“Don’t be silly, darling.” He tugs me through the narrow room and into the dining room and through one of the French doors in the long line. “Look at that.” He flings his hand toward the horizon, as if he’s painted the view himself. “Imagine our children growing up with this. Imagine that the house finally has life in it.”
The breeze ruffles his hair, and I’m drawn, as always, into his vigorous, optimistic view of the world. “You’re right.”
“Right.” He pats my shoulder and slides his sunglasses down to his tanned face. “I’m going to take a look at the boathouse and leave you to your explorations. We’ll have lunch at Marguerite’s, shall we?”
“Yes. I’d like that,” I say, but I’m already drawn back into the house, anxious to put my hands on everything, touch it, make sure it’s real.
As I walk through the rooms now, touching doorjambs and walls and artwork and vases, I listen to the atmosphere for anything ghostly or sad, but the rooms are only quiet. Hushed, almost, as if waiting. Leaving the master bedroom for last, I explore it all, then move silently up the swirling staircase to the room that occupies fully a third of the second floor. French doors open to a balcony that extends the length of the room, and opposite rise ceiling-high closet doors, sleek and varnished, with discreet chevrons inlaid along the edges.
Ghoulishly, I look at the floors, parquet covered with pink and gray rugs. This is where the original owner of the house was found murdered, stabbed to death at the tender age of twenty-eight.
Veronica Parker, a dark-haired and voluptuous beauty, was a New Zealand lass who’d risen to Hollywood stardom in the midtwenties. In 1932, the Olympics were held in Los Angeles, and Veronica was part of the welcoming committee for the athletes of her country, which was how she met Auckland native George Brown, an Olympic swimmer. A tumultuous love affair began. Veronica had already built Sapphire House, but George was married to his high school sweetheart, who refused to give him a divorce.
It was, by all accounts, the undoing of Veronica.
The turbulent romance lasted six years. On April 9, 1938, she was found stabbed to death after a party on the hill. Dozens of suspects were interviewed, but everyone was sure it was George who killed her. His world in tatters, he secluded himself for the last three years of his life. Some said he died of grief. Some of guilt.
I toe the floor, wondering, but I can see no signs of foul play. Of course, it was scoured some eighty years before. Still, I find it intriguing that Veronica’s sister lived in the house all this time and never slept here.
Or not. Who would want to sleep where a sibling had been murdered? Why did she live here, alone, for such a long time? Had she been so grief stricken that she could find peace only in this house her sister had built? Or was it simply expedient?
Not expedient. She could have done a hundred other things. Sold the house, made it over into her own tastes. Instead, she lived in those three unassuming rooms, leaving the rest of the house almost exactly as it was when her sister was alive.
Except here.
Rounding the room, I open drawers and find them empty. The closets are bare. Only the desk, sitting in the corner, holds any artifacts. Yellowed paper and desiccated sealing wax fill one drawer. In another, I find a dried-up bottle of ink and a fountain pen.
My fingers curl around the pen, and a shimmer of loss brushes the edges of my throat. The pen is substantial, smoothly inlaid with geometric patterns in green and yellow. Tugging off the lid, I find a carved silver nib.
Time slides away.
I am ten, practicing calligraphy with a dip pen as a storm pounds the windows of the bedroom I share with my sister. Her curly hair falls in her face as she bends over her page, meticulously drawing an L, her favorite letter. It’s better than mine. Her calligraphy is always better than mine.
I drop the pen back in the desk drawer and wipe my hands on my thigh.
The house might not be haunted, but I surely am.
Chapter Three
Kit
A couple of days later, I’m boarding a big-bodied Air New Zealand plane, feeling oddly nervous. I haven’t traveled a lot, not counting spring break trips to Mexico a few times, so I booked myself a window seat in business class. Since I don’t buy anything but surfboards and fountain pens for myself, I also splurged on a juicy Airbnb in a high-rise building in the city center, overlooking the water. That way if the whole trip is a bust, at least I’ll have had a little vacation.
Cocooned in the white noise of the engines and the murmuring voices, I find myself falling almost instantly asleep. Inevitably, the dream arrives. It’s always the same.
I’m sitting on a rock in the cove with Cinder beside me. I have my arm around him, and he leans against my body. We’re staring out to the restless ocean, watching waves that are too big race toward shore and smash against the rocks that are so dangerous. Spray splashes us all over, but we don’t move. In the distance, Dylan is riding his surfboard, not even wearing a wet suit but only his yellow-and-red board shorts. I know he shouldn’t be out there, but I just watch him. The wave is too big to safely ride, but he does it, skates along the center of the curl with his hands out, his fingers trailing in the water in front of him. He’s happy, really happy, and that’s why I don’t want to warn him that the wave is breaking up.
And then it throws him, and he disappears into the sea. Cinder barks and barks and barks, but Dylan doesn’t surface. The water goes still, and there is nothing to see but silvery ocean all the way to the horizon.
I jerk awake, mouth dry, and open the blind to look out at the darkness of endless ocean. The moon is full and shines in a line over the water far, far below. Stars glitter above, softening the harsh darkness of black sky.
A yawning hole pulses in my chest for long moments, but as always, if I am still and focus on something outside of myself, it fades.
The only way I survived the losses that marked my early life was by learning to compartmentalize, despite my mother’s advice to get some counseling. I’m fine most of the time. But tonight, with the dream fresh in my mind, memories pour in. Me and Josie stealing into the restaurant in the very early morning to pour out the sugar and substitute salt, thinking it so hilarious until our father lost his temper and spanked us both. The two of us dancing on the Eden patio in my mother’s cast-off nightgowns. Playing mermaid on the beach or fairies on the bluffs. Later, all three of us moving like a school of fish, Josie and Dylan and me, swimming in the cove or making a bonfire or practicing calligraphy with fountain pens my mother brought back from some trip she took with my father during one of their happy stints, an interest bolstered by Dylan’s passion for all things Chinese. Like so many boys of the era, he’d fallen hard for Kwai Chang Caine in the Kung Fu television series.
I adored them both, but my sister was first. Worshipped the very air she breathed. I would have done anything she told me—chased down bandits, built a ladder to the moon. In turn, she brought me sand dollars to examine and Pop-Tarts she stole from the pantry in the house kitchen, and she kept her arms around me all night.
It was Dylan who introduced surfing. He taught us when I was seven and Josie nine. It gave us both a sense of power and relief, a way to escape our crumbling family life and explore the sea—and, of course, it was our bond with Dylan himself.
Josie. Thinking of her in the times before she turned into the later version of herself, the aloof, promiscuous addict, makes me ache with longing. I miss my sister with every molecule of my being.
She changed as an early teen, fighting constantly with our father and rebelling against even the tiniest rule. Not even Dylan could rein her in, though he tried. For all that he acted as an uncle or father figure, he was still only a teenager. She started hanging out with older kids on the beach just north of us. Baby Babe, they called her, Surfer Baby. By then she was even more beautiful, tiny and tanned to a deep mocha, her blonde hair sun-streaked and endless.
Josie, Josie, Josie.
At last I doze again, this time falling into a deep, faraway kind of sleep, and do not awaken until a shaft of light plays on my eyelids.
There below me is New Zealand, blue and sinuous in the vastness of the ocean. Little islands dot it all around, and I’m amazed to see both the Pacific and the Tasman Sea. The Tasman looks bluer.
The plane banks and drops, and now I can see the coves and cliffs lining the coast, and my heart jolts a little. Is Josie down there somewhere, or am I on a ridiculous errand?
I rest my forehead against the glass, unwilling to take my eyes off the view. Light skitters over the waves, and I remember when my sister and I thought there were jewels in the ocean, dancing on top of each swell.
One morning when we were small, my mother woke us, whispering into the tent where we were sleeping, Josie and me curled together with Cinder.
“Girls,” she called sweetly, wrapping a hand around my foot, “wake up! I found something!”
The air was thick with fog, but the tide had gone out, leaving ironed-flat sand. My mother led us over the path and into a small cave that was approachable only at low tide. “Look!” she said, pointing.
Inside was what looked like a box. Josie bent over, peering into the dimness. “What is it?”
“I think it might be treasure,” Suzanne said. “You should go see.”