I need a favor. It’s my boyfriend? It’ll only take a minute, just enough to make him jealous, please?’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘It’s important. You don’t even have to talk to him.’
He cuts the motor. ‘OK.’
It’s kind of trippy, going into their place with a gorgeous man, knowing that Carter, who might actually be watching from the attic window, will hear them talking on the stairs. But of course they aren’t talking. Dan just follows politely so she is rummaging again, weighing setup lines. Think of something to say that will make him answer, Stef, think fast. She blurts, ‘I told him you were my boyfriend!’
‘What?’
‘Carter. Carter Bellinger. It’s a long story,’ she says, thinking: Take that, perfidious Jen.
‘I bet.’ He isn’t listening, he’s inspecting the scarred wallpaper as they climb the stairs, as though what he needs is written there.
‘So if you wouldn’t mind . . .’
‘What, holding your hand?’
‘Playing like you care.’
But he is running his fingers over initials carved in the old newel post with a weird, visionary squint.
‘Come on!’
Opening the attic door Steffy says, to keep the conversation going, ‘Mom told me you have, um, family down here?’
‘Sort of. Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘Where else would you get a copy of the world’s oldest Swordfish? I mean, fuck, it’s from my mother’s year.’
And for the first time since they left her house, her new guy smiles. ‘It was my mother’s year too. Her name was Lucy,’ he adds, as though she’ll recognize it and start to talk. ‘Lucy Carteret?’
‘Awesome!’ she says as her head clears the top of the attic stairs. We’re practically the same age. This makes her so happy that she laughs. She’s trying hard to make this sound like a party. ‘That is sooo cool!’
What follows is everything Steffy hoped and more. ‘Babe!’ Carter is energized by the unfamiliar voice. He greets her with a studly hug. At the same time he is craning over her shoulder to see who . . .
‘This is my friend Danny,’ she says carelessly, as Dan Carteret emerges from the stairwell. ‘Danny, Carter. Carter, Dan.’
Nicely – he really is a good guy! – her friend slips a possessive arm around her. ‘Any friend of Steffy’s . . .’
Carter gives him a diffident, ‘Hey.’
‘He’s a reporter. How cool is that?’
‘Really.’ Not a question. Period. Carter is trying way too hard to sound unimpressed. ‘And you brought him up here because . . .’
Steffy says, all, everybody-knows-this, ‘You mean you don’t know what happened here? When you get home, Google Lorna Archambault. She burned up right here in this house.’
‘No shit.’
‘Yeah, shit. Dan’s doing a story about it, for his paper? It’s . . .’
But her trophy is too absorbed to pick up on his cue. Instead he spooks around the attic, peering into gables, turning over trash with his toe, running a hand over the dressmaker’s shape which might in fact be dead old Lorna’s shape, poking at defunct Venetian blinds. When he does speak, he says nothing that Steffy expects. Instead he pulls out a tired old picture, which he hands to Steffy first. ‘I can’t stay, but, hey. Do you know these guys?’
More than anything, Steffy wants to help him, but she doesn’t know these guys. She hands off the snapshot to Carter, who’s so close that her flank twitches, from her armpit all the way down. His warm breath swirls around in her ear; she wants to finish this fast so Dan will leave. Then she’ll do whatever she has to with Carter, to get him back from Jen.
But the least likely person to recognize somebody in Dan’s crap snapshot turns out to know. Carter yips like a pirate with a treasure map. ‘Well, yeah!’
‘No shit!’
‘Yeah, shit. There’s one a lot like it tacked up at my dad’s fishing shack? Except my dad isn’t driving in that one, go figure. I mean, it’s his Jeep. That’s Millicent Von Harten’s father in the back with Mr Coleman and his twin brother, the one that died in the wreck? And the guys hanging off the sides? Oh hell, I don’t know who this one is, that has all the red hair? But the one on the driver’s side is definitely Mr Kalen, you can tell by the unibrow.’
28
Dan
A quick study, Dan leaves the attic before the kids can distract him, rehearsing their names. Coleman. Von Harten. Kalen. Bellinger. Four names, sixteen steps. It won’t take long. Chaplin’s off the list – those watery blue eyes. With four locals to research, it