Page 3

Lorna

Hours before Lorna’s disappearance: 36

I am at sea.

The realization is accompanied by a familiar, bland horror. The kind that always seems to whisper: Is this how I die?

Only it sounds like this: I am at sea.

It’s the same.

Behind us, Sorrento is getting smaller. Its square, stately hotels, their lettering bleached by the Mediterranean sun, are now just smears of color—pink and white—a collection of rusting balconies and terraces. The Lingates don’t seem to feel it. The way the dark water churns across the stern. The way we are trapped, all six of us, on this fifty-foot yacht.

Minutes ago, it wasn’t too late to send them ahead without me. I could have stayed ashore, feigned an emergency. But then my bag was loaded and the lines were thrown and the simple truth was I needed to be here. I can do anything for a week. Longer, I have learned.

I pull my eyes away from the shore, where the Italian peninsula is quickly going out of focus. When I turn, my employer, Marcus Lingate, is looming over me, blotting out the sun and the island ahead of us. He has left his wife of almost forty years, Naomi, on the bow. Helen Lingate and her boyfriend, Freddy, sit across from me. Richard, Helen’s father, the widower, is alone under the flybridge.

Marcus thrusts a champagne glass in my direction, forgetting that I don’t drink. I take an obligatory faux sip. I close my lips against the sweetness, the bubbles. I smile. It’s good, I’m saying. All of this is good. He nods at my pleasure, and when we hit chop from another, larger boat, he lurches into the seat next to me.

“No working this week,” he yells over the wind and the engine. He’s smiling. Like it’s a secret we need to keep from everyone else—my sterling work ethic.

“So you’ve told me,” I say. He has.

“What?” he says, as if he didn’t hear me. But then, a few seconds later: “You don’t believe me?”

“I believe you!” I say it loud, with the kind of enthusiasm that masks the fact I don’t. It’s part of the job, the charade, being a good sport, taking it on the chin. I’m excellent at this game when it gets me something in return. Despite my smile, I know there is work ahead.

When the boat picked us up in the marina, I tried to make it clear to the captain and crew that I wasn’t with the family. Not really. I’m not one of them, I wanted to say. I actually arranged this pickup. I’m the assistant. I almost took him aside—our young, short, deeply tanned captain—and tugged on his uniformed sleeve. I’m working, I might have said. We’re on the same team.

But then, I don’t speak Italian.

So instead, I said it by lugging my own carry-on, by being unsteady on my feet, by not knowing I had to remove my shoes before boarding. By wondering, Has leather always been this soft? By running my hand over the navy stitching of the bench seat with the same appreciation our captain ran his hand over the knee of the stewardess when he thought we weren’t watching.

First-class or private. Concierges. Luxury surfaces. That’s what no one talks about—the finishes. Hand feel. Mouth feel. Unctuous. I learned that word from Helen, my boss’s niece.

No one should be allowed to have this life.

And of course, ahead of us—the island of Capri. Where, for the next week, it has been alleged, I won’t be working.

It’s not what I imagined. It’s smaller. Sharper. Steeper. Much steeper. Two bony shards jutting out of the Mediterranean with a swale in the middle. Blond cliffs everywhere. It’s a wonder they don’t bother them—the cliffs.

Helen’s mother was famously found dead beneath one of them, her body mangled and bloated. Thirty years ago, in fact. I’ve searched out the earliest articles. I’ve memorized the blotchy gray scale of the old photographs. I’ve found myself growing sentimental over the way her red dress clung to her legs when she was pulled from the water. The way her hair obscured her face like a morgue sheet. It’s the kind of elegant tragedy that still receives glossy retrospectives: Lingate Death—Decades Later, Questions Remain. It was an accident. Maybe a suicide. That’s what the family has always said.

And every year they come back here to prove it’s true.

I want to set down this glass of champagne, but there’s nowhere to put it. So I cradle it like a baby bird, worried too much pressure might break it. The air is thick with salt. It’s uncomfortably humid, but they don’t care.

“I want you to feel like a member of the family,” my employer says, his words cutting through the chop of the waves.

But I’m not one of them. I am not a Lingate.

—

“You’d love it,” Marcus had said to me in early May. We were having lunch a few blocks from his office, at a place with white tablecloths and waiters so deferential they always seemed to have a backache. He insisted that I try his braised quail, and its tiny bones felt like carved ivory in my fingers. I don’t like foods that take a lot of effort to consume—small game birds, soft-boiled eggs, crab, lobster—they’re time wasters, a pantomime of manners, all miniature forks and spoons. But that day, I nibbled.

“It’s not like you imagine,” he continued, massaging his fingers into his napkin. “It’s so much better, Capri.”

He said the name with a sharp accent on the first syllable. Like a gunshot: kapow. Only it was Kaa-pri.

I’d never been to Italy.

“Better than Majorca,” he continued.

I’d never been to Spain, either.

“Inconvenient,” he said, “but worth the effort. The best places always are.” He washed down his quail with a gulp of white wine and tossed off: “You should come.”

It was an accident, I think, that invitation. But I’ve always liked seeing money up close. In private it gives off a heat. The cool, slick public facade replaced by an addictive glow.

“Okay,” I said.

I assumed he would forget the conversation. But then he sent my flight information. And that was what surprised me most— he had reached out to confirm there would be space on the jet. Even though it was my job.

You should come —he had meant it.

“Don’t people like that always travel with their assistants?” my roommate had asked me.

“I’ve never traveled with them.”

A staff was always discreetly arranged in advance. NDAs signed, preferences made clear.

“But is it really that strange he would ask?” she said, rifling through our fridge, empty but for leftovers in dented Styrofoam containers and two half-drunk bottles of wine. “Since you and Helen are friends. Maybe she was going to invite you all along?”

Maybe.

It would be better this way.

Helen Lingate and I were friends. We were friends, despite the fact that I lived here, with a roommate, in my mid-thirties, within earshot of the 405. I had worked hard for Helen. You have to when people have money. They’re suspicious. For good reason. But I had put in the time. And now the heir to all that Lingate money and I saw each other at least once a week—a hike, a lunch, a bar meetup where I always ordered a lemonade and she a gimlet.

“Will it be weird?” my roommate continued, struggling with a cork jammed into one of the bottles of wine. “You working and her—”

“Lounging,” I supplied.

“Yeah.”

I shrugged. I wanted to pretend a little longer; pretending made my life bearable. But I had already talked about them too much.

Discretion was the job. And Helen had recommended me. Her uncle, she said, needed an assistant. We were only acquaintances then. I ran the front of house for a busy bakery in Brentwood she visited every morning at 10:35. It was the kind of thing where seeing someone’s face several days a week added up to something like knowing a person, and then we ran into each other on a trail and she started talking. I liked listening. Listening was how I ended up on that trail in the first place.

It’s who you know, my mother used to say.

And I knew all the Lingates.

Even now, thousands of miles away from my apartment and its flimsy blinds, they still won’t let me forget my role. While Marcus may have arranged my seat on the flight, I have handled everything else—the boat (which was late), the villa (which was secured a year in advance, as always), the dinners and the housekeeper and the beach club reservations. Naomi’s private shopping appointments at Hermès and Pucci.

Two hours earlier, as we waited in Sorrento for the boat, I hadn’t been sitting with them at the bar, enjoying a drink. No. I had been on the phone with the charter company, who assured me the delay was unavoidable. I had been walking the marina trying to find another boat to accommodate six people and their extensive luggage. But this being high season on the Amalfi Coast, there weren’t any. And then, when the boat did arrive—the captain saying, his voice a beautiful singsong: an impossible delay, signore, the motor, signore, the wind, signore, a late drop-off, signore—my employer took me aside and whispered in my ear, Make sure you get a refund.

They always want a refund. Rich people love a fucking refund.

I added it into my phone, at the top of my list for tomorrow— refund.

—

The boat is slowing as we come into the Marina Grande. Into the heart of the port that serves Capri. Fishing skiffs bob past us. Small boats zigzag between the marina and the yachts anchored offshore. Yachts so big they look like islands.

Beyond the polished teak prow of our boat, the Marina Grande reveals itself to be alive. Peopled by bodies heaving fish and boarding ferries, slouching around café tables and smoking cigarettes. And there, on the dock, are the two bodies that will be helping us come ashore—one whistling, the other pointing.

I stand to help. It’s on instinct. I don’t know what I’m going to do; I’ve never docked a boat. But Helen grabs my wrist and pulls me onto the leather bench next to her.

“Just relax,” she says, giving me a full, gap-toothed smile. Her teeth are small and painfully white, like baby teeth. Her hands are cold.

Next to her, Freddy crosses his legs. A loafer connects with the opposite knee. “Watch out for the lines. They’ll wrap around your ankle. Take your foot clean off.”

Then he smiles.

I’m left with the visual: a rope twisting around my ankle, my wrists, my neck. Maybe he sees it too.

Meanwhile, the captain is backing us into the slimmest berth. During the whole process, his hands keep moving, like he’s conducting a symphony, one hand up, the other on the wheel, both hands under his chin, flicking at the guys on the dock. The stewardess coils ropes, pulls out fenders, suddenly all business after the crossing. It’s bravura, their performance.

We drift back into the tight space. And before we meet the concrete edge of the dock, the captain leaves the wheel and vaults over us in two quick strides to the stern. There, he places one foot on the swim platform and reaches for the dock with the other. The men onshore are too busy calling for the porters and watching the stewardess to see him stop the boat before it hits the seawall. But I see it. The way a simple movement, a well-timed gesture, can say, I am in control. You can let go now.

He dips his hand between the boat and the concrete wall. I can’t see why—if it’s a line that missed its target or just a burst of ego. But when he does, his foot slips. And the mistake is immediate. There’s nothing now to stop the boat. No fender. No foot. Only his hand in the water.

He pauses. His smile falters. I watch the recognition flash across his face. But it’s too late. The boat is surged by the wake of a passing vessel and we connect.

A cracking sound comes from the stern—flesh and bone and fiberglass mashing against the grit of the wall. Then the captain howls. And when I try to see it, the injury to his hand, all I can see is the way he has stained the teak swim platform pink. It’s beautiful, actually. The color of the bougainvillea that strangles the columns at the entrance to the cafés.

Next to us, towels are neatly rolled and stacked. I grab one and clamber to the back of the boat. It could be me, I realize, who might be crushed by all of this, by being of service to the Lingates. I’m on your team, I want to say as I hand over the soft terry.

On the stern, rapid Italian is being spoken. From the cockpit, the Lingates watch the scene. And although their lips are moving, I can’t hear what they’re saying. The captain bleeds through the first towel, and I look up in time to see Freddy throwing me another; I pass it on.

“Ciao,” says a voice from the dock. “Marcus Lingate?” A guide scans the cockpit, and my employer lifts a hand. “Can you come with me?” the man says. Already, he’s gathering our bags, lining his arms with the braided loops of our purses and carry-ons. Behind him, a porter is lifting our luggage into a wheelbarrow. “Your car is here,” he says. He gestures toward the heart of the marina.

The captain bleeds through the second towel, and our shoes are supplied.

“Are we just going to leave him here?” I ask. But the Lingates and Freddy are already off the boat, shoes on.

“Shouldn’t we stay and help?” I grab another towel. Shouldn’t they want to stay and help?

“What can we do?” Marcus says. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Here,” says Freddy. He pulls out an alligator billfold and passes me a wad of euros.

I stand there, holding them in my hand. The money feels hot, fresh from his pocket, and I consider keeping it, like I used to do when a man passed me a couple of bills, but I don’t. I just hold it. I hold it until I feel the stewardess trying to pry my fingers open. When I look down at her, her face is stained with tears.

I am not a Lingate.

This is not my vacation.