparently started chopping in my kitchen.
Bags covered the floor.
Someone had already placed a wet towel over the back of my linen sofa.
Under ordinary circumstances, that towel would have irritated me for an unreasonable amount of time.
Now I barely saw it.
I opened the smart-lock application on my phone.
The access history loaded.
At 2:41 that afternoon, my primary code had opened the front door.
Before that, at 11:06 the previous Tuesday, someone had accessed the lock remotely through an administrator account.
My account had not done it.
I clicked the activity.
The administrator name appeared beneath the timestamp.
ELISE MORROW.
My property manager.
I read it twice.
Elise had called me three days earlier to ask whether I planned to use the house this weekend.
I had told her no.
She had sounded distracted, and I had heard a dog barking behind her.
Nothing about the conversation had seemed important.
Now my mother was standing in my foyer with a code only Elise should have been able to retrieve.
I turned around.
“Do you know Elise Morrow?”
Mom’s face answered before her mouth did.
Brooke saw it too.
“Oh my God.”
Kyle stood.
“Who’s Elise?”
“My property manager.”
Dad’s grocery bag slipped from his knee and landed softly beside his shoe.
Mom looked at Harris.
“This is a private family disagreement.”
Harris shook his head.
“Not anymore.”
My phone vibrated in my hand.
For one stupid second, I expected Elise.
Instead, it was a text from a number I did not recognize.
The message contained a photograph.
I opened it.
My mother and Elise were sitting together at a restaurant table, wineglasses between them, both smiling at whoever had taken the picture.
The timestamp embedded in the forwarded image was from six months earlier.
A second message appeared beneath it.
You need to ask Linda what she promised Elise in exchange for the house.
I looked up at my mother.
She was no longer angry.
She was scared.
For several seconds, nobody moved.
The refrigerator alarm kept chirping from the kitchen with the stubborn cheerfulness of an appliance that had no idea a family was coming apart twenty feet away.
Kyle finally went inside and shut the door.
“Couldn’t take it anymore,” he said when he came back.
No one laughed this time.
I showed Harris the messages without handing him my phone.
He read them, then asked whether I knew the sender.
“No.”
“Don’t delete anything.”
“I won’t.”
Mom took a step toward me.
“What did they send you?”
I turned the screen against my chest.
“Who is Elise to you?”
“She manages your house, apparently.”
“You were having dinner with her six months ago.”
Brooke looked at Mom so sharply that the movement made her earrings swing.
“You knew Mara owned this place six months ago?”
“I knew she owned property.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“I never said it was.”
Dad stood slowly from the bench.
He left the cobbler where it had fallen.
“Linda, stop doing that.”
Mom stared at him.
“Doing what?”
“Answering the sentence beside the question.”
May you like
Something passed between them that had nothing to do with the beach house.
It was old enough that neither of them needed to name it.
