“Poor Jilly,” I said. Despite Rochelle’s denial, we all still believed that Jilly was her daughter. I couldn’t imagine living in a house with
my
mother’s giant face staring down at me constantly.
Inside the beach house, Calvin had slowed way down. He was clearly working on giving us a guided tour. The others had already gone farther into the house, Rochelle following hungrily behind Milo as he placed his bouquet on a low coffee table, camera aimed directly at the living room couch. It was a good call on Milo’s part. The sofa was one of those huge recliners, facing an enormous flat-screen TV that hung on the far wall. Judging from the Chinese food containers, empty popcorn bowls, and lipstick-smeared wineglasses scattered around, it got a fair amount of use.
Since not much action was going to be happening on that couch right now, Dana reached over and tapped the tablet’s window for Milo’s camera. It shrank into a thumbnail, and the images from the other two Minicams took over the screen.
The flower-cam that Garrett carried was still moving—across that expansive room and down a hall, past what looked like a dining room.
Cal, meanwhile, lingered. He circled in his wheelchair, providing Dana and me with a panoramic view of the catastrophe that was Rochelle’s living room.
Without warning, Calvin’s face appeared in the screen, upside-down and humongous. “Would you rather eat five pounds of earthworm poop or be forced to live with
this
crazy bee-otch?” he whispered into the mic.
I laughed. Dana scowled, but I could tell that her glower was only to hide the smile she wanted to crack.
“Calvin! Where you at?” Garrett’s voice boomed through the speaker of the hidden camera in the bouquet he still carried. I refocused my attention to Garrett’s POV. He had made it into the kitchen, where the perspective shifted when he set the floral arrangement on the counter.
Cal’s face disappeared from his screen, and then his view was in motion again as he wheeled himself out of the living room and down the long corridor.
Despite the expensive wallpaper and intricate gold chandeliers, this part of the house was a disaster. Dirty laundry piled itself high on either side of the wide hallway, creating a narrow, claustrophobic feel. As Cal slowly motored forward, I spotted a set of ratty-looking pink sneakers and a pair of ripped jeans on top of a particularly large mountain of clothing.
“That’s Jilly’s stuff! It has to be!” I pointed to the clothes that clearly belonged to a teenager just as Cal passed it. Calvin was on the same page. He aimed his camera directly at the pile, then stuck his hand in front of the lens to give us a thumbs-up.
Dana nodded, her eyebrows furrowed as she studied the images on the screen.
“Do you think that means she’s still living there?” I asked. “I mean, Rochelle would’ve definitely tossed that stuff if Jilly was…gone, right?”
By
gone
, I meant something far worse. But I couldn’t bring myself to say the word
dead
out loud.
Dana shook her head.
Calvin continued forward, passing a formal dining room on the left—the table piled with more laundry—before he reached the kitchen. I had already noted, via the bouquet Garrett had set down on the countertop, that this room was even more cluttered and disgusting than that hallway.
“Apparently Destiny greatly improves your housekeeping skills,” I said.
Garrett’s bouquet was next to the sink, which held a leaning tower of food-encrusted dishes. He looked clumsy and absurd as he leaned in and fussed with the various stalks of flowers, no doubt making sure that the camera was aimed correctly. Meanwhile, through Cal’s cam, I spotted Milo standing in the corner of the room, his back rigid against the mahogany cabinets as Rochelle worked on proactively popping his personal-space bubble. She whispered something to Milo.
Milo—
my
Milo—reached out, touched Rochelle’s shoulder, and smiled back at her.
Ouch.
“
Here’s
Cal!” Garrett exclaimed with over-the-top enthusiasm. “Thought we’d lost ya, buddy!”
“Yup! Here I am! With more flowers! ’Cause you definitely don’t have enough of
those
now!”
Rochelle didn’t turn around. Whatever she and Milo were discussing was obviously far more interesting.
She twirled a lock of blond hair in her fingers as she leaned even closer to Milo to hear whatever nugget of awesomeness he had to say to her in reply.
I hated her.
Hated. Her.
Even though I knew that Milo was putting on an act. This was not real. He was keeping her occupied so that Cal and Garrett could look around. Right?
Right?
“So, Rochelle!” Garrett said loudly. “Where’s Jilly? I was gonna see if she wanted to…play some…Scrabble…?”
Beside me in the car, Dana threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, please!” she barked at the tablet. “Are you
kidding
me?”
Calvin, still lingering in the doorway of the kitchen, leaned forward into the bouquet-mic and whispered, “And the Academy Award goes tooooo…Garrett McDouche.”
Milo stepped away from the wall, somehow squeezing past Rochelle’s giant boobs. The woman turned to watch him, and I found myself thinking of one of those nature shows where a snake tracks its helpless prey. Except the warm and knowing smile that Milo shot back to Rochelle was anything but helpless. He joined Garrett, leaning against the kitchen island as he drawled, “That’s right. Garrett’s told me a lot about how great Jilly is. I really wanted to meet her. Is she here?”
The flowers on the counter were giving us a great shot of Milo and Garrett. Calvin motored forward a bit, deliberately angling his chair so that Dana and I could also have a good view of Rochelle’s face.
And it was a seriously weird face. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what was so strange about it, but Dana said, “Whoa, check out her insane micro-expressions.”
“Her what?” I asked as in the kitchen, Rochelle gave a saccharine smile and said, “Oh, Garrett’s told you about my niece Jilly, huh? She’s a handful—with the pink hair one day, green hair the next! I never know what she’s going to do!”
“Micro-expressions,” Dana repeated. “Not everyone does it, and it happens really fast, but if you slow down a recording…” She accessed the control panel for the tablet’s surveillance program, rewound the digital recording from Cal’s camera and…
“She’s at that age,” we could hear Rochelle saying over the kitchen-counter floral-mic as on the other half of our screen we watched her face in slo-mo.
Her expression went from disgust to contempt to utter rage. Even when she smiled, her anger flickered through with slight downturns of her mouth or the baring of her teeth. As far as Rochelle’s micro-expressions went, there was no misreading her feelings about her daughter-slash-niece. The fact that we could hear her trill of musical laughter as we watched the slo-mo made it even more surreal.
“I’m just trying to be patient,” Rochelle continued telling the boys, “and let her, you know, find herself. If she can.”
“Is she here?” Calvin asked.
With a flick of her fingers against the tablet screen, Dana had returned us to the real-time feed from his camera, so we caught the oddly blank look Rochelle gave Cal—again, as if somehow she hadn’t expected him to speak.
“Jilly,” Milo clarified.
He
got a smile.
“Oh,” Rochelle said. “Of course. No. Nope. She, um, went to the beach. Yeah. She left about a half hour ago. You just missed her.”
Dana shot me a quick
I call bullshit
look.
I nodded. “There’s no way. We had a clear view of all the doors. Jilly didn’t go anywhere today.”
Cal knew it too. He stuck one thumb in front of the flower-cam and very slowly and deliberately turned it upside down.
Meanwhile Garrett was asking, “The public beach?”
Rochelle shrugged expansively. “Well, that’s where she
said
she was going, at least.” A giggle. “Teenaged girls. You know how
that
goes.”
Giggle, giggle.
“Excuse me!” Cal’s voice boomed through the speaker of the tablet. He still had the third floral arrangement on his lap. “Ma’am? May I please have, um, a glass of water? I’m parched.”
We got more of those crazy micro-expressions from Rochelle. Now that I knew what to look for, I could catch little glimpses and flashes of bared teeth as she smiled, as if the woman had a snarling animal trapped inside her. For one horrible moment, I actually thought she was going to grab a knife and start slashing at Calvin as punishment for being thirsty. Or, more likely, thirsty while in a wheelchair and black.
But then, Garrett spoke up. “Yeah. Me too, buddy. Jilly’s a Diet Splash addict—I bet there’s a twelve-pack or two of that in the fridge. Ro, do you mind?” He started toward the refrigerator, but Rochelle rushed to cut him off.
“I’ll get it,” she said, and I immediately conjured up images of severed heads and body parts stashed in the vegetable drawers. “I’m not sure we have any Diet Splash though. Jilly’s just decided to go, um, corn syrup–free…”
“She’s a terrible liar,” Dana announced.
Meanwhile, Milo was taking advantage of all of the energy around the fridge. He grabbed the flowers off Calvin’s lap as he breathed, “Help Garrett.”
For a fraction of second, Milo looked directly into the camera—directly into my eyes—but then he turned the floral arrangement around and the perspective changed to whatever Milo could see.
Calvin came into view. From his wheelchair, Cal shot the bouquet of flowers a sideways glance and blew a quick kiss.
“I’m gonna kill him when he gets back,” Dana growled. “Doesn’t he have even one serious bone in his body?”
“Nope,” I replied confidently. “Calvin has exactly zero serious bones. Or mean ones. Nicest, goofiest guy in the universe.”
“Yeah, well,” Dana replied grumpily and then went on to grumble more unintelligible complaints about absolutely everything. I acted wisely and kept my mouth shut.
Calvin, however, did not. In that messy kitchen, he wheeled over toward Garrett and Rochelle saying, “Water would be fine.”
On the other half of the tablet screen, Milo was heading down a hallway that led to the far wing of the big house. I could hear his steady inhalations even over the noise in the kitchen.
“Ah, there is one can of Diet Splash left,” Rochelle announced as Garrett tried to get a look inside the fridge.
“Whoa, you’ve got a shit-ton of chardonnay in there,” he said, busting my severed head theory.
“This stupid house doesn’t have a wine refrigerator,” Rochelle complained.
The hallway that Milo had taken looked similar to the other. It was a hot mess of clothes, hairbrushes, old ratty books, and even a haphazard pile of more framed glamour shots of Rochelle.
Milo leaned closer into one of the pictures with the bouquet, to offer Dana and me a better look.
I instantly knew what he wanted us to notice.
“Look at that!” Dana exclaimed, too.
I inhaled sharply. “Whoa. That’s crazy.”
The photograph had been taken a long time ago; Rochelle’s hair and clothing choices were clearly dated. If I had to guess, I would’ve said the picture had to be at least ten years old, if not more. But the really crazy thing? In the photo, Rochelle looked like she was
at least
ten years
older
than she was today.
“Destiny is no joke,” Dana said, and I knew she wasn’t paying the drug a compliment.
I shuddered. It
was
creepy. “So she really is, like, forty.” And she’d been hitting on my boyfriend.
Barf
.
Milo kept going, as in the kitchen, Rochelle realized he was gone. “Where’s…your other friend?” she asked Garrett, who was getting two glasses down from a cabinet so he and Cal could share the single can of Diet Splash.
“Milo needed to use the men’s room,” Calvin volunteered. “He’ll be right back.”
“Milo.” Rochelle said his name almost as if she were tasting a fine wine, and I couldn’t not react. I tried to make it a laugh, but I’m pretty sure Dana wasn’t fooled. “Oh, I should go find him and let him know that the one down here—the, um, toilet clogs.”
“Lying,” Dana intoned. I’d heard it, too—Rochelle’s
um
that meant she was making things up. Like
Jilly’s at the beach
.
Meanwhile, Milo was still moving down that hall, past a set of stairs going up and toward what must’ve been some kind of playroom or maybe a home gym. There was a pool table, along with an old-time pinball machine and an array of exercise machines and free weights. Milo stopped in the doorway and did a slow sweep with the flower-cam.
It was a little dark in there—kinda odd since the afternoon sun was shining so brightly. Milo noticed that, too, whispering, “Shades and blinds are all pulled down. Hmm.”
He moved farther into the room, even as the sound of shattering glass pulled my attention back to the camera in the kitchen.
“Sorry!”
“Oh, wow, sorry!”
Garrett and Calvin apologized almost in unison as Garrett did an awkward little hop both out of the way of Cal’s chair and over the glass that he’d just dropped onto the kitchen’s tile floor. It was obvious they were doing some kind of Two Stooges imitation to keep Rochelle from chasing after Milo.
It worked, because now she wasn’t even trying to hide her scary micro-expressions as she unleashed her exasperation. “Garrett, what the hell…?”
“Sorry!” he said again. “I’m sorry. I’ll clean that up. Do you have a vacuum?”
“Does she
look
like a woman who has a vacuum?” Dana mused.
“Or a dustpan,” Cal offered as he rolled over and opened the cabinet under the sink. “We could sweep it up with a dustpan—”
“Oh! The invalid wants to help!” Rochelle said, her tone tinged with disdain.
I gasped.
Dana’s eyes narrowed. She pursed her lips until they turned white.
But, if Cal was equally offended, he did an awesome job of brushing it off. “I know,” he replied, chuckling. “My invalidity is a total bummer! You’re right. I’ll just hang here, helplessly, and let way-more-valid Garrett clean up.”