by Tess Little
We turned off Melrose, up toward Santa Monica Boulevard, snaked our way left, then right, then left and left, so we could stick to the emptier avenues—the neighborhoods, with their fruiting date palms and dappled sidewalks, guard-dog signs, parents taking kids to school.
“This is going to sound insane,” Kei said. “But there is one thing I keep thinking. Tell me it’s crazy, Elspeth.”
I waited. “Go on.”
“I go over every detail, and it doesn’t make sense, does it? Why did Richard invite just us? Why did he play those games all night? And the things he said, the speeches, the food. You know he gave each of us a different arrival time?”
I could see myself reflected in her shades. I answered her question with another question. “What are you saying, Kei?”
“It’s just…why wasn’t Lillie there? That’s the thing that…I know she would have been there if it had been a normal party. She adored Richard and he adored her. She’s the only person who knows all of us, and wouldn’t she have wanted to be there?”
A commuter scooted past us on the sidewalk.
“Lillie did want to be there,” I said. “At first she wasn’t going to come—she didn’t want to see Honey and Richard back together after the allegations and the media attention. Then she changed her mind, but Richard told her it was too late.”
“Of course he told her not to come.” Kei shook her head at this new information. “And you know, maybe Lillie thinks it was her idea to not attend because of Honey, but can’t you just hear him? I’m sorry, darling, but Honey’s organizing my birthday. You don’t have to come, though. I know you don’t want to see him right now. We can celebrate together some other time.”
I could well imagine he had planted that seed. But it could have been for any number of reasons. “Maybe he wanted to drink and, you know, he’d bought the heroin. Richard wouldn’t have wanted her to see him like that.”
“I know that, I do. But I can’t help thinking…What if his death was meant to be a test?”
I stared at her. A test?
Watching me, Kei shrugged. “Yeah, Sabine never wants to hear it. She thinks I’m trying to justify what we did. But whether or not Richard deliberately overdosed, I still regret leaving him to die. I’ll always carry that guilt. I’ll always be sorry for doing that to Lillie. To you, letting you find his body.”
We walked in silence for a while. Then I said, “A deliberate overdose. When Richard died, that’s what I thought. Until the police told me about his throat. I thought he’d either killed himself or maybe, if it wasn’t totally on purpose, maybe he’d been kind of reckless. Because of how Dominus had performed and then him being dropped by the studio. He’s always struggled with himself.” I thought for a moment. Then added, “But the throat wounds, Kei. I just don’t know.”
“Yeah, I get that. I do.” Kei was slowing her pace, watching each step. She continued, “I guess I was kind of persuaded by what Tommo’s defense said. I wondered that myself—whether he already had the bruises before he died. And then when they found the bottle. That’s when I really felt like the test made sense.”
“Because?”
“They found it in the filter, right? I’m certain, I’m certain, no one could have had time to push a bottle down his throat, remove it, hide it in the filter, then sit back down like nothing had happened. I would have heard the filter flap. And it’s not—why would you kill someone like that? It’s weird, right?”
“They could have hidden the bottle later. The next morning.”
“No,” said Kei. “No, one of us would have seen. We were all there. And you would wipe your prints off too, if you were covering your tracks. You know, I think back to before the party, and Richard was in this hopeless situation, wasn’t he?” Kei said.
I nodded. I had thought the same when I’d learned of his death. And I’d only known the half of it then. Richard had slipped the film’s schedule with endless takes, with his incessant perfectionism. The studio started to muscle in. He took his frustrations out on the cast, on everyone. At home, he had probably grown more controlling over Honey. Richard was ready to seek comfort in his addiction. Jerry tried to stop him, which had resulted in the fight, the firing. And when Honey came forward with his accusations, right before the film’s release, everything collapsed.
But then, Kei went on, Richard turned things around. Somehow, despite his addiction, he went on. I knew that was out of character. Richard would always use in situations like that—when he was at his most frustrated, when he’d lost control.
And the forgiveness that followed Richard’s downfall too—as he made amends with Honey, apologized to Kei, Sabine, Charlie, Jerry, Miguel, thanked me at the party. None of that had been genuine, I knew. He had wanted us back in his sway.
Kei thought it was more than that. That he had wanted to test our resolves that night, our love for him, and if it all went wrong—if he couldn’t claw his way back into our lives, back to success—then he would conduct the ultimate test. Would we save his life? At least?
“I think he thought that one of us would,” she said. “I think that’s why you were there. You loved Lillie too much to let anything happen to him. I don’t think he really believed he would die. But also, like you said you thought initially, I don’t think he was scared of death.
“If things went wrong, Richard had insurance. He would take us with him, like a pharaoh buried with his servants and pets. That’s why he hid the bottle, with Tommo’s fingerprints.”
“You think he did that to himself?” Even as I asked this, I knew that if Richard had set his mind to such a plan, injuring himself in that fashion would have been no challenge for him. He had hurt himself before, to make me feel guilty. Throughout our marriage he’d done countless reckless things.
“I know, it’s far-fetched. I know. Sabine thinks it’s ridiculous too. I mean, she says that, but there was this one thing…You remember those bright-blue candlesticks on the dinner table? When Sabine was talking to Charlie at the party, Richard came over to them with a couple of those candlesticks to show off their ‘craftsmanship’—Murano glass, or whatever. He insisted on giving them to Sabine and Charlie—something about how the pair complemented each other, like the actors had in Dominus. It was kind of awkward, Sabine said, so they had to accept. And Richard put the candlesticks in the coat closet so they wouldn’t forget them. Sabine found hers in her purse the next day. Placed it in a drawer and forgot about it, didn’t even tell me—until I started wondering about the bottle with Tommo’s prints. This idea of Richard taking us all down with him. And then I started wondering whether there was a murder weapon for each of us, waiting to be found. And whichever one the police managed to find first—that person would go down with him. If none of them were found, well, there were still the throat wounds, right?
“Sabine says she doesn’t think it was a test—she says that, but she let me smash up the candlestick with a rolling pin. We drove to Santa Monica at dawn the next day, threw the shards off the pier into the sea.”
The purse, the glass candlesticks, the champagne bottle—something about this part of the theory was bothering me, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint what.
“And Dominus has done better in movie theaters since then, hasn’t it?” I asked.
“That’s a fucking understatement,” said Kei. “Everyone’s re-reviewing it. Rooting out subtexts, like it was his farewell manifesto. And the story surrounding his death? The investigation? It’ll be a Hollywood legend. He’ll be immortalized. I think the only thing he wouldn’t have foreseen is that none of us were named until the court case. He would have wanted more drama, more attention around the investigation. That’s why I think he hired staff, so there would be spies that night, leaks to the media, you know?”
“But there weren’t leaks, because he had specified—”
“Come on, dude,” Kei said. “Any
one of them could have made a year’s pay by selling their story to the media. We were just lucky. Fucking lucky. If Richard hadn’t wanted leaks, he wouldn’t have hired any staff. And the memorial too? There were journalists—you saw how quickly the cameras started flashing when the cops arrested Tommo. And did you see that some of the same waiters were there as well? That was all part of it. He wanted us to remember that night. He wanted to haunt us. He thought of everything. And it worked—every time I cry, every time I wake up in the night, I see him laughing.”
I could picture it myself.
There was something believable in her theory, I had to admit. I thought of the envelope Honey had found in Richard’s desk—In the Unlikely Event. His detailed plans for the memorial.
We circled back to the coffee shop to collect our cars as I tried to pick apart Kei’s theory. But she had an answer to each of my questions. Was this because it was true or because, like all conspiracy theories, it was flavored with fact, obscured with minute details and unverifiable conjecture?
As I drove home, I ran over the facts: Richard’s envelope, the champagne bottle, a candlestick in Sabine’s purse. And then I remembered. That night I had a bottle of water in my purse—until I didn’t. Acqua Panna, medium-sized. I’d found its disappearance odd at the time, but had it been taken as “insurance” for his death? It was just the right shape.
A long, blunt object.
I wished Kei had not told me her theory. It only left me with more questions, more confusion. I didn’t know what to think. Not even when I returned to my daughter.
“Are you okay?” Lillie asked. “You look kinda sick.”
She was carrying her backpack, ready to leave the house. Lillie had found a job as a runner on a reality show, was getting as much experience in production as she could, without her father’s connections.
I told her I was fine; she hugged me goodbye. And then I knew, as I waved to her from the front door, that I would never tell her, or the police, about Kei’s confession. How Richard’s guests had watched him die. She had been tortured enough when the murder investigation began, at the thought of one of her friends, family, colleagues, killing her father. What would it do to her to know the truth: that six of them had let him die?
And if the real story went public, it would never be forgotten. Kei’s words were echoing through my mind as I watched Lillie drive away that day. It’ll be a Hollywood legend. He’ll be immortalized. Already Richard’s death was legendary; it would be even more so, I thought, if the truth ever came out. If the public learned that six guests had been guilty, Sedgwick would become a photo op on an open-bus tour forevermore. I couldn’t ruin Lillie’s life like that. I couldn’t let Richard’s death chase her, chase her career.
The next time I saw Kei, I let her know my decision. She didn’t seem relieved. She just nodded solemnly. I never told her about my missing bottled water—I didn’t want to add more fuel to her theorizing. Kei deserved to escape. And that’s what she did: She and Sabine moved to Paris. I followed their new life on social media. They sat in cafés with chairs and tables sprawled across cobbled streets, arms around each other, smiling. Sabine holding bunches of flowers; Kei with a hand-rolled cigarette behind the ear.
I kept an eye on the others too. Charlie was doing well for himself. Of course he was; the industry always gave men like him second chances. When I learned that he’d won the lead in a new superhero movie, I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought Dominus would be his end. As for Miguel, I never read about him in the media, but I assumed he was still making money, that his wife had never discovered the affair. Jerry stayed with Judy, who was nursing him through his chemo. Tommo had disappeared.
After the jury’s verdict, Scott asked Lillie if she wanted to file a civil lawsuit against Tommo, venture into battle again. She decided the media attention wouldn’t be worth it. Ultimately, as Tommo had predicted, Richard’s death would come to be remembered as an overdose, the throat wounds an uncomfortable question raised by the coroner’s report, which some were happy to forget, others not.
Honey had retreated as well. In the months that followed the memorial, as the court case rose to front pages and feeds, he shrank from the gaze of the media. He refused them the shortest statement, even when the verdict was read, and suspended his social-media accounts. He insisted that Lillie take the money from the sale of Sedgwick. He auctioned off the artwork.
While Honey and I would never grow close—it was too late for that—hearing Kei’s account of Richard’s last moments had laid any lingering suspicions about him to rest. I would follow his journey over the years with pride and, maybe, with distant love. Only five years later, he would rise to creative director of an artistic glossy, destined—as whispers had it—for editorship. I would be pleased for him, pleased again a decade later when I saw the photographs of his wedding: the peonies, the rays of sunlight, the big band and the beach. His hair would be a powder pink, matching the silk of Lillie’s bridesmaid dress. And I would wonder if Honey was thinking of Richard, the life he could have lived if it had all been different.
It was Richard that I was thinking of as I took to the podium. As the cameras began to snap.
I gripped the podium to steady myself.
Over the past few weeks, I had slowly unspooled Lillie’s life. We began late one night when she returned from work. I read Lillie the email; I gave her space to think it over. The next day she asked questions and I answered them. Just like that, we unpicked memories, we frayed beliefs.
The time Lillie had missed a birthday party because we spent the afternoon in the emergency room: Richard had broken my wrist. The time security guards had looked after her, let her play with their office supplies: I had fainted in a store, starving—Richard thought I’d been putting on weight. The time Lillie missed preschool for three days straight: Richard was convinced I was seeing a former co-star, had hidden the car keys, locked the gates of our home, and taken my purse. He had not unplugged the phone line—he never went that far—and I wondered whether it was a test of my love: to taunt me with freedom. But who would I have called? What would I have said? I told myself that I would only call for help if Lillie and I ran out of food.
We came close. Three days passed—three days of distracting my daughter. Blanket forts in the living room. Bread pizza for every meal. We used up all the toppings, till only beef jerky was left.
The cameras snapped.
I asked myself whether I would have found the courage to stand there, before the journalists, were Richard still alive. I remembered the lies he had told, after Honey’s accusations, and the lies I had told as well.
But this was only for one brief moment.
Lillie placed her hand over mine. She did not let go when I started to read my statement—first drafted months ago, as she slept soundly on my shoulder.
“A year has passed,” I began, “since I read a statement to the press. I told you that Richard Bryant was a wonderful, dependable father to my daughter. The best husband I could have asked for.”
I exhaled a shuddering breath. Cleared my throat again. Continued: “That statement contained lies, misdirection, and omissions.”
Someone scraped their chair on the floor. I could feel it: the room, listening. I could feel the sweat on my palms. I inhaled, then exhaled. Pictured myself beneath the water. Those tumbling limbs, the suede-like skin. The opening in the creature’s eyelids: as thin as a bobby pin.
Lillie had received an email, only a few days before the press conference: Persephone was now a mother. There was a video attached, filmed through a narrow crevice. I could just make out Persephone’s limbs beyond the hanging eggs, drifting like willow branches in the wind. Still large and suckered but withered, whiter than before. Persephone was a ghost of herself, jetting water over the eggs with every last breath.
I was watching the video alone: Lillie had forwarded it to me while
she was at work. I closed my laptop before it ended; it didn’t feel like a scene that should be watched.
For A.S. & I.L.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Carrie, without whom this story would not have become a novel; to Elana and Emma, without whom this novel would not have become a book and a great many of these words would not have found their way onto these pages; to Lucy, without whom this novel would not have crossed the Atlantic Ocean; to Loren, Kathy, Craig, Elena, and everyone else working at, and for, Ballantine Books, without whom this book would not be this beautiful book; to all the friends, family, colleagues, and writing group members who read and commented on various iterations of this story, without whom I would have had neither the feedback to craft it nor the confidence to pursue its publication; to my grandparents, without whom I would not have heard as many stories; to Jonah and Maili, without whom I would not have told as many stories; to my parents, for all the novels and notebooks, without which I might not have found my love of writing; and to Hasan, without whom I would not be myself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tess Little is a writer and historian. She was born in Norwich, Norfolk, and studied history at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. At the age of twenty-two she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, where she completed a doctorate on 1970s feminist activism in the UK, France, and the United States. Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Words and Women: Two, The Mays Anthology, The Belleville Park Pages, and The White Review, and on posters outside a London tube station. This is her first novel.
TessLittle.com
Twitter: @tessmslittle
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