The Last Guest

by Tess Little

I knew this was not possible. The forensic examination would surely have noticed the signs of struggle, round lesions from suction cups; toxicology reports would have discovered venom, sea salt.

  Then, a needling question: What if they were simply looking for the wrong things in the wrong place?

  I tried to silence that thought. If I told the cops my theory about the octopus, they would only laugh. I could picture the female detective’s face: the confusion at first, then disbelief, then amusement. An octopus as the murder suspect? No. I didn’t need to draw attention to myself, compromise my credibility, with wild ideas about a vengeful, bloodthirsty creature escaping its tank to suffocate my ex-husband. I didn’t need to make Scott’s job any harder.

  And so, making myself a salad for lunch, I ran over the events of the night as Scott had asked. With each slice through the tomato skin, I weighed down my octopus suspicions with solid facts: eight guests, and then the meal, and then the speech, and then—

  Lillie emerged from her room, still in pajamas.

  “Do you want some?” I asked. “Caprese.”

  She nodded and sat at the table.

  I drained the mozzarella and tore into it with my bare fingers, letting the soft clumps fall on the tomatoes. A few basil leaves—clapped in my palms to release the flavor—then oil drizzled, salt sprinkled. I found an extra plate for Lillie and set it all down.

  “Late-night reading?” I said, dropping some salad on my plate. “You haven’t been out of the house, have you? All week? I think you should get some fresh air. That might help.”

  I was taking care not to spill olive oil onto my shirt—I’d already changed into nicer clothes.

  “You could come with me now—I’m about to leave to go to the police station. I could drop you at a friend’s house?”

  “It’s okay,” she said, “I can drive myself if I need to.”

  “I’m not offering because you need to be driven, Lillie. I just think it might help if you keep busy.”

  “I am busy,” she said. “I’ve got a friend coming over.”

  “Which friend?”

  Lillie was chewing each mouthful thoroughly. I’d already nearly finished, and her plate was almost full.

  I checked my watch. I needed to leave. “Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go. Leave the dishes. I’ll clear them when I get back.”

  As I packed my things into my bag, I said, “Maybe when the investigation is over, we could both go back to New York. It might be helpful for you to get some space. Or if you’re worried about the media, we could go away? Europe or something. What do you say?”

  Lillie swallowed her food. “I have to be here for Dad’s memorial.”

  I had forgotten about the memorial. We hadn’t spoken about it at all. I didn’t even know who would be organizing it—whether Lillie would play a role.

  “Of course,” I said quickly. “After, I meant after.”

  “I don’t know,” she responded. “My life’s here now, isn’t it?”

  I kissed her cheek goodbye and tried to quash the guilt. I needed to concentrate on the interrogation; I would ask about the memorial later.

  But as I sat in my car, waiting for the front gate to roll open, I couldn’t keep my thoughts on the party. Lillie had insisted on picking me up when I touched down at LAX. I could rent a car later, she said; wouldn’t I be exhausted from the flight? But I knew her true motivation. She had wanted to carefully orchestrate that moment when I saw her behind the wheel for the first time. See, she had wanted to tell me, with a casual press of her key fob, I’m not a kid anymore.

  As we drove to her house, she let the radio sing. Asked me about my flight, talked about all the things she wanted to show me. New restaurants, hiking trails. She wore her sunglasses; the window was open—she chatted without looking at me.

  “Are you okay?” Lillie asked, midsentence. “You seem quiet. Is it the plane? Are you tired? You might have time for a nap.”

  I was not tired; I was overwhelmed. All the ways in which she had changed, all the time since I had last seen her. We had days ahead of us—how would we fill them? What would we talk about? And the specter of Richard’s party, that very evening, hanging over my every thought.

  “Yes,” I said. “Exhausted.”

  “Aren’t you glad I came to pick you up? I mean, maybe you should rethink whether to rent a car at all—I could drive you, you can take taxis. When’s the last time you were behind the wheel anyway?”

  I looked out the window at the roads, at how much the city had changed, and hadn’t, in the ten years I’d been away. “Please, Lillie. I’ve been driving longer than you’ve been out of diapers.”

  She threw her head back with laughter.

  “Having a license is not the same as driving,” Lillie said. “You’re so pampered in New York. You’ll have to get used to how different it is here. No driver, no doorman.”

  I did not remind her that I had lived in L.A. for much longer than the year and a half she had spent there. I did not want to remind her that this city had been our home until I dragged her across the country to condensed high-rises and biting winters.

  “Speaking of pampered,” she said, checking her rearview mirror, “how’s Julian?”

  “He’s…” I studied the bumper of the truck ahead of us. “I don’t know. We separated.”

  “Wait, what? No. You broke up? When?”

  “A few months back. In January.”

  Lillie was silent for a few minutes. Then asked: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I sighed. “You don’t want to hear about my boring life back home. Honestly, it didn’t seem that important.”

  “You were together for two years, weren’t you?” She frowned. “I thought you were talking about moving in together. I’d say that’s pretty—”

  “Let’s not turn this into an issue, Lillie. I didn’t tell you right away because I knew I’d mention it at some point.”

  And when was the last time we had spoken on the phone for more than ten minutes?

  I clutched my purse, tight, and looked out the window again. Tried to think of something to say. The concrete walls bordering the highway were gray and featureless.

  It was unmistakable now, the absence of excitement, the silence between us, as we wound up and around the hills to reach her house. Our time together was unfolding exactly as I’d feared it would.

  “Well,” she said flatly, while we waited for the gate to open, “here we are.”

  * * *

  —

  “A barista!” Richard poked Charlie in the stomach. “Barista.”

  “Oh, man, that was a lunch to remember.” Miguel folded his arms, leaning back against the kitchen sink. Directed his next question at me: “You heard this? So Rich is an hour late for our lunch meeting, and I’m really pissed. I ordered because I didn’t think he was going to show, and I’m just about finishing my second course—the truffle pizza, Soho House, wood-fired, divine, you’ve gotta try it—when he bursts in, shouting across the room: Miguel, Miguel, you won’t believe this! So I think somebody’s died, and I’m out of my seat like, Which hospital? Because I’ve never seen Rich like that, I literally think there’s been some kind of accident. But he’s so into his story he doesn’t answer. He says, I was just served coffee by the quintessential Luke Winters—”

  “Come on, guys, that’s not…” said Charlie. “I didn’t serve him coffee, did I? I wasn’t even working that day. I was dropping off some flyers for—”

  “Well, needless to say, I’m relieved,” Miguel steamed on, “and the waitstaff is too. I mean, we’re all on standby. Not that Rich would notice—he’s all jumpy, can’t talk about anything else. I’ve got to have this guy. I’ve gotta have him for Dominus.”

  “Yes.” Richard was grinning. “Quintessential.”

  “I was like, Sure, o
kay, let’s see what this barista can do”—Miguel nudged Richard—“but can I order dessert first?” They both fell into laughter.

  “You make it sound like you just came into the coffee shop and, like, handed me the job.” Charlie was laughing as he spoke, yet he looked almost pained, shifting from foot to foot. “But I was already an actor. I had an agent then, and I was Brick in that—”

  “Oh my god.” Miguel slapped the counter. “I forgot that part, I forgot.” He turned to me again. “Get this: This guy, when Rich offers him the audition, he’s like, I’m sorry, I can’t make it. I have rehearsal that day.”

  “It wasn’t a rehearsal, it was the first matinee,” Charlie said. He was still smiling, but his hurt was hardening his words now.

  Kei added, “Maybe he didn’t want to let people down.”

  “Exactly,” Charlie said. “Plus, my agent always tells me: Go for the role, not the promise.”

  “You need a new agent, buddy,” said Miguel.

  Richard smirked. “Changed your mind sharpish when you went home and googled me that night, though, didn’t you, Charlie boy?”

  Charlie didn’t respond.

  “Anyway”—Kei was sitting on the counter, beer in hand, frowning—“it’s not really in the spirit of the game to say Charlie would be a barista.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?” Richard pounced, eyes shining. “If he wasn’t an actor, that’s what he’d be doing.”

  Tommo was counting out five glasses. He paused and pointed at me. I was still awkwardly lingering near the door to the garden. “Want an old-fashioned?”

  I hesitated; I really needed to get going.

  “They’ll taste delicious, darling, have one.”

  “Yeah,” Kei was saying, “but it’s like—what would you be doing in a different life.”

  “I’m making you one”—Tommo had already grabbed another glass—“and you can decide if you want to finish it once you’ve tried the first sip.”

  “A life where I hadn’t met him?” Richard said. Then he adopted an atrocious American drawl, which I recognized well from the days when he’d mimicked me: “Uhhh…is that a grande or a tall? And you wanted a side order of my headshot? No? Well, I’ll slip you one for free, bro. Can I get, uhhh, your name? To put on the order? How is that spelled, is that uhhh R-I-T-C…”

  Miguel clapped him on the back. Charlie tried to laugh along, but he said, too loud, “I went to college, Richard. I know how to fucking spell. And I think you’ll find it’s D-I-C-K.”

  “Bit close to the bone, Charlie boy?” said Richard, grinning at his producer.

  Miguel added, “Yeah, what’d you major in anyway? Mochaccinos?”

  “Community theater.” Richard laughed.

  “Well, anyway,” Kei cut in, “I think I would probably be an architect.”

  “No,” Richard said, “you’d be shooting music videos for whiny indie bands.”

  The group hushed with a knock at the kitchen door. One of the caterers poked her head around the corner.

  “That’s it,” she said to Richard. “Everything’s loaded up. Is there anything else you—”

  “No, thank you, Sally, you’ve been wonderful,” he said. Then to the rest of us: “Weren’t they wonderful? The staff are leaving now.”

  Everyone murmured their agreement.

  Richard pressed an envelope into the woman’s hand. “For the staff to share.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s—thank you. Very generous.”

  “Please,” said Richard. “You all deserve it. And if you could remind everyone about discretion…”

  “Already done, Mr. Bryant. Like I said, it’s in the contracts.”

  “Much appreciated,” said Richard. When the door had closed behind her, he turned to us. “You know how it can be,” he explained, “with all these camera phones and gossip blogs and tweets nowadays.”

  Tommo nodded at the door. “She would have been a naval officer. Did you catch her barking commands at the start of the night?”

  “What’s the game?” I asked.

  “It’s called alter ego,” he replied, opening a bottle of bourbon. He gave it a sniff, then started pouring. “You have to say what you might be doing if you hadn’t ended up where you are today.”

  “Which isn’t, strictly speaking, the concept of an alter ego,” said Richard.

  Kei shot him a sulfurous look. “The point is it’s not supposed to be something you’ve done. It has to be something totally different—but something that would suit you.”

  Sabine was coming in from the yard. She rolled her eyes at Kei’s remark and did not pause as she swanned through to the hallway. “Always with tedious games. Where is Honey? You bore me.”

  “Okay,” said Richard, “so I’m visualizing Tommo sitting on a building site, slobbering over Page Three until he clocks off early for a pint at the local Wetherspoons.”

  “Did you understand any of that?” Miguel asked me. “Is this guy speaking English?”

  “He’s alluding to my apocryphal working-class background.” Tommo was shaving peel from an orange, unamused. “All lies. My parents worked in construction, fine, but they were business owners. And if I weren’t in finance, I could see myself as…I don’t know. A mixologist. Maybe have my own bar.”

  He paused, tapped the peeler against his palm. “But that’s beside the point, isn’t it? Because now Richard has tactfully informed you all that I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, unlike him.” Tommo resumed his peeling, spoke calmly. “It’s supposed to be some sort of slight. He’s forgotten, of course, the endemic magnetism of the American dream—I’m the noble one in this territory. So, now you’ve clumsily jibed at me, who’s your next victim, Dicky?”

  Richard was unfazed by Tommo’s retort and answered without hesitation: “Elspeth.”

  There was a moment of silence as I was studied.

  “I can see Elspeth as a painting, a masterpiece,” Miguel ventured. “Girl with a Pearl Earring or—what’s that one where she comes out of the shell?”

  “She’s a…” Charlie tapped the neck of his beer bottle, thinking. I realized what it was, earlier, that had unnerved me. The disconcerting look in his eyes was a result of his stare, which he maintained for an uncomfortably long time. “I want to say…a model. Like an older model? From one of those Patek Philippe ads.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” said Kei. “Elspeth is clearly an art dealer.”

  “No, no, you’re all so unimaginative,” said Richard, finally diverting Charlie’s attention from me. “She’s a postwoman.”

  “A mailman?” exclaimed Miguel. “Come on, Rich, she’s too beautiful for that.”

  “She’s a little old postwoman in a small town,” Richard went on, sizing me up. I kept perfectly still. Tried to relax my expression. “She reads all the letters. She knows exactly who hasn’t paid their bills, who orders items from the naughty catalogs, who gets multiple Valentine’s Day cards…but she never tells a soul. She doesn’t speak to anyone. Not even a wave to the neighborhood children. She’s a little old quiet postwoman, wheeling along her—”

  “Come on, dude,” Kei said, “that’s no way to talk about the mother of your child.”

  Tommo was handing around the drinks.

  “You should have seen how he spoke to me when we were still married,” I told her.

  “It’s a joke, it’s a joke, she knows what I mean. Don’t you, Ellie?”

  I did. He knew that I had always been fascinated by mail as a child—I had told him about our class trip to the Queens Processing and Distribution Center. How I had watched the envelopes shuffling past on conveyor belts and had marveled at the endless stories they contained. I wanted to know everything, about everyone, these strangers and th
eir lives.

  But I resented this reminder of how well he knew me. The attempt at closeness, especially in front of his friends.

  “He’s just being rude again,” I said.

  Tommo broke the tension. “Well, you’re all wrong, anyhow,” he said. “Elspeth is obviously a world-class poker champion. Now can we please go through to the living room? I want to be sitting down and relaxing as I drink this, not soaking my arse in the kitchen sink.”

  * * *

  —

  “Ms. Bryant Bell?”

  The interrogation hadn’t been as challenging as I’d feared—no surprises like the first time I’d sat in this room, when I’d learned of Richard’s murder. Scott had told me that we would just be running over the facts, and all I needed to do was recount my memories. Which I had done, and it had been straightforward. But after what felt like hours of conversation, I was starting to flag.

  On the way into the station, I’d crossed paths with a small woman, who had looked me up and down—then held my eye with disdain. I was sure we’d never met before, but that face had stuck with me. Beady eyes and a hard little chin.

  And the look she had thrown at me: recognition, then disgust. As the questions continued to drum, that look haunted my mind. Like it was a judgment of my performance, punishment for having stayed awake all night thinking of octopuses.

  “Ms. Bryant Bell,” repeated the female detective, “you were saying?”

  “Well, I was certainly awake,” I said, trying to forget the stranger’s stare. “But I want to state, for the record, that I was probably intoxicated at the time.”

  Scott coughed. We had not agreed on any plan of action for the questioning, but I had learned to shut my mouth when he so much as sniffed.

  “I was intoxicated as in tipsy, I mean. So my memory isn’t perfect.”

  “Try to think back to that moment,” said the officer. “Can you recall where everyone was?”

  I shut my eyes. Saw the marble coffee table, the couches to each side, the tank bubbling in the background. I pushed Persephone and the judgmental stranger out of my mind. (Richard pulled his belt through the loops.)