3
You okay?” Theo put his arm around Raquel’s shoulders as they watched the new Chief Grady drive off in a whirl of dead leaves. Theo was good like that.
“Of course.”
“In other words, no.”
She rested her head on his shoulder, a peace offering. He squeezed her lightly. “Do you think we’re done with visitors for the day?”
“Is there anyone in town left?”
A smile. “What would you like to do now?”
She considered the options. “Couple of hours of daylight left.”
“Back to work, then.”
She pulled away from him enough to peer at him directly. “What do you think of her suggestion to contact the cold case unit?”
His turn to contemplate. “I get the impression the local sheriff—”
“Police chief.”
“Police chief isn’t big on sharing with outsiders.”
“In other words, we just have to wait a couple hundred years?” Raquel arched a brow.
Fresh smile. “She was younger than I expected. Not to mention…”
“Prettier?”
He picked up a lock of her hair, ran it through his fingers. Not a slow caress, but the promise of one. Raquel felt it all the way to her toes. Again, he was good like that. So good like that.
“She must’ve been just a kid when it happened,” he commented.
“Growing up in the shadow of four other children who disappeared,” Raquel murmured.
“No way she doesn’t know more than she’s telling.
Not to mention…I’ll bet you anything her father kept his own personal files to work on on his own time.
No self-respecting cop would stop seeking closure for his community. ”
“We could invite her over to dinner.”
“Too obvious. Maybe…” Raquel worried her lower lip. “Let me think about it.”
“Certainly wouldn’t hurt to call the state cold case investigators,” Theo cycled back. “Given we’re the new homeowners, we have reason.”
She nodded, still thinking. The trick was to gain enough attention to assist their efforts, but not enough to arouse undue interest. A reporter from the local paper had already reached out asking for an interview.
By now, Theo was well versed on his private wife’s private ways to decline on principle.
“Back to work?” Theo prompted softly.
“Back to work.”
She followed him inside the house, where they paused at the bottom of the stairs, peering up at the gloom as day slipped into night. So many things that could be happening in those shadows. So many things that had.
From the first moment Raquel had spied this house, she rarely pictured it as a brick-and-mortar structure.
Mostly, she saw an old woman, well past her prime, hunched and enfeebled, and yet somehow still regal in her defeat.
Raquel saw a caretaker who ached for her lost charges.
Some nights, she swore she even felt her pain.
The house hurt. And Raquel could understand that. She hurt, too.
Her fingers crept toward the pendant around her neck, remembering at the last moment she’d left it off, not just to keep it out of sight of the neighbors, but to appease Theo.
Now she took a deep breath in, then exhaled slowly. Theo squeezed her shoulder lightly.
Together, they ascended into the darkness above.
Raquel knew the importance of appearance.
She grew up with firsthand experience in the length of one’s skirt being the determining factor of your moral character while the address where you lived defined your place in the world.
She understood it wasn’t enough to be pretty; you had to be the right kind of pretty.
Walk too fast, and you had something to hide.
Walk too slowly, and clearly you were as lazy as your good-for-nothing parent.
Clothes, makeup, accessories. Everything said something about you. In a small town, that could be especially suffocating as the queen bees spread their judgments in a buzz of gossip to the rest of the hive. And there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it.
To think different, act different, aspire to be different simply got you stung.
Especially when everyone knew exactly what went on behind closed doors. Not that they were going to do a damn thing to help, given it was so much easier to wag their tongues and tsk with their lips.
Raquel had always wondered what the neighbors had chattered about the morning after. Or had the sight of that much blood finally been enough to shut them all up?
She never returned home to find out.
Eventually, she’d bought a one-way bus ticket to the big city of Boston, where she didn’t know a single living soul, and better yet, not a single person knew her.
She’d established her design business. Built a perfectly adequate life and then, quite unexpectedly, made eye contact with a handsome man grinning at her from across the room.
Initially, she’d held Theo’s good looks and charming smile against him.
No way the contents inside could measure up to that level of packaging.
His background didn’t help. Third-generation Boston money.
The kind of wealth that guaranteed a life of comfort and ease, attending the right private schools, golfing at the right country clubs, vacationing at the right hot spots.
Even when Theo “went out on his own” with his personal investment firm, his father had seeded the venture with a five-million-dollar investment, quickly followed by additions from uncles, cousins, and prep school classmates.
No wonder Theo exuded the kind of confidence Raquel associated with movie stars and Saudi princes. Whatever he wanted, he got. It had pissed her off.
She hadn’t wanted some entitled nepo baby chasing after her.
She had bigger dreams, higher ambitions.
A woman who grew up learning firsthand the importance of a carefully cultivated facade made for a naturally brilliant interior decorator.
She didn’t just know what pieces worked together and how color affected the mood of a room; she understood how every piece of furniture, standing lamp, hanging canvas also said something about the homeowners themselves, even if they didn’t realize it.
Very quickly, she’d built up an impressive roster of clients, wealthy families who didn’t simply love her, they depended on her. Whatever bad, upsetting, stressful thing was going on in their ivory-tower worlds…nothing like a Raquel redesign to set it right.
From the very beginning, Raquel had had two things working in her favor.
She had a talent for creating magic.
And she had an aptitude for spinning lies.
Some days, she honestly wasn’t sure which one served her better.
And Theo, well, Theo proved he had his own tricks up his sleeve, including an aptitude with numbers, a genuine work ethic, and, even more mysterious to Raquel, a big heart.
When he smiled, he meant it. When he asked about hopes and dreams, whether hers or his clients’, it was because he fully intended on making them come true. And he did, over and over again.
If Raquel could appraise any situation with emotional distance and ruthless cunning, then Theo was the giant golden retriever, smashing through all best-laid plans, only to somehow, miraculously, create something even more marvelous out of the chaos.
She cursed him about twenty times a day. And loved him desperately.
Now, here they were.
Before they’d even closed on this house/money pit/quixotic adventure, Raquel had developed a plan.
First step, deal with the practicalities—electrical wires destroyed by rodents, a burst pipe that had taken out the basement furnace, a badly leaking roof.
This whole project was foolish enough without having to endure no light, heat, or water.
Raquel hired the contractors from afar, then deliberately stayed away, receiving updates via texted photos and FaceTime calls. Let the gossip begin.
Then, her and Theo’s official arrival, when they spent the first twenty-four hours scrubbing the lower level to within an inch of its life and hastily assembling a perfectly respectable living room.
Neighbors would come. The curious, the suspicious, and even the genuinely welcoming.
It was important they see immediate progress.
The mysterious new couple hadn’t just purchased the terribly neglected, horribly infamous Dixon house; they’d already made it their home. They were that good.
Of course, that led to another adage—appearances can be deceiving.
Now, climbing the stairs, Raquel could feel her and Theo’s carefully crafted illusion slipping away, as each step brought them closer to graffiti-covered walls and violently destroyed rooms.
Downstairs had been largely spared the wrath of time and teenage squatters, whereas upstairs…
This was the real deal, a true testimony to the senseless damage booze-fueled kids could unleash upon their environment.
Shattered sheetrock, gaping floorboards, bathrooms where fixtures hadn’t just been ripped off the walls but in some cases tossed through a neighboring window.
Not to mention stripped copper pipes and a bird’s nest of rodent-chewed electrical wires.
Looking at these rooms, you had to wonder what kind of people thought it was even possible to save such a long-neglected, highly abused structure. Looking at this space, you had to wonder if the couple who’d purchased this home hadn’t lost their minds.
Final step, landing in the middle of the hallway where there was nothing else to see but the carnage spreading out before them. Professionals would probably require most of a year to put this to rights. Theo and Raquel were giving themselves six months.
Theo squeezed her hand.
“You okay?” he asked, per usual.
“Of course,” she replied, as always.
His gentle smile, letting her know she could fool the entire world but never him.
She loved him, she thought again. She loved him madly, deeply, completely, in a way she thought she’d never experience and wasn’t even capable of. He terrified her. He soothed her. He pushed her to be better, but accepted her just the way she was.
Now…
Raquel didn’t know what was going to happen next. And for the first time in her life, she didn’t find that liberating. She found it lonely.
“Do you think they knew?” she asked softly, standing outside the row of bedrooms that once contained four Dixon children and two Dixon adults. “Had a faint inkling that something terrible was about to happen? That in a blink of an eye, the world as they knew it would end?”
“For their sake, I hope not.”
She nodded even as she shivered.
“Are we crazy, or just stupid?” she murmured, more to herself than him.
There was an awkward pause. Then Theo, sounding unusually serious: “Something had to give.”
Her turn to attempt to lighten the mood. “At least we’ll never run out of projects.”
Then they turned toward the main bedroom, which had once been beautiful, but now bore thirty years of grievous injury.
“Who you gonna call?” Theo sang out softly, in his best Ghostbusters impression.
“Drywall contractor!” she sang back.
“We got this,” he said firmly.
And they both knew he wasn’t talking about the remodel.