Page 12

Lorna

Hours before Lorna’s disappearance: 17

Helen, Freddy, and I are lying on yellow sun beds arranged beneath blue umbrellas on a slab of concrete that’s wedged between the Faraglioni rocks and the cliffs at the end of the Belvedere di Tragara. Capri, it turns out, is largely without beaches. Just cliffs. Sheer cliffs that crash into the Mediterranean. Decades ago, enterprising operators recognized the flaw of an island without sand and smoothed over a few rock isthmuses with concrete instead. Which is where we are now, a private beach club tucked between two of the island’s most popular attractions.

There’s something romantic about the way Capri seems to be constantly falling into the sea. And perhaps something a little threatening about it, too. The ground always shifting.

It’s still early. Early enough that the concrete of the beach club is cool, a cool that will be replaced in a few hours by blistering heat, at which point I will join the Italians who lie facing the sun, in the hopes that I can burn away the nerves that skitter across my skin.

“Isn’t that the house?” Freddy asks after we order drinks, settle in.

He points, and he’s right. You can see it through a gap in the rocks. The top of it, at least, the Moorish parapet almost obscured by stone pines and a spray of palms. It’s like a sentry, that house, standing guard at the edge of the Marina Piccola.

But Helen doesn’t respond. She’s hunched over her phone, fingers paused midtap. Neither Richard nor Marcus has mentioned the envelope that accompanied the necklace, and so Helen and I haven’t either. Despite the fact we both know what it contains, how it will shape the days, the hours, ahead of us. Will they mention it? We told ourselves back in Los Angeles that they would have to. It would be a crisis. An unraveling.

The not knowing makes me antsy. And I can’t help but feel like Helen is avoiding the details. The whens, the whys, the whos. She hasn’t talked about the necklace, waiting back at the villa. Or the fact it hasn’t yet kicked the week off its axis, like we intended.

Instead, she’s texting.

I want to know who she’s texting.

We’re not supposed to be keeping secrets from each other. I’ve convinced myself that I’m only keeping secrets from her for her own good. I like to think she’d do the same for me, but Helen is still a Lingate. Will always be a Lingate. And I’ve seen, up close, how the rich behave. How they always pick their own.

“I really think we could have stayed at the house,” Freddy says just as I’m leaning in Helen’s direction, trying to read what’s on the screen. “Had drinks by the pool.”

“I like to swim,” Helen says, finally throwing her phone into her bag and stripping off her cover-up.

I look instinctively for my phone, but it’s at the house. I didn’t want to read any more emails about refunds or see a banner with Stan’s name flick across. Juggling it all is getting harder. I nearly reach for Helen’s phone. Just to check the time. To see if there is a name on the lock screen. But then Helen says to me:

“Are you coming?”

I’m not quick enough and the moment passes.

“Sure,” I say, throwing my towel onto the sun bed and pulling off what few clothes I have on. But I want to stay, to snoop. I wonder if Freddy would tell her that I did. Helen leaves us and makes her way to the edge of the water in a few quick steps, folding her wavy blond bob into a topknot.

“I thought you hated the ocean?” Freddy says quietly. He takes his drink from the tray that has arrived.

“I don’t,” I say.

“I could have sworn you told me that once.”

I can’t remember when I told him this. But it might have been the night I drove him home from an event Naomi was hosting in Malibu. The same night that he leaned across the console of the car, his lips brushing against my ear, then my chin. Finally, my lips. I let him because it felt so familiar, so easy. Or it might have been one of the other nights that followed. At the end of which we always said to each other: This is it. The last time.

He’s right. I am terrified of the ocean. And what else he knows about me.

“This isn’t even an ocean.” I say it more for myself than for him.

It’s a sea.

“Don’t drown,” he says, low enough that I almost don’t catch it.

—

Helen was at her uncle’s office the day it arrived. A month had passed, maybe longer, since our conversation in Runyon. The Lingates’ driver was waiting to ferry us to lunch, during which he would sit in the parking lot so he could later inform Richard that we had seen no one else.

I was opening the mail. Marcus was out. And Helen was looking through a folder of Sarah’s letters that I’d photocopied for her months before. Even so, whenever we were in the office alone, she liked to page through them and run her fingers across her mother’s handwriting.

Everyone, she used to say, is so fascinated by her death. It’s her life I care about.

She meant it.

Over the years, Helen had amassed, in secret, an archive dedicated to her mother’s work and life. Her plays, her correspondence. Every snippet of interviews, every photograph she could find. And Marcus’s files contained even more of Sarah’s flotsam: scraps of paper with a doodle of Lincoln Center, a note from the lighting guy about tracking, a crumpled tissue smeared with lipstick.

They weren’t shrines. If only because Helen wasn’t worshipping her mother, she was divining, in all those pieces, herself. The part of her that wasn’t a Lingate. The part of her that made me, whether I should have or not, trust her. Marcus, I assumed, kept the material solely to prevent it from ending up in someone else’s hands.

That day, the mail mostly contained bills and invitations. Amazon orders he didn’t want going to the house. They were shockingly banal: vials of beard dye, an exercise contraption for six-pack abs, a book by Esther Perel. I opened another box. I was nearly done.

Sometimes, too, there were crank letters. Handwritten accusations about what the family had done to Sarah. Requests for money in exchange for information. Assurances that the sender had seen Sarah in Bangkok and she was very much alive. Which was why, when I emptied the contents of the last box onto the desk, I didn’t believe it was real.

Helen knew right away.

The necklace barely had time to slither out of its felt bag and into my hands before Helen snatched it. She checked the origin of the shipment. It had come from Naples for Marcus.

“It can’t be real,” I said.

Helen hadn’t spent three years opening the mail at the office. She hadn’t seen the number of people who claimed to be her mother, who claimed to know her mother, who claimed to know why her father killed her mother.

Helen flipped the necklace over and felt along the smooth back until she hit a divot. Then she looked up at the filing cabinet.

“Does he keep insurance documentation here?” she asked. “For Naomi’s jewelry? For family objects?”

There was an entire folder dedicated to photographs of lamps and paintings, individual pieces of silver. I pulled the file while Helen checked her watch. The driver was waiting. I paged through the file until I reached the older items, the things that came from Helen’s grandfather. So many of the items I hadn’t seen—jewelry and artwork that were probably in storage, under drop cloths.

It was in there, folded in half. The file containing two images of the necklace, front and, most crucially, back. I passed it to Helen, who held up the necklace to compare. While she did, I checked the box for a note. Nothing. Just a series of stamps that indicated it had come from Italy, twenty-five days ago.

“Who sent it?” I asked. Whoever they were, they didn’t want to be known. Maybe they thought Marcus would know, that he wouldn’t need to be told.

She paused, matched the three small hallmarks on the back to the photo in the insurance file, and looked at me.

“It’s hers.”

I expected she would suggest we call the police, suggest we make its appearance public. Instead, she did the math. Helen knew her mother was gone; the necklace couldn’t change that. But it was a threat to them, and a threat to them was an opportunity for her. She seized it.

“We’re going to send it,” she said. “She would have wanted me to get out.”

—

Helen is waiting for me at the edge of the beach club, where the concrete slab falls away into the dark blue of the Mediterranean. Thedepth so immediate I almost balk.

I am terrified of open water.

“It’s always colder at first,” she says as she slips in. She inhales, the sound, a silly little whistle through the gap in her teeth.

“I don’t mind the cold,” I lie.

She’s moving her arms in wide circles now. And I think: I can do that.

“Oh fuck.” I inch in.

It’s absolutely freezing. I don’t know how it’s possible that the island of Capri can be so hot and this water so cold. I like the silky highs that come from North Africa. But the water bites my stomach and breasts. And it’s salty, so salty that it stings the corners of my eyes, my nose. At least the salt makes it easier to float.

We paddle around the roped-off swimmers’ bay. Across from us, a short, round, leathery man, a walrus of a human, slaps his arms against the water as he cuts a leisurely crawl. I expect his face to be whiskered when he pops up, but it’s not.

When we reach the farthest boundary rope, Helen grabs onto a shard of rock, but she can’t quite get ahold of it, so we bounce up and down next to it as the boats make their way under the famed arch of the Faraglioni. And for a minute, it’s nature’s amusement park ride.

Then she looks at the shore, where Freddy is lying, a towel over his face, an already drained cocktail beside him.

“Should we get out of here?” she says, eyeing at the rope that keeps us in.

I don’t want to. But she does, so I agree.

She dips under the rope, and I follow her as she skirts close to the Faraglioni, where day-trippers circle the rocks in small boats, and into the Marina Piccola, where yachts—dozens of them—pepper the bay. A captain yells at us, and Helen yells something back in Italian that I’m pretty sure is Fuck off. We’re vulnerable out here.

“You can swim, right?” she says, paddling next to me.

I can. Sort of. But I want to look competent, like the partner she needs me to be, so I say: “Of course.”

“Okay, then.” She puts her face in the water and pulls away from me in a few strokes. I struggle after her, my head above water but falling farther and farther behind. I’m not a strong swimmer, but I am a survivor. I’m still out in the deep when Helen reaches the shallows. In fact, her suit is almost dry by the time I meet her on the rocks.

“How far was that?” I say, out of breath.

She smiles, that big gap. The pink tongue behind it.

“Don’t worry, we don’t have to swim back,” she says. “They say that when Lucifer was cast out of heaven for trying to steal a piece of paradise, he fell here. Into the Bay of Naples. His fallen angels were cast out with him. At least, that’s the legend. And the paradise he tried to steal”—she gestures around her—“was this. The island of Capri. But all their wickedness stayed here.”

I don’t want to talk about myths. Not right now. Even though I know how easily beauty can transform into terror.

“Helen—”

She cuts me off, and I worry she’s about to tell me she’s changed her mind. Or worse, that she’s told them the truth about the necklace, the letter we wrote.

“Did you know we’re right below the house?” she says. “My mother’s body was found near here.” She looks at her hands against the rocks.

It’s hot on this side of the Faraglioni, the sun full on. There’s no real beach where we are, no real place to go ashore, no real safety, only pieces of the island that have fallen and gathered to create a little sliver of tenuous, isolated sand.

I consider changing the subject, keeping us on task. There’s money at stake. But I can’t help it. Her mother’s death lurks everywhere here. It’s the backdrop to every dinner, every view, every cocktail hour. She’s famous for dying, Sarah Lingate. And they’re all famous for not killing her. Maybe.

Everyone wants to know.

“What do you think happened?” I ask.

Helen rolls her face toward me and holds up a hand to block the sun. All around us are the craggy cliffs and cacti, the deep blue sea, a landscape with ancient appeal.

“I think they killed her,” she says. Then she looks back out over the stretch of sparkling water. “But not the way everyone thinks. Maybe she did it to herself. Maybe it was an accident. In any case, I’m sure it’s one of them—all of them—that pushed her. Never physically. They wouldn’t do that. They’re too soft. But just every day, a little closer and closer and closer, until—” She brushes her hands together to wipe off the sand, but she’s miscalculated the force and it sounds like a clap.

There is no good response. None of us know what people are capable of sounds like an accusation. None of us know one another’s secrets sounds too close to the truth. So I say nothing, I don’t ask about the hoary details. But I know more about those these days than she does. They haven’t told her much.

I nearly tell her. About Stan. About what I’ve brought to give him—to sell him. About why. The way women are sometimes inclined to go horror for horror, trauma for trauma. A race to the bottom that inevitably produces a winner. But I don’t.

“Anyway,” Helen says, “look at this place. Can you blame them for wanting to come back?”

I can’t.

There’s no easy way to ask about the letter in this moment. To find out if they’ve agreed to pay. And before I can, a boat approaches us. Just a dinghy, really, low and unsteady in the water. There are three men on it. Shirts off, music blaring. They’re Italian, I can tell. I will them to turn around. This is the only time we’ve had alone and there’s still so much to say, to organize. But then one of them calls out: “Ciao, signorini! Hai bisogno di un passagio?”

“Inglese,” Helen calls back.

“Are you looking for a ride?” the man calls again, this time turning down the speakers.

“Sì,” she calls back, “per favore.”

She splashes into the water and I follow.

“Sono Ciro,” the driver of the boat says as he extends a hand, helping us each onto the small vessel. The name familiar but impossible to place. Ciro.

And only when we’re on board, outnumbered by the men, do I remember Helen saying to me: Don’t worry, we don’t have to swim back. We may have left the shallows, but I have miscalculated how deep I really am.