“Haven’t a clue, since I never opened my door. She did seem to come and go a lot, always disappearing. She may have just been sneaking off for a ciggie all those times. You know how models love to smoke.”
“Do they? I wouldn’t know.”
He shrugged his shoulders irritatedly, as if my cluelessness annoyed him. “You just have to look at the paparazzi shots. Kate Moss is always waving a cigarette.”
He checked his watch suddenly, an obvious gesture of wanting to be done with our conversation. He stuck his reading glasses in the V of his sweater, flipped over the cover of his iPad, and rose to leave. Had I done something to make him so eager to exit?
“You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Bailey? I’ve got to go cancel my dinner plans for tonight.”
“Do you have an update on the road?”
“Our lovely hostess Sandy informs me that a plow is headed this way. But I’d been planning to be back in the city by five, and there’s no way that’s going to happen.”
“One question before you go. Did you, by any chance, call extension seven last night? Just before two thirty?” I was tipping my hand, but I needed to know if he was the caller.
He paused midmovement. By the expression in his red-rimmed eyes, I could tell that the question greatly intrigued him.
“Ahhh, is this an important clue you’re giving me a hint to?”
“Not really a clue of any kind. As you may have heard, Devon called that girl Laura for water during the night. About an hour and a half later the phone rang again, but no one was there. Devon was dead by then.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
What next, I wondered? I needed more answers, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. People were obviously in their rooms, catching up on sleep or praying for the plow to arrive.
When I reached the foyer downstairs, planning to return to my room yet again, I noticed that several rain ponchos had been hung on a row of pegs on the wall. Having viewed the weather only from windows over the past twelve hours, I decided to grab a poncho and head out to the deck.
It looked surreal outside, like a scene from a movie about a planet in a distant galaxy. Fog rose from the ground in patches all through the woods, as if there were smoldering brush fires. It had stopped raining, and the temperature seemed to have dropped again.
I took three steps out onto the deck and jerked in surprise when I spotted Tommy in the far right corner, the same spot where Cap and Devon had stood late Friday night. He was jacketless, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and a cell phone to his ear. It couldn’t have been a private call because he didn’t bother to lower his voice when he spotted me.
“Fuck it, man,” I heard him say. “I’m not going to do that. So just fuck it.”
The person on the other end must have offered a plea on his or her behalf, because Tommy listened for a bit, his face pinched.
“Like I said, fuck it,” he said finally. “I’ll talk to you later.”
He flicked the cigarette over the rail of the deck and dropped the phone into the pocket of the oversize white shirt he wore above jeans so tight the only thing left to the imagination was genital skin tone.
“Hi,” I said, walking toward him. “You want a poncho? There’s a bunch of them inside.”
“Why would I want a poncho? It stopped raining.”
Okaaay.
“How you doing?” I said, trying again. “This must be pretty upsetting.”
“Ya think?”
I wasn’t sure what to try next. He seemed to be making it clear he didn’t want to talk to me. But then he leaned back against the wet wooden rail of the deck and looked at me intently, as if we were two people who had things to say to each other.
“Devon was my lady for six freakin’ months, you know,” he said. “We weren’t an item anymore, but we were—I don’t know, connected still on some cosmic level.”
“Why did you break up?”
He shrugged. “I got a little distracted on my summer tour, if you know what I mean. That didn’t sit well with her at all. I couldn’t stand the nagging, so I took a powder.”
“And now you’re with Tory?”
“Yeah. For now. My IQ is shrinking just being with that bitch.”
“Any guesses about how Devon died?”
“Nope. She was as fit as a horse as far as I knew.”
That was a stretch, considering she had probably weighed about ninety-five pounds sopping wet.
“I mean, she smoked, she drank,” he added, “but she didn’t do hard drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Was she anorexic or bulimic?”
“A lot of these model chicks are all fucked up about their eating. I brought out a can of Reddiwip once with Tory, just for a little fun, and she practically went insane. I think she thought the calories were gonna be absorbed through her nipples.”
“But what about Devon?” I asked, trying not to let a picture form in my mind of Tory and Tommy in the sack with a bunch of sex props. “Was it more than just counting calories?”
“She never did anything on my watch. But from what I hear, it’d been a problem when she first started out. She was younger then—and she had a shitload of pressure on her. Everybody wanted her—she was the biggest model in the world.”
“Do you know any reason Devon would have been scared this weekend?”
“Scared? What are you talking about?” He stepped closer, and in the harsh light I saw how deep the grooves ran in his skin and the pockmarks from adolescent acne. He had the kind of looks only groupies and models seemed to love.
“I caught her crying in the woods around midday yesterday,” I explained. “She told me she was frightened—but she didn’t say why.”
He shrugged, wrestled a butane lighter and pack of Salems out of his jeans pocket, and fired up another cigarette.
“In case you didn’t notice, Devon was a bit of a mind fucker,” he said, after shooting a razor-thin stream of smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Maybe she was just playing with you.”
“It didn’t seem that—”
“I can’t help you, then. Like I said, there was still this connection between us, but it’s not like we talked anymore.”
“I had the feeling this weekend that she might want to restart the relationship—she seemed to be flirting with you.”
He snorted, as if I had no clue what I was talking about.
“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “Devon was a master mind fucker. She liked playing with me, just like she liked playing with everyone else. Why’re you so interested, anyway? Tory said you’re a reporter for one of those tabloid magazines. Shouldn’t you be trying to track down some story about a woman giving birth to wolves?”
“I work for a different type of rag than that.”
“You good at what you do? You look like you’d be good at what you do.” He ran his eyes up and down my body, letting them rest on my poncho. If I wasn’t careful, he was going to suggest we hunt down a squeeze bottle of Hershey’s syrup and spend the afternoon together.
I was thinking it might be just the right moment to take my leave, especially since it had begun to rain again—or make that sleet. Icy slivers of rain were suddenly bearing down on us, stinging my face. As I started to say good-bye, I heard a door nearby bang open. When I turned around, Tory was standing there, wearing only a pale yellow top and black leather leggings. She looked about as friendly as a fer-de-lance.
“You’re standing out here, talking to her?” she screeched.
“I’m having a fucking cigarette,” he snapped.
“But you said you were coming back in five minutes.”