twos company chapter 1

The first thing you should know about rich people is that they never throw anything away. They just stop looking at it.

This is how a house like Foxglove gets built. Not all at once, but gradually, over generations of people who mistake keeping things for having a personality. A silver tray nobody uses. A portrait of a dead man nobody liked. A dining room large enough to seat twenty-four people who would rather be somewhere else. Eventually, the house becomes less of a house than a very expensive argument against the passage of time.

Foxglove had all of these things.

It also had three refrigerators, which I thought was excessive even by Whitmore standards.

The first was in the kitchen, a hulking stainless-steel thing that dispensed filtered water and made ice in three different shapes. The second was in the pantry, where Beatrice kept champagne and the sort of cheeses that smelled like wet basements. The third was downstairs, in a little room off the laundry, and contained nothing but bottled water, two jars of mustard, and a birthday cake from the previous September.

I knew about the cake because I had opened the refrigerator.

I knew about the birthday because the cake had HAPPY 30TH MARGOT written across it in pink icing, the letters beginning to sink into the frosting like they were drowning.

I closed the door.

There are certain things you learn not to ask about when you have known someone for most of your life. You learn that a question can be an accusation even when you haven't meant it that way. You learn that some people would rather let a cake rot in a basement than admit a party is over.

And you learn that if somebody lets you stay in their house for free, you should probably keep your observations to yourself.

Especially when that somebody is Margot Whitmore.

I arrived at Foxglove on a Thursday afternoon in late October, with two suitcases, a dying phone, and forty-seven dollars in my checking account. The leaves had started to turn along the drive, though the trees nearest the house were still stubbornly green. The gravel crunched under my tires. Beyond the iron gates, the property opened up in that theatrical way rich people's properties do, as if the land itself had been waiting for an audience.

The house appeared slowly.

First the roofline, then the chimneys, then the white columns and long windows, all of it sitting at the top of a hill like it had personally won the Civil War.

Foxglove was built in 1847, according to the little brass plaque beside the front door. The Whitmores liked to mention this fact as if they'd been there for the ribbon-cutting. In reality, their family had bought the place nearly forty years later, after the original owners lost most of their money and a son in the same summer. The details varied depending on who was telling the story.

Margot once told me the son drowned.

Her mother said he died of fever.

A man at the country club said there had been a horse involved.

The official family history made no mention of the son at all.

I found this discrepancy funny. I found most things funny when I didn't know what else to do with them.

I parked beside the garage and sat for a moment with the engine running.

The house looked exactly as I remembered it, which was irritating. I had spent years imagining Foxglove differently. Smaller, maybe. Less impressive. I wanted to come back and discover that it had been ordinary all along, that the whole thing had been a trick of childhood perspective and good landscaping.

Instead, it was still enormous.

The front lawn rolled down toward the road in neat green terraces. The windows reflected the pale afternoon sky. A stone fountain stood dry in the circular drive, its basin full of leaves. Someone had put a small white pumpkin on the front steps.

I hated the pumpkin immediately.

It was the sort of decoration that suggested a person had never once had to think about what groceries cost.

My phone buzzed in the cup holder.

MARGOT: you made it?

I typed back.

ME: unfortunately.

Three dots appeared.

MARGOT: don't start.

ME: i haven't even gotten out of the car.

MARGOT: you started in the car.

I smiled despite myself.

That was the problem with Margot. She knew me well enough to be funny.

I got out, pulled my coat tighter around me, and retrieved my suitcases from the trunk. The air smelled like wet leaves and chimney smoke. Somewhere behind the house, a dog barked twice and went quiet.

I had not been back to Foxglove in eleven months.

Not that I was counting.

The front door was unlocked. Of course it was. The Whitmores had a security system that could detect a stranger approaching the east terrace but had never quite grasped the concept of locking a door. Margot claimed it was because everyone in Bellwether knew everyone else.

What she meant was that everyone who mattered knew the Whitmores.

I stepped into the entrance hall.

The house smelled like lemon polish, old wood, and something faintly floral that I could never identify. The ceiling rose two stories above me, painted with clouds that had gone slightly gray around the edges. A chandelier hung overhead, its crystal pieces catching what little light came through the windows. Along the walls were portraits of Whitmores in various stages of disapproval.

I recognized three of them.

The others were just dead people with money.

I set my bags beside the staircase.

"Hello?" I called.

My voice traveled down the hall and returned to me, thinner than it had left.

No answer.

I checked my phone. No new message.

Margot had told me she'd be gone for a few days. A work trip, she said, though I couldn't imagine what sort of work required Margot to leave Kentucky in October. She had a title at the family foundation and a vague collection of responsibilities that seemed to involve lunch. Her father had established the foundation after making a fortune in commercial real estate, and her mother had spent the last twenty years turning its charitable donations into a social calendar.

Margot's actual job, as far as I could tell, was being Margot Whitmore.

She was good at it.

I carried my bags upstairs to the room I'd always used when I stayed over. The guest room at the end of the west corridor had pale blue walls, a four-poster bed, and curtains heavy enough to keep out the sun and, presumably, the poor. A silver-framed photograph sat on the bedside table.

Margot and me at seventeen.

We were standing in the garden in matching white dresses, both of us squinting into the camera. Margot's hair was pinned up. Mine was falling out of its clip. She had one arm around my waist and was looking directly at the photographer.

I was looking at her.

I turned the photograph facedown.

Not because it upset me. It didn't.

I just didn't particularly want to look at myself.

My phone buzzed again.

MARGOT: there's food in the fridge. don't eat the salmon. it's for beatrice.

ME: what happens if i eat the salmon?

MARGOT: she'll know.

ME: is she psychic?

MARGOT: worse. she's your mother.

I stared at that last message for a second longer than necessary.

Then I typed:

ME: thought that was you.

She didn't answer.

I unpacked one suitcase and left the other zipped. There wasn't much to unpack: jeans, sweaters, underwear, a pair of boots with a broken heel I kept meaning to fix. I had brought a book I wouldn't read and a notebook I would fill with grocery lists, resentments, and the occasional sentence I thought might make me sound interesting if anyone ever found it.

I put the notebook in the bedside drawer.

Then I went downstairs.

The kitchen was bigger than my first apartment. There were copper pans hanging over the island, a bowl of pears arranged by size, and a vase of flowers that looked expensive enough to have their own insurance policy. A handwritten list sat on the counter beneath a magnet shaped like a lemon.

THINGS TO REMEMBER WHILE I'M AWAY

Water the orchids.

Bring in the mail.

The gardener comes Monday.

Don't let anyone into the house without calling me first.

If Beatrice comes by, be nice.

I read the list twice.

Then I took a pen from the drawer and added:

6. Don't eat the salmon.

I was laughing when I heard the sound.

A single click from somewhere deeper in the house.

Not a footstep. Not a voice. Just the small, precise sound of a door latch settling into place.

I stopped laughing.

The kitchen was at the back of the house, with windows overlooking the garden. Through the glass, I could see the empty fountain, the clipped hedges, and the narrow path that led around the east side of the house toward the old servants' entrance.

The sound had come from inside.

I waited.

Nothing happened.

Old houses make noises. Everyone knows this. Pipes knock. Wood contracts. Doors shift when the temperature changes. Foxglove had been standing on that hill for nearly two hundred years, and it had accumulated a lot of opportunities to make noises.

I took a pear from the bowl.

I bit into it.

It was hard and sour.

"Jesus Christ," I said to the empty kitchen.

I threw it away.

Later, I would remember that moment with a level of detail that seemed excessive. The taste of the pear. The little brown bruise near the stem. The way the kitchen clock ticked once between my first and second bite.

I would remember it because it was ordinary.

Ordinary things are easy to trust. They don't ask anything of you. They don't arrive carrying explanations. They don't require you to decide which version of yourself is supposed to respond.

At the time, I didn't think about any of that.

At the time, I was simply a woman alone in a big house, eating bad fruit and waiting for her best friend to come home.

I checked the kitchen clock.

Three seventeen.

I checked my phone.

No messages.

I went upstairs and made the bed, though it was already made. I showered. I changed into a sweater and leggings. I opened the curtains and looked down at the drive, where my car sat beneath the yellowing trees.

At five, I ordered Thai food from a place in town.

At six, I ate it in the kitchen.

At seven, I called Margot.

It went straight to voicemail.

"Hey," I said after the beep. "Just checking that you're alive. Not because I care, obviously. I just don't want to have to explain to your mother why I lost her daughter while house-sitting. That would be a lot of paperwork."

I hung up.

Then I called her again.

I don't know why.

The second call also went to voicemail.

I stood in the kitchen with my phone in my hand and looked at the list on the counter. The ink had begun to smudge where my wrist had rested against the paper.

Don't let anyone into the house without calling me first.

I wondered who she thought might come.

I wondered why she had bothered to write it down.

I wondered, briefly, if Margot had always been this strange and I had simply never had enough distance to notice.

Then I went to the pantry for a glass of water and found myself looking at the refrigerator door.

The third refrigerator.

The one downstairs.

I had no reason to think about it. I had no reason to go looking for anything in it. I had already decided the cake was depressing, and I had no interest in seeing it again.

Still, I found myself standing in the pantry doorway, looking toward the stairs that led down to the laundry room.

There was a light on at the bottom.

I was almost certain I had turned it off.

I stood there long enough for the refrigerator to begin its low, familiar hum.

Then I switched off the kitchen lights and went upstairs.

I did not check the basement. I want to be clear about that.

I did not check the basement because I was tired, because it was late, because the house was unfamiliar in the dark, because I was twenty-nine years old and had no

intention of becoming the kind of person who investigated every noise she heard.

I did not check the basement because there was nothing in the basement that concerned me. That is what I remember. And memory, as you will discover, is a very accommodating thing.