Chapter 38
I must set some kind of record cutting down the street, because in what feels like seconds, I’m pounding on Tippy’s front door.
“Este.” She’s surprised to see me, leaning forward to look past me, like maybe I’ve brought a police escort, and then back to my face. “I heard about Beau. Are you okay?”
“Tippy.” I push my way into the house, my thoughts tripping over each other. “I need to talk to you about Gemma.”
Tippy’s features turn cold. “What about her?”
“That night I saw you? Before the Lemon & Fig party? I said I didn’t want to know your secret, but I think I kind of have to know now.”
She walks toward the living room, making herself busy with the throw pillows on her sofa, fluffing them up and then karate-chopping them down the center. “I don’t know what that means, Este.”
“I saw you,” I press, wanting her to admit it. Wanting her to finally cop to what she’s been hiding. “Gemma was my friend, Tippy,” I plead.
“She was my friend, too,” she says innocently.
Fine. If you’re going to be a coward about it.
“Tippy, I saw you with her. I know you were together the night before she died.”
Tippy’s eyes narrow.
“That was nothing.” She shrugs, whacking her hand through the center of another pillow.
“Nothing? Tippy, what does that mean? She’s dead, and you—”
“I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re here to imply.”
The denial feels haughty, all things considered. Tippy and Gemma were carrying on an affair, and even after her death, I’ve never heard Tippy utter one kind thing about Gemma.
“I saw you on Carol’s security cam, taking her home—”
Tippy interrupts with a raucous laugh. “Is that what you think you saw? My, what an imagination you have.”
I picture the footage from Marcus’s restaurant, and the hand reaching out to grab Gemma.
Was the person Tippy’s height? What about the shoe? Was it something Tippy would wear?
Tippy crosses her arms as if it’s very bad manners to pace in someone’s living room after accusing them of having an affair and then suggesting they killed their mistress.
Which, to be fair, it certainly is.
“I wasn’t sleeping with Gemma,” she says. “She drove my car home after I had a little too much to drink at Lemon & Fig.”
“That’s all? Why did she go inside?”
“We were having fun. Gemma was always a little flirtatious. I didn’t mind.
The attention is entertaining enough. And I wouldn’t have minded if word spread and Shep thought there was something going on between Gemma and me.
Watching him squirm always has been the best part of my extramarital activities. ”
That explains why she looked so eager to talk.
“But imagine my surprise the night of Marcus’s party, when you offered to keep my confidence instead.
” She crosses to the wet bar in the corner, overlooking the pool and the lake.
“I haven’t met many people like you,” she says, pulling a tumbler from one of the glass-paned cabinets. “Not around here.”
The pool construction she was going on about at the dinner party is still under way—tiles and tools tucked under a construction tarp in the storm.
I can tell from the pavers and dwindling piles of material, though, that the work is almost done.
Pretty soon, the facade of this house will be picture-perfect again.
A very well-decorated lie.
“My father never believed in this marriage,” she tells me and sniffs darkly.
“But he gave a lovely toast at our wedding. That’s when he promised Shep ten million dollars if the marriage lasted ten years.
All Shep had to do was stick it out. And not cheat.
Daddy amended my trust, too, so that if I filed for divorce before ten years of marriage, I forfeited ten million.
” As she looks at me, her eyes are sharp but wounded.
“What my family likes most about money isn’t the freedom it affords—it’s the way it twists a knife.
If I was going to marry a man he didn’t approve of, Daddy was going to make sure I sat in the failure for a long time—long enough to feel it.
Long enough to let the regret burn in the back of my throat. ”
“Jesus, Tippy.” I sigh.
It’s sordid and fucked-up, but more than that, it’s sad.
“Want to hear the worst part?” She’s busying herself at the bar like this is some old, ordinary story.
One she knows like the back of her hand.
“My father was right. About our marriage being doomed. A few years ago, I realized we’d drifted apart.
That’s when I started cheating out in the open.
Just to humiliate him. Because I could. Our actual prenup doesn’t have a morality clause.
He can’t cheat, and I can’t leave. Those are my father’s terms. And the ten million dollars is the ante in my father’s fucked-up version of marriage roulette.
But Shep never took the bait. Never cheated.
He waited me out so I could choke on my father’s ‘I told you so.’ The timer’s set to expire in about four hours now. ”
When my gaze catches on a blown glass bowl near the wet bar sink, I can’t hear Tippy talking anymore. It’s nearly a foot wide—a tangle of green and blue glass swirling together. And the center of the piece is filled.
With broken golf tees.
“Tippy, what’s that?” I point, my hands shaking.
Her eyes follow mine, but she’s confused. “That? It’s some stupid thing that Shep used to do. When we first started dating, he would bring me his broken tees from rounds of golf. They were everywhere for a while—the man golfs like it’s a full-time job.”
In an instant, my heart is in my throat.
The tees are Shep’s. Gemma was keeping them.
I feel sick.
Tippy’s filling her tumbler with bourbon, oblivious to the smoking gun sitting in her living room.
I stare at her. “Tippy…Where is Shep?”