The Night Visitor Read online

  “I imagine she’d banked enough money to retire.”

  Rory snorted. “She made top money, all right. Spent it too.” She took a breath. “Anya never told me what really happened between her and Jonah. She brushed it off. ‘We’re just friends. We were never serious.’ ” Rory remembered how Anya had met her eyes, challenging her to say otherwise.

  Rory walked to a white-lacquered grand piano. “Anya loved this piano.” She raised the keyboard cover and pressed a couple of keys. “She didn’t play, of course. She hired someone to play for parties.”

  Rory ran her fingers across the piano keys and thought about a Valentine’s Day party here that she and Junior had come to. They’d just gotten engaged. She recalled how raggedly handsome he’d looked in his paint-splattered workman’s pants and boots, a distressed leather jacket over a black T-shirt. Locks of his black hair curled over his collar. They’d both gotten a little drunk. Junior had backed her into a corner and nuzzled her neck, tickled her, making her laugh while at the same time she wanted to drag him into a bedroom. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

  They’d watched as Jonah Donati had arrived. Anya had almost flown to greet him in a way that was un-Anya-like.

  Junior had said, “Your sister’s in love.”

  Less than an hour later, they’d seen Jonah leave. Anya had closed the door behind him. Rory had looked up and caught Anya, beautiful and elegant in the midst of her adoring crowd, watching her and Junior. At the time, Rory had thought she’d read disapproval in Anya’s eyes. Thinking back, she realized she’d been operating under her typical MO of feeling picked on by Anya. Now she felt that Anya had been watching them not with disapproval but with longing.

  “Where did you go?” Tom asked.

  “Thinking about how poorly I knew my sister.”

  “She didn’t seem to be the most accessible person.”

  “No, she wasn’t.” Rory closed the keyboard cover. “I don’t know why I came here. It’s making me uneasy.”

  “Let’s go.”

  She wanted to. Being in Anya’s house felt like being in a tomb. She’d hoped for a catharsis, but all she felt was sad and empty.

  The waking dreams flickered in the back of her mind, as if plying for her attention. She felt compelled to stay. The feeling was urgent and consuming. “Let me just walk through, and then we’ll go.”

  She turned down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Framed magazine covers featuring Anya lined the walls. Anya’s bedroom was surprisingly juvenile, done in white and pink with stuffed tigers everywhere.

  “What’s with the tigers?” Tom remarked about the many tiger-themed paintings, figurines, and stuffed toys.

  “Anya collected them. Her fans sent carloads of tiger stuff. She donated most of it.”

  They entered a room that had been turned into a closet.

  “Whoa.” Tom took in the packed racks, shelves, and cabinets.

  “Anya was a world-class shopper. She might have even outdone my mother. Plus designers were always giving her things.”

  She slipped her hands between hanging evening gowns, struggling to push them apart. “Valentino, Chanel, Armani. We ought to auction them off to raise money for The Other Victims.”

  Rory went into Anya’s office. Piles of papers, letters, and five-year-old magazines had been tidied by the cleaning crew. Rory picked up a contact sheet of photographs of Anya.

  “These were for Langtry’s Pretty Is campaign. The ads were scheduled to hit the newspapers a week after Anya’s murder. Richie wanted to pull them, but I insisted they run. It was an unpopular decision, but the campaign was a huge success. Marked a turnaround for Langtry. We stuck to the story that it was too late to pull the ads.” She looked at Tom. “Think I was a cold, heartless bitch, capitalizing on the notoriety of my sister’s murder?”

  “It was a difficult decision. You’d paid for the ads.”

  “Thank you for being charitable, but it was a cold decision. I’ve traded on my sister’s murder ever since. So, am I maintaining Anya’s legacy or exploiting it?”

  “You’re the savvy head of a major cosmetics firm.”

  “That’s exactly how I justify it to myself.”

  She picked up a cord dangling from a large-screen computer monitor. “The police took her laptop and tablets.” She sat at the desk and started opening drawers. “And all her cell phones.”

  “All her cell phones? How many did she have?”

  “Five or six. She had phones that were dedicated to communicating with certain people. One for this boyfriend or that boyfriend. One for her agent. If she dropped the person, she cleared out all the history and changed the phone number. She could keep communications secret.” Rory waved her hand. “I think it made her feel important.”

  As she was looking through Anya’s desk drawers, an image entered her mind. She saw the vintage library table in Junior’s loft. She could see the graffiti that had been carved into the surface by bored school children. On top of the table was Anya’s Birkin bag. Beside it were two cell phones. One had a hot-pink silicone cover. That was the one she used for most of her communications. The other phone had a rhinestone cover in a gold-and-black tiger-striped pattern. A little gold charm of a tiger’s head dangled from a corner. That was one of Anya’s secret phones, one she’d been using a lot in the weeks before her murder.

  Looking at Anya’s desk, Rory could see the two phones on Junior’s library table. She felt as if Junior had put the image into her mind. The iPhone in the tiger-striped case felt like the most important thing in the world.

  “Rory, you’ve left me again. What are you thinking about?”

  She shrugged and lied. “Just thinking about Anya’s Birkin bag. She was on a waiting list forever to buy it. I guess the police still have it in evidence, if it hasn’t been stolen.” She pushed herself up and left the room.

  They walked through the kitchen with its professional-grade appliances, which Anya had barely used. Rory went through a doorway into an attached garage and turned on the overhead light. Anya’s vintage Mercedes two-seater, with its hardtop off, was parked in the center. The rest of the space was crammed with the detritus of Anya’s flirtation with different sports and hobbies, racks of discarded clothing inside zippered bags and odds and ends of briefly loved, now spurned furnishings and housewares.

  “The keys are in the ignition,” Tom said, looking inside the Mercedes.

  “Rosario’s people start it. They might even drive it around to flush it out.” Rory opened the driver’s door and slid onto the leather seat. She breathed deeply but only detected the dusty odor of the garage. Any residue of Anya was long gone.

  On the passenger seat was a denim jacket lined in mink. Rory picked it up and rubbed her cheek against the fur. “Just a little knock-around jacket. You know, to throw over your yoga gear.” Rory did a good imitation of Anya’s voice. “I think the workers are playing dress-up and driving Anya’s car.”

  Rory got out of the car, taking the jacket with her. She put it on. It was too large. Anya had always been bigger than she, plus Rory had lost weight since her accident. She put her hand into one of the jacket’s pockets and pulled out a lipstick. “Ha. A Langtry lipstick. Mauve-Tastic.” Anya’s favorite shade. In the other pocket were a gum wrapper and a crumpled receipt from a Rite Aid pharmacy. She opened it. “This receipt’s dated two weeks before Anya was murdered.” She read the itemization. “Gum, candy, InStyle magazine, and…EPT. That’s odd.”

  “EPT? The pregnancy test?”

  “Yes. Here’s Anya’s name from her credit card on the receipt. She must have thought she was pregnant.”

  “Wouldn’t a pregnancy have been discovered during the autopsy?”

  “I don’t know. If it was a very early pregnancy, maybe not. If Anya was pregnant, I’m shocked. She didn’t want kids. She was afraid she’d turn out to be as bad a mother as our mom. Wonder if the father was Jonah Donati. He got married not long after Anya’s murder. Married a
cocktail waitress he met at the Sunset Tower. Something was going on with Anya during the weeks before her murder. She was definitely keeping secrets.”

  Tom shot a glance at her.

  “I’m done,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  34

  The small cemetery was tucked behind a stone church in an exclusive neighborhood near Pasadena. Anya’s grave was on the crest of a knoll in the shade of a split-trunk elm.

  The obscure location didn’t hinder Anya’s fans from finding her grave, as it was littered with tributes. There was a stemware flute, brimming with flat champagne, and an open bottle of Cristal, Anya’s favorite. There were dozens of bouquets, both faded and fresh, with a preponderance of anthuriums, Anya’s favorite. There were stuffed tigers and tiger figurines. There were stacks of letters and handmade signs. Plastic pinwheels on each of the grave’s four corners turned slowly in the light breeze.

  “Wow,” Tom said. “A sign at the gate said they clear off the mementos each week.”

  “Maybe there’s so much stuff because of the five-year anniversary of her murder.” Rory shakily lowered herself to the grass. On her knees, she moved things from the headstone and started wiping dirt from it with her hand.

  Tom kneeled beside her. “Let me.” He wiped the stone with a cloth handkerchief from his back pocket.

  The headstone was a rectangular block of black granite, lying flush with the ground, according to the style of the cemetery, with a simple epitaph etched in plain lettering:

  ANYA SOPHIA LANGTRY

  Daughter Sister Friend

  Followed by the dates marking the start and end of her twenty-five years on earth. It was an accurate but understated assessment of her life.

  Rory pulled off the dead bouquets and stacked them beside the grave. Tom removed cellophane from a dozen pink roses and handed the bouquet to Rory. She poured water from a plastic bottle into a submerged cylinder below the headstone, set the roses inside, and arranged them.

  She sat cross-legged on the grass and looked at the headstone in silence. Tom sat beside her, slipping his hand into hers. She plucked a dandelion that had gone to seed. She closed her eyes, as if making a wish, blew the feathery spores into the air, and watched them float away. She looked up through the elm tree’s lacy canopy at blue sky.

  After a while, she squeezed Tom’s hand and released it. She reached to pick up a sealed pink envelope that was propped on the grass. It was addressed to “Anya, Supermodel.”

  “Think Anya will mind if I read it?” Rory said with a smirk.

  She slit open the envelope with her thumb and took out a sheet of pink stationery decorated with flowers. She read aloud: “Dear Anya. You will never be dead for me. You live on in my heart. You are my guardian angel. I feel you watching over me. I am sixteen and a model. I started modeling when I was fourteen, just like you. I’ve been doing department store ads, but I want to go to Paris and do the runways, just like you. When I become a supermodel and people ask me who had the biggest impact on my life, I’ll tell everyone that you did. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Love forever, Ashleigh.”

  Rory crumpled the letter and tossed it onto the pile of dead flowers. “Is there no end to the supply of stupid young girls in this world? Is there a hatchery somewhere that keeps spitting them out? She’s idolizing a narcissistic and manipulative woman who came to a violent and early end.”

  Tom remained silent as he looked at her.

  “I know I sound like a bitch, talking about my murdered sister that way. I don’t even know who she was at the end. Finding out she had secrets makes me wonder about every conversation I had with her as an adult. Was she ever straight with me or was it all a lie?”

  “Honey, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before about being at Anya’s house. It was so long ago.”

  She waved dismissively. “I don’t care about that. I don’t know why I ever felt guilty for not visiting Anya’s grave.” She held her arms wide, indicating the scene. “No reason to. She’s still getting plenty of attention. My mom never even comes here.”

  “You feel guilty because you’re a sweet and caring person.”

  “And my mom’s not.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “That’s because you’re a sweet and caring person. My mom is Evelyn Langtry in capital letters. Former sex kitten who reinvented herself as an overbearing stage mother to supermodel Anya and reinvented herself again as a socialite, philanthropist, and survivor of personal tragedy. Anya’s murder gave my mom’s life the gravitas it was missing. Without that, she’d merely be a self-absorbed, faded beauty who managed to marry well before she hit the wall.”

  Tom again took her hand. His eyes were sad.

  “My mom has gotten better since Anya’s murder. You can’t help but be changed by something like that. It’s drawn me and my mom closer. When Anya was alive, her glare was so bright I felt like Mom couldn’t even see me. Seems odd now, but for years Mom and I barely visited except for holidays or an occasional Sunday dinner at the villa. Anya would come sometimes, on the arm of her true-love-of-the-moment. We’d stand around that cold ballroom with that portrait of Boo staring down and make awkward conversation, perpetuating the ruse that we were a family.”

  Rory shivered. “After Anya was murdered, my grudge against my mother just got too heavy to carry. So, I let it go.”

  “Now I understand why you chose to stay with your aunt and uncle even after your mom married Richard.”

  “Chose to?” Rory turned to look at him. “I was ordered to stay with my aunt and uncle.”

  He frowned. “That’s not the story you told me.”

  “That’s not the story I’ve told anyone. I guess we all have secrets. I wanted to move to the villa. What teenager wouldn’t? My aunt and uncle’s house was cramped, and I wanted to finally live with my mom. And I really wanted to go to the Polytechnic School, a fancy private school in Pasadena. I was only thirteen, but I was already thinking about my future. No one else was. Being a Poly grad would have helped me get into a top college. But my mom was traveling with Anya a lot and there was no one at the villa to watch over me. Mom said that she was working on me still living with my aunt and uncle in Temple City but going to Poly, with Richard paying for it, of course.”

  “But you didn’t go to Poly.”

  “Anya made the final decision.” Rory stared at the headstone. “She told me she didn’t want me at Poly or anywhere near her. She didn’t want me to be part of her new life.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “I was crushed. Anya and I were best friends as kids. She truly was my big sis. She was bigger, stronger, and more aggressive. I was pale and skinny, and I always had a runny nose or an earache. Anya watched over me. If any of the kids messed with me, they had to deal with her. And I had her back. Did her homework most of the time.”

  She stretched out her legs on the grass and leaned back onto her hands. “We felt that all we had was each other. Even though my Aunt Donna and Uncle Dave treated us like their own, it couldn’t take away Anya’s and my feelings of being abandoned. Mom would breeze in and out. We’d see her on Christmas and our birthdays, maybe. She’d usually just send expensive gifts.”

  Rory looked up to watch two squirrels chasing each other across the tree branches. “I was the practical one. Anya was the dreamer. She always wanted to be a model. At four years old, she’d dress up and pretend she was on the catwalk at a fashion show. She got her break when Mom married Richard. Mom’s acting jobs were drying up. She had all the time and money in the world to devote to Anya’s career.

  “As soon as Anya started modeling professionally, she changed. It was as if all the attention stoked her narcissism. Instead of her being my protector, I became bait for her. That sweet side of her seeped out until all that was left was this cold, brittle, beautiful shell.”

  “The attitude that sold a zillion magazines.”

  “I’ll never forget the day I started to hate my sister.” Rory sat up and look
ed at Anya’s grave, her gaze darkening. “It was August, a few days after our fourteenth birthday. School was out. I was hoping to enroll in Poly that fall. Mom said it was in the works. She’d sent me a birthday gift of clothes—all of them practical and boring. There was only one thing I’d wanted for my birthday and she hadn’t bought it for me. It was a pair of red boots made of soft leather in this slouchy style that was popular at the time, with a zipper up the back. I’d seen them in a Barneys catalogue. My mother usually sent her gifts, so I was on the mailing lists of all the high-end retailers. The boots were pricey, but Mom was always buying Anya things like that.

  “That day, Uncle Dave had asked me to weed his vegetable garden. He was going to pay me ten dollars. That’s where I was, by the fence in the back, dirty, hot, and sweaty, when here comes Anya strolling across the garden, picking her way around the tomato cages and zucchini vines, dressed to the nines. I was surprised to see her, all right. She never came by anymore. But it wasn’t just that. She was wearing the boots I wanted.

  “I’m on the ground, a trowel in my hand, my eyes level with the boots. She started talking in this flip manner that she’d taken on. ‘I had Richard’s driver bring me over. Mom and I are off to New York. I’m shooting a spread for Vogue. I don’t have much time, but I came to tell you something. You can’t live in the villa. I don’t want you at the Polytechnic School either.’ ” Rory’s eyes welled and her voice wavered. “She said, ‘I don’t want you around me. Just stay away from me. Get it?’ Then she spun on her heel and marched off.” Rory wiped away tears. “My heart was broken.”

  Tom reached to put his arm around her, but she climbed onto her knees and crawled to Anya’s headstone.

  “Daughter, sister, friend, my ass.”

  She picked up the bottle of champagne and brought it down against the granite. It broke with a wet sound, the champagne spilling across the stone and onto the grass. Rory’s sobs choked her and she gasped for breath.

  Tom reached for her but stopped, letting her release her rage.