Chapter 24
When she woke—in the right bed, thank the Goddess—it took her a minute to remember what had happened.
She was at Rill Loeffler’s beach house.
The love shack …
And there had been a party.
One Miles had planned. Had they trashed the place? She couldn’t remember, but there had been a lot of people, some she had never seen before. She should definitely check. Today was their last day. Adrian would be back to pick them up that night.
She looked around warily. She was alone in the room. Alone in the bed, thank the Goddess for that, too. She grabbed her phone, still on the bedside table where she’d left it before the party. It was two in the afternoon. Six hours until Adrian. She ached for water.
Beside her, in the covers of the bed, lay a picture. A photograph. She brushed the sleep out of her eyes and held it up. It was a snapshot of Edie, on the younger side, maybe around forty years old. She was wearing one of her gypsy costumes, standing on the deck of a house. This house.
Last night’s memories lazily swam to the surface.
After playing golf-ball ping-pong and screaming out the score like the guy who called the Savannah Bananas games, she and Sheffield had torn open the plastic storage bins.
Inside, they’d found a lot of cool stuff.
Old martini shakers and ice buckets. Ashtrays.
A whole bin of vinyls, which Sheffield went nuts over and said he was going to come back at some point and steal.
They’d also found a bunch of old clothes and beach towels, all mildewed and musty. And then she’d found the pictures.
Pictures she couldn’t, at the moment, recall in any specific detail—
Suddenly, the door banged open and someone bounded in, then launched himself onto the bed. Sheffield lunged at her, smothering her in a bear hug.
“Practical Magic!” he sang out. “I can’t believe I’ve lived next door to you for a year and a half and never knew how fun you were!”
She felt her stomach roil, then rise. She struggled out of his arms and ran to the bathroom, where she vomited in the toilet. She came back in and regarded Sheffield with watering eyes.
“That wasn’t fun,” he said. “Hey. Can you tell your cute little boyfriend to give me a chance? Please, please, please, please.”
“Who? Miles?”
“He’s so yum.”
“He’s straight,” she said. “And you’re married.”
“Neither an insurmountable problem. I think there’s something else. A bigger problem.”
“What’s that?”
Sheffield threw open his arms and brought them together in a dramatic, fluid chorus girl move, pointing at Ingrid. “He’s besotted with you, gorgeous.”
“He’s absolutely not besotted with me. Trust me. We’re like brother and sister.” She sat on the bed beside him. Sheffield groaned and fell over, laying his head in her lap. She laughed, then patted his beautiful, honey cupcake frosting hair.
“It’s Moroccan oil.” He snuggled on her lap, getting comfortable. “What I use to get my hair to look like an angel’s. Tell your boyfriend-slash-brother-slash-roommate that I can get him on a movie set if he’ll go out with me.”
She swatted him. “What about Dean?”
He sighed. “He is so mean. He says I have to get a job. I told him I had a job. Stay-at-home daddy.”
“I thought you were an actor or a model or something.”
Sheffield rolled his eyes. “He means like real job at a restaurant or a hotel. He doesn’t think I show the proper motivation in my chosen field.”
“I mean, you do smoke a lot of weed. I smell it all day long.”
He laughed. “Ouch.” He gazed up into her face. “You and Miles should come over for dinner sometime.”
“And let you seduce him in front of your poor husband?”
“Now you feel sorry for Dean? Believe me, you’ve got this all wrong. You have no idea. He’s got plenty of action on the side.”
She gave him another swat, but this one was gentler. It was hard not to feel sorry for him. Snotty old Dean couldn’t be the easiest person to live with. “Maybe we’ll come over. Who cooks, you or Dean?”
“This lady named Zelda.”
She laughed and pushed him off her lap. “I need to get going. What’s going on downstairs?”
“Everybody left this morning. I stayed in case Miles needed some help holding his hair back over the toilet.” He sent her a devilish smirk.
She walked to the door. “Come with me. Help me clean up. You can score some points with Miles.”
While Miles picked up trash on the beach, Sheffield helped Ingrid put the area under the house back in order. Plastic bins were opened, upturned, items strewn everywhere.
They’d made a hell of a mess. It looked as if they’d basically staggered around the space, drunkenly flinging handfuls of old photos in the air. She crouched to gather them, and at last, she had them collected into one huge mound.
She organized them by style of print, older to more recent.
The shiny rectangular prints—from the nineties, she guessed—that were all taken here, at the beach house, at Rill’s many parties.
She sifted slowly through these. From the looks of it, the parties had been epic—everyone tanned and glassy-eyed from drink and drugs.
All in a state of undress, all with their arms flung over shoulders.
One photo showed a woman spraying a bottle of champagne off the deck.
One showed a man doing unspeakable things to the sailfish, on whose long sword hung a woman’s bra.
A woman held a pan engulfed in flames over the stove.
Someone played the bongos by a bonfire. Someone else was naked, head lolling, twined in the arms of someone who winked at the camera.
In every picture, everyone was always laughing.
And then she saw them. The pictures of Edie.
Edie sitting at a small bistro table on the deck, doing a reading for someone. Edie clinking a can of beer with a fellow partier. Edie wearing oversized red, white, and blue glasses and holding a lit sparkler.
One made her heart stop. It was of Edie, standing on the deck, in the same peasant blouse and skirt, hoop earrings and bandana as in the picture Ingrid had brought to bed with her.
Beside her, a devastatingly handsome Rill Loeffler, shirtless, tan and very young, had his arms wrapped around her and was kissing her cheek.
Above them, on the clapboard siding of the house, hung a carved wood sign reading SARGASSUM SLING.
Ingrid studied the picture again. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something different about their embrace.
Something … intimate. Edie seemed so relaxed, her body resting against Rill’s.
And he just seemed so happy. And then she noticed his hand.
Resting lower on her hip than a friend’s would.
Resting in a possessive way, like she belonged to him.
Ingrid glanced at the wooden sign above them again. SARGASSUM SLING.
S.S.
The entries she’d found in Edie’s ledger. So Edie had come here, in the mid-1990s, at least a dozen times, probably as the entertainment at Rill Loeffler’s parties. That must’ve been when Rill fell in love with her. And when Scoot decided Edie White was her mortal enemy.
It was easy to see why. All you had to do was look at the picture. See the expression in their eyes.
At precisely eight o’clock that evening, the house cleaner arrived, a young woman in a pink polo shirt, lugging a bucket of cleaning supplies and a vacuum cleaner. Adrian arrived as well in the Rolls-Royce.
On their way out, Miles and Ingrid passed the house cleaner and exchanged guilty glances.
They’d tidied every room in the house, scrubbed the kitchen, and hauled three full trash bags out to the next-door neighbor’s garbage cans so as not to raise suspicion when the maid looked in the Loefflers’ cans.
Ingrid hoped they’d been thorough enough.
She didn’t want Sailor thinking she couldn’t be trusted.
On the drive back, Miles fell asleep, as she googled Sargassum.
The first entry that popped up was the government’s NOAA Ocean Exploration website.
It said that sargassum was a type of algae, “a genus of large brown seaweed that floats in island-like masses and never attaches to the seafloor.” Apparently, when it washed up on shore and began to decompose, the rotten egg smell it emitted was considered poisonous, causing anyone who came into contact with it to suffer heart palpitations, short ness of breath, dizziness, vertigo, headache, and skin rashes.
If inhaled in concentrated forms, like in an enclosed sewer, it could cause death.
She swiped out of the website, unsettled. What an odd choice, to name your beach house after a poisonous plant.
When they arrived back in town, Adrian dropped Miles off at Ingrid’s house, then took Ingrid the few blocks to the Loefflers’. He carried her bag up to the door, depositing it in the entry way and then tipping his hat.
She suddenly felt panicky, wondering if he could tell she been up to no good at the beach house. If he somehow could intuit that in her bag, tucked carefully between the pages of the copy of Circe—the paperback she’d packed for the trip but never gotten around to reading—was a photo.
Not the photo she’d brought to bed with her or the one she’d found when they were cleaning up. It was another one, clearly taken the same day, while Edie and Rill were standing on the deck of Sargassum Sling. A photo she couldn’t afford for anyone to find in the Loefflers’ house.
Because in this picture, Rill and Edie were locked in an embrace, their bodies pressed together, kissing.