Page 4

Lorna

Hours before Lorna’s disappearance: 36

I join the Lingates on the dock. I don’t have a choice. Not really. None of us look back. Ahead, the Marina Grande spills toward the sea. Cafés are bloated with tourists and Italians who soak up the sun. Workers and visitors wait on ferries, clustered under what little shade is available. I try to enjoy it, but also to memorize it—where the boats pick up, the location of the ticket kiosk, the areas that are most crowded. Only the unforgiving sun distracts me, softens my bones. As if with the next step, I might buckle onto the stone. Surrender.

And as much as I don’t want to admit it, he was right—Capri is better than I imagined.

Marcus loosens himself from the knot of Lingates a few feet in front of me and waits until I catch up.

“You handled that well,” he says. “Naomi can’t stand the sight of blood.”

“Most people can’t.” I don’t mean to stick up for his wife, but I have.

“Not you,” Marcus says, as if I should add this information to my résumé, as if it’s an achievement. But then, people like the Lingates want to know you’ll be able to clean up any mess.

I catch his profile: a Roman nose, tan cheeks, painfully white teeth against the blinding glitter of the Med. This man whose email I read and whose prescriptions I fill. Marcus Lingate takes oral minoxidil to maintain his full head of hair (and it is full, a bit wavy and long, with streaks of gray at the temples), as well as Crestor. His doctor asks him, regularly, to clean up his diet and get off the statin, but he refuses. He’s thick, but not in an unattractive way. He likes his coffee black and from the Pacific Rim. His dinner reservations are always for 7:45 p.m., and the table must be secluded but never near the kitchen or bathroom. He insists charitable donations never be made anonymously, and he rarely communicates with his family via email or text. Just on the phone. I don’t join those calls.

It’s a strange thing, knowing so much about a person when they know so little about you.

“Must be your nursing background,” he says absently.

“What?” I say. I’m not really listening. I’m watching a group of men gathered around a tarp covered in caught fish, their jelly eyes bulging. I know better. Little distractions can lead to big mistakes; I pull my eyes away from the catch.

“Didn’t you say you worked briefly as a nurse?” he asks.

I did say that. I’ve said a lot of things over the years that I didn’t think people would remember. But then, that’s the strange thing about Marcus Lingate: he remembers everything.

I will need to follow up about the refund.

“It was mostly administrative work,” I say, gambling he won’t push for details. “Surprisingly little patient care.”

I’ve had lots of jobs before I started working for the Lingates. Odd jobs and no jobs, jobs that never made it onto my generously padded résumé. Jobs that put me at the fringes of people like the Lingates—bottle service, party girl, a few other things that stretched definition.

He doesn’t press. In any case, I didn’t need to work in a hospital to learn how to handle harm. The Lingates, in particular, are surrounded by it.

At the end of the marina, a car is waiting for us. It’s Illy red with a sawed-off top; a striped awning in lieu of a roof flutters in the breeze. All the taxis on Capri are like this, convertibles that can never be converted back. I know this because I googled the island before we came. People like to be surprised—delighted!—on their vacations, but this isn’t my vacation. Marcus and I load in after the rest of the family, and the man who met us moments ago closes the door and summons a separate taxi for himself.

It’s not far from the Marina Grande to the town of Capri, but it is steep. We climb up a road clogged with scooters and e-bikes to the soundtrack of an Italian summer, tinny pop hits I can’t understand.

I try to keep my hair from twisting in the wind, but it pulls free. Already a tan is blooming on my arms and chest. I’ve always preferred that my skin change with the seasons. If I pay for it later, it won’t be the only thing. Next to Helen, I imagine, I look as tan as the men on the docks.

My father, my mother always said, was from Buenos Aires. Who knows if she remembered that correctly. My mother wasn’t great with the details. I never met him, never saw a photo. She gave me his last name. It would make it less obvious that I was her daughter. This way, she said, it’s like we’re just friends. She didn’t even want us to seem like sisters. Maybe she always knew it would make it easier to leave me behind, too.

We curve around another hairpin turn. My shoulder presses into Marcus. We arrive at the center of the island—the swale between the two high points—and the cars stop. The rest of Capri is for pedestrians only.

Our doors are reopened, and bottles of water, dripping with condensation, are passed out.

We aren’t even to the center of town yet—the Piazzetta—but already I can feel the eyes following us, their weight unmistakable. It feels like they leave marks. The Lingates, however, love it. The once-over at an entrance, the quick sidelong glance— Are you someone I should know? The irony is that the most powerful people are often the most unrecognizable. It’s a fact that defines the Lingates’ entire life—be unknowable, be the richest.

Marcus and Richard cut ruthlessly through the crowds of visitors, past the Capriotes slouched around tables in the Piazzetta, down a long pedestrian street dotted with the first clutch of luxury boutiques and gelato shops. We follow the outline of their linen-clad bodies. Richard in all white, a pair of flowing pants, a cuffed button-up, like a guru. And Marcus in the pink shorts Naomi laid out for him before we left L.A. I’ve spent two months preparing for this trip, but I couldn’t have prepared for the way the island smells—of figs—or the way the light kisses the agaves and the pines. I couldn’t have prepared for the scene—the jewelry, how everyone wears their fabric draped loosely but has insisted their plastic surgeon pull their skin tight, the personal security that follows at a safe distance.

Maybe the incident on the boat was only a distraction. Maybe it’s this that the rich have taught me—how to ignore anything unpleasant. How to bat it away with beauty. A bouquet of lilacs to erase the scent of urine, a gate to keep out poverty.

Usually I’m the one on the street.

Off this main artery spider narrow streets and hidden doors. I hear the thin sound of techno music, but also, incongruously, church bells. Every few feet people seem to be on the come up. Behind them follow others already worried about the come down. That, at least, I recognize.

We enter the heart of the shopping district—Hermès, Gucci, a massive Ferragamo storefront—where two strikingly beautiful women and one man, dressed in pastel linens and straw fedoras, swan through the flow of tourists and shoppers.

“They’re models.” Freddy nods at them just as they pause, pose. “They get paid to walk around like that. It’s promotional, for one of the shops.” Then he laughs. The sound is high and hard and awful, like fiberglass hitting concrete. “Lorna thought they were real,” he says to Helen.

“I thought they were too, the first time,” she says to me. “You’ll get used to it.”

I force a laugh. I’m in on the joke now. But I hate it, how easy it is to pretend to be someone else.

We’re nearly through the thick of it, this touristy stretch, when a man wedges past me to clap a hand on Marcus’s back and say: “They’re letting anyone on the island now?”

The man kisses Naomi on both cheeks and extends a hand to Richard for a quick shake. When he does this, he turns. I recognize his profile. And it comes flooding back—the sight of the strawberry-pink blood on the swim platform, the knowledge that there’s no easy exit from this island, from this family. I look at the ground, but I even know his loafers.

“I thought you were in Antibes,” Marcus says.

“I was, I was. But then I heard about this thing Werner’s putting on at Gallo Lungo, and you know I never pass up an opportunity to check out someone else’s island.” He smiles and his canines are bigger and sharper than the rest of his teeth. “So I took the boat down. How long will you be here?”

“A week.”

“You have to join me for dinner. I won’t take no for an answer.”

“If we have time,” Marcus says. It’s a cold wind—the affable family man gone in an instant. But then, it’s no surprise. These two have a long history. The only surprise is that Stan Markowitz stopped us atall.

“Of course,” he says. “Only if you have time.” He turns to leave and adds, his eyes meeting mine: “I’ll call your assistant.”

—

“Don’t you ever wonder,” Stan Markowitz said to me, “what really happened on that island?”

I had just delivered him a bottle of water. Sparkling. Saratoga, not Pellegrino. He had asked for it by name. The blue bottle, he had said, you know the one.

I did know the one. I was good at my job; I had bought it specifically for him.

“I don’t,” I lied, standing by the door. “Can I get you anything else?”

“Is he running late today?” Stan checked his watch.

“Nope. On time.”

“It’s already two.”

“I’ll go check with him,” I said.

Let me go.

“You’ve really never thought about it?” he said as I went to leave.

“No.”

Of course I’ve thought about it.

“I don’t believe you.” He took a sip of water. “Is that why you took this job? Let’s be honest, you probably know more than most. I can only imagine the kind of access you have. They’re so private. ” He said it harshly, a criticism. “Everyone says his brother, Richard, did it, killed his own wife,” Stan continued. Then, looking past me, he added, “I’m still furious they got away with it.”

It’s nothing compared to what you’ve gotten away with.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

At the door to Marcus’s office, I leaned my head in. “Stan’s waiting.”

“Good,” Marcus said. He didn’t look up.

“What would you like me to tell him?”

“Nothing. Let him wait.”

He’s asking about Sarah. He’s going to do more than ask, Marcus. It’s going to get worse.

I smiled. “Okay. Do you need anything else?”

“No. Thank you. In about fifteen minutes, please tell Stan I need to reschedule.”

Fuck.

“Great. I’ll let him go in fifteen.”

“Thank you, Lorna.” Marcus looked up at me before turning to his phone, tapping it, holding it to his ear.

Fifteen minutes later, I let Stan loose.

“He’s very sorry it didn’t work out today,” I said, walking him to the building exit.

“The fuck he is.”

“He asked if there was a time when we might be able to reschedule?”

“I’m not coming back here. Are you insane? Who needs his money anyway? Tell him I was looking out for him. Not the other way around.”

He slammed his way out onto the street. But he was wrong: he did come back.

He couldn’t let them get away with it.

—

We’re off the central pedestrian street now, on the Via Marino Occhio, a narrow alley that winds precipitously toward the back of the island. Below us is the Marina Piccola. The ferries don’t dock on this side, only yachts do. The crowds are also gone, their chatter replaced by birdsong and a pulsing beat echoing off the water.

It’s only a few minutes of walking before we reach the villa. I recognize it instantly, like I’ve always known it—its Moorish parapet and lush gardens reproduced hundreds of times in magazines and newspapers. A friend of the family, a nameless European aristo who used to pal around with Richard and Marcus’s father, owns the property. But even though it’s not theirs, it will always only be associated with them. With her.

It makes sense now, why they keep coming back. Even though she died here, her body raking the cliffs as she fell. The wooden door that faces the street—a gate, really—is pushed open, and I see the house: white stucco with dark green shutters and rounded archways inlaid with Islamic tile. Curved balconies that face the Mediterranean, dripping with bougainvillea and decorated with intricate latticework. The entrance to the house is a long, columned allée, flanked by stone pines that smell toasted and sharp against the backdrop of fig.

And then the gate swings closed behind us.

I don’t expect it, but a tightness lodges behind my sternum. Spreads to my throat and stomach. Wraps around my sides like a snake, constricting inch by inch.

Helen touches me and I startle. It’s just a hand on my arm. Does she feel it? I try to put her at ease: I smile, I breathe in a way that might loosen the tightness, I keep moving. And with every step, I ignore the voice that whispers: Run.