Chapter 26
Tyler
I arrived in Southampton around eight thirty that evening, my palms sweaty and my legs restless as Flying Point Road turned
into Wickapogue Road, Fowler Street, and, finally, that strange and unnamed avenue into Meredith Bradford’s hidden universe.
Katie sat on the bottom step of the sunset-smeared stoop in a cropped sweatshirt and a pair of leggings, twisting a wave of
hair around her fingers. She rose to her feet as I hopped out of the car.
“What’s in the box, weirdo?”
I glared at her as Maurice, before I could stop him, disappeared with my shit. I hadn’t brought much. When Selma had called
to tell me I’d been summoned, she said it’d only be for a few days. “They’re walkie-talkies.”
Katie grabbed the package and ran her fingers over the side panel. “And what, exactly, are we going to do with said walkie-talkies?”
“We’re going to use them, Katherine. When the murders happen.”
She tsked, then promptly tore open the cardboard and fished out two bubble-wrapped bricks, tiny antennas poking out. “Tyler!
They’re pink!”
I scratched the back of my neck. “Yeah, well, I figured you’d be more likely to use them if you thought they were cute.”
Her eyes crinkled, and something warm and easy stretched across my chest.
“Come on,” she said, shoving the walkies back into the box, then pushing open Meredith’s front door. “I’ll show you around.”
Katie gave me the grand tour of the home’s first floor and gardens: the parlor, the sunroom, the pantry twice the size of
my bedroom in the city. She showed me the media room, the pottery studio, the pool table. The gym and sauna, the ivy-draped
gazebo off the tennis court, the shed filled with croquet sets, pool floats, and beach cruisers. We were halfway up the stairs
to the library when a timer went off in the kitchen.
“I kind of baked a lobster potpie,” she said.
“How does one kind of bake a lobster potpie?”
She chuckled, then traipsed back down the stairs. I followed her featherweight steps, one after another, as she floated into
the kitchen, explaining how she’d begun making her way through a Barefoot Contessa cookbook she’d found on her second night
here.
“Anything you want,” she said, pointing to a notepad splayed out on the island, “you put on the list, and I think Maurice
just goes to the market and buys it.”
I traced Katie’s loopy letters—raspberries, ricotta, good vanilla—while she cut into the pie’s golden crust. Steam escaped, and my mouth watered.
“Two sticks of butter,” she said, licking the back of the knife after she served us each a slice. I grabbed our plates as
she led the way outside, past the pool, and over the stairs, a bottle of sparkling water tucked under her arm. We settled
onto the beach, the sky dark and the sand cool and the world behind us, quiet. Waves crashed. The breeze blew.
“Meredith writes late at night,” she said, stabbing a pea with her fork.
“Then she usually sleeps in. I see her in the afternoons, mostly. I thought she’d have a ton of staff or whatever, but it’s just Maurice—who I barely see—and then this woman who Meredith said comes sometimes to clean, but I haven’t met her yet. ”
I nodded, picking out a piece of lobster from the pie’s filling. Katie had made, it seemed, a small accounting error with
the salt, and the meal was . . . not good. She’d been the first to admit it.
“Oh!” she said. “I forgot to tell you! Sorry, it’s actually important. You probably won’t be able to see it until morning,
but way east, at the end of the property, past the woods, there’s another house. It’s a carriage house—like, for staff. Anyway,
it’s off-limits. Meredith writes there.”
I put down my plate. I was a foot away from Katie, maybe less, and her bare feet were covered in sand. “What do you mean,
off-limits?”
“I don’t know. Just, we’re not allowed to go there.”
“You mean it’s forbidden?”
She shrugged.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “That’s obviously where the bodies are. How are you a writer? How did you fail to mention this to
me sooner? I would’ve brought you a rhinestone-studded axe or something! No Wi-Fi, and now this? On top of what is clearly
the most orchestrated occurrence of Forced Proximity I’ve ever seen? We are one hundred percent dying in this house. That, I’m sure of.”
Katie laughed, setting her plate aside and twisting toward me a little more. “You’re insane. You know that, right? The newspaper
selfies. The conspiracy theories. The walkie-talkies . . .”
I turned to her. The space between us, inches. Her mouth, the slightest bit open. Her lips, the slightest bit wet. “Would you like me to care about you less, Katherine?”
She looked straight out toward the ocean. The moon dangled above us, a sliver of light.
“No.”
I inhaled, then moved a half inch closer to her. It was nothing—a tiny, imperceptible shift. A centimeter, maybe two. But
then, she did the same. Our hands just lay there, flat on the sand. Two pinkies fighting a muscle memory I still hadn’t managed
to forget.
“Okay then,” I said. “I won’t.”