Chapter Nineteen
Rhys
The Glenbrook build archive lives in a cinder-block room under the lodge kitchen, behind the walk-in freezers, and it smells like cardboard and old coffee and, faintly, onions.
I’d been down there since two in the afternoon. By seven, I had forty-one banker’s boxes open on the concrete floor in a ring around me, and I was sitting cross-legged in the middle of them like a kid who’d dumped out every toy he owned looking for one particular truck.
“You look insane,” Jonah said from the doorway.
He had two pizza boxes stacked on one palm and a six-pack of root beer hanging from the other hand. He was still in his ski-school fleece, the red one with INSTRUCTOR across the back, and his cheeks were wind-burned from a day up on the mountain getting the ski school ready for the season.
“I’m working.”
“You’re sitting on the floor in the basement surrounded by boxes. That’s not working, that’s a documentary.” He stepped over a box marked HVAC SUBMITTALS 2017 and set the pizza down on another marked PUNCH LIST—FINAL. “Mom says hi. She says eat something that isn’t a protein bar.”
“You told Mom?”
“Mom reads the internet, Rhys. Mom read that gossip site before I did. She called me to ask what estranged means in this context.” He handed me a root beer. “What are we looking for?”
I told him. Margot at the table in San Francisco yesterday with her hands folded, saying anybody can write a date.
Lucy saying they’re dated, every page, and the way her voice had held on the last word.
The team, the process, the mood boards Margot had invented or remembered or dressed up.
The only question that mattered now, which was whether anything outside Lucy’s notebooks proved her drawings had come first.
“Okay,” Jonah said. “So who else was there?”
“What do you mean?”
“In 2017. When she was drawing it. Who else saw the drawings before anybody built anything?” He shrugged, sitting down on the floor across from me. “You. Owen. The architect guy. The one with the ponytail.”
I stared at him.
He bit into a slice. “What? I pay attention. I’m the one who had to drive the architect guy to the airport every other Thursday.”
“I’ll call him.” I reached for my phone and then didn’t, because my hand had landed on the lid of the box marked PUNCH LIST—FINAL, and I’d already been through that one, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I pulled out the top sheet and handed it to him.
A walk-through list from the week before we opened, typed by the contractor, forty-odd items. Great room—sconce height.
Library—window trim. Dock—cleat spacing.
And down the right margin, beside nearly every line, in blue ink, a small slanted hand.
No—3” lower, it glares. Paint the trim, don’t stain it, the light’s wrong.
Cleats every 6 ft or the kids will trip.
“That’s hers,” Jonah said.
“That’s hers.”
“She went through the whole thing?”
“She went through every room in the building with a flashlight at eleven at night. I remember. I was asleep in the truck.” I took the sheet back and held it.
“There are twelve boxes like this. Her handwriting’s on everything.
It just isn’t signed. Margot’s lawyers will say anybody could’ve written it.
A designer on staff. A contractor’s wife. ”
“A contractor’s wife.” He snorted. “You mean your wife.”
“I know who I mean.”
“Do you?” He said it lightly, around a mouthful of crust, but he looked at me when he said it. “Because it took you about ten years and a magazine cover.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I put the punch list back in its box, very carefully, on top.
* * *
Glenbrook’s architect of record had retired to a vineyard outside Placerville. He answered on the third ring, and when I said my name, there was a long pause.
“Rhys Sterling,” he said. “I saw the article.”
“Then you know why I’m calling.”
“I suspect I do.” I heard a screen door open and bang shut. “I’m going out on the porch. My wife doesn’t like it when I talk about work anymore. It makes me swear.”
“I need to know who designed Glenbrook.”
He laughed. It wasn’t unkind. “Your wife did. You know that. I told anybody who asked for ten years. My job was to make sure it didn’t fall down. The rooms, the light, where the stairs went, how the great room caught the lake—every bit of that came off her drawings. I just made it legal.”
“Did anyone else ever send you designs? The company? A team?”
“There was a woman from your office. Sharp. Kline?”
My chest went tight. “Yes.”
“She sent over finish schedules once or twice. Spreadsheets. Tile costs, fixture budgets. Useful stuff. She never sent me a drawing in her life.” He paused. “I’ll say that to anyone. I’ll say it under oath, if that’s what this is heading toward.”
“It might be.”
“Then I’ll dust off my good tie.” The porch creaked. “You know, you wrote me an email once. About Lucy’s drawings. I printed it and pinned it over my desk because it made me laugh. You were so pleased with yourself.”
I sat very still. “What did it say?”
“I don’t remember the exact words. Something about money.” He chuckled. “I lost it when I moved the office. Check your sent mail, son. You were a man who answered email in 2018.”
* * *
Sterling switched email systems in 2021.
The old mailboxes were exported to a set of encrypted drives that lived in a locked cabinet in this same basement room, because nobody had ever gotten around to deciding where else they should go.
Our head of IT drove up from Incline at five with a laptop and a face that said he had plans tonight and I was ruining them.
It took him until nine to restore my 2018 mailbox and hand it over.
“Search is slow on these,” he said at the door. “Be specific.”
I wasn’t specific. I typed Lucy and hit enter.
One thousand four hundred and twelve results.
Jonah whistled low over my shoulder. “That’s a lot of Lucy.”
I scrolled. It was like opening a window on a room I’d forgotten was in my own house.
Lucy says the fireplace wall has to be stone, not tile. She’s right. Change it.
Per Lucy—the library windows face north. Don’t let them move them.
Ask Lucy. She’ll know.
Lucy wants the masonry heater in the great room big enough to heat the whole wing. Listen to her. She’s thought about power outages. I haven’t.
Lucy wants the bedroom ceilings a foot higher on the top floor. Yes, it costs more. Yes, do it.
“Look at you,” Jonah said quietly. “You were so into her.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. There were hundreds of them. Me, eight years younger, forwarding her ideas with exclamation points. Me, telling the contractor she sees it before I do. Me, signing off one email to our lender, Wait till you see what my wife drew this week.
When had I stopped writing like that? I didn’t search 2020, or 2022. I didn’t want to see the answer in a results count.
“Narrow it,” Jonah said. “Search the architect’s name.”
I did. Two hundred and nine. I sorted by date. I started at January and went forward.
It was 11:40 when I found it.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018. 10:52 p.m. The architect had written at nine that night, a short, harried message: Rhys—quick one before I finalize the great room and library set. I’ve got Lucy’s sketches from last spring and a few different notes floating around from your office. Which governs?
My reply had gone out an hour later. Two lines. No greeting.
Everything per Lucy’s sketches. She’s the designer, I’m just the guy with the money.
I read it three times. Then I put my hand over my mouth, and sat there on the concrete with the laptop balanced on a box of HVAC submittals, and didn’t say anything for a while.
Jonah leaned in and read it. He read it again. Then he sat back on his heels.
“Well,” he said. “There it is.”
“I wrote that.”
“You did.”
“I was proud of that. He said I was pleased with myself. I was. I meant every word.” My voice came out wrong, too high, cracked in the middle.
“I knew, Jonah. I knew it in 2018. I wrote it down. I put it in writing to a licensed architect. And then I let Margot print Sterling Design Team on everything for eight years, and I never—”
“Hey.”
“—I never once—”
“Rhys. Hey.” He put a hand on the back of my neck, the way Dad never did, the way I used to do to him when he was nine and scared of the lift. “Don’t do this part down here. Print it.”
I printed it. The printer in the IT cabinet wheezed and clunked and finally pushed out one warm sheet of paper, and I held it in both hands under the fluorescent light.
The header was there, the date, the time stamp, both our email addresses.
Lucy’s sketches from last spring. Spring of 2017.
Months before any team meeting Margot could invent.
“You should take the whole file, too,” Jonah said.
He nudged a fat brown accordion folder with his boot.
It was labeled in Sharpie, in my old assistant’s neat caps: GLENbrOOK—OWNER CORRESPONDENCE—2018.
“Whatever else is in there. Her lawyer will want the context. That lady in the suit seems like a context person.”
“I haven’t gone through it.”
“So she will. She’s better at it than you.” He picked it up and put it in my arms on top of the printout. “Go.”
“It’s midnight.”
“Yeah.” He looked at me with our mother’s eyes, steady and not impressed. “And she’s awake. You know she’s awake. She doesn’t sleep when she’s scared. She draws.”
I didn’t ask how he knew that. I should have known it myself.
I went up the back stairs past the dark kitchen and out into the cold. The sky over the lake was full of stars, so many it looked spilled. I put the accordion file on the passenger seat and the printout on top of it, and I buckled the seat belt across both of them like they were a person.
At 12:07 a.m. I pulled out of Glenbrook and turned north toward Truckee.