Chapter 8 #2
I was overcome by relief as, one by one, I put each foot up on the opposite knee and swiped and scraped it clean as best as I could with my hands, then gave each a finishing rubdown with the outside of my sock before shaking it out and putting it and my shoe on.
Ricky was standing over me, smiling, when I finished. “Feel better?”
We set off slowly, heading south, away from the lighthouse, following the curve of the inlet.
Below the trail down from the inn, a small forest hugged the steep cliffside, with only a narrow strip of beach between it and the water.
We had barely made it past the base of the trail when we discovered that we weren’t alone.
Coming around the cove toward us were Wiley and Tawny, their faces drawn, their shoes in their hands.
Tawny brightened and gave a little wave as our eyes met, turning and saying something to Wiley, who remained stony-faced.
“Hey, guys,” she called out as they got closer. Her tone was friendly, but much less aggressive than the night before. “We met last night for a sec, remember? I’m Tawny, and this is my husband, Wiley.”
Wiley grunted, barely slowing as he passed us. “I’m going to keep going, okay? Nice to see you again.”
Standing next to us now, her hands on her hips, Tawny rolled her eyes at her husband’s back. “Sorry about him. His cousin Richard died, you know, but that’s not an excuse to be rude. Remind me of your names again—you’re Jeff, right?”
I suppressed a laugh. I had forgotten the name I had given Ricky the night before.
For his part, Ricky smiled diplomatically. “I’m actually Ricky, not Jeff. That was a little joke. This is Oliver.”
Tawny laughed, too, a bit ruefully. “I came on kinda strong last night, huh? Sorry. To tell you the truth, I was just so excited to see some people from outside Wiley’s family. I try so hard, but they all hate me. They treat me like trash.”
I took in her teased platinum-blond hair and the hot pink low-cut top and stretchy white capri pants that hugged her curvaceous figure. She certainly did stand out in comparison to the restrained Roses.
“It’s hard to break into a group like that sometimes,” I offered. “Have you and Wiley been together long?”
“Five years,” she said. “I’ve tried, but I guess maybe I took the wrong approach before. I used to get kinda loaded sometimes before family gatherings, to take the edge off, you know? But I think it gave them a bad impression of me.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to this. Tawny had inserted herself between me and Ricky, and was walking us slowly up the beach, back in the direction she had come from, away from Wiley.
“I’ve given that up, though,” she went on proudly, apparently content to have someone other than her husband to listen to her. “But it’s hard to figure out how to be social when you’re sober. Maybe that’s why I scared you guys off last night. I’m not so bad, though, right?”
She wasn’t, really, though even this less pushy version of her was a little much for me.
There was a resigned sadness barely concealed by her outgoing exterior, and I felt bad for her, understanding what it felt like to be an outsider.
Fitting into a group almost always felt like fumbling in the dark to me.
“No, of course not,” Ricky was saying. “Everybody in Wiley’s family that we’ve met has been nice enough, but they’re not exactly social butterflies, are they? Too much money, probably.”
She laughed again, a bit bitterly. “I’ll say!
Their brains are poisoned by all that money.
All they’ve ever seen when they look at me is a gold digger.
And I’m not, I swear! I never went after Wiley for his money.
He went after me, for one thing. And he doesn’t have that much of his own money anyway.
His dad got kicked out of the family business before Wiley was even born, and drank all his money away by the time he died, when Wiley was a little boy. ”
I remembered what Cecilia had said: He was like a second son to me. “He was close with his cousins, though, right? And his aunt, Mrs. Rose?”
“Sure, yeah, after his father died,” Tawny nodded. “His aunt Cecilia, all prim and proper with a stick up her derriere, thought he needed their good influence. He and Richard were actually buddies, though; Richard was okay, not as stuck up as the rest of them. That’s how come he’s so upset.”
“We saw Wiley come to the lounge last night to get you some milk,” Ricky said. “He said you were pretty broken up, too.”
Tawny’s face colored ever so slightly. “Yeah, I surprised myself, getting all worked up like that. But, you know, Richard was nicer to me than most of them. Not that I knew him that well,” she added quickly. “I felt sad for Wiley, really, losing someone he had been so close to.”
Without the high heels she held in her hand, Tawny was short enough that Ricky and I could look at each other over her head. He narrowed his eyes at me, and I tried to give him the ocular equivalent of a shrug.
“Wiley didn’t seem all that upset, though, last night,” Ricky said.
“Probably shock,” I offered, remembering the exchange between Wiley and Mary Alice in the lounge the night before.
“Yeah, I’m sure he was in shock. He’s been awful mopey today,” Tawny agreed, nodding. “I tell you, they were thick as thieves when they were kids. And Richard helped take care of Wiley when he was sick.”
“Oh,” I said, “when was that?”
“Back when they were kids. I think Wiley was sixteen, seventeen. He got cancer. Prostate cancer, actually, can you believe that! It’s really rare, but it can happen that young.
Anyway, his aunt did pay for all his treatments, I’ll give her that much, and Richard visited him every day when he was in the hospital, and took him to all his appointments and stuff.
But that was also kind of the beginning of the end for them being so close. ”
Ricky asked, “What happened?”
Tawny shrugged. “Richard had been at the university in Eugene, but then he went off to graduate school on the East Coast not long after that, so I think they drifted apart some. And then he married Rachel, who really has a stick up her butt, and they weren’t very friendly with anybody after that, except Cecilia.
And Cecilia felt like Wiley owed her for paying for his treatments and everything, like that obligated him to always do what she wanted. ”
I thought about something else Cecilia had said to me about Wiley: He took from me when he wanted to and rejected me when he wanted to.
I could see now how this must have felt from Wiley’s side.
Again, it felt like the Roses approaching relationships on purely transactional terms. “That doesn’t seem very fair. ”
“Nope,” she said. “So Cecilia’s been hot and cold with him ever since he married me. Of course, he didn’t even tell me about any of this before he threw me into the deep end with these people. I didn’t even know about the cancer until last year!”
I wondered where Wiley, who was emerging as a more and more complicated figure within the puzzle that was the Rose family, had gone since he had left Tawny with us.
I turned to look behind us, and caught sight of him, standing partway up the hill that led to the trail back up the bluff, his hands in his pockets, staring intently in our direction.
He was too far away to make out his face, but his body language seemed to radiate hostility.
As if catching his aura with the back of her head, Tawny said, “Enough about my family. I need a break from them. What about you guys? What’s it like in the outside world these days?”
I had no idea how to respond to such a broad question, but Ricky saved us both by checking the time on his phone again. “Unfortunately, what it’s like for us right now is, we have to head back up to the inn or we’re going to be late for our massages.”
“Pooh,” Tawny pouted. “Well, now that we’re friends, come talk to me again sometime, okay?”
We all turned to head back toward the trail. Wiley was nowhere to be seen anymore. But Tawny still seemed to feel his chill in the air. After a moment, she hung back, saying, “You guys go on ahead. I don’t wanna slow you down. I’ll hang here for another minute.”
Ricky let me take the lead this time, heading back up the long stone staircase that seemed perhaps three times longer going up than it had coming down. Once we had lost sight of Tawny down below, I said to Ricky over my shoulder, “I feel bad for her. She seems lonely.”
“Yeah,” Ricky said, only slightly less short of breath than me. “She doesn’t really fit into the family, and she knows it. But, lucky for us, that also makes her more willing to spill some juicy gossip about them.”
“What do you make of all that?”
“It’s hard to say,” he panted. The stairs seemed to be getting steeper. “She seemed to want us to feel sorry for Wiley, too, but he came across as more … angry? … than anything else.”
“There’s definitely something odd about Wiley,” I agreed. “He was bothered by Tawny’s reaction to Richard’s death, and bothered that she wanted to talk to us. He was watching us after we started walking with her. It was kind of creepy.”
“The vibes are off, for sure,” Ricky said. “What she didn’t give us was any hint of a motive—that is, if Wiley seems as suspicious to you as he does to me.”
“I’m not sure,” I wheezed, as the top of the trail finally came into sight.
I knew there was something about Wiley that my oxygen-starved brain wasn’t able to grab hold of.
I stopped for a moment, clutching my sides and trying to catch my breath, staring up the hill at the last upward stretch of the trail back to the inn.
Ricky passed me by, but I waited still, until it came to me: the will.
Wiley had been the secondary heir to Cecilia’s fortune, set to inherit if Richard died before Cecilia.
Had he known? He didn’t know, I was sure, that Lis had, just this morning, taken his place in the line of succession; had he gotten rid of Richard in a now-scuttled attempt to claim the family fortune?
I scrambled up the last few yards of the trail and found Ricky, who had recovered from the strenuous uphill trek maddeningly quickly, in the parking lot. Before I had a chance to share my suspicions about Wiley, he was grinning and waggling his eyes at me, leading me toward the entrance to the spa.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m in the mood for that sexy couples massage now.” He leered at me. His voice dropped to a mock-seductive stage whisper. “I was watching your butt all the way up the hill.”
Yikes. Everything else fled from my mind and my stomach made a hasty drop into some mysterious black pit in the depths of my guts.
I had not been ready for that, and I was not ready for this, but in the absence of any signal from my brain, my legs were marching me straight into the spa, toward what was shaping up to be the most terrifying experience of my life—far more terrifying than murder.