The Heiresses

by Sara Shepard

  “This one is lovely,” she said as she set the empty glass on the table, already feeling lighter.

  Will chuckled. “Long day?”

  “Sometimes it feels like it’s been a long few decades,” Corinne said, surprising herself. She wondered how such an honest thought had escaped her lips.

  Will shifted on the stool. “I was sorry to hear about your cousin. We only met a couple times, but I remember that you were close.”

  So. There it was. Corinne felt the knot inside her chest unfurl. Of course that summer wasn’t a secret to either of them, but hearing him acknowledge it, she somehow felt as though a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders. She pictured Poppy then, dancing with one of Will’s friends the night they met, never caring what anyone thought of her, and yet somehow managing for everyone to think only the best things. “Thank you,” she said softly, a little bit calmer. This will go okay, she told herself. Just keep breathing. Just get through it.

  Next, they tried a red from the Lagrein region, and then a heady Barolo, followed by some dessert wines. Before long, Corinne’s posture wasn’t as straight, and she wasn’t dabbing her mouth after every sip. She stared at Will, who was talking animatedly to Andrew, firming up their final selections. An unexpected sensual feeling filled her. All at once, she could almost feel the cool sand between her toes, the salty spray coating her skin, the first night they met. And now, as she gazed at Will’s pink, sensuous lips, she remembered distinctly what it had felt like to kiss him.

  Andrew kissed her good night on both cheeks, and then left them with the unfinished bottles. Before long they’d helped themselves to another glass. Then another. Corinne’s head was swimming; she felt as if she was floating. And though she knew she should get home, she couldn’t exactly will her body to leave the stool.

  Will turned to her and grinned. “You work at Saybrook’s, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Corinne said, trying to remain poised. “I’m the head of foreign business.”

  “The head.” Will didn’t seem surprised. “Of course you are.”

  Corinne lowered her eyes, feeling as though she’d been too boastful. “Well, it helps if your last name is on the letterhead.”

  “Don’t do that.” He took her hand, the force of it surprising her. “I’m sure you deserve the position. Good for you. Ever think about working somewhere else?”

  Corinne blinked hard. “I’ve never really thought of it.”

  “Really? Never?”

  She was transported back to that summer once more. Not long after they’d kissed on the sand, Will had found Corinne again when she was shopping in town. He’d peered at her from across the street, and then walked over and slipped a note into her hand. “The boatyard at Carson and Main. Midnight,” it read.

  It had been a warm and sticky night. Corinne had stood alone on the docks in a long skirt and way-too-expensive leather sandals. But then Will had appeared through the mist and took her hand, leading her to a small fishing boat halfway down the slip. Corinne hadn’t asked whose boat it was; she hadn’t even thought about it. She sat down in the hull. And then, instead of kissing her, he touched Corinne’s house keys. The key chain was to the Meriweather Yacht Club. “You have a boat?”

  “Just my family’s.” It wasn’t just a boat, exactly—it was a massive yacht that slept twelve—but she hoped he didn’t know that. He’d been so careful about his sneakers near the water, afraid to get them wet, whereas Corinne, who had been wearing five-hundred-dollar flip-flops, hadn’t given it a thought.

  “Of course. Your family’s,” Will said.

  Corinne had held his gaze. It wasn’t a surprise that he knew about her family; it surprised her, though, that he seemed to care. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ask questions about your family. I don’t want to know who they are. I want to know you. The real you.”

  The real you. It was a concept she didn’t quite understand. There were the obvious basics. I am Corinne Saybrook. I went to boarding school at Exeter. I had a 3.87 average at Yale. I play field hockey, lacrosse, and ride horses; I summer in Meriweather and go to Portofino or St. Barts over spring break. I’ve read every Jane Austen book twice. I just broke up with Dixon Shackelford, and starting next month, I will be working in the foreign business department of my family’s company.

  And so she said all that—even the part about Dixon. Will had given her a searching look. “That sounds like a résumé. You’re more than that.”

  Was she? But suddenly she found herself telling him things no one else knew. She told him that her first-grade teacher had it in for her for some reason—she never knew why—yet Corinne always told her parents she was the teacher’s pet. She talked about how her mother used to make her walk around with a book on her head and made her go to every charitable event in the city, even though the other girls there weren’t very friendly to her. She talked about how her father seemed to prefer Aster. She’d even admitted that there were rumors that her sister was getting in trouble in Europe, and told him how worried she was about her. But angry too.

  She wasn’t sure why she told Will everything. But she did, and that night a thought floated through her mind, unbidden. I love you already, something deep inside her had whispered.

  Now, she looked across the bar at Will. He was still watching her. “I never thought about branching out because I never felt allowed to,” she said, the confessional floodgates opening again. “I was always a good girl. I always did what my parents asked. That meant working for the family. It meant going to the right schools and wearing the right clothes and marrying . . .” She trailed off.

  “What was that?” Will asked, cocking his head.

  Corinne looked down. “Marrying well,” she admitted.

  Will stared at her, and for a long time he was silent. Then his fingers groped for his glass. “I’m sorry I was cold to you the other day,” he said, his voice hitching on cold. “And this might make me sound like an asshole, but you never have to deal with me again after tonight, so I might as well say it.” His lips trembled for a moment. Corinne’s heart started to pound. “Life’s too short to care about marrying well.”

  She clutched her wineglass. She wanted to defend Dixon, but all of a sudden, Dixon felt very far away. Corinne couldn’t even picture his face—not the shape of his eyes, not whether he had dimples, not the way he smelled. On the other hand, she’d carried around a mental image of every contour of Will’s face and body for five years. She could have sketched him perfectly if someone had asked. Maybe that meant something; if you could still draw someone when he was gone. If you remembered him perfectly. If you were his mirror, even after lots of time had passed . . .

  She rubbed her palms against her eyes, smearing her makeup. What was she thinking? She balled a napkin in her hands and stood. “I think I’ve had too much to drink. I must look awful.”

  Will stood too. “You look amazing.”

  He placed his hand on her arm. Her head hummed. And suddenly it was as if she had floated out of her body and was watching from above, from some other plane. She pictured herself sitting in the front row of a theater, Poppy next to her, their hands in a bowl of popcorn, their mouths agape, as Corinne reached out for Will, pulling him toward her. He fell into her, his mouth hungrily searching for hers. Bumping against each other, they backed out of the private room into one of the cellars, a space dry and dark. Will laid Corinne down and gazed at her. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, but she covered it. He gripped the waistband of her skirt desperately.

  The night on the boat washed over her once more. After Corinne had told him all her secrets, he’d taken her into his arms. It almost felt as if something was swelling inside her—and if it didn’t happen right that moment, she would burst.

  There in the wine cellar, Will kissed her neck as he tore off her sweater, and she arched her back against the surprisingly cold floor. He pushed her skirt up around her waist. And then they breathed into each other, their mouths tasting like
wine. “Oh my God,” Will kept saying, every so often pausing to stare at her. Tears formed in Corinne’s eyes, though she wasn’t sad. It was just that she remembered Will doing that same thing the first time they were together. Looking at her like that, as if he couldn’t believe this was happening.

  That first night, the boat had bobbed with their movements. Their sounds echoed across the bay. Corinne had never felt particularly passionate about sex, but with Will above her, blanketed by a canopy of stars, something happened. Something that felt very different. An aligning of the planets, maybe. A big bang, creating a universe.

  And that was the thing. They had, in fact, created something that night.

  They’d created someone.

  11

  Rowan sat at her desk at seven on Wednesday evening, staring blearily at a contract on her screen. It was still light outside, the evening hours stretching longer and longer as they moved further into May. A few phones rang in the bullpen of cubicles outside her office. Every so often, a paralegal or assistant swept by, but most people were packing up to leave.

  She looked at her screen again, about to pull up a different document. But then the cursor began to drift toward the bottom right-hand corner of her monitor, though she hadn’t touched the mouse. Rowan straightened up and rolled her chair back a few inches. She watched as the little arrow slowly migrated to the Windows icon in the bottom-left corner.

  “Hello?” she called out, though to whom she wasn’t sure. How had that happened?

  There was a cough in the hall, then a small, shuffling set of footsteps. “H-hello?” Rowan called out, half standing. The office was suddenly too quiet, too empty. “Is someone there?”

  Rowan jumped as Danielle Gilchrist poked her head in, her face flashing with worry. “Oh my God, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Rowan smoothed down her hair. “I’m fine. What’s up?” She offered a wobbly smile, taking in Danielle’s long red hair and her modern-looking black-and-pink wool dress. She and Danielle worked together from time to time—as legal counsel, Rowan occasionally had to advise on hires and fires.

  Danielle checked over her shoulder, then stepped into the room and shut the door. “Something has kind of been weighing on my mind.”

  “Sit,” Rowan said, gesturing to the couch across from her desk.

  Danielle perched on a cushion and folded her hands in her lap, a conflicted look on her face. A few moments passed before she spoke. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Poppy’s murder and who might want to hurt her . . . and I had a thought. Something I’m not sure the FBI knows about.”

  A shock wave coursed through Rowan. “What do you mean?”

  Danielle took a deep breath. “I used to be friends with Poppy’s assistant, Shoshanna. You remember her, right? She basically ran Poppy’s life? She was my hire. She came highly recommended.”

  “Sure,” Rowan said. Plenty of times she’d walked into Poppy’s office when Shoshanna, a lanky girl with curly black hair, a long face, and a predilection for baby-doll dresses, was briefing Poppy about something or other. “She left the company a few months ago, right? For De Beers?”

  “That’s right. She got a great offer in the PR department, better than what we could match.” Danielle cleared her throat. “Before she left, though, she sort of let something slip about Poppy.”

  Out the window, a searchlight beamed around the sky. Rowan stared for a moment, then glanced back at her computer screen. The cursor hadn’t moved again. “What did Shoshanna say?” she asked, turning back to Danielle.

  “Maybe it’s nothing, but she mentioned some . . . discrepancies in Poppy’s schedule. Poppy started putting mysterious appointments in her calendar—vague things, like ‘meeting,’ without saying who it was with. And when Shoshanna asked—it was her job to know—Poppy said that she had everything covered. Shoshanna said she got kind of snippy about it.”

  “Okay,” Rowan said, tapping the surface of her desk. None of that sounded so strange to her.

  Danielle pulled her bottom lip into her mouth. “Or she would write things like ‘lunch with James,’ but then James would call during lunch, not knowing anything about a lunch. Shoshanna had to cover for her.”

  Rowan sat back. That was strange. But Poppy could have had the date wrong, or James might have forgotten. There were lots of explanations. “Huh.”

  “Shoshanna said she started taking these mysterious blocked calls too. And one time, Shoshanna tried to hop on the phone to take notes for Poppy and Poppy snapped at her to get off. She didn’t explain who the calls were from or what they were about. But I think Shoshanna drew some conclusions.” Danielle stuck her tongue in her cheek.

  Rowan searched her face. The only sounds in the office were the little buzzes and clicks of Rowan’s hard drive. Her brain seemed to temporarily short out, going black. Finally she said, “You think Poppy was having an affair?”

  Danielle pressed her lips together. “I don’t know. And maybe there’s another explanation.” She laid her hands in her lap.

  Rowan considered the woman sitting across from her on the couch, for a second picturing the young girl who used to drive Edith around Meriweather in a golf cart. She’d been Aster’s friend, not Rowan’s, but Rowan had always found her entertaining. One summer, when they were all sitting on the beach together, they’d watched an older couple fighting as they walked along the water’s edge. The wind had snatched away the couple’s real words, but Danielle had adopted a high-pitched nasal whine for the woman and a phlegmy rumble for the man.

  “I told you not to wear that Speedo,” she’d said in a pinched voice.

  “You worried about the competition?” she’d then rasped, holding her arms out at the same time as the old man.

  Rowan knew the arguing couple—the Coopers were one of Meriweather’s few year-rounders—and Danielle had mimicked their voices perfectly. Danielle’s mother, Julia, had dashed by at that moment on her morning jog. “Be nice, Danielle,” she’d admonished, her bright red hair flying behind her.

  “Have you told the FBI?” Rowan asked.

  Danielle shook her head. “They haven’t contacted me. And instead of going to them directly, I thought I should let you know first. Especially since I don’t even know if it is anything. I hope that was the right thing to do.”

  “Of course it was.” Rowan shifted in her chair. “You did what anyone in the family would do, and I appreciate it.” She shifted in her chair. “You don’t have any idea who was on the other line in those blocked calls?”

  Danielle shook her head. “Shoshanna might, but she didn’t tell me.”

  Rowan stared out the window. Lights twinkled in the building across the street. “I wonder if Foley looked into Poppy’s calendar. Maybe those appointments were a clue about who she might have been seeing,” she murmured, mostly to herself, hardly believing the words coming out of her mouth. She’d assumed James’s theory about Poppy’s affair was just that: a theory. A thought that justified his own infidelity with Rowan. But here was another person echoing James’s suspicions. The idea of Poppy having an affair still didn’t compute, though.

  A knock sounded at the door, and James poked his head in. “Oh, I’m sorry. Am I interrupting?”

  “Oh, hi.” She blinked confusedly at him. “Um, no, of course not.”

  “We were just finishing up.” Danielle stood and smoothed her pencil skirt. “Well, if you need anything, call me, okay?”

  “I will,” Rowan said, and Danielle slipped out of the room.

  Rowan turned to James. “So . . . what are you doing here?”

  “I’m coming from work,” James explained. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his dark-wash jeans, looking suddenly sheepish. “The kids are with Megan. I thought you might still be here. I just . . . wanted to see how you were doing.”

  Rowan blinked rapidly, feeling disoriented. “How did you get in?”

  James shrugged. “My wife was the president. They always let me in.”

 
Rowan nodded. Of course.

  She rubbed her eyes. “God, I’m sorry. It’s just so quiet here. Kind of spooky.” She wondered if he’d heard the conversation she’d just had with Danielle. But he looked guileless, one corner of his mouth lifted up in a smile, revealing the dimple she hadn’t seen in so long.

  She put her head in her hands and rubbed her scalp. Should she tell him what Danielle had said? Switched appointments, secret phone calls—that did seem to add up to an affair. Maybe the signs James sensed were really there. Suddenly Rowan felt somehow offended, as though she was the one who’d been betrayed. The woman she’d considered her closest friend felt as unknowable as a stranger at a bar.

  Rowan’s anger was a hot prickle on the surface of her skin. She stared hard at a picture of her and Poppy that sat on her desk, wanting suddenly to turn it facedown. Tears filled her eyes, and she immediately regretted her thoughts. Her cousin, her best friend, had been murdered. She couldn’t be mad at her.

  “Hey, everything okay?” James stepped forward and reached out as if to put a hand on her arm, then retreated, as though worried she’d brush him off.

  “Yeah. It’s just been a long day,” she said, blinking back tears. “So how are the kids?”

  “Briony’s feeling better.” James sat down on Rowan’s couch.

  “And how are you?”

  James stared at her for what felt like forever. “You want the truth?”

  “Of course.”

  He took a deep breath. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  Rowan squeezed the sides of her chair. Her mouth twitched, and she could feel her face growing red. James stood up, crossed the room, and walked to Rowan’s desk. He sat on the edge, still staring at her. Rowan was afraid to move, much less speak. She felt like two people: the Rowan who desperately missed her cousin, her best friend—and the Rowan who had slept with James . . . and who wanted to do it all over again.