June (4 page)

What followed Nick’s mention of the name June was unprecedented. Yes, the dreams Cassie had been having were all-consuming; yes, they stayed with her during the day; yes, she ruminated on them, sometimes all day long; but they were dreams—just dreams. None of what happened in them actually showed up in her real, waking life. But then Nick said her grandmother’s name, and, suddenly, she felt everyone arrive. “Everyone” was the constellation of people in Two Oaks’s dreams, a crush of laborers and guests, of those who’d once built the house and maintained it, who’d filled Two Oaks in that party dream Cassie sometimes had, in which a great white tent was pitched over the side lawn and everyone was dressed to the nines.

Two Oaks was stuttering to attention. The mention of those two names together was too much to sleep through. In its excitement, the house ushered forth its crowd of memories, flooding the foyer and the parlors, where Nick and Cassie were discussing Jack and June.

Cassie couldn’t see the dream people, not exactly, but she could feel them, gathered around her, gathered around Nick, pressing in from the foyer and peering down from the stairs. Hundreds of people, if she wanted to count, people she’d never even noticed in her dreams but she now understood had been waiting there, on the outer fringes. She could hear them too—voices chattering in gossipy whispers, the thumps of their heartbeats, their swallows, their concern—and smell them—Ivory, menthol Kools, Old Spice, Pepsodent, and, dangling above it all, the heavy waft of a floral perfume. Cassie was surrounded, and, well, it was terrifying.

Cassie had assumed that her active dream life at Two Oaks was a safe—if odd—phenomenon, but this assumption was predicated on her being asleep when the dreams began. Now it was morning. She was certainly awake. She knew this because she pinched herself and she wasn’t waking up. It was daylight, there was a man here named Nick, he was saying words to her, but all she could attend to was the house filling with, what, souls? Souls she was starting to think might, alarmingly, be dead. Was that what she was seeing in the night? Ghosts? Were all the dream people really former people, coming to haunt her? Why had they roared to attention at the sound of her grandmother’s name?

“June,” she said sharply, testing them. Nick thought he was talking to her, and stopped and frowned midsentence. She realized she was sitting at a strange angle, that she had frozen in her chair, her arms tight at her sides, her head lolled back, but she didn’t think she could move. And now Nick was onto it too, rising, coming over to her, looking concerned.

They hadn’t responded the way Cassie had thought they might. They were just chattering on around her, as though the name meant nothing to them. So why were they here then? Maybe it wasn’t June’s name after all. Or—Cassie thought back to the moment they’d shown up—maybe it was June’s name paired with the name of the movie star.

“June and Jack!” Cassie shouted, and, sure enough, every one of them quieted. The dream people remained around her, but they were noticing her now, leaning in, more interested than they’d been, and the names said together had made that happen. As a little girl, Cassie had loved to feel her pet hamster stilling in her hands, even as its heart throbbed like timpani. That’s what it was like now, the house alive but quiet, and the hair on Cassie’s arms stood on end.

“June and Jack!” she called out again, and, in the same instant, all the dream people were gone. Cassie and Nick were alone in her house.

At the moment Cassie called out Jack’s and June’s names, Two Oaks had gone from hardly knowing Cassie was inside it to considering her essential to its survival. Only someone who knew of June and Jack (only someone who knew of the schism and loss and fear and newness born of those two lives entangled), could begin to understand how to mend what had been broken. But Two Oaks could feel it had alarmed the girl, and it wouldn’t make that mistake twice. It would calmly observe her from now on, hoping she followed through, feeding her the dreams that would tip her in its favor, but, otherwise, it would keep its dream people at bay, at least during the daylight hours.

Meanwhile, as far as Cassie could tell, everything had gone back to normal. She found herself pressed into her chair, as though centrifugal force had pushed her backward. Gravity was her friend again.

“Are you all right?” Nick was perched over her, a glass of 7UP held above her head, asking her again and again how she was. She couldn’t tell whether he was planning to pour the drink on her or offer a sip.

She nodded to quiet Nick’s insistent concern, took the 7UP, and gulped it down. He watched her carefully as she came up for air.

“That was…”

He nodded. “It looked like you were going to pass out.”

She gestured to the empty space, which had, so recently, been jam-packed. “I’ve never felt it like that before.”

His frown deepened. “I’m sure the news comes as a shock. I should have—”

“Wait.” Their presence had been so obvious, so apparent, that her incredulity won over discretion. “You didn’t feel that?”

“I heard you call out your grandmother’s name. And Jack’s. And then your eyes kind of rolled back and you went like—” He pushed himself back in a crude imitation of how she’d looked. He winced as he said, “Was that a seizure?”

“I was reacting. To the…the way they just—” She clasped her hands together and squeezed until her knuckles turned white. “The”—she almost said “ghosts,” then noticed Nick’s pursed lips and thought better of it. Talking this openly about the dream people was, like the horrifying pile of mail just a few feet to her left, a sign she’d been spending too much time alone, and she was only just now seeing that. She cleared her throat. “Whatever it was.”

His brow furrowed. “Maybe you should lie down.”

“I don’t need to lie down,” she said, her voice rising higher than she wanted. She reached for a handful of chips and shoved them into her mouth. He was still watching her carefully. She uttered a gruff and crumby “Sit.” He obeyed. She felt grumpy, ruffled, judged. She’d been wrong to let him linger this long. “So—this inheritance. How much did the movie star leave me?”

He folded his hands in his lap. Back to business. “Thirty-seven million dollars.”

At the mention of this sum, Cassie nearly fell out of her chair. Her question had sounded flippant, but only because she’d thought they were playing a flirtatious game. And also because how on earth had an old dead codger of a movie star thought to leave her, Cassandra Danvers, any money at all, let alone money like that? She tried to ask a question about it, but the words wouldn’t stick together.

“…plus a few properties—the home in Malibu, the apartment in Paris, an island in the Caribbean.” Apparently, Nick had been talking for a while and, now finished, was awaiting her reply.

“That’s…” Cassie couldn’t even imagine what that amount of money looked like. “That’s…”

“A lot of money,” Nick said, in his patient, gentlemanly way.

Cassie nodded, but she was watching him carefully. It couldn’t be this simple, could it? A man bearing $37 million doesn’t just show up on your doorstep. “Who do you work for?”

Nick lifted his eyes to meet hers. His irises were a surprising gray, swirled with silver. “Tate Montgomery,” he said softly, and the wince was undeniable.

Of course. Tate Montgomery. Jack Montgomery’s second daughter, the one who was so famous there was a haircut named after her. Cassie had known Tate was Jack’s daughter at some point, back in middle and high school, when she’d pored over fashion magazines. Now the facts flooded back: flat-abbed, perfectly coiffed, ivory-toothed Tate Montgomery had a royal bloodline. The goddess rose up in Cassie’s imagination: in her midnight blue bikini holding hands with Max Hall in that famous paparazzi shot from the day they got engaged; locking up her bike in front of the coffee shop on that sitcom she’d starred in for nine years; crying her eyes out on the tarmac in that tearjerker, when Rob Lowe finally went back to his wheelchair-bound wife. Compared to Tate Montgomery, people like Cassie were mere mortals.

“How does Tate feel about her dad’s money going to some stranger?” Cassie asked. It felt strange to say only her first name, as if she knew her.

Nick leaned forward awkwardly. “Are you? Just some stranger?”

Cassie laughed, one loud laugh she didn’t know she had in her. “Are you asking if I’ve ever met Jack Montgomery? Uh, no. I barely know who he is.”

“So you didn’t know anything about this?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He shook his head quite seriously.

“Nick Emmons.” Cassie felt positively giddy; this whole thing was absurd. “This is obviously”—she hesitated, relishing how he hung on her words—“an epic mistake.” He sat back in his chair, disappointed. She shook her head and shrugged. “Was Mr. Montgomery demented? That strikes me as the most likely scenario. Maybe he, like, picked my name out of a phone book. Maybe he didn’t want his children to get his money and a random girl in Ohio seemed like a better choice.”

Apparently this was no laughing matter. “Tate is upset,” Nick said gravely.

“Understandably.”

He cleared his voice. “He left a letter.”

“To me?”

“To Tate and her sister.”

“The sister’s famous too, right?” Cassie remembered that her father had loved the sister. Her name started with an
E.
He’d watched her on TV when he, and this sister, were both young.

Nick frowned at the word
famous.
He was oddly prim, Cassie thought, for a man who worked for a movie star. “Elda Hernandez. Used to be Montgomery. You’d likely know her from
Planet Purple
.”

Planet Purple,
that was it. A show from the early seventies with low production values, because who needed them when you had barely legal girls flitting around in bikinis, waving ray guns? Cassie could vaguely summon up this bronzed, Amazonian version of Elda with a long ponytail set high atop her head. Cassie had seen the show a few times on sick days; it had played on midday reruns. But these days, Elda Hernandez was three times the size she’d once been. She wore healing crystals over her long linen dresses. She showed up in the tabloids every once in a while, usually for flipping off some paparazzo or saying Hollywood was run by misogynists or making a frank statement about the realities of menopause. There’d been a scandalous memoir, but Cassie had been too young to read it.

“What did the note say?” Cassie asked.

“It said…well, it implied that you were Jack’s…granddaughter.”

“Nope,” Cassie replied. No, she had a grandpa. Not exactly the fun get-on-the-floor-and-play-with-you type, and dead since she was nine years old, but certainly a decent man, decent enough to urge his wife to move a hundred miles away so as not to disrupt the life of his newly orphaned granddaughter, even though his heart disease was bad enough to kill him within the year. Not to mention that Cassie’s grandmother was by far the most straitlaced, morally upright person she’d ever met; it was impossible to imagine her having an affair with anyone. It was impossible to imagine her ever having had sex.

“Arthur was my grandfather,” she explained. “June married him the summer she was out of high school. She had my dad exactly nine months later. And, believe me, my grandmother was definitely a virgin when she got married.” Nick was looking at her dubiously. “You can’t seriously think anyone believes Mr. Montgomery was right? How would June have even met someone like Jack? She was a small-town Ohio girl.”

“The thing is…” Nick cleared his throat and met her eyes again. She was reminded of the Atlantic on a January day. “The thing is, Cassandra, Jack Montgomery actually filmed a movie in this town sixty years ago this month. Your grandmother would have been eighteen—”

“But that’s what I’m telling you,” Cassie pressed. “That’s when my grandparents got married. There’s no way—”

“It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Jack fathered June’s child.” Nick pulled a thick legal document from his bag and handed it to her. It said “Last Will and Testament” across the top, but she didn’t want to look at it now, not when Nick could tell her what she needed to know. “Especially because, were he still living, your father, Adelbert Lemon Danvers, would be fifty-nine years old.”