June (36 page)

“We’re all here,” Nick half shouted into the little black box. Nick, Cassie, and Tate were crouched over the smartphone on the yellow couch in the front parlor, like freezing people around a fire.

“Hey, everyone,” the DNA girl, Madison McKenzie, said. She was about Cassie’s age. Her stylish black glasses had made her look like a sexy scientist out of central casting, although Cassie had simply called the first number for a DNA lab offered by information. Nick had picked Madison McKenzie up behind the old video store, where he’d made her leave her car, in a cloak-and-dagger arrangement he’d insisted upon as soon as Cassie made the appointment and handed him the phone.

“Cut to the chase.” Tate was done with niceties, apparently, although she’d buttered up Madison McKenzie before and after her cheek swabs, as though the girl would be able to change the outcome of the test if it wasn’t in Tate’s favor. Tate had been supremely displeased that the DNA test wasn’t being done on her terms, with her doctor, but Cassie had made it clear this was the only way she’d submit to it; she’d told Tate she’d consider taking another test for the state of California if it came to legalities, although now she wasn’t so sure.

Of course, Tate couldn’t resist running the show from the moment the girl walked in. The story Tate told was about her movie star parents’ love affair and the people in the way of it—“people” presumably being Cassie and June. Poor Madison McKenzie had driven all the way up from Columbus at a moment’s notice, against the policy of her lab (ten thousand dollars cash was nothing to sneeze at, even if she did mention more than once that she was afraid she could be fired), agreed to be picked up by a strange man and to sign a confidentiality agreement on his dashboard, submitted to being driven to a house surrounded by photographers, and walked in to discover the biggest movie star in the world yammering her ear off about destiny and true love.

“This is seriously against policy,” Madison McKenzie reiterated over the phone. She’d said that a lot since Cassie had called her.

“We know.” Cassie raised her voice so the woman would be sure to hear her on speaker. “That’s why Tate’s going to pay you another ten thousand dollars once you’ve given us the news.”

Tate glared, but Nick jumped in. “Cash,” he agreed.

Elda offered up an amused grin from the armchair. She looked like the cat who’d eaten the canary.

“I’m not supposed to tell you any of this information over the phone,” Madison McKenzie said.

“And you’re not supposed to come to our house to swab us,” Tate reminded her, “but you did. Honey, you opted in when you took my money yesterday.”

Out of the corner of Cassie’s eye, she could see Hank edging into the hallway from the kitchen. She’d been banished there by Nick as soon as Tate and Cassie had descended. Cassie knew it was killing her to miss this.

“Okay.” Madison McKenzie’s tinny voice quavered. “You’re right. I guess I should just ask for verbal confirmation that you’re all, you know, there and okay with me sharing your private medical information with the group.”

“Whatever you need,” Tate replied in a clipped voice.

They confirmed that, yes, they were Tate Montgomery and Cassandra Danvers, and that they were both okay with sharing their private medical information with the people present.

“Just so you know,” Madison McKenzie said, “I’ve run the results a couple of times. What I’m finding is consistent. To remind you, I took multiple swabs from both of you. Just to be sure there were plenty of samples to crosscheck.”

This was interesting; Madison McKenzie was covering her ass.

She cleared her throat. “From these tests, there’s a zero percent chance that Tate Montgomery and Cassandra Danvers are related.”

Disappointment. Relief? Maybe, but mostly disappointment. The triumphant look on Tate’s face wasn’t helping matters.

Nick was all business. “So you’re saying,” he confirmed, “that Cassie is not Jack’s granddaughter.”

“Well”—Cassie tasted a note of excitement in the woman’s voice—“you’ll remember that I also took a swab from Esmerelda Hernandez. Just to be sure to determine paternity with Jack Montgomery, since Ms. Montgomery and Mrs. Hernandez are his daughters, and you didn’t have a sample of Mr. Montgomery’s DNA.”

Tate frowned and shook her head. She was not interested in this line of inquiry. Obviously, they’d already gotten what they needed.

“Mrs. Hernandez, do I have your permission to share the results of your DNA test with this group?”

Elda’s grin had come back, and it was bigger than ever. She sat forward, joining the huddle over the phone. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

“Well then, as I’ve said,” Madison McKenzie said, “I’ve run this test a number of times.” She held a juicy, dramatic pause. “And every time, it indicates there is a zero percent chance that Ms. Montgomery and Mrs. Hernandez are related.”

Tate cackled, loud and mean and triumphant.

But Madison McKenzie wasn’t done. “Here’s where it gets interesting. There is a ninety-one point nine percent chance—the highest percentage you could hope for in an avuncular test between an aunt and a niece—that Mrs. Hernandez and Ms. Danvers are. Related, that is.”

There was a silence then, a horrible, chilling silence, ended only by Tate’s question: “What does that mean?”

Madison McKenzie cleared her voice. “I’m not supposed to interpret the data,” she said meekly.

“What does it mean?” Tate cried, her voice violent with need.

“In layman’s terms,” the girl’s voice replied after a sharp intake of breath, “Mrs. Esmerelda Hernandez is Ms. Cassandra Danvers’s aunt, and Ms. Tate Montgomery isn’t.”

It roared up again, that sudden, shocking sensation as Two Oaks flustered to life around them, just as it had on the day Nick first arrived. Only this time—Cassie could tell—Nick felt it too; his eyes widened, his hands gripped the corners of his chair. The air inside the parlors and the foyer suddenly thickened with everyone who had come before, everyone who had cared about and thought of and wandered into and polished and hammered and shined and worried about Two Oaks for all the many years it had stood, long before Cassie and Nick had come here, long before they were even twinkles in their fathers’ eyes. The experience of all those beings together, so close—and yet unseen—reminded Cassie of a room filling with natural gas, the burner unlit, tightening toward a dangerous ignition point.

Tate was standing over the telephone, voice shaking, eyes wild. “Did you just fucking tell me I’m not Jack Montgomery’s child? He fathered Elda, and he fathered fucking Adelbert, but I’m the bastard?”

“I can run the tests again,” the poor woman said. “And I encourage you to get a second opinion.”

Tate picked up Nick’s phone and flung it as hard as she could against the far wall. It smashed into a million pieces, scattering all over the floor of the back parlor. Then Tate strode across the foyer and up the stairs, snapping her fingers at Hank and Nick to follow, but only Hank obliged.

“Well holy shit and hallelujah,” Elda purred.

Could Elda not feel the house alive and breathing around her? In contrast, Nick was a send-up of a man in a state of shock—mouth open, eyes darting to the same spots where Cassie could hear the whispers and scuttlings and speculation that seemed to fill the space—and Elda was cool as a cucumber.

The sensation of all the dream people filling the house ratcheted up, tighter and tighter. The whispers grew louder, the heat of curiosity and judgment and blame became more intense—and Cassie tried to wade through the ruckus to understand what had just been revealed:

Cassie’s father, Adelbert, had been Jack’s son.

But Tate was not Jack’s daughter.

Cassie was going to inherit Jack’s money, his houses, his fortune.

And all that Tate had built her life upon was a lie.

“It’s going to be okay,” Cassie mumbled, although the house was making her sick. She felt dizzy, nauseated. She finally knew, for sure, that June had slept with Jack. That Elda was her aunt. And Tate was…what? Poor Tate, poor Tate. Cassie kept coming around to Tate, bereft of everything that mattered to her.

Just then, from above, came a startling, deafening crash. Next Nick and Cassie and Elda ran up the stairs, which had filled with dust and a damp, moldy smell that Cassie couldn’t name. As Cassie took the steps two at a time—was it a gun? Had Tate thrown something?—she heard Tate sobbing, and the sound of Hank’s shriek, a lament that quaked over them—over the dream people too; they were parting for her, and, as they parted, dissipating, as though suddenly disinterested.

But Cassie didn’t have time to consider the dream people’s whereabouts or intentions, not as she mounted the last stair and launched into the upstairs hall and discovered what she thought was white smoke pouring from her bedroom. A fire? An explosion? Behind her, Nick and Elda gathered. In front of her, Tate was sobbing, moaning, and Hank looked terrified. Cassie peeked into her bedroom. The place where her bed had once been was now a dusty mess of floorboards and plaster, roofing and beams.

“What the fuck?” Tate was screaming now. “What the fuck?” She was raging, untamable, her hands bare and aggressive. Hank tried to get her arms around her, but the girl was like a toothpick caught in a hurricane.

“Ceiling collapsed,” Elda noted placidly. Cassie realized that, yes, that was exactly what had happened—she felt a surge of gratitude that Elda had put a name to it—but Elda’s sanctimony only churned Tate up. It was hard to understand what she was saying, although Tate was actually now startlingly close to her, alarmingly, unnaturally close. Cassie’s ears rang from the high decibels of Tate’s cries.

Nick put himself between them, shielding Cassie from Tate’s fists, which had started to pound Cassie’s shoulders and chest.

“No,” Nick said sternly. “No.” But there was something gentle about the way he treated Tate, something Cassie admired, a firm kindness that effectively managed Tate almost at once, that soothed her fury. Nick pushed back against her, leading her into the master bedroom, where he shut the door behind them. Cassie stepped into what was left of her bedroom and looked up through the hole in her house. She saw sky.

Sitting on the floor of Lemon Gray Neely’s office, surrounded by unread mail, Cassie listened for the sound of the cameras; she knew they’d snap to life as soon as Tate stepped out the door to leave St. Jude for good. The lace curtains furrowed in the grass-bitten breeze. Light flirted across the ceiling. Any minute. Cassie counted to ten, and then she counted to ten again.

A knock.

She watched as Nick’s hand squeezed between the rounded pocket doors. He did his best to push one open—enough, at least, to squeeze through and still give some semblance of privacy. He looked a wreck. “I have to go.”

“So go.”

“I’m sorry.” His voice was raspy, real.

“She didn’t hurt me.”

He tugged at the door he’d come through, trying to close it behind him. Then he looked up at the ceiling with a nervous grimace. “Should you be in here?” She’d left her bedroom, directly above, just as it was, covered in all the pieces of the house that had fallen down. But she couldn’t imagine that everything that was up there would fall another floor; that seemed an indignity even Two Oaks wouldn’t muster. She shrugged.

“And I don’t mean I’m sorry about Tate,” he said. “Obviously, that insanity was inexcusable. But I mean about us.”

She waited for more, but it didn’t come.

She sat up. “Hank stole my pictures.”

Nick shifted uneasily.

“Hank leaked the story.”

He offered a weak smile. “I suppose anything’s possible.”

“So you’re not sorry, then. Not enough to believe I didn’t do it. Hank did it, I know she did.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know.” And she did—not because she had proof, but because she could feel it in her bones. It didn’t make logical sense; who would sabotage their dream boss? And yet, at Illy’s, she should have seen the truth: Hank was a woman who would do anything to win. “You should believe me.”

He cleared his throat.

“What?”

“Tate—wanted me to ask you something.”

Cassie crossed her arms and looked up at him defiantly. “Well?” He cleared his throat again. She wanted to scratch out his eyes. “Spit it out,” she said.

From behind his back, he pulled a silver frame she recognized immediately—it must have been tucked into his waistband. It had been the frame that held the picture of Benny the dog, and Tate and Max, in front of the Great Wall of China, the one Tate had kept on June’s mantel. But it was empty now.

Nick cast his head down, as though he already knew what he was asking was wrong. It reminded her of how he’d looked the day they met, and she cringed even as she felt a part of herself harden into anger in anticipation of his question: “Do you know where the picture is?”

“Fuck. You.”

“It’s my job to ask,” he said, voice drenched in apology. “It’s my job to protect Tate. To believe the most likely scenario and do my best to protect her.”

“Well, you have a terrible job.”

“I’ve worked hard to get where I am.”

“Newsflash: where you are is working for a lunatic. A spoiled tyrant. She’ll only protect you as far as your next mistake.”

“I’m sorry, Cassie, but I like my job. Yes, it’s a job. Yes, that means I have to sometimes do unpleasant things. But that’s what a job is.”

“I know what a job is, Mr. Responsible.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Nick sniped, no longer so neutral, “I didn’t know it was a crime to act like an adult. You want some kind of prize for letting your house fall down around you? Apologies for not thinking that’s heroic.”

She could see it out of the corner of her eye—his hand on the edge of that door. So let him go. Just let him go and she could bury him with the rest of her skeletons, and get along with the business of dreaming in her haunted house.

But then she saw the uncertain shuffling of his feet, and knew those same feet would soon lead him right out her door. The pain of his suspicion overwhelmed and shocked her; she felt it like a stab wound in her gut. How could he believe she would have leaked those pictures? How could he have touched her with such respect and now just as easily disdain her?

“I don’t understand,” she said, as he was about to go. “How could you think I’d want those pictures out in the world for everyone to see? I made them. They’re personal. They were mine.” And she knew she was crying, and she hated those tears, hated that he could see them, but they wouldn’t stop.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I guess I just figured…it seemed like maybe…like it was your pattern or something.”

“My what?” The question came out angry. He shifted his weight. “If you clear your throat again, I’m going to kill you,” she snarled, cutting him off at the pass.

“I just mean, like your show,” he said. “That show was raw. It was personal—intimate, even. The
Times
loved that about it, loved that you re-created every inch of the crash that killed your parents, the way only you remembered it—from the installation you made of the sounds you heard in there, trapped in the darkness, to the real car that people could climb inside with that little mannequin who looked like you in the backseat. The leaking bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the floor, which didn’t show up in the police report but which you, in your spoken word piece that played over the exhibit, remembered being there. You put your family’s biggest secrets right out there. I guess I just thought that was how you do things.”

“Well, you’re wrong.” But he’d laid the truth bare. That was exactly what she’d done, exactly what she’d made, and it had broken her grandmother’s heart. She’d had nothing to do with selling Tate’s secrets to the tabloids, but what she’d done to June was much worse.

They stayed there, each in their solitary sorrow. Then Hank called: “Nick?”

“Coming,” he yelled, without a second’s hesitation. But he stood there watching Cassie instead.

“Go.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Go.”

“Did you feel it too? The house, clenching in around us? That’s what it was like on the day I first came, wasn’t it? All those people…”

And she had, and she wanted to go to him, to thank him for feeling it too, for knowing her—by knowing, yes, how strange her house was—as no one had known her. But he didn’t deserve that.

He stood there for three counts to ten. She didn’t look at him and she didn’t get up. Eventually, he pried open the pocket doors and left her.

The sound of the paparazzi rushing toward the car was like that of a hungry wave on a stormy night, chewing up a beach. But no, not quite—that was the feeling of the sound, the urge of it, but the actual sound of it was different. It was brisker than that, and more immediately frightening, the clattering of all those camera shutters, threatening and untamed. As Cassie heard Tate’s engine curl off onto the wind, and listened while the photographers got their shots, she located the name, the idea, the sound, of their cameras clattering together: it was like rattlesnakes.