The Santiago Sisters (22 page)

Calida smiled. Lucy’s candy-blonde, Southern-Comfort demeanour meant it was sometimes easy to forget there lay a sharp mind beneath. Looking around, she saw that Lucy was right. The models were shamelessly touchy-feely. Six-feet frames lolled over each other, a leg stroked here, a kiss planted there …

Calida downed her champagne.

Over the next few hours, despite the A-list factor in the room, it seemed that she was the person to be seen with. As
she got progressively tipsy and Lucy got progressively trashed, a stream of names approached her for a photo, or just to introduce themselves.
See, Tess Geddes? You’re not the only one who’s good at this.

At two a.m., the party piled into a chain of waiting cars.

‘I’ve got a shoot in four hours,’ said Calida, hailing her own cab.

‘Bullshit you have!’ Winona Glazer crowed, grabbing her. ‘We’re just getting warmed up. Brett’s renting this sick place out in Glen Cove. You
have
to come!’

The mansion was an hour’s drive out of NYC. Winona insisted on Calida and Lucy sharing her ride and wasted no time in producing a heap of cocaine.

‘This is the best birthday ever!’ Winona slurred. ‘D’you know why? Because of this woman right here.’ The limo turned and Winona’s body slammed into hers, her hand squeezing Calida’s knee.
‘Cal Santiago,’
she whispered, before erupting in giggles. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you. My fucking boyfriend dumped me like two hours ago and do you know what? I don’t even care! I’m invincible. Alex Dalton can go screw himself because I’m hotter than him, I’m hotter than everyone, I’m hotter than the fucking sun and it’s all thanks to you!’ Winona kissed her. Lucy sat opposite, flirting with a TV actor with badly dyed hair.

As Winona had vouched, the Long Island pad was unbelievable. It couldn’t be smaller than the White House. Moonlight gleamed off landscaped lawns as the party of fifteen—Winona’s proclaimed ‘core set’—piled inside. Calida was amazed at the endless corridors and huge, polished rooms. Who lived here? It was a palace.

‘Brett’s renting it off some Italian dude,’ said Winona. ‘He’s super-rich.’

‘No kidding,’ said Calida. A wall of photographs in the vestibule boasted a suited, dark-haired European mixing with the glitterati. The Italian was attractive but pristine: his teeth too white, his hair too oiled, his hands too smooth. Her thoughts wandered to Daniel Cabrera in his dusty T-shirt and worn blue jeans.
Don’t. It hurts.

Lucy was the first to jump in the pool. Her silk slip became transparent as she frolicked and splashed in the water, and soon the rest were joining in, peeling off their clothes and diving into the blue. Brett located the bar and the first shots were served.

‘This is wild!’ Lucy cried, playfully spattering the TV actor. He responded by grabbing her and kissing her. In a rush the silk slip came off and her breasts crushed against his chest. Calida decided she had seen enough. She headed inside.

The grounds were spinning. She’d drunk too much. Locating the kitchen, she drank two glasses of water and sobered up. By the time she went back outside, the pool was deserted, just several bundles of clothes lining the perimeter. Voices and music emanated from a hexagonal pool house; she crossed to it and opened the door.

Inside, it was lavishly upholstered. On the central table a collection of powder-filled bags promised the party would continue until dawn. Everyone was naked and touching each other. The word
orgy
spun in Calida’s liquor-soaked brain.

She searched for Lucy. ‘Hey, Cal, c’mere,’ drawled Winona. The model was reclining against Brett’s chest and smoking a thin cigarette. Her nipples were tight and small, light pink, and the narrow strip of hair between her legs burned amber. Keeping her eyes on Calida’s, she began to touch herself, parting her thighs so Calida caught a glimpse of a silky pink
flower, so similar yet so different to her own. Winona opened wider, sinking her finger and raising her hips. Brett’s hands appeared from behind, lightly squeezing her breasts. People were taking their cue from Winona and kissing and fondling each other, the floor and upholstery a mass of limbs and bumps and swellings, the pink of skin and clumps of hair reaching and swaying like coral on the ocean floor. It was impossible, in places, to see where one body ended and another began; some were connected not to one other but to three or four, by hand, mouth or lower. Soft moans rose from the melee. An alarm sounded faintly in Calida’s head.

Winona stretched for her, ‘I’m waiting …’

A model Calida didn’t recognise manoeuvred himself between Winona’s legs, while another positioned himself over her, pulling himself off.

‘Wait.’ A voice she recognised. ‘Don’t. I’m not sure … I don’t know if I …’

Lucy was face-down on a cushioned banquette, neck lolling and eyes bleary. The TV actor began kneading her buttocks, while Winona’s friend Ursula kissed her spine from top to bottom. Lucy sighed, with pleasure or surrender or both. The actor stepped back when Ursula’s kisses met the tanned ravine of Lucy’s ass and parted her.

‘We’re going.’ Calida found a shirt and threw it at her friend. ‘Get dressed.’

‘Chill, girl,’ said the actor, with a lewd grin, pointing his obscenely big erection towards her like a cocked gun. ‘Don’t you want in on the action?’

By now Winona was on all fours. The guy she was with entered her from behind and drilled her like a jackhammer. ‘Yeah!’ she squealed. ‘Oh, yeah, it’s party time!’ At the same
moment Brett eased his penis into Winona’s mouth and it vanished almost completely. She rocked between them like a dancing piston.

‘Lucy, I mean it. Get dressed. Now.’

Lucy attempted to grapple forward but Ursula was eating her out like there was no tomorrow. Only when the actor tried to have sex with her did Calida pound a fist into his jaw. It cracked like wood. ‘Crazy
bitch
!’ he snarled. ‘Are you insane?’

She grabbed Lucy and hauled her up.

‘I want to go home,’ Lucy blubbed, shivering and pale-faced.

‘All the liquor and drugs in the world still makes that rape,’ said Calida.

‘Jeez, don’t get heavy on my ass,’ said the actor. ‘It’s only a freaking party!’

Out in the fresh air, Lucy promptly vomited by the side of the pool. Calida helped her get dressed. Instead of the slip, she wrapped her in a blanket, and hugged her tight to keep her warm. It was a relief when their car finally pulled up and she was able to bundle her inside. Her friend fell instantly asleep and Calida watched the Long Island mansion recede in the wing mirror like a Gothic nightmare.

What had she expected?

It proved what she had known all along about this fake, dangerous, poisonous world. Just as it had spun lies and dripped venom into her sister all those years ago, so the real version delivered. Another reminder that her twin had wished for this life, these people; she had chosen them over family, over loyalty, over everything of value.

Replaced, swapped, upgraded.

Teresita used to fear monsters, when they were six years old and lying in the bunk and could hear the old shed rattling
in the wind. Calida had told her not to be afraid. She hadn’t known then that the only monsters were the ones Teresita would one day pursue—and that, when she found them, she would become one herself.

Calida had read about her sister’s wedding, tried to avoid it but in the end been unable to. She had seen the pictures, each one a splinter in her heart.

Had her twin thought of her? Had she even crossed her mind?

No. Of course she hadn’t. Calida glanced once more at the mansion before it dissolved from sight.
Become a monster,
she told herself.
If that’s what it takes.

Lucy moaned in her sleep. ‘Home … Please, take me home …’

Calida, too, closed her eyes, and prayed that the dark would come quickly.

Argentina

H
ome.
The word held terror and wonder. Tess Geddes was going home.

Work commitments meant the couple were forced to delay their honeymoon, and arrived in South America two months after the wedding. Tess had hoped the trip would be put to one side once ordinary life resumed, but Steven would stop at nothing. He employed a full-time team to source their itinerary—from polo-playing to wine tasting, from an ‘authentic’ Pampas safari involving luxury silk-weft gazebos and a Michelin-starred chef, to an al fresco dinner party for all their friends on the final weekend. The night before they left, he presented her with a schedule.

‘What do you think?’ he asked, kissing the tip of her nose.

‘It looks wonderful,’ Tess said. All she could see was the proximity to the ranch where she’d grown up; they would be mere miles from its perimeter.
Forget it. It’s a scrap of deadbeat land.
That place had abandoned her—she owed it nothing.

But as soon as she stepped off the propeller plane on that Patagonian airstrip, the heat and scent of Argentina embraced her like a lover who had broken her heart. ‘This way, baby,’
said Steven, who was clad in a billowing linen shirt and a camel-leather Panama, like some 1930s island explorer. He guided her towards the BMW, which squatted on the road like a growling panther. Steven preferred to maintain the illusion that this was nothing out of the ordinary, that they weren’t attracting a wave of stares and a crowd of followers, that there hadn’t been a cluster of tipped-off paparazzi waiting for them at the airport gates, and there wasn’t a beefy security guy named Ike hovering at their back. But it was, and they were.

As they shot like a bullet through her homeland in air-conditioned luxury, the contrast gave Tess vertigo. She ought to be on horseback, barefoot and knee-scraped. Instead she wore a stark white Diane Furstenberg pantsuit with patent blue heels.

She saw herself in the tinted windows, superimposed against her rustic, sprawling birthplace, and it seemed a miracle that her country, her land, had been here all along, waiting through these years for her return, and hadn’t changed. The peaks and lakes shone as bright and glorious as she remembered: more, finer, better.

You can’t deny where you came from. It’s
inside you.

As soon as they arrived at the ranch and met its studiously rustic sign—EL PARAÍSO—Tess knew just what kind of place it was. Against all evidence to the contrary, she had both feared and hoped for a glimmer of her world, that Steven might have tapped into it. Instead this was an
estancia
purpose-built for the rich, those who wished for a sanitised Argentina and who were content to occupy the land and all its wonder, so long as a hot shower welcomed them at the end of the day and they could slip between satin sheets on a full belly and their internet access wasn’t compromised.

They stayed on
El Paraíso
for two weeks, walking, relaxing, having sex, and Tess concentrated on the great things about her husband and tried to forget the rest. Now they were out of LA she saw him in a different context, and couldn’t help comparing him with the rough-knuckled gauchos of her youth, who seemed daring and wild in comparison.
I’m just like my mother,
she thought.
I don’t know how to be happy.

One day, her favourite day, they took the horses out. Tess stroked her animal’s flank and searched his warm, ink-glazed eye, and felt her soul slip back into place.

She put her foot in the stirrup and swung her weight up and over and it was as easy and natural as breathing. Reins in her fist, the earth below and the sky above …

Meanwhile Steven picked his way across the churned-up terrain and the rancher hauled him up; then he hung off the beast’s neck, legs dangling. After a series of frustrated grunts, he righted himself, located his upper body strength, and landed on the creature’s back with a loud
thwump,
his groin taking the brunt. There was a sound like ripped material and Steven’s mouth slung open. His skin went bright red.

‘Are you OK?’ Tess asked.

Steven was quiet a moment, then said in a high-pitched voice: ‘I’m fine.’

They set off. Steven put on a brave face but was clearly uncomfortable. His horse was thickset and had flatulence; each time it lifted its tail to relieve itself Steven winced as if the indignity was his, as if this were a flawless oil painting he had spent weeks constructing only to find someone had been
sick all down it. The dust blew in his hair and eyes and inside the rim of his forty-five-thousand-dollar Bentley Platinum sunglasses. As they climbed across the steppe, it started to rain. Steven reached to pull a waterproof from his saddlebags and the flapping material sent his horse into a spin.

‘It’s having a fit!’ Steven cried. ‘Jesus Christ!’

The gaucho rode back. ‘Stop. No clothes, no move …’

‘No clothes?’ Steven parroted as his animal performed a flustered circle and ducked and tossed its head. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

Tess seized the bridle and soothed the horse to a stop. Steven clung to its neck, the dirt on his face streaked by rain. ‘If you want to get something out of the bags,’ Tess said, ‘stop and dismount first. He senses the disturbance. It makes him panic.’

‘I’m sorry to have troubled such a sensitive disposition,’ Steven snapped. ‘Does he want a scented candle and a massage with that?’

Tess stroked the horse until it calmed. It reminded her of Paco.

‘You know horses,’ the gaucho said to her in Spanish.

She found her mother tongue as if it had been yesterday. ‘
Sí. Viví aca
.’

They stopped for lunch and ate
empanadas
from the grill. By now Steven was in a comprehensively bad mood, and refused to sit on the tree logs with the others, instead spreading his waterproof as far from the horses and herd droppings as he could. Tess boiled and cooled water from the gulley, while Steven popped the top off a bottle of Evian and drank lustily, before chucking the empty plastic on the ground.

Tess could have stayed out, but her husband wouldn’t entertain the idea and demanded to put the day out of its misery. As they ventured ‘back to civilisation so I can wash this filth
off’, she could no longer fight the impulse. Telling Steven she’d be back later, Tess let her horse loose on the reins and galloped across the prairie.

It felt wonderful: the horse’s hooves clattering, his mane streaming black in the choking wind. She stood in the stirrups, every motion and moment coming back to her, the familiar mould her body occupied. She could hear Steven’s shouts a long way away, growing fainter and fainter as she rode faster and faster. This was her land.

And then, suddenly, it was.

Tess recognised the raised plateau, the cluster of trees, and the position of the pale day-moon in the sky, thin as a fingernail. She pulled her horse to a stop.

The light changed. The wind blew silent.
Home.

For some time she looked at the ridge; where she and Calida had come as girls, escaping from their parents or camping out for the night. Calida would cook them supper on the fire and tell stories in the dark, about Cherokee Indians and the legend of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and wild horses who could fly to the sun on wings made of silver, until they fell into slumber and woke up at dawn …

Beyond that ridge was her farm—or whatever was left of it. Tess dismounted and took a step, then stopped, not quite able to cross over and see the graveyard of her youth. The land wasn’t theirs any more; she would be trespassing … but that wasn’t the real reason she held back. She didn’t trust how she would feel if she saw it again.

The wound was raw—it always would be, no matter how celebrated or prosperous she became—an unopened box of pain and rejection she had bound tight and hidden away so she never had to look inside. The absence of her twin would forever be a whistling void, made worse by Tess’s inability
to grieve. How could she, when the person who’d died had forsaken her so savagely? Calida had never been the person Tess believed her to be. Like Julia, she’d seen the money and run.

She hadn’t cared—so why should Tess care about her?

That pain didn’t go away. No matter how many banknotes she threw at it.

Tess knelt and ran her palm across the soil. Behind, her horse grunted and tugged a tuft of grass with his teeth. She let the grains run through her fingers.

A tear fell and stung a line down her cheek. The wind kissed it dry.

On their last weekend, the Americans descended. Steven had organised a magnificent dinner party, presumably to show off his new identity as Intrepid Adventurer.

Their guests arrived on Friday night, among them Steven’s Best Man Greg Steinway and his actress wife Natalie Portis. Tess was home-baking
fugazza,
an Argentinean-style focaccia, because it gave her an excuse to hide out in the kitchen.

‘Isn’t it sweet? What a cute little place! How quaint!’ A burble of excited chatter swept in with their guests. Tess entered the fray for the meet and greet.

‘Natalie, Greg, how wonderful to see you.’ She embraced them.

‘Darling, you look incredible!’ Natalie trilled. ‘Married life suits you—and so does this place! But you’re from here originally, right?’

‘Nearby.’

‘You should see her on horseback,’ bragged Steven, ‘she’s a devil.’

A voice emerged from the back of the crowd. It silenced all others.

‘Did someone say devils on horseback? How perfectly delicious.’

Their guests parted like a Biblical sea. The voice was absolutely sure of itself, almost offensively so, slightly accented but irresistibly refined, the kind of voice that demands to be heard. Tess caught a flash of dark hair. Crisp shirt. Blue eyes.

‘Vittorio!’ Steven raised his arms. ‘Greg said you were unavailable!’

‘You know me, Krakowski,’ said the man. ‘After I missed the wedding of the decade, I couldn’t let another chance pass by to make your wife’s acquaintance.’

The man stepped forward and lifted Tess’s hand to his mouth, where he touched it ever so lightly to his lips. He held her gaze with a thrilling, potent stare.

Tess was momentarily tongue-tied. With his glistening hair and marble-square jaw, the man looked so …
European.
Like a prince in a storybook, dark and sculpted like granite. He regarded her unapologetically, hungrily, daring her gaze with his, with a stubborn tenacity she recognised in herself.
I’ve met my match,
she thought.

‘Vittorio Da Strovisi,’ the man murmured, eyes hooded. ‘And you are Teresa.’

He must have read it somewhere. No one called her by her real name.

Tess’s skin tingled; she experienced a physical pull in his direction. Vittorio searched her eyes, and when he found what he was looking for he smiled.

Natalie giggled. ‘Vitto,
stop
! He’s an awful flirt. You’re both married!’

Steven joshed along with it. Tess got the impression that Vittorio could have stripped her naked and thrown her over the table and Steven would have joshed along with it. Vittorio’s scent lingered, musk and sex. For once, no trace of lavender.

‘How’s Scarlet?’ asked Steven. ‘I haven’t seen her since …’

Vittorio chuckled. A flash of conspiracy went between the men. ‘She is back in Tuscany. We agreed I’d take this trip,’ his eyebrow lifted, ‘on my own.’

As the party conversed, pieces of Vittorio Da Strovisi slotted into place; Tess did know who he was. An Italian businessman often featured in the pages of
Forbes
and
Fortune,
his wife was a brittle shipping heiress named Scarlet Schuhausen and the couple were continually splashed across the press in a yacht or a super-car or boarding a jet. They had more money than Steven and his cronies combined.

Vittorio kept stealing glances in her direction. His sweater was emblazoned with the insignia
VDS
(an emblem Natalie later informed her was applied to his every possession), and his skin was so smooth that it looked as if he bathed in milk.

Back in the kitchen, while the others were showering and preparing for supper, Tess gathered herself.
What’s the matter with you
?

You don’t like sex anyway, remember
?

‘What a feast!’ enthused Natalie, as they took their seats on the veranda. The dusk was lilac and sweetly fragranced, the land around them vast and quiet.

‘Tess is a wonderful cook,’ bragged Steven, as they dug into Provolone cheese with flatbread, followed by rich and sticky
carbonara criolla.
‘She insists on making everything from scratch. Half the time I don’t know what we’re paying our staff for!’

Vittorio took a slug of blood-red wine. When his plate
was put in front of him he didn’t wait for anyone else, he just started. He ate like an animal.

‘Where did you learn?’ Natalie asked politely.

‘From my sister,’ said Tess. She cleared her throat; she never normally talked about her life before Simone, but Vittorio was watching her intently, as if he saw everything and there was no point in trying to hide it. ‘My real sister, I mean.’

‘Where is she now?’ Natalie asked.

‘She died,’ Tess said coldly. ‘She and my birth mother were murdered.’

‘Oh.’ Natalie put a hand over hers. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You weren’t to know.’

Steven prickled in his seat, as if this really wasn’t an ideal vibe for a glitzy dinner party. ‘Vittorio, why don’t you tell us what’s new in Milan?’ he encouraged.

Vittorio continued eating. He ate quickly, in big forkfuls, and when the fork wasn’t adequate he tore at the food with his fingers, which was an action at odds with his neat appearance. Finally, he said: ‘I want to know more about Teresa.’

‘Tess doesn’t like to talk about her childhood,’ said Steven quickly.

‘It’s fine,’ said Tess, ‘don’t make an issue of it.’

‘I’m not, darling. It’s just it’s hardly …’ Steven tried and failed to find the proper words. ‘I just don’t think our guests need to hear about that.’