I took in the posh decor as I followed her up an incredible staircase that was lined with paintings and sculptures that looked straight out of a Paris museum.
Finley made a point of touching two of the sculptures on the head and then she stopped and tapped the top of the banister three times. “You’ll be staying two doors down from me. The bedrooms are all left once you get to the top of the stairs. Your room is the third door on the right.” She smiled at me over my duffle. “Just in case you get lost, which is pretty easy to do in twenty thousand square feet.” She stopped long enough to point out a door. “This is Cole’s room. You definitely don’t want to go in there.”
“I guess he’d be mad, huh?”
“No.” Her blue eyes looked serious beneath the heavy black make-up and fringe of white blonde bangs. “Dirty socks. Stinks like hell in there.”
I smiled. “Mental note taken.” We continued down the long hallway. “I take it Cole is your brother?”
“Half-brother.” She looked back at me. “Cole, Jude, and I all have different mothers. We were all part of my dad’s procreation period.”
“He had a period?”
She broke into wild laughter and then fanned her face to stop. I was feeling rather stupid. “No, like Picasso’s blue period. No tampons involved. His ‘procreation period’ came right after his ‘captivated by cocaine’ period and right before his ‘grappling with middle age’ period. Which, believe me, he’s still grappling with. I think the only difference between his ‘middle age’ period and the ‘captivated by cocaine’ period is that instead of packing coke in his suitcase, he’s packing ibuprofen.”
“Captivated by cocaine?”
We stopped at a room and she threw open the door. “My dad thinks captivated is a much happier word than addiction.”
“He has a point.” We stepped inside the room, and I had to mentally remind myself to close my mouth. A large four poster bed, complete with silky canopy and more pillows than I would know what to do with, sat in the center of a room that rivaled the school cafeteria in size. “Getting lost in the house— hell, I’m going to get lost in that bed.”
“That’s cute. I like that.” Finley looked up at me. “You sure are beautiful. I’ve always wanted to be tall and statuesque like my mom. She was a model. But I was six weeks premature, and I just never grew much.”
“Do you see her a lot?” Talking about her mom sent a twinge of homesickness through me.
“Nah, she’s living in Venice or something like that. My dad got full custody of each of us, so we grew up with him. It helps to have a lot of money for good lawyers. But I think the three of us would have chosen to stay with him regardless. Jude’s the oldest. He’s twenty-two. His mother was an actress, but she died in a car accident. And Cole sees his mother occasionally. She used to be Dad’s accountant.” She sighed. “Oh my gosh, just tell me to shut up when I drone on too much.”
“There’s been no droning at all. I find it fascinating.”
“So what are your parents like?” She reached for my hand. Her fingers were covered with rings, and her slim wrists were weighed down by bangles. “Do you live with your mom or dad?”
“Both actually.”
“Wow, you don’t hear that very often.”
“I know. That’s kind of sad. I live with my parents and my two little sisters. My parents had me when they were teenagers, so they’re pretty young. My dad is absolutely obsessed with your dad.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear and displayed a long row of tiny gold hoops running down one ear. “Let me guess, mid-thirties, played in a band, still wears long hair.”
“Yes. Holy crap, do you know him?”
“No. That is just the usual profile of Dad’s man groupies.”
I pressed my hand to my chest. “Thank God. I just had a nightmarish vision of my dad standing outside of your house with his Black Thunder t-shirt holding a big piece of cardboard painted with the words ‘I love you, man’.”
She laughed. “Hey, you’d be amazed what people do to get into see my dad. One lady even parachuted onto the grounds. She was completely naked, but her body was painted with the Black Thunder black wing logo.”
“What did your dad do?”
“That’s the sad thing about it. She’d gone to all that trouble but hadn’t bothered to find out if my dad was even home. He was in Europe on tour. Jude felt sorry for her though. He handed her a signed picture before the cops put her in the car.”
A wet nose on the back of my hand startled me, and I looked down expecting to see a dog. A black and white pig with a gold hoop in one ear wiggled his snout at me.
“That’s Some Pig,” Finley said.
“He sure is.”
“No, I mean that’s his name, Some Pig. He was rescued from a horrid farmer who didn’t feed him enough. That’s why he is so small. His real name was Sheldon, like the T.V. character, because he’s highly intelligent and obsessive-compulsive, like me.” She leaned closer. “But worse,” she whispered as if her pig could understand.
“Can I pet him?”
“He’d be pissed if you didn’t.”
I reached down and stroked the top of his head. “I’ve never touched a real pig. I remember seeing some on a field trip to the farm, but they didn’t let us touch them. The whole time the guy was standing in the pen, telling us all kinds of information about pigs. But I wasn’t paying attention. I just kept thinking—when are we going to pet them? But we never got to touch any of the animals. It was the lamest field trip ever.” I leaned down and ran my fingers down his back. His hair was thick and rough. “How did he end up being called Some Pig?”
“One day, I made the grave mistake of letting Sheldon, the pig, not the television character, watch Charlotte’s Web with me. After that his mood changed. He stayed in his straw bed, and he wouldn’t eat, not even nachos. Those are his favorite. So a pet psychic came and had a session with him. She told us to change his name to Some Pig and it worked.”
“There’s such thing as a pet psychic?”
“Yeah, they’re in high demand in this neighborhood. Lots of neurotic pets.” She headed out of the room. “Are you hungry?”
“A little bit.”
“Great. Let’s go down to the kitchen. You can meet Jude. He’s an ass most of the time, but I love him.”
“And does he also suffer from dirty sock syndrome?”
“Yeah, after all, he’s a guy. But Jude likes to sleep in the pool house, so his room stays pretty stink free.”
Some Pig and I followed Finley down the long flight of richly carpeted stairs. She touched two different sculptures on the way down but once again tapped the banister three times at the bottom. She must have sensed me noticing her little ritual. She looked back at me over her shoulder. “Some people pray to keep bad stuff from happening. I tap the banister. I personally think my method is less involved.” A steady drumbeat rolled down the hallway to the left of the landing. “Sounds like Jude’s in the gym.”
“There’s a gym in your house?”
“Among other things.”
She had short legs and I had absurdly long ones, but I had to hurry to keep up with her frantic pace. The pig had to nearly gallop on his stumpy legs. We reached a door that vibrated with loud music.
“Stay,” Finley told Some Pig and she reached for the knob. The sound system would have made my dad drool. It nearly blasted me off my feet.
A long, hardwood floor stretched out beneath a field of exercise equipment and weight machines. The room had a lower ceiling than the other rooms and half of the walls were covered in mirrors. It seemed deserted as I followed Finley around two large weight machines to the farthest corner. Then through the pounding music, I heard the rhythmic sound of grunting interspersed with fists smacking a punching bag. The last mirror held the reflection of a shirtless guy with broad shoulders and a muscular back. Sweat dripped down a large, intricate tattoo of Black Thunder’s famous black wing logo. The punching bag bounced with each hit.