he turns to me, his expression growing suspicious. His grip on my leg is suddenly too tight. “I thought you said you didn’t remember much about this place?”
“I don’t remember much,” I lie, oddly reluctant to tell him the truth. He holds his cards close; I will hold mine. “Honestly, I don’t. I only came here three or four times, and that was over a decade ago.”
“You look disoriented. You need to pull it together.” His voice is even and low, but I can hear the frustration building behind it. I am too emotional; this has always been his diagnosis of me, from the very beginning. You can’t be emotional when you’re pulling a con; emotion makes you vulnerable.
“Not disoriented. It’s just odd, that’s all, to be back here again after all this time.”
“This was your idea. I just want you to remember that if this somehow gets cocked up.”
I push his hand off my leg. “I am fully aware of that. And I’m not going to cock it up.” I look up at the house, smoke coming from one of the great chimneys, lights burning in every window. “I’m Ashley. You’re Michael. We’re on vacation. We’re surprised and delighted at how lovely the house is. Never been to Tahoe before, always wanted to come, so excited to see the area.”
Lachlan nods. “Good girl.”
“No need to be patronizing.”
There is movement from the house in front of us. The front door swings open and a woman appears in a rectangle of light. Her blond hair glints in a halo around her, her face inscrutable in the shadows of the porch. She stands there watching us, arms folded tight against the cold, likely wondering why we’re just sitting there idling in her driveway. I reach across Lachlan and turn off the ignition.
“Vanessa is watching us,” I observe. “Smile.”
“I’m smiling,” Lachlan says. He flips on the radio, tunes it until he finds a classical station, and cranks it loud. Then he reaches out and hooks me around the neck and pulls me in for a long, lusty kiss, and I’m not sure whether it’s intended as an apology or a show for her. The lovebirds, taking a moment for themselves before they get out of the car.
Then he pulls away, wipes his mouth, straightens his shirt. “OK. Let’s go meet our hostess.”
7.
Thirteen Years Earlier
MY MOTHER AND I made the eight-hour drive from Las Vegas to Tahoe City on the day after I finished my freshman year of high school. The highway traced the border of Nevada and California, and as we drove north and west I could feel the temperature dropping, the oppressive desert heat making way for the mountain chill of the Sierra Nevada.
I didn’t mind leaving Vegas behind. We’d been there two years—an eternity in our lives—and I’d hated every minute of it. There was something about the overwhelming heat of the place: the way the relentlessly beating sun made everyone laconic and mean, the way it drove you into the sterile embrace of air-conditioning. The halls of my high school smelled chronically like sweat, sharp and animal, as if the entire student body was living in a constant state of fear. Vegas didn’t feel like a place that anyone should actually live. Even though our apartment building was miles away from downtown, in a cookie-cutter stucco development that could have been torn from the sprawl of any western suburb, the shadows of the Strip still fell on our neighborhood. The whole city seemed to turn toward the money pit at its center: Why would anyone live there if they weren’t hustling for a quick buck?
My mother and I had lived in the airport flight path and every few minutes you could look up and see the planes arriving, the transient hordes coming in for Mega Fortune and margaritas-by-the-foot. “Suckers.” My mother dismissed them, as though these suckers weren’t the whole reason my mom and I were there in the first place. Every night, she parked me in front of the TV and drove down to the casinos to try to rip those suckers off.