“Fan-flippin’-tastic. Of course. What would you expect?”
“Fan-flippin’-tastic.”
“I know! It was disgusting in a way. I mean, at first she was just some salesgirl helping me and doing a really great job of it, so I was beholden to her, right? Then she said something that made me realize, oh my God, this is Lexi Henderson, so I looked at her differently. Of course. It was quite an emotional roller coaster.”
Nicola was still clueless and trying to play it cool. “What do you mean?”
“Well, obviously, you run into Lexi Henderson twenty years later and she’s waiting on you in Sephora, you get a totally different perspective on her. And yourself.”
Twenty years later. Nicola racked her brain. Twenty years ago. She’d just met Holly. At camp. Camp camp camp . . .
“Oh my God, Lexi Henderson?”
There was a puzzled moment before Holly responded, “Um . . . yes. Hello? Were you not here for this entire conversation I just— Oh my God, you forgot who she was!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You totally did. I’m saying Lexi Henderson and you’re thinking, Is that some Minneapolis news anchor?”
“I did not think that!”
“Then you thought something exactly like that and tried to fake your way through the conversation.”
“Maybe.”
“So are you up to speed now?” Holly asked with a good-natured laugh. “You know who I’m talking about?”
“Totally.” Nicola gave a firm nod, even though Holly couldn’t see her. “Now, repeat all the other stuff you said, because I forgot it once I remembered who the hell you were talking about.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“I’m sorry! I’m not always a mind reader!”
“Okay, Lexi Henderson. Blond. Pretty. Mean. You know who I’m talking about?”
“Affirmative.”
“If you’re going to be sarcastic—”
“Okay, fine, yes. I remember her. She was a bitch.”
“Right. Or was she?”
“I seriously think she was. What makes you think she wasn’t?”
“First of all, she was really nice before I realized who she was. But, granted, she was trying to sell me stuff. But then we got talking, and it came out that Sylvia was the real one in charge. The Queen Bee, so to speak. And I really think she was telling the truth, or at least that she believed what she was saying.”
“Sylvia?”
“Are you kidding?” Silence plunked down between them. “Suddenly you didn’t live before you graduated from college?”
“Oh, Sylvia!”
“Really?” Holly challenged. “Or is that oh, Sylvia like it was oh, Lexi a few minutes ago?”
“No, no, this one I remember.” Who could forget weird Sylvia, with her frosted blond hair (at age thirteen!), pig nose, and bad skin? How did she end up ruling the roost for every girl at camp? Holly had been prettier than Sylvia. Lexi certainly had. How was it that Sylvia had dominated them all when she might have been the most vulnerable of any?
Sheer will, Nicola concluded immediately. She’d seen it a hundred times before, and she was sure she’d see it a hundred more times before she hit forty.
“Good. So it turns out that Sylvia was the force behind all Lexi’s evil. And I’m not giving Lexi a pass on everything—believe me, I’m skeptical—but from what Lexi said, she was scared to go against Sylvia because she didn’t want to be the target. I can understand that.”
“I don’t know. That Lexi was pretty mean.”
“Yeah. She definitely was. I’m only saying that you never know what’s going on behind people’s actions, you know?”
“That’s for sure.” Nicola sighed. It was hard to feel sorry for gorgeous, rich, confident Lexi. If she’d had all those gifts at thirteen, surely she had the strength to stand up to Sylvia if she’d wanted to. “So that is pretty interesting that you ran into her.”
“I haven’t even gotten to the interesting part yet,” Holly went on, and, after a dramatic pause, said, “She’s flat broke.”
“Broke? How is that possible? She was so rich! Wasn’t her dad some sort of industry chief?”
“I can’t remember what he did, but he’s dead now.”
Nicola felt a pang. Her own father had died ten years ago, and she didn’t wish that kind of sadness on anyone. “Recently?”
“I think it must have been. Because this broke thing seemed pretty new to her. As was the job. This is her first week.”
“But not her first job, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know. It sure sounded like it. And given how rich she was, she might have been one of those spoiled rich girls who walks around with a little white dog in her purse and shops for recreation, with all the bills going to Daddy.” Holly groaned. “I wish I were one of those girls.”
“You do not. You’d be bored out of your skull the first day.”
“Maybe. Anyway, Lexi was saying her dad left everything to her stepmother. Everything. And she did seem like she was still in some shock about it.”
“Oh, the stepmother I remember. Lexi complained about her constantly.”
“Well, I guess she had good reason to, because not only did she keep all the money, but she kicked Lexi out of the house. Lexi’s living with some guy in exchange for working on his house.”
“No way. There is no way I believe that. She’s playing you.” Nicola shook her head to herself. “That’s what amateurs do, they always add that one detail that takes everything too far. I believed it all the way up to that point.”
“I don’t think she’s lying.” Holly’s tone was serious. “Look, you were nominated for a Golden Globe, and I didn’t buy your I remember Lexi act. There’s no way this girl was outacting you.”
“Come on, you’ve known me for twenty years. Of course you know when I’m lying. You can be a good actor but a bad liar.” She remembered a guy she’d slept with last year. He seemed so perfect until she found out he was married. “Or a bad actor and a great liar.”
“I’m telling you—she wasn’t lying. In a way, it was the absurdity of that detail that made it ring true. Whatever. I believe her—and when you see her, you’ll see what I mean.”
That brought Nicola up short. “What do you mean when I see her?”
“You and I need to fix this for her.”
“Fix what for her?”
“We’ve got to get the ring back.”
The ring. Shit. Nicola had forgotten all about that. “Are you out of your mind? I’m not coming back and digging around in the woods for some old cubic zirconia.”
“You said you were sure it was fake!”
“Yeah, well, I was also sure we’d be going right back out the next day to get it back once Lexi had freaked out.”
Nicola remembered what it had felt like that night, walking through the inky darkness and being startled by the camp counselors appearing out of nowhere and marching her and Holly back to their cabin.
“Come on, Hol, do you really think that was a real diamond? I don’t even see how that’s possible. Do you know how much it would have been worth? Good Lord, there’s no way her stepmother would have let her get away with that!”
“Her stepmother might have had no idea she was the one who took it. You know how rich people are—they have maids, gardeners, drivers, all kinds of people working in and around the house. If they noticed a big, ostentatious ring was missing, they probably wouldn’t have leapt to the conclusion that an adolescent kid had taken it.”
“I guess you could be right.”
“What if I am? I don’t even know if I should hope I’m right or wrong, but if there’s any possibility that the ring was real and we stole it, that’s a felony!”
A sick feeling balled up in Nicola’s stomach. “And you’re thinking that if she’s broke now and if that ring was real, it could really help her out.”
“Exactly.”
“Assuming it’s still there and they haven�
�t razed the entire Camp Catoctin area to make a housing development or something.”
“I already looked it up online. It’s still there, same as ever. You can see the whole area on Google Earth.”
“Can you see the ring?”
“Very funny.”
“Did you tell Lexi any of this?”
There was a long hesitation. “No. Truthfully, I didn’t think of it until I was leaving the store but . . .” She sighed. “I don’t know, would there be any point in telling her? What if she got her hopes up and it was all for nothing?”
Nicola could see that point, but there was more. “And what if you tell someone you did something terrible to them and then you have no way to rectify it? If we told her the truth then couldn’t find the ring, all we’d be doing is reminding her of something painful.”
“And potentially setting ourselves up for liability.”
Nicola doubted that. “We were underage.”
“But we haven’t been for fifteen years. There could be some legal loophole where you’re responsible for not returning something if you know about it once you’re of age.”
“Holly.”
“What?”
“That’s ridiculous. And you know it’s not the point.”
“Okay, the point is that we did something really, really wrong. And, I’ll admit it, I’m ashamed to go to that poor woman now and confess it. But at the same time, does it serve any purpose at all to tell her about it if we can’t get the ring back? I mean this sincerely—I think all we’d be doing is stirring up a bunch of angst.”
“Or answering a question she’s been asking for a long, long time.”
“Or stirring up angst.”
“Okay, or both.” But Nicola knew that if something that meant a lot to her had been stolen twenty years ago, she’d probably still be wondering what the hell happened to it and if there was any way to find it.
Admittedly, she hadn’t remembered Lexi’s name when Holly first said it, but now that she was thinking about her, Nicola could clearly picture that blond-haired girl lying four feet away on her bottom bunk, staring at that ring every night as she went to sleep, as if she were wishing on a star.
Whether or not the ring had had any great monetary value, it was clear it had a lot of sentimental value.
“You’ve been saying you wanted to come for a visit anyway,” Holly was saying. “Maybe you weren’t exactly planning on traipsing around in the woods of the Catoctins, but, hey, it will be good quality time for us to spend together.”
Nicola laughed. “It’s definitely not what I had in mind. But I miss those East Coast twilights, and it’s been a long time since I really dug in the dirt. It might do me some good.”
“And if things go as they should, it will do Lexi some good,” Holly said, then added, “which, okay, I’ll admit, will do our guilty hearts some good, too. It’s a win–win–win situation.”
“Hopefully.”
“Yeah, hopefully. So can you come?”
“I don’t know.” Nicola thought about the alternative. She could stay here and continue to drag her sorry, pessimistic butt to auditions when she was in a foul mood; she could hang out in her house, watching less-talented actors make more money on sitcoms than she had made for a hit movie; or she could go to Maryland and try to shake off the weirdness she was feeling, possibly coming to some sort of new peace.
“Randy broke up with me,” Holly said suddenly.
“What? When?”
“A little more than a week ago. I would have said something sooner, but . . . I was hoping it wouldn’t stick. I didn’t want to tell you and have you hate him and then . . .” Over the phone line, it sounded like Holly took a shaky breath. “Whatever. I could really use a visit, regardless of the ring, though I think that would be a fun adventure, if nothing else. What do you say? Could you take even a couple of days away?”
Now it didn’t seem like that hard a decision.
“I’ll let you know my flight information in a few hours,” Nicola said. “Meanwhile, get a map and some Deep Woods Off! We’re going on an adventure.”
18
The decision to move to Greg’s had been easy. Not only did it seem like fate, running into him that way, but it wasn’t a huge commitment. She could still take her time finding a more permanent solution to her housing problems, so she wouldn’t end up stuck in a terrible place or living with an awful roommate.
Which was more to the point: Given the potential roommates she’d encountered, his “known evil” seemed far less risky than the “unknown evil” she might have ended up with instead.
“This will be your room,” he said, opening the door on a room that was about half the size of the one she’d had at the house in Potomac. There was no attached bathroom, so needless to say, no Jacuzzi tub or bidet.
It was a simple room with hardwood floors and a view of a wildly overgrown garden out back.
She could get used to it.
“Think you can deal with it?” Greg asked. “I mean, I know where you’re coming from, and this isn’t quite so lavish.”
“Not quite.” She smiled. “But it’s perfect. Really.”
“The bathroom across the hall is yours. You can put all that girlie stuff of yours in there.”
“How do you know what I—?” She stopped. He knew everything about the way she kept her room and bathroom. He’d traipsed through them countless times over the past few weeks. “Never mind.”
“You gonna miss it?” he asked, and something about the sincerity in his eyes made her feel a little like sinking into him and just crying away the weeks of hurt and confusion she’d experienced.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I left in such a hurry. . . .”
“You kind of had to. You ran out of time.”
She nodded. “It was hard to say good-bye. To think about it. I grew up there, you know. My whole life, I didn’t realize it was such a palace.”
“No, it was home.”
Lexi remembered an entry in her mother’s journal. She’d written it to a four-year-old Lexi. Her father had hit it big, and her parents were moving to the house in Potomac. Tomorrow we’re moving to the house on Carriage House Drive, she’d written, and even her handwriting had seemed to show her excitement for the new place. You’ll just know it as “home,” of course, and it will be the place where you and your siblings will grow up. Maybe you’ll even get married in the backyard someday, by the pond your daddy has promised to put in back by the weeping willow tree. . . . The pond had never materialized.
Neither had the siblings.
It seemed almost nothing had gone the way Anna Henderson hoped.
“Exactly,” Lexi said, trying to shake the mood. “It was home. But it isn’t anymore.” Saying it didn’t make the pain go away, but it reminded her of the truth. It wasn’t home anymore. It wouldn’t have done her any good to sit around in the rubble and dust, reminiscing with herself about how it used to be or could have been and how horrible Michelle was for taking Lexi’s mother’s home for herself. “And this is perfect. Why are you selling it?”
“It’s what I do. I flip houses. Not so much as I used to a decade ago when the market was hot, but it’s still a pretty nice financial supplement.”
“Aren’t you attached to it?” she asked. The place was adorable. She could get attached to it. “Won’t you miss it?”
He shook his head. “All I see is the structure and what I can sell.”
“Hm.” It was like what everyone said about ob-gyns—they stopped looking at a woman’s parts as a roller coaster and saw them clinically.
She didn’t know him well enough to joke that his house was a vagina.
Instead, she said, “Even a few months here will give me time to get back on my feet and move on.”
He studied her. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime.”
She laughed. “Tell me when you’ve got all night.”
“I’ve got all night tonight.”
/> She didn’t know what to say.
He must have sensed that because he added, “I’m serious. I’ve got a six of Sam Adams and all the time in the world. Let’s order Chinese, and you can tell me what I’ve gotten myself into by letting you move in.”
“It would bore you to tears.”
Again he gave that smile. “You have the capability of doing a lot of things to me,” he said, and even though he did not move his eyes from hers, she suddenly felt naked under his gaze. “Boring me is not one of them.”
A tingle ran through her. Oh, no. No, no, no. She could not get the hots for this guy. That was one thing she absolutely could not afford. “Not tonight,” she said, her voice a lot stiffer than the molten lava that her insides had become. “But another time, maybe. Thanks.”
The spell was broken somewhat the next morning when she encountered the kitchen. Or, rather, the room that would have been the kitchen if it weren’t just a receptacle for dirty dishes and beer bottles.
“How can you live like this?” she asked incredulously. “I can’t even find a toaster to heat up a bagel. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to find a plate, either.”
“What are you talking about?” Greg asked over a cup of coffee and the Metro section of The Washington Post. “There’s about fifty of them in the sink.”
“A clean one,” she corrected. “This is just . . . ew. I did not sign up for this.”
“Ahh . . . You should have read the fine print.”
“There was no print.”
“You didn’t sign the contract?” He was trying not to smile.
She put a hand on her hip. “You mean the contract you didn’t sign, either? I think you might have missed the fine print my imaginary lawyer put in, too. Like the part about you doing your dishes as you use them.”
He laughed outright. “Touché. I’ll have my imaginary lawyer contact your imaginary lawyer and hash this out.”
“Ugh. This is so gross.”
“I know,” he said. “I had some guys over for preseason football a couple of days ago and we grilled out. I just haven’t had time to deal with it yet. It’ll be clean tonight.”
“Yes, it will.” She turned on the water. “And in the future, you should get paper plates.”
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