“I’ll go,” I say, maybe hoping to see a whisper of that younger woman.
And for a single moment a flame leaps in her eyes. She reaches for me, and for once I let her take my hand, squeezing it in a fit of generosity.
“You promise you’ll actually live in my house?” I ask.
With her free hand, she draws an X across her heart and raises that same hand in a gesture of an oath. “Promise.”
“Okay. I’ll get out of here as soon as I can arrange it.” A wave of mingled anticipation and terror rolls through my chest, sloshes in my gut. “Holy shit. What if she’s really still alive?”
“I guess I’m going to have to kill her,” Suzanne says.
Chapter Two
Mari
Fingering the blindfold over my eyes, I ask, “Where are you taking me?”
My husband, Simon, slaps my hand away. “Leave it alone.”
“We’ve been driving forever.”
“It’s an adventure.”
“Are we going to have kinky sex when we arrive?”
“It wasn’t previously on the agenda, but now that you’ve brought it up . . .” He slides a hand up my arm, aiming to wander over my chest, but I swat at him. “I quite fancy the idea of you naked and blindfolded, out in the open.”
“Out in the open? In Auckland? Uh, no.”
I try to puzzle out clues about our destination. We left the highway a few minutes ago, but I still hear no auditory clues to the neighborhood. Distance traveled might be more of a help if we didn’t live all the way in Devonport, a long drive to many other areas of the city. I lift my head to smell the air and catch a whiff of bread. “Ooh, I smell a bakery!”
Simon chuckles. “That should narrow it down.”
We ride quietly for a bit. I sip my paper cup of coffee and fret about my daughter, Sarah, who had a breakdown over breakfast, her wild dark hair falling in a cape over her arms as she protested going to school. She would not say why, only that she hated it, that it was awful, that she wanted to be homeschooled like her (strange and prissy) neighborhood friend Nadine. Quite the scene for a seven-year-old who’d previously been the star of her class. “What do you think is going on with Sarah?”
“It’s likely a schoolyard spat, but we should go round to the school and talk with them anyway.”
“Yes, agreed.” Even with her older brother offering to keep an eye on her, she hadn’t wanted to go. At age nine, Leo is a mirror image of his father, the same thick, glossy dark hair, ocean-deep eyes, and lanky build. He shows every indication of taking after him athletically as well, swimming like a fish from the age of six months. And like his father, he suffers no dark moods or lack of confidence, unlike Sarah and me.
I can’t even imagine a life of such calm and sunniness, though I love it in both of them. “She takes after her mother, I’m sorry to say.”
“Were you given to moody spells as a child?”
I laugh. “The understatement of the century.” I pat his hand on the seat, knowing where it will be even with the blindfold. “Some would say I still am.”
“Not I. You’re perfect.” He squeezes my hand, and we turn sharply, bumping into what I presume is a drive. The car angles upward for some distance and then stops.
“You can take off the blindfold now,” Simon says.
“Thank God.” I rip it away, shaking my hair and smoothing a palm down over it.
But the view gives very little away. We’re in a tunnel of wild bush made up of tree ferns and vines. An overloaded feijoa tree has dropped hundreds of dark-green fruits to the pavement. “Where the hell are we?”
Simon lifts one heavy, dark brow, a small grin playing over his generous mouth. “Are you ready?”
My heart skitters. “Yes.”
He drives forward, and upward, upward, the road rutted and neglected, for another minute or two, and then we suddenly emerge from the heavy growth to a wide circular drive fronting an elegant 1930s house, standing by itself against a backdrop of wild blue sky and sea.
The air leaves my lungs, and practically before Simon halts the car, I’m tumbling out of it, mouth agape.
Sapphire House.
It’s a two-story Art Deco mansion overlooking the harbor with its line of islands in the distance. I spin around, and spread out below is the city, glimmering and glinting in the bright morning sunlight. Three of the city’s seven volcanoes are visible from here. When I whirl back to look at the house again, my chest squeezes. I’ve been enchanted by it since I arrived, partly for the tragic story attached to it but mostly because it sits up on this hill, so elegant and aloof. Untouchable, like Veronica Parker, the murdered film star who built the house for herself in the thirties.
“Are we going to see the inside?”
Simon holds up a key.
I capture it and fling my arms around his neck. “You are the most wonderful man!”
His palms land on my butt. “I know.” He takes my hand and laces his fingers through mine. “Let’s go look.”
“Did she die?”
“Last month. You should do the honors.” He pauses in front of the door. “Since it is, after all, yours.”
My blood goes ice-cold. “What are you talking about?”
He tilts his head back to look at the roofline appraisingly. “I bought it.” His chin lowers. “For you.”
His eyes are the color of the Pacific on a stormy day, gray and deep. Right this minute, they shine with delight in his surprise and the direct, open love he carries for me. A line of Shakespeare, lodged in my head from one of the only classes I ever attended regularly in high school, runs through my mind: “Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.”
I fall into him, forehead against his chest, arms around his waist. “God, Simon.”
“Hey, now.” His hands stroke my hair. “It’ll be right.”
He smells of laundry detergent and our bed and a faint note of autumn leaves. His body is strong and broad, a bulwark against the marauders of the world. “Thank you.”
“There is a slight catch.”
I lean back to look up at him. “Yes?”
“Helen, Veronica’s sister, had two dogs. Her stipulation was that they came with the house, and there will be a society checking in on them.”
I laugh. “I kind of love her for that. What kind of dogs?”
“Not sure. One large, one small, that’s what the agent said.”
Dogs are no problem. We both love them, and our golden will be so glad to have company.
Simon nudges me. “Come on—let’s go in.”
Heart pounding, I unlock and open the door.
It swings into a foyer two stories tall, with an airy gallery surrounding it. A skylight pours in great bucketfuls of sunshine on such a bright day. The rooms open out in a circle, and the doors are propped open, offering glimpses of the windows and views. Against the wall of what looks to be the long living room, a row of French doors reveals a staggering view of blue-green sea, sparkling and rolling. Far in the distance, a sailboat bobs by.
But inside is even more astonishing. The paintings, the furnishings, the rugs and appointments are all period, mostly Art Deco with its clean, clear lines. A few Arts and Crafts pieces are mixed in. An exquisite black-and-red lacquered cabinet holds a carved vase filled with dry stems, and next to it sits a round chair that has almost certainly never been perched upon. The rug is red and gold, with stylized vines.
My voice is hushed. “Is the whole house like this? So . . . untouched?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been inside.”
“You bought it sight unseen?”
He takes my hand. “Let’s go look around.”
It’s a magical wander—practically a museum of the world in 1932—the furniture, the bedding, the walls and art. The three bathrooms are tiled, and one in particular, the master bath, is such a jewel that I have to do a little dance of delight in the middle of the room. I run my fingers over the understated green and blue tiles that cover the walls, the ceiling, an alcove for the bath.
The splendor of the house would be a find even if it were classic Art Deco, but this house was built with a sense of Oceanic pride. The stairs are polished kauri wood, the banister Australian blackwood. A theme of stylized ferns and kiwis weaves through the accents and woodwork and tiles, and as we move through the hallways and rooms, I trail my fingertips over the precise inlays and carvings, wondering who the woodworker was. French doors with stylized cutouts lead from room to room and to a vast patio that looks out to sea.
Only three rooms of the twenty-two have been updated—a bedroom and sitting room at the back of the house, which are an ode to the charmless seventies, and portions of the kitchen, which has a stove and fridge that both look to be about a decade old. The stainless steel appliances clash with the rest of the room, which was designed for a household filled with servants and is suitably vast. The tile work is less spectacular here, but the stove sits in a tiled alcove, and I can see that there might be more buried beneath an unfortunate coat of paint.
Simon and I wander back through the butler’s pantry, still stocked with everything from fish knives to soup tureens and china in every possible variation. I open one of the glassed doors and take out a bread-and-butter plate with a dark-blue rim on white china, a pattern of dual lionesses and stylized flowers in gold along the edge. “This is . . . incredible. It’s like a museum.” Carefully, I settle it back in place. “Maybe that’s what it should be. Maybe it’s selfish to want to live here.”