I don’t have time to contemplate, to knock, to peek inside. I test the door, find it unlocked, and hurry through. Fighting the shoving of a fierce gust, I manage to get the door closed behind me.
Dripping wet and shivering, I call for Ness and then Monique. No answer. My shirt is soaked, and I see that the dark bra was a poor choice. My legs are covered in goose bumps. The AC and my wet clothes threaten to turn me into a giant ice cube as a puddle begins to form at my feet.
I hurry to the guest bath and find just a sink and a toilet. There’s a small and useless hand towel threaded through a ring—the decorative kind you can never tell if you should actually use. The kind that barely absorbs water anyway.
I look elsewhere. The house is a maze. I’ve only seen parts of it: the overhang room, the main hall, the foyer, the kitchen. A breezeway leads off to another wing. The windows are all closed, turning the breezeway into a sheltered glass hall. I follow it, leaving wet footprints behind me, hoping to find guest quarters with proper bathrooms and proper towels. This is already going badly. But it’ll be a long time before Ness returns. I hope.
At the end of the hall, I pass through a reading room. Bay windows jut out toward the sea. There are shells everywhere: on the walls, in glass cabinets, decorating every surface. Shelling books are scattered on a table. There’s an open sketchbook with a detailed drawing of some torus. I can look later. My teeth are chattering. I need to find a thermostat and turn off the AC.
Past the reading room, I enter a bedroom twice the size of my entire apartment. It has its own sitting area with a fireplace, a breakfast nook, a desk in a far corner, matching Tahitian-style furniture, and flowing white drapes that frame a view of the beach. I can see why the house is arranged as a scattering of joined rooms along the dunes. Every room has a sweeping view of the sea.
Through a door on the far side of the room, I pass through a walk-in closet and, finally, a bathroom. Towels. Hallelujah. I grab one and pat myself dry, squeezing my hair in the folds, and realize my clothes are not going to dry for a while. There’s a robe hanging on the back of the door. I close the door, strip naked, and don the robe. Wringing out my shorts in the sink, I remember the note and fish it out. The piece of paper is soaked through, the blue ink turned to blotches. It’s barely readable. But Ness is the only person who could get angry about my being here, and he knows he wrote it. I lay the note out to dry, wring out my shirt and underwear, and drape everything over the shower door.
Rather than snoop around in Ness’s robe, I decide to borrow clothes from the closet. Wrapping my hair up in a fresh towel, I step back into the wardrobe. I find a shirt and a pair of shorts. Both will be too big, but they’ll keep me decent. I’m pulling on the shorts when a small voice tells me I’m making a mistake, that I need to slow down, that the rain and my wet clothes are a blessing.
No one can blame me for coming up to the main house. I’m a guest. Our plans got rained out, and my clothes were soaked through. Of course I would want to find a change of dry clothes. Who wouldn’t?
I put the shorts and shirt back and pretend I never saw them. If I’m caught rummaging around, I can say I’m looking for something dry to put on. I can’t use that excuse if I’m already wearing something. It’s perfect. Agent Cooper would be proud.
Back in the bedroom, I go through the nightstand first. Two books with dog-eared pages, one on Tahitian wayfinding, the other on rogue waves. Both are from university presses. Expensive and dull. There’s a pen and a notepad, but nothing written on the first page, and the indentations are too faint to make out what was written before. A tangle of wires and two electrical chargers, nothing interesting.
I try the desk on the other side of the bed, passing by a display case full of rare shells. The problem with looking for excellent fakes in this house is that there are museum-quality pieces everywhere. Even if I had my loupe, the last specimens overcame close scrutiny by both me and the FBI. What I need are notes, passwords to his email accounts, letters from accomplices, something like that.
The small desk mostly turns up pictures of Ness’s daughter. They’re everywhere—in frames arranged across the desk and loose in the drawers. They start with her as a toddler and progress to a gap-toothed smile and then to a gangly young woman on the verge of puberty.
The rain outside is a steady roar. The metal roof rattles from the downpour, and overflowing gutters create a veil of water so thick that it’s impossible to see the beach, hard to even see the end of the deck. It’s also impossible to hear anyone in the house.
“Uh, hello?” a voice calls. “Ness?”
My heart drops. I close the desk drawers in a panic and hurry toward the bathroom. I’m halfway there when someone steps through the bedroom door. A woman. I’m so startled, it takes a moment before I recognize her. Victoria Wilde. Though she goes by Carter now, I think.
“Who are you?” she asks.
I freeze in place. Ness’s ex-wife hasn’t changed at all from the last tabloid pictures I saw of her, years ago. She has on a black dress, heels, a white pearl necklace. She appears to be dressed up for some event, maybe a funeral. I start to answer her, to explain what I’m doing there, when she raises a hand.
“Never mind. I don’t want to know. Where is Ness?”
“I—I don’t know,” I stammer.
“Woke up to an empty bed, huh?” She crosses the room toward the desk I just left. “Let me tell you, that’s the good Ness. Try living with him for eight years. It’s when you’re falling asleep in an empty bed that you’ve got trouble.”
“I’m not sleeping with him,” I say. I feel young all of a sudden. Guilty. Full of excuses. It all comes from having been caught, but the bad thing I was doing wasn’t the bad thing I’m suspected of doing. The desire for truth won’t let me just shut up. “I’m a reporter,” I say.
“Of course you are, darling.” Victoria rummages through the same desk that I was just rummaging through, and while neither of us belongs there, she makes it look okay. I hear another voice somewhere in the house. Victoria is writing a note, presumably for Ness.
“No really,” I say. “I’m with the Times. I’m doing a piece on Mr. Wilde—”
Victoria turns and looks me up and down for the first time. I touch the towel on my head, then close the robe tighter across my chest and see that Ness’s initials are embroidered there. This looks bad.
“Research, I suppose.” She waves a pen up and down at me, then points it at the bed and raises an eyebrow. Part of me wants to blurt out that yeah, we’re having epic sex, and he wants me to move in with him. But it’s a vindictive part of me that I’m immediately ashamed of. I just want to hurt her because her presence is making me feel like a bad person.
“Holly’s riding lessons are rained out.” Victoria jabs the pen at the window. “Obviously,” she adds. “And I can’t watch her. I’m already going to be late for my luncheon. Make sure Ness gets this note. And don’t worry, she can take care of herself until he gets back.”
“His daughter?” I ask.
“My daughter,” Victoria says. She slams the pen down on top of the note, leans on the desk for a moment, then laughs at something and shakes her head. She turns toward the door. I want to say something, to ask her to stay for a coffee, to talk to her, get to know something about her, when she turns, takes in the room one more time and my presence in it, and says, “Don’t rearrange the furniture.”