Where was Mark’s sudden interest in Penny coming from?
“Can I be excused?” Penny asked when she was finished eating. Her phone vibrated with a text and she ran upstairs.
Emma began clearing the table. Angus stood close to her at the kitchen sink and whispered beneath the sound of the running water, “This is all about the house, you know.”
Emma turned off the faucet. “What do you mean?”
“You think it’s a coincidence that Penny inherits a multimillion-dollar house and suddenly her father shows up after years of absence?”
The house had crossed her mind, but she doubted Mark knew about it. It was a local story. He was a West Coast person and, frankly, not big on current events. Although she was sure Penny had told him about it by now.
“Look, I’m the first one to be cynical about Mark, believe me. But I think the timing really is a coincidence.”
“Be careful,” Angus said.
“I’m trying to be.” She was so unnerved, she was taking the next day off to spend it with Penny. And no, it wasn’t lost on Emma that Penny’s punishment for running off the other day had fallen by the wayside. “I’ve got it under control,” Emma said.
Angus took a plate from her hand. “I’ll finish these. Go talk to her.”
Upstairs, Emma hesitated outside of Penny’s closed bedroom door before knocking once sharply.
“Come in.”
Penny sat cross-legged on her bed, hunched over her phone.
“Who are you texting?” Emma said.
“My friends.”
“Put that down, please.”
Penny complied but not without a sigh of annoyance.
“You were supposed to be grounded for a week, and you got out of that because your father showed up. But we’re not done talking about what you did the other day. It’s inexcusable, Penny. I’m taking your phone away for a few days.”
“You can’t! I have a right to talk to people. You can’t cut me off from the world.”
“I’m not cutting you off from the world. We have a landline in the house. You’re free to make calls.”
“What about emergencies? I can’t walk around tomorrow without a phone.”
“I didn’t have a cell phone growing up and I survived. Besides, you’ll be with me tomorrow. Now hand it over.”
“What if Dad texts me? I can’t just ignore him.”
Emma felt like screaming. Now all of a sudden Mark had to be accommodated? “I’ll let him know that if he wants to talk to you, he can call on the landline.”
“This isn’t fair.”
“Why can’t you look on the bright side? I just said I’m going to spend the day with you tomorrow. You don’t have to go to the historical society. We’ll do something fun.”
“I don’t want to spend the day with you.”
“Penny, I’m really trying here. I need you to meet me halfway. Come on. What do you want to do?”
Penny looked up at her. “I want to go to the house. And I want to move in.”
Bea rested on top of the bed, pushing aside her New Yorker and her reading glasses. She couldn’t stop thinking about the drawings.
Why had Henry left them scattered around town? Surely he would have known that she would make the trip to Sag Harbor after his death. He knew she would notice the drawings, and he must have understood that she would not stop until she’d seen them all.
Up until today, the ones she’d found had been innocuous. But those drawings of that uncomfortable night? It was a provocation. Was he trying to remind her that she’d rejected him romantically and she’d rejected his move to the country, so she shouldn’t expect to inherit his estate? Or were the drawings confirmation of his intention to leave her the house and his art, reinforcing that while their relationship had always been simply professional, at least in the end he’d left his legacy in her hands?
It was maddening.
The house had to yield more clues. She stepped out of bed; the bones of her feet felt fragile against the hardwood floors, and she put on her slippers.
She knew everyone thought she was crazy. This whole business with the house had even driven Kyle to quit! But then, none of these people had known Henry. If they had, they would’ve understood that Henry Wyatt was not a man to leave his entire life’s work to a virtual stranger.
There must be something in that house that would help her case. But what? And where could it be? She’d already searched his desk. Henry, with his devotion to the spare and the aesthetically pleasing, had nothing as pedestrian as a filing cabinet. His paperwork was minimal. Bea had decades’ worth of business documents pertaining to his work in her own office in Manhattan, and he’d never had an interest in having his own copies. Victor had been in possession of the damn will.
She made her way down the hall to the office and rechecked the room, but she was confident she’d been thorough the first time, and she found nothing new.
Downstairs, she wandered aimlessly. Funny; Bea had been called the architect of Henry Wyatt’s career, but no one understood that Henry had been calling the shots all along. And was still calling them.
In the living room, shelves were embedded in the stone walls behind nearly invisible cabinets that were spring-activated and took only the lightest touch to open. She’d gone through these her first week in the house, but perhaps less carefully than the office and the bedrooms at this point. She checked them again, but they yielded nothing useful.
Frustrated, she walked back up the stairs to the bedroom. She sat on the bed, trying to think like Henry. What were his principles of design? Minimalism. Form follows function.
In Windsong, nothing looked like what it actually was; walls were windows, stairs floated, cabinets were invisible. But then, wasn’t that function following form? Oh, it was maddening, the whole thing. If she were a different type of person she would simply retreat back to Park Avenue. But she’d never given up on Henry.
She paced the room and then paused at the foot of the bed. The form always came first. Nothing was exactly as it appeared.
The wood base of the bed was thick and blockish, a few feet off the ground. Slowly, her back protesting with every inch, she lowered herself down, got onto her hands and knees, and examined the bed frame. Sure enough, she found two long, thin horizontal seams inches apart. She gingerly pressed the wood between them and jumped when a drawer slid out.
The drawer was shallow but functional enough to hold a few used DayMinder calendars, blank sketch pads, and graphite pencils. In the back, she found a thick comic book of some sort, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, volume 1. Strange.
She pulled out the book and flipped through it. Why was it tucked away here and not in Henry’s library? And since when did he read such juvenile material?
And then, a folded sheet of paper stuck between the last two pages. She shook it loose and spread it out on the floor. There, in Henry’s neat cursive writing, the words she’d been looking for: Last Will and Testament of Henry Wyatt.
I, Henry Joseph Wyatt, being of sound mind, leave my artwork and my house on Actors Colony Road, Sag Harbor, New York, to Bea Winstead of 720 Park Avenue, New York City, New York. It is my wish that the house at Actors Colony Road be turned into a permanent installation of my work and a public museum. The exception to this are the pieces noted below, which are to be donated to the Ellen Noel Art Museum in my hometown of Odessa, Texas. I also name Bea Winstead as executor of my estate.
Bea could scarcely breathe. It was dated May of 2000. It was old, but it was something! She closed her eyes, clutching the paper to her chest.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Four
While Emma waited for Penny to get dressed, she watched Angus sprinkle brown sugar over thick slices of bacon. He lined them up a few inches apart on the baking sheet and slipped it into the oven.
“No good can come from that house,” he said, peeking through the oven window.
“Please don’t say
that around Penny. She’s excited about it.”
Emma had been thinking long and hard about how to let Penny “have” her house without turning their entire lives upside down, and she’d decided they would use it the way other people used a vacation house.
“It’s our stay-cation house,” Penny had said gleefully.
“Exactly,” Emma said.
“Can I pack some things to bring over?”
Emma considered this. “Okay. But just enough for a few days. We’ll go on weekends or some nights to swim and be on the water. But our home home is still the house we live in.”
She repeated this at the table in front of Angus, and he nodded his approval.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” Penny asked him when she came down for breakfast.
“Young lady, I am going to work.”
During the fifteen-minute ride to the house, Penny chatted to Emma more than she had the entire past month. No matter the strangeness of the situation, no matter Angus’s misgivings or her own, Emma was relieved to see Penny so happy and animated.
Emma hadn’t been to the house since she’d taken the impulsive water-taxi ride late at night, but when she walked into the kitchen, she realized something was different.
The sink had two used coffee mugs in it.
“Penny, wait a second,” Emma said. “I need to look around. Someone has been here.”
And she was sure she knew who that someone was.
Emma walked to the airy breakfast room just off the kitchen, the space with sliding glass doors to a patio and where the floating stairs led to the north wing of the house, the wing with the master suite. She climbed the stairs.
“Hello?” she called out. Nothing.
She passed the library and office and found the door to the master bedroom open. The room was pristine, but on the bedside table, a pair of reading glasses. A cashmere wrap was folded on top of the dresser.
Emma slid open the closet door and found a collection of Chanel, St. John, and Lilly Pulitzer that could only belong to one person.
“The nerve of that woman!”
Emma ran back down the stairs and found Penny outside on the deck.
“All right. We need to move into our bedrooms,” she said.
Emma knew from her late-night exploration of the place that there were three guest rooms located on the side of the house opposite the wing with the master suite. The two parts of the house were connected by the central living space: kitchen, dining room, and living room. The guest rooms on the first floor each had its own full bath.
Furious, she swung open the first bedroom door and found large men’s sneakers by the foot of the neatly made bed. An empty beer bottle rested on the nightstand.
Emma closed the door.
“What’s going on?” Penny said.
“Those people are living here. The old woman.”
“Why?”
Emma sighed. “Because she’s a stubborn pain in the butt, that’s why. Come on. Let’s just put some things in the other two bedrooms. I’ll deal with her later. This shouldn’t spoil our day.”
She let Penny choose her room of the two that were left. One had a four-poster bed of dark wood made up with stark white linens and half a dozen white pillows. The bedside table was glass and chrome, and each wall featured one of Henry Wyatt’s paintings.
The final room had a softer feel to it, with a blue ceramic lamp, block prints on the bedspread, and, at the foot of the bed, a tufted blue bench with Lucite legs. On one wall, a gilded mirror, and next to it, a metal sculpture.
“I like the other room best. That bed is huge!” Penny said.
“Go for it,” Emma said, sitting on the blue bench and dropping her bag. “And when you’re done unpacking, meet me out by the pool.”
Emma changed into her bathing suit, a white two-piece she’d bought on sale at the end of last summer. She was relieved to see that she was still in decent shape, considering her only exercise was biking to and from work and running up and down the stairs of the hotel. Apparently, that was enough for now. Still, every morning she saw women walking along Main Street in their yoga pants, carrying their rolled-up mats. She sometimes wondered what she was missing. But then, that was how she felt about most things in life.
God, she was pale. They were weeks into the summer, but anyone who looked at her skin tone would guess it was February.
Outside, Penny sat on the edge of the pool with her legs dangling in the water. “It’s freezing!”
“I have to figure out the heater.” And then Emma thought of the electric bill and decided Penny would have to get used to cold swims or wait for later in the summer when it would heat naturally. Or was heating the pool something she could pay for through the maintenance account the lawyer had mentioned? It was all so complicated.
She settled onto one of the four chaise longues lined up beside the pool and pulled a paperback out of her tote bag. Something felt really odd. Oh yeah—she was actually about to relax.
Penny let out a squeal as she submerged herself in the water.
Emma opened her book and tried to read but realized after turning a page that she wasn’t absorbing a single word. The strangeness of sitting by the pool, looking out at the bay, was having a paradoxical effect. Not only couldn’t she relax, she was flooded with tension.
How had this situation happened? Why had it happened? No matter how many times she told herself to just accept the circumstances, she couldn’t stop feeling like she had to apologize. Last week, an old friend from high school called. She worked as a personal chef to a hedge funder and his wife in East Hampton and had heard the news about the house through the gossip mill. By way of explanation, Emma found herself saying, “I don’t really know why he left Penny the house. Rich people are eccentric. You know that as well as I do.”
On one level, Emma did believe that. Not everything that happened in life made sense, and often the inexplicable things that happened were bad. This, at least, was a positive turn. It was something that could make Penny’s life better and her own too—if she could stop analyzing it long enough to enjoy it.
But then there was the Mark thing. Was it the house that had lured him back, as Angus so cynically suggested? Penny admitted to Emma that she’d told her father about the house and that he had “seemed really surprised.” Emma felt like saying, Your father is an actor. But she held back. Despite all of her disappointment and frustration with Mark, no matter how negative her thoughts, Emma had promised herself she would not talk badly about him to Penny. It just wasn’t right, and ultimately it wasn’t good for Penny to hear her mother say bad things about her father.
And so what if it was curiosity about the house that had inspired his visit? The important thing was that he was there spending time with his daughter. Yes, it was frustrating to hear Penny talk about him with such glowing adoration when all Emma got was attitude and push-back. But it wasn’t a competition. She was the only real parent, the one who did the hard work day in and day out. Penny might not appreciate that now, but she would understand when she was older. In the meantime, she should have fun with her father. It was harmless.
Emma watched Penny backstroke the length of the pool. Even though Penny was a strong swimmer, Emma felt a compulsion to keep an eye on her, as if she were still a toddler wearing floaties on her arms. But after a few minutes, she allowed herself to close her eyes. How long had it been since she’d really relaxed? Since she had taken a half hour to do absolutely nothing? She heard the gentle lapping of the water, a seagull calling out.
And a loud, grinding sound in the distance.
What was that?
It was coming from the direction of the bay.
“I’ll be right back,” she called out to Penny, slipping back into her flip-flops. She followed the stone pathway down to the beachfront. As soon as the dock came into view, the source of the noise was immediately clear. A dilapidated, thirty-foot wooden cabin cruiser was tied to the end, and standing a
t its helm was a sweaty Kyle Dunlap wielding an electric sander. He wore a T-shirt with a whale logo, cargo shorts, and some sort of shoe that was a cross between a sneaker and a boot. She almost didn’t recognize him without his city pallor, his tan accentuated by the fact that his brown hair had turned golden from the sun.
She hurried to the edge of the dock, stepping around planks of wood and scattered tools.
“What is this?” she said, hands on her hips.
Kyle silenced the sander, looked down at the pile of wood at her feet, and said, “That’s teak.”
“No, I mean what is all of this. What are you doing?”
He wiped his brow with his forearm. “I’m fixing this boat.”
“What are you doing here?”
Kyle put down his sander and walked closer to the edge. “Come on board for a minute so we don’t have to yell back and forth?”
Fine! She stepped onto the boat and he reached for her arm to steady her.
“I’m okay,” she said, pulling away from him. The floor of the boat was a ripped-up mess. They were no longer shouting back and forth, but she was going to end up with splinters. “Kyle, why are you here?”
He glanced back at the house. “Emma, I’m sorry. Bea is convinced the will is invalid. She’s not giving up.”
Emma shook her head. “I’m not going to go around in circles on this. I don’t care what Bea thinks. This is trespassing.”
The boat swayed, and a small metal scraper slid near her feet.
“You’re right,” he said. “I mean, I guess you could just call the cops.”
Yes, she could get Jim DiMartino on the phone right that minute. And he would…what? Arrest Bea when she showed up? Emma could already see the headlines in the local papers. The last thing she needed was more attention. No, she would have to handle this quietly. With a lawyer. How much would that cost her? Too much.
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