our luggage, buried beneath a stack of poetry books and my old yoga mat, we have packed a dozen tiny spy cameras. Each is the size of a screwhead, and yet they are capable of streaming high-definition video from Stonehaven to our laptops in the cottage, a few hundred yards away. What was once cutting-edge technology, now available online for $49.99.
The cameras are to be planted in inconspicuous hiding spots inside Stonehaven, where we might be able to track Vanessa’s movements and pinpoint the location of the safe. The safe is most likely to be in her bedroom, or perhaps a library or an office. We’ll have to find excuses to get into those rooms, however we can. The closer we can get to Vanessa, the easier this will be.
It’s not that there aren’t other valuable targets within the walls of Stonehaven: Just the grandfather clock that I saw in the parlor would cover six doses of my mother’s cancer medication. And yet, as long as Efram is missing in action, we lack a fence for antiques. The money in Vanessa’s safe is a better bet. Easier to smuggle out, easier to liquidate.
Once we’ve located the safe, sussed out its contents, and taken measure of the security system, we’ll check out of the cottage and go somewhere else for a while. We’ll hunker down somewhere nearby and let a few more renters come through the cottage, erase ourselves from Vanessa’s memory, delete our trail from the Internet. And then, six weeks or so later, maybe over Christmas if she leaves to visit her brother, we’ll go in and take it all.
I close my eyes and an old, familiar image rises in my mind: a dark vault, stacks of green bills bound with paper bands and luminous with promise. So much rides on luck, of course: that the code hasn’t changed, that the cash is still there. But I just know. The Lieblings were both paranoid and lazy. I remember how Benny talked about the money in the safe, as if it was simply understood that everyone needed a seven-figure emergency fund: William Liebling had surely passed his neuroses on to his children. After all, we inherit our parents’ habits—good and bad—along with their genes.
I let myself imagine what else we might find in the safe, once we get it open. Gold coins? Jewelry? The diamonds I saw fastened around Judith Liebling’s neck in the photo from the San Francisco Opera opening: Vanessa surely inherited that, along with the rest of her mother’s jewelry collection. Likely they are in there as well, tucked in velvet boxes alongside the cash.
Don’t get greedy. Just this once, am I allowed to ignore all my own rules?
* * *
—
Lachlan and I sit there, drinking and scheming, until the wine is gone and we are tipsy and exhausted. I am in desperate need of a shower, so I grab my bag and take it to the bedroom. I throw open the door and then find myself standing in the doorway, unable to go any farther.
Because there it is, the bed. A great four-poster monstrosity, dulled from years without polishing, but still a piece grand enough for a princeling. Probably it was, once. It is also the bed where I lay as Benny peeled off my jeans, tugging them awkwardly over my calves, while I kept my eyes riveted to the painting on the wall. The bed where I lay waiting for him to take his own clothes off, my body shaking from fear and desire and strange roiling emotions I didn’t know how to name.
Poor Benny. Poor me.
I wonder what Benny would think of me, if he could see me now. Not much, probably; but then again, I suppose he never really did, not once that flush of puppy love had faded away and his family reminded him who I really was.
Lachlan has come up behind me, I can feel his breath on my neck as I stare into the bedroom. “Bringing back memories?” he says.
“Yeah.” I choose not to elaborate. Because something about this adult lover that I have now—so modern and cunning and slick with deceit—feels like a rebuke to that first, na?ve, tender love I so