Page 14

Lorna

Hours before Lorna’s disappearance: 16

Once we are on board the boat, Ciro makes introductions.

“This is Lorenzo.” He points to one of the men lounging on the bench, sipping a beer. “And Giuseppe.”

It feels like a joke, these Italian names, the way Giuseppe rolls a cigarette. The shiny wooden ribs of the boat. The cheap cushions on the benches. The motor, which smokes lightly. But there is relief, too, in no longer swimming.

“Where are you going?” Ciro winks at Helen.

“To the beach club,” she says, pulling her hair out of the topknot and wringing out the water.

“Ah.” Ciro spins the wheel, piloting us away from shore. “Do you mind if we go to the Marina Piccola first? Very quick. I need to drop something off for a friend.”

I look to Helen. I expect to see her stiffen. Helen, who usually retreats around strangers. But she shrugs, smiles. On this island she opens. Unfurls. It’s new. And new is an alarm. The words she’s shared about her family are left behind so easily that I realize this is her skill—slipping on the mask. It’s hard to trust someone who can do it so easily. I should know.

I take in the boatful of men and remind myself that we’re together. That’s what I’ve always told myself— There are other girls here —as if that’s some kind of insulation.

“Okay,” he says, “we go.”

Ciro throttles up on the motor, and Lorenzo offers us both beers, which we accept and only Helen drinks. I want to drink it. Desperately. I’m parched from the salt and the swim, and I bargain with myself and lick the condensation off the bottle. I don’t even care if it looks ridiculous. Erotic.

“Do you have water?” Helen asks, noticing, taking the bottle out of my hands.

Lorenzo passes me a bottle and laughs when I sniff it before drinking.

“è acqua,” he says. It’s water.

I guzzle the entire thing.

“Are you here long?” Ciro asks me.

We are arcing across the bay of the Marina Piccola with speed and precision, Ciro not even looking at the path we’re cutting, like he’s done it a million times, like he could do it blindfolded.

“Just for the week,” I say.

The boat hits the wake of a larger tender, and I startle, instinctively flexing my hand against the bench. The boys laugh at my reaction. Maybe it’s not the water I hate but the feeling of isolation. Of being far from shore, from help.

Ciro makes a gesture to indicate there are waves, and I don’t know which is worse, the boat or the swimming.

“A week isn’t enough time,” Ciro says. “The island is small, but it’s not enough. Maybe a whole summer? A lifetime?”

“Are you a local?” I ask.

“Not anymore,” he says. “ Napoli . Naples.”

It makes me feel better, this news. That Italians like to visit Capri, too. That it’s not all British tourists and rich Americans.

We slow as we approach the dock, but Ciro doesn’t pull out any ropes. He hoists a bag from the floor of the boat and shoulders it, scanning the dock for a familiar face. When he locates it, he swings the bag overhead and lets go. It lands, squarely, on the concrete, and the man lifts a hand. He’s got it.

It’s surprising, this throw, because Ciro doesn’t look that strong. He looks wiry and light, but the way he throws the bag says otherwise. It says we shouldn’t mistake his slightness for weakness. Ciro is like me, I can read it on him. And it worries me.

“Okay,” he says, clapping his hands together, “now a tour?”

I throw the water back to Lorenzo. “I’d love a tour,” I say, even though I wouldn’t. But I’ve been on more boats like this than Helen has, or at least I think I have. And we need more time alone. Although now that I’m here, on this island, I’m glad I’ve made other plans. Because it’s hard to tell if this version of Helen, the one who is tipped back against the gunwale, the one who, as soon as we’re under way, walks the length of the boat to where Ciro is driving and puts a hand on the back of his chair to steady herself, is a Helen I can trust.

—

“I’m not going to turn them in. If that’s what you’re worried about,” Stan said.

He must have waited hours to corner me there, in the shitty, nondescript parking lot two blocks off Wilshire’s Miracle Mile, where Marcus kept his office. Especially since I followed the most important rule of assistants—always leave after your employer—and Marcus had gone home hours ago.

“I’m worried about getting fired. That’s what I’m worried about,” I said.

“How will they know?”

“How will they know that Marcus’s assistant is combing through files looking for information that implicates his family in his sister-in-law’s death? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because they have tracking software on everything. And in any case, you think they haven’t scrubbed all of that? You think it’s just lying around?”

Stan nodded, conceding the point. “I’ve thought of that. But what if they mention it? I’m just asking for you to keep an eye out. Not even look into it. Just tell me if something comes up. Maybe there’s something there they haven’t thought of.”

“After this long, I highly doubt that they’ll let something drop in casual conversation. What are you expecting— Oh, I did kill my wife ? Bullshit.”

“Look,” he said, “I know you want to keep this job. I want you to keep this job. It’s a good job, right? Benefits? Reasonable hours? And I can help you keep it, if you help me.”

For weeks I had avoided his calls. This was the result.

I always knew Stan’s name might pop up in Marcus’s email, on his calendar. Maybe some part of me hoped he wouldn’t remember me when that happened. There were so many girls. But he placed me immediately, knew my name even. Which was worse, more intimate. Lorna.

The way he’d said it sounded like a threat.

“I like them,” I said. It was weak, and we both knew it.

“And they like you.”

What he meant was, They like you. But if they knew more, they wouldn’t.

In 1988, the year I was born, Stan Markowitz graced the cover of Fortune magazine when he took his fledgling chip company public. It was one of the first and largest foundational tech companies in California. By 1992, he was still CEO, but bored. So he decided to start another company, and then another. By the time he turned sixty, he had transitioned to venture capital, vowing to never retire. He kept working. Moving between home offices in Los Angeles, Aspen, the North Shore of Oahu, and a yacht, Il Fallimento, which he had brazenly decided not to name after a woman or feminine noun. Il Fallimento. Failure. Stan hated it.

He hated it, in particular, with women. Which was how I got to know Stan. I never called myself an escort or a call girl or a hooker. Those roles have more defined boundaries. But I was tall, with long legs, thick brown hair, and a body that looked obscene even in the most conservative situations. And so, while I might have ended up with a screen test if things had gone another way, instead I ended up on boats, or at houses, but always at parties. Did that mean that I slept with every man whose party I attended? No. But I slept with a lot of them. I drank with most of them. And I did steal from all of them. Including Stan. Stan, who loved the party girls. Stan, who didn’t pay for sex, but paid for other things—rent, food, flights, dinners, clothes, medical treatments (both vital and optional). Stan, who was always trying to shake off those early years of rejection with women, back before the money started flowing in and he could pay to avoid it.

When Marcus hired me, there was a background check. An extensive background check. But I was the kind of girl who also kept a day job—barely, with the drinking, drugs, late nights, and fencing of stolen goods—so not much turned up. Plus, I had Helen pulling for me. I had become the me who didn’t get involved with guys like Stan anymore.

She’s great. You’ll love her.

“Why do you care?” I said, crossing my arms. “Why do you care if they did it? If they didn’t do it? Who the fuck cares?”

“That guy,” Stan said, pointing at the black box of a building where I spent the bulk of my days, “that guy has been dicking me around for years. He promised me an investment in my first company and never came through. Same with my second. Then he pulls that shit blowing me off? I’ve known them for years. They’re bad people, the Lingates. You don’t understand the fucked-up way they operate.”

“How do they operate, Stan?”

“Like old money is above it all. Like old money can do anything. But he’s wrong, you know. Their money? It’s nothing compared to what I have. What my friends have.”

And yet they have something you want.

“This is all a petty revenge scheme?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Don’t you get it? They deserve it. ”

“I don’t even know Richard that well,” I said. “I work for his brother.”

“I know you know how to get to know men, Lorna.”

—

I can’t hear what Helen and Ciro are saying over the engine, but I feel the eyes of Lorenzo and Giuseppe on the side of my face. When I turn to catch them, they aren’t watching me. They’re chatting, laughing, hands braced against the waves.

Ciro drives us around the Faraglioni, where boats are queued up to pass under the rocky archway.

Just relax, I tell myself. Go with the flow. Have fun.

But then, that advice has only ever taken me bad places.

The crush of boats is behind us within minutes. We motor around a finger of rock with a house built on it—low, rectangular, inexplicably red—and then we’re alone. I feel it in my body, the distance that is growing between us and the bustle of the marina, the beach club.

“The Casa Malaparte,” Ciro says, pointing at the house.

I know the name. It’s where she was the night she died. A dinner at Casa Malaparte, the articles read.

We’re approaching the end of the island now. The Amalfi Coast is just beyond us—Positano, Sorrento. Ciro idles the motor and lets the boat drift into an inlet, one of the dozens we’ve passed. All crystalline blue and white rocks. The cliffs tower above us—hundreds of feet up to the top, maybe more. I want to take Helen aside, to ask her if she can feel it too, how alone we are, but there’s nowhere on the boat to have a conversation like that, no scrap of space big enough for the two of us to get away from them.

“The Villa Jovis,” Ciro says, gesturing to the top of the cliffs, where I can see the edge of a structure. “It used to be the home of the Roman emperor Tiberius. A pleasure palace where he was free to do what—or who—he wanted. When someone disappointed him, he would simply throw them from these cliffs.” He makes a pushing motion and a whizzing sound through his teeth.

“Nice guy,” I say.

He nods. But then says: “A monster.”

Aren’t we all.

“We swim,” Ciro says. He doesn’t ask.

Neither Giuseppe nor Lorenzo has said anything since we left the marina, but now, in the quiet of the inlet, their silence feels outsize. Their bodies, their legs, seem like they’re growing. Inching farther and farther into my space. I make myself smaller.

“No,” I say. “I’ll stay. I’m getting hungry. Helen, are you hungry?”

I realize she doesn’t feel it. The feeling that creeps up your throat and spreads its fingers around the back of your skull, the feeling that tingles. The feeling that says: Strangers, outnumbered, alone, trapped, danger. Maybe she has never felt it. I’ve long suspected people like the Lingates can’t. Money is a surprising insulator against fear.

“We don’t have food,” Ciro says. “But beer, it’s like food to us.”

He passes me another bottle, and I just hold it, look at it.

This is why I stopped drinking. It allows moments like these to slip, frictionless, into something worse, something achingly bad.

Ciro moves to the front of the bow and pulls out an anchor, throws it overboard. The sound of the chain against the deck is a sharp clatter. I look at Helen, but she’s entirely at ease. It’s possible, I know, that I’m reading it wrong. But the risks are clear to me.

“We only swim for a little bit, okay?” Ciro says.

Giuseppe stands and stretches his arms overhead, throwing his cigarette overboard as he does so. I flinch when he reaches around me to retrieve a towel. Lorenzo, who sees my reaction, laughs and says something in Italian to Ciro, who, for the first time, doesn’t bother to translate for us.

Helen smiles at me and begins to wrap her hair back up.

It’s fine—relax. Go with the flow. Have fun.

There’s no swim platform on the boat, just a ladder that drops down off the back. But none of the men use it. They throw themselves off the bow with such force that I stumble, hit my knee against a bench seat, and wince at the pain.

“They’re just Italian,” Helen says to me once they’re in the water. “It’s all bravado.”

She’s noticed, I realize, that I’m watching their movements the way I might watch a snake coil.

If you act scared, it will only get worse.

I walk to the front of the boat and make a big show of diving into the water to the sound of their cheers. Helen follows and we all swim, the knot of us, into the inlet where the water is crystal clear and turquoise, nothing like the navy of the deeper Mediterranean.

“This is why you need more than a week,” Ciro says, splashing Lorenzo. Who, I notice for the first time, has a scar running from the crease of his eye to his chin.

We can’t go ashore here. It’s not like the shallows below the house. Here everything is deep—eight, ten feet. I can see the bottom, so it seems welcoming, but there’s nowhere to rest, and my arms and legs are tired.

“I’m going back,” I say. “For some water. Some sun.”

A look passes between the three Italians, and they take off together, a sea of thrashing arms and legs. They’re grinning as they do it, and I’m not worried, not at first. But then they reach the boat before we do, and Giuseppe is already in the bow, pulling up the anchor chain.

Helen swims alongside me, a smooth, unperturbed stroke, low in the water. She flips onto her back.

It’s all bravado.

The motor starts up. And it looks like they’re going to leave us. Here. Alone in this inlet. To drown.

“Helen—” It’s all I can manage, but when I look at her, she’s smiling.

She’s fucking smiling.

When we reach the boat, the swim ladder has been pulled up. Helen treads water next to the boat like it’s nothing, no big deal. We wait. We wait until they come to the back of the boat, the three of them, standing there.

“I thought you were going to give us a ride,” she says. “Or should we make other arrangements?”

Ciro smiles. “Oh, did you want a ride?” He gestures toward the Marina Piccola. “We’re running late, you know. We need to hurry back. It’s lighter with just the three of us.”

“Very funny,” Helen says.

But Ciro stands there, flanked by his two friends. I’m growing tired. And treading water is making my legs and arms feel leaden.

“No, really,” he says, his voice light. He’s laughing. “We have togo.”

“It’s a bad joke, Ciro,” Helen says, surprisingly firm, like she’s in a position to challenge him, not stuck in the water. “Lorna’s tired. Put the ladder back.”

He turns toward the steering wheel as if it’s time to leave.

“Wait!” I say.

I grab onto Helen. I don’t mean to, but I pull her underwater. My legs exhausted, my body weak. I tire so easily these days. It’s hard to override the fear I feel, thinking about him abandoning us here when I’m so close to getting out.

Helen comes up for air, and I tell myself to let go of her upper arm. I don’t want to drown her. But that part of my brain seems to have shut off. The only thing remaining is survival.

“She can pay you.” The words are out of my mouth before I know what I’m doing.

But Helen can’t answer because I’ve dragged her back under. I don’t even notice myself do it. I doubt she heard my offering.

Ciro turns in time to see Helen surface once more.

“Lorna,” she manages, “you have to let go—”

I do. I think I do. Only she goes back under again. My hand, I realize, is towing her down. This time, she kicks me: her foot connects with my side and I flinch.

“Lorna—” Ciro calls from the boat. It’s a warning.

Both Giuseppe and Lorenzo are behind him now, watching the scene.

Helen’s free arm flaps weakly to the surface.

“Please!” I say.

I don’t know if Helen can breathe. I tell myself, again, to let go. But my body isn’t listening, even as she fights me.

Ciro’s in the water then, swimming toward us. His stroke is cutting and fast, and he doesn’t even bring his head up when he grabs me and pulls me off her. The jerk so strong I cry. For a moment, I think he’s dislocated my shoulder.

Lorenzo throws a life preserver in our direction, and I swim toward it, even though I don’t know if it was meant for me. When I reach it, the panic finally ebbs. Replaced by horror and shame at what I’ve done.

Helen is coughing, but Ciro is supporting her, dragging her toward the boat.

“Just float,” he tells her, “just breathe.”

“Helen—” I say. My voice is hoarse. “I’m so sorry. Oh god, I’m so sorry. I—”

Ciro kicks by me, and Helen’s face is pale. Almost blue. Lorenzo and Giuseppe help Ciro lift her into the boat, where she places her head between her knees and coughs for what feels like minutes. When I climb into the boat, I’m shaking. From the cold, I tell myself. Lorenzo passes me a towel and offers me another beer that I just hold.

“Helen—” I try again. She has to know I didn’t mean it. It wasn’t me. It was some animal trying to survive. She has to understand.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m fine. Just a joke gone too far.” She looks up at Ciro like it’s his fault. But he turns to me, and I can read it on his face. He would leave me here now. He would let me drown to save her.

We drive back to the beach club in silence. But in my mind, I’m replaying the moments in the water, I’m clenching and unclenching my hand to prove that it works, I’m hearing myself say, She can pay you. I tell myself it was an accident, even though I’m not sure.

We round Casa Malaparte and return to the noise and the bustle of the marina. Ciro idles the engine at the end of the swimmers’ bay, and Helen stands, grabs my hand. Her grip is surprisingly fierce.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ciro asks. “I could drive you all the way in.”

“We’re fine,” Helen says. She pulls me off the boat before I have a chance to say anything. To him, to her. The saltwater rushes around my face, into my ears. We dip back under the boundary rope, and she slows until I’m next to her.

“Let’s not tell Freddy, okay?” she says. She watches Ciro and his boat circle back around. “It was an accident. Nothing more.”

“Sure,” I say.

Then she pulls away from me, ten strong strokes toward shore.

It’s embarrassing how relieved I am. But when I see Freddy stand, when I see Helen pull herself out of the water, when I think back to Ciro leaping off the boat, I realize it’s not me she’s protecting, it’s not me at all.