Cav came out on the balcony again. He reminded Tash of one of those Swiss story clocks, where carved wooden characters came out of swinging wooden doors, over and over again, like jacks-in-the-box in perpetual motion.
“It’s been fifty years now since it all happened,” Cav said seriously. “I don’t think anybody cares anymore.”
“I’d still feel safer if we didn’t have to go through with it. Are you sure we have to go through with it?”
“Well, Tash, there are other ways of making money than selling all your memorabilia at auction, but I never learned how to go about doing them, and I’m too old to start. And so are you.”
“I suppose.”
“Besides,” Cav said, “I’ll be glad to get it all out of here. It spooks me sometimes, running into my past the way I do around here. Doesn’t it spook you?”
“No,” Tash said thoughtfully. “I think I rather like it. In some ways, in this house, it’s as if I never got old.”
“You got old,” Cav told her. “And so did I. And the roof needs a twenty-five-thousand-dollar repair job. And I’ve already had one heart attack. We need to hire a full-time nurse and you know it, just in case.”
“I don’t think I’ll wait for ‘just in case.’ I think that on my hundred and third birthday, I will climb up to the widow’s walk on this house, and dive off into the sea.”
“Come to bed,” Cav said. “We have a lot of people coming very soon. If you’re not rested, you won’t be able to visit with them.”
Cav was right, of course. No matter how good she felt most of the time—how clear in her mind, how strong in her muscles—she was going to be one hundred years old at the end of the week, and she tired easily. She took the arm he held out to her and stood up. She looked back at the sea one more time. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go, Tash thought, diving off the widow’s walk. People would say it was just like her.
“Tell me something,” she said. “Are you sorry we did what we did, way back then? Do you ever wish it could have turned out differently?”
“No.”
“Never? Not even once?”
“Not even once. Sometimes I still find myself surprised that it worked out the way it did, that it didn’t turn out worse. But I never regret it.”
“And you don’t think anybody cares anymore. You don’t think anybody out there is still angry at us.”
“There isn’t anyone out there left to be angry, Tash. We’ve outlasted them all.”
Tash let herself be helped across the living room to the foyer, across the foyer to the small cubicle elevator at the back. She came down the stairs on foot, but she never went up anymore. When she tried she just collapsed.
She sat down on the little seat in the corner of the elevator car. Cav’s daughter. Her own sister. Aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. Lawyers and accountants and agents and movie executives. Once everybody in the world had been angry at them. When they had first come out to the island, they’d had to keep the phone off the hook. But Cav was probably right. That was fifty years ago. Almost nobody remembered—and the people who did, like the reporter who was coming for the weekend from Personality magazine, thought it was romantic.
Good lord, the kind of trouble you could get yourself into, over nothing more significant than a little light adultery.
The elevator came to a bumping stop.
“Here we are,” Cav said. “Let me help you up.”
Tash let him help her. Cav was always desperate for proof that he was necessary to her. Tash thought the least she could do was give it to him.
2
HANNAH KENT GRAHAM SHOULD have let the maid pack for her. She knew that. She should have written a list of all the clothes she wanted to take, left her suitcases open on her bed, and come out into the living room to do some serious drinking. Hannah Graham almost never did any serious drinking. She almost never did any serious eating, either. What she did do was a lot of very serious surgery. Facelifts, tummy tucks, liposuction, breast augmentation, rhinoplasty: Hannah had had them all, and some of them more than once. She was sixty years old and only five foot three, but she weighed less than ninety pounds and wore clothes more fashionable than half the starlets she saw window-shopping on Rodeo Drive. Anyplace else in the world except here in Beverly Hills, Hannah would have looked decidedly peculiar—reconstructed, not quite biological, made of cellophane skin stretched across plastic bone—but she didn’t live anyplace else in the world. She didn’t care what hicks in Austin, Texas, thought of her, either. She was the single most successful real estate agent in Los Angeles, and she looked it.