Summertime Guests Page 4

  After a few weeks Gwen was on her last nerve. When she walked Muddy, it looked as if she were water-skiing across the grass, the dog yanking her along. They tried everything, going so far as to throw a few hundred bucks at a trainer for a weeklong, so-called in-residence program. But even the trainer seemed baffled, surprised by what he described as the dog’s strong will. He went on to explain that some breeders overbred their dogs with poor results and suspected that such was the case with Muddy, a well-meaning canine who was slightly off in the head, thanks to crappy genetics.

  Which only made Jason feel more sorry for it.

  “I hate to say it,” Gwen pauses, then smiles as if it doesn’t pain her that much, “but it’s kind of nice not to have to think about the dog. Those were some of the most stressful months of my life.”

  Jason’s lips curl into a half smile. “Admit it. You’re not really sorry, though.”

  She shrugs and fiddles with her rings. There’s a silver one on her middle finger, two on her thumb, and, on her pinkie, another slim ring with a star and a moon. “Does that make me a horrible person?”

  “Probably,” he teases. If it were up to him, he would have kept the dog, but then again, he was fine leaving it outside while it barked for four or five hours, which Gwen said bordered on animal abuse. The fact that he still thinks of Muddy as an it and not a he probably says a lot about how Jason treated the dog in the first place. Still, he’d felt like a jerk giving it away, as if Muddy had failed some kind of IQ test.

  “But, hey, not everyone’s a dog lover,” he says now, willing to move on.

  “Right.” She snakes the lime wedge off her glass and squeezes the rest of the juice into her glass. “And I’m sure Muddy’s a lot happier with his new family. Those kids really adored him.”

  “Yeah, seemed to.” He understands that his job at the moment is to reassure her that they’ve done right by Muddy, that he’ll be fine without them and happy in his new home, a friend of Gwen’s.

  “I suppose it means we won’t be good parents, though.” She sets down the vanquished lime beside her glass.

  “Wait, what? How do you make that leap?”

  Her shoulders rise, as if it’s obvious. “It’s what people say. You know, first you have your dog baby, and then, once you can handle that, you’re ready for real babies.”

  His eyes narrow, and he wonders if she really believes this or if she’s trying to bait him, feel him out about kids.

  “Huh,” he says, noting a certain dreaminess that’s crept into her eyes. They haven’t talked about kids in any meaningful way before, despite the fact that they’ve been dating for a year and a half. Hell, they’re not even engaged. “Well, we’re not most people, are we?”

  Her gaze settles back on him, its wistfulness evaporating as quickly as it arrived so that Jason can’t be certain it was even there in the first place. “No. We’re not,” she says succinctly, as if that might be a bad thing instead of good. Her fingers work to fold her cocktail napkin into miniature squares, and Jason gets a funny feeling that those squares might soon turn into angry shreds of paper. Gwen flips her ash-blond hair over a shoulder, a punctuation mark on their conversation.

  What unspoken words have just passed between them he’s not sure, but he hopes he hasn’t already screwed up the vacation. His eyes roam around the bar, taking in the mostly older guys in polo shirts and loud shorts. A few sit with their wives or, Jason supposes, girlfriends. He and Gwen are by far the youngest couple here, which makes sense, given that it’s a weekday and most people are probably working on a Tuesday afternoon. The Seafarer definitely caters to a particular clientele, which is to say the ridiculously rich. Back in the dead of January, when it had been snowing for seven consecutive days and they were climbing the walls of their apartment, Gwen had clicked on the hotel website and scrolled through the photo album, calling him over to take a look. It was impossible not to be impressed—all that marble, the dark-paneled lobby, the sweeping staircase, the views of the water. The history of the place.

  “We should go sometime,” she’d said nonchalantly. “You know, for a romantic getaway. Or a special occasion. Once it reopens.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he agreed—and then promptly forgot about it.

  Now he reaches over to run his hand along her tanned arm, her skin, remarkably smooth. For a split second, he debates telling her right here—how he walked out on his students, how he’s been wasting his time at the library, hasn’t written a word in weeks. How he’s turned out to be a huge disappointment but doesn’t care because any whiff of idealism he might have possessed—that he might actually influence the next generation of students for the better—has vanished. But he shakes the thought off. Gwen is killing herself to make this getaway special, and in typical fashion, Jason can only think of ways to screw it up. Why can’t he appreciate a good thing when it’s within his grasp?

  “Buy you another daiquiri, darling?” he says instead, slipping into the Southern drawl that sneaks up on him from time to time, usually when he’s had too much to drink. (Jason hails from Virginia but he’d be loath to call it home.)

  Gwen holds up her drained glass and grins. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  When he attempts to flag down their waitress, the sound of church bells—his ringtone—goes off on his phone. He flips it over to see it lit up with a text from a number he doesn’t recognize.

  Dude, I can’t believe you failed me. You’re such an asshole, especially for someone who can’t teach.

  “Can you please put that thing away?” Gwen’s tone telegraphs mild annoyance. “I don’t see how you can possibly relax with your phone going off every ten minutes.”

  “Sorry,” he says and shuts it off. The little fucker, Jason thinks. Final grades were posted yesterday. Only two people could have sent that text, and it’s sure not the young woman he failed. She’d never have the balls to address him as dude. It can only be Charlie—contemptuous, fall-asleep-in-the-back-of-class Charlie. Jason is tempted to fire back a response immediately, something like, Well, Charlie, what did you expect? When you don’t do the work, you don’t get an automatic pass.

  Instead, he slips his cell into his shorts pocket and thinks he’ll deal with Charlie later. Much later. Like maybe never later.

  Friday, June 11, 2021

  FIVE

  When he questions her later, Riley tries to think if, in fact, she saw anything out of the ordinary. While it’s true that they were all sitting at the table adjacent to the window—the table that would have provided the best view (had one of them been glancing out the window at that exact moment)—Riley can’t recall any relevant details. Her hands are still shaking while the officer sitting across from her, probably midfifties with a sizable belly and kind brown eyes, waits patiently for her to say more. She knits her hands together in her lap, willing them to calm.

  “Take your time,” he says gently, as if he’s accustomed to interviewing perfect strangers about perfectly morbid events.

  Riley closes her eyes briefly, trying to conjure up an image across the black scrim of her mind. Tom and her future mother-in-law were debating something at the time. What was it again? Oh, right. Whether or not they should serve only cold hors d’oeuvres since the wedding will be in July. But then that would mean that they wouldn’t have Tom’s favorite—pigs in a blanket. She’d been thinking to herself what a ridiculous conversation it was to be having when the crash stopped everything.

  What does a person see when someone falls from the sky? How do you fathom the unfathomable? The questions dart around her mind like birds fluttering through the low branches of a tree. Was there a glint of yellow that crossed her field of vision when she gazed at her fiancé at that precise moment? The man whom she loved very much, but with whom she was losing patience for failing to rein in his mother? She knows that the stranger was wearing a yellow dress, but did anything catch Riley’s eye
when she fell? A flash beyond the window that she might have mistaken for something else? But, no, there’s nothing. Just more nuthatches flying around in her mind. Riley shakes her head, defeated. “I’m sorry.” It comes out sounding apologetic, as if she should be doing a better job of being a star witness. “I can’t think of anything.”

  “It’s okay,” the kind officer reassures her. “Sometimes details come back to us later.” He uncrosses his legs and leans back in his chair like it’s already been a long day. “Especially after something this traumatic.”

  “Her hands,” Riley says suddenly, without thinking.

  His dark eyebrows flicker upward. Unlike his thinning hair, they are robust and thick, as if they decided long ago to be the wild child of the family. He bends forward again. “What about her hands?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Riley says, embarrassed that she’s gotten him excited about such a trivial detail. “I just remember noticing her hands, like they’d been grabbing for something. And they were freckled, I think. And rings. She wore several rings.” She watches as the officer scribbles notes on his spiral pad and nods, as if he suspected as much.

  “Any chance you remember seeing her in the restaurant before...before the incident?” Riley’s eyes flicker in mild surprise. So, he’s being careful not to call it a suicide. Maybe the woman with the blond hair didn’t jump at all. Maybe she fell by mistake. Or, maybe, she was pushed.

  Riley shoves away the image stuck in her mind, that of the dead woman’s body lying several yards away, and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t remember seeing her in the restaurant. I only remember the sound.”

  “The sound?”

  “Um, the sound of, you know.” She swallows, struggling to get the words out. “When she hit the terrace, I guess.” Riley’s stomach contorts into a knot as she says this, the earsplitting blast of a human body colliding with the earth still ringing in her ears.

  “And what was that like? The sound?” Riley stares at him as if he’s crazy. He really wants her to describe it?

  She holds out her hands, palms up, unsure of what to say. “I don’t know. I thought the chandelier in the lobby had crashed. Or that there’d been an earthquake. Or someone had shot off a gun.” It’s weird to think that now. But the noise was so loud, so sudden, not at all how she’d imagine the sound of a body falling. “Everyone jumped. I think we were all so startled. No one knew what was going on.”

  The officer nods his head and makes a few additional notes. Riley imagines he was probably handsome once and might still be to a certain type of woman. He’s the kind of man who presents himself with a certain heft, sturdy and unflappable. His hands are rough and cracked, but his fingernails are neatly trimmed, clean.

  “It must have been frightening,” he says now, throwing her a bone.

  She gives him a timid smile, grateful for this small kindness. “There was a lot of screaming. But that was right afterward. At least, I think so. It was total chaos, you know?” He nods again.

  “And what happened immediately afterward?” Riley is unsure what he’s driving at. “Did you see anything suspicious? Anyone moving away quickly from the scene?”

  She bites her lower lip sharply, so much so that she thinks she tastes blood, and tries to remember. There was the jogger, the man who took the woman’s pulse, a small group of people huddled around. And then the general manager had arrived, encouraging people to back up while he crouched down beside the woman to help. Riley didn’t see the woman’s face, turned away from the restaurant window, when he’d brushed back her hair, but she’d gathered from the manager’s expression that it wasn’t good. “Um, nothing suspicious that I know of,” Riley offers now. “The manager was on the case pretty soon afterward. It looked like everyone tried to help. Until he pushed her hair away and you saw all the blood. You kind of got the sense that they weren’t going to be able to do anything after that.”

  The officer, saying nothing, continues to write in his notebook. Riley pauses to sip from the water bottle that Gillian handed her earlier. “And I think it was the manager who got the tablecloth, you know, to cover her up.” Riley thinks back to that moment, how her heart dropped when she realized that the woman was, indeed, beyond saving. Her stomach rumbles, though whether it’s because she’s hungry or upset, she’s not sure. “The paramedics came shortly after that.”

  Her eyes wander back to the window, where she notices a dinner roll lying on the floor. Probably knocked off the table in the commotion after the fall. Or jump, or whatever they’re calling it. Beyond the window, someone has strung a ribbon of yellow police tape around the terrace’s perimeter to prevent pedestrians from passing through. The woman’s body, Riley knows, has since been removed, but a yellow tarp has been erected over the place where it hit near the firepit. A small team of policemen hovers just beyond it.

  Her lips begin to quiver, and the officer fetches a napkin from a nearby table for her.

  “Thank you.” She dabs at her eyes, blows her nose. “I’m sorry. It’s just that...it’s just that today was supposed to be wonderful. I took the afternoon off from work so my fiancé and I could sample a menu for our wedding day, and well...” She hesitates and gives a feeble laugh. “And well, this wasn’t quite what I imagined.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so.” His eyes crinkle sympathetically while he waits for her to continue.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m a terrible person. Here I am talking about how my day has been ruined, and that poor woman lost her life. Does her family know yet?” Riley’s mind suddenly spins with questions.

  The officer shakes his head. “We’re hoping someone on staff can identify her. We should know soon enough, though.”

  When she searches the room again for Tom, he’s sitting about a hundred feet away, talking to a policewoman. His brown hair is tousled, his shirt untucked, which means Riley probably looks like she flew in on a hurricane herself. She reaches up to smooth her hair, then gives up and weaves it into a loose braid. It occurs to her that she hasn’t seen her mother-in-law-to-be since Marilyn started hyperventilating and a young man from the waitstaff had to escort her out of the dining room. A mix of worry and sympathy bubbles up inside her. She doesn’t know if Marilyn will ever recover from this day—but then again, will any of them?

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know how else I can be of help, and I should really check on my fiancé and my mother-in-law. Do you mind if I go?”

  The officer flips his notepad shut and says, “Not at all. I think we’re done here. I appreciate your time. You’ve been very helpful, Miss...” He double-checks his notes.

  “Thorton,” Riley supplies.

  “Thorton.” He tilts his head and gazes at her with a funny expression. Riley’s afraid of what might be coming next. Will he want her to go down to the station, even though she has nothing more to offer? She’s watched enough true-crime shows to understand that the police want to record everyone’s memories while they’re still fresh. But Riley didn’t really see much of anything. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I don’t mean to stare. It’s just that you look so familiar, and I’m usually good with faces.”

  Riley smiles, stands up and smooths her skirt. “I get that a lot. Memorable in an unmemorable kind of way.”

  He chuckles and shakes his head. “No, that’s not what I mean. I’ll think of it eventually. Here, in the meantime, let me give you my card, in case you remember anything else.” In her hand he places a white rectangle that reads Detective Dale Lazeer, Boston Police Department. A telephone number and an email address float below it. “Give me a call anytime. Day or night.”

  “All right, thank you. I will.”

  Halfway across the dining room, Tom is breaking free of his interview, and she pushes through a press of people to go meet him. “You okay?” he asks and pulls her into his arms. Riley nods, but she knows she’s not okay, and he�
�s probably not, either, and his mom most certainly isn’t, and that they should find Marilyn as soon as possible, but instead of saying all this, tears slide down her cheeks, salty and hot, while the image of the woman in the yellow dress lodges in her mind. Because, God, how could something so horrible have happened on such a beautiful day?

  And Riley knows one other thing: she and Tom can’t possibly get married here now.

  SIX

  Jean-Paul understands that the Seafarer has seen its fair share of drama over the years, largely due to the kind of clientele it caters to—the wealthy, the famous, the self-indulgent. Those most likely to make unreasonable requests or inappropriate use of the hotel simply because they’re unaccustomed to being told no. He’s familiar with this kind of guest because his old hotel in Paris, Le Bistrol, catered to the same class. But sometimes the brashness of Americans surprises even him. Their assumption that the world revolves solely around them, that they’re infallible (at least the French have the decency to mask their entitlement with good manners). The other day, his night manager, Oliver, recounted a story of how, a few years ago, a famous American actor insisted on flying his helicopter to the hotel. Even though the hotel had advised him that they had no helipad, the actor had insisted, setting his helicopter down on the hotel’s front lawn, its whirling blade giving it the virtual finger.

  Then there was that time, back in the eighties, when a few Hollywood stars invited everyone in the bar up to their suite for an Ecstasy party. Guests wandered the halls naked, and the Boston cops had to herd them like drunken cats into their patrol cars. There were also the husbands and wives (and mistresses) who occasionally had run-of-the-mill spats down in the lobby. Rumor had it that a spurned mistress once hurled her lover’s clothes and laptop off the balcony and that they’d landed with a satisfying crack! on the water. And every so often, a fistfight breaks out in the bar. But such incidents are par for the course, to be expected in the hospitality business. Jean-Paul knows this.