Her Dark Lies Page 4

  “He likes you.” Jack is grinning, looking at me in admiration. “That’s Romulus. This is Remus. They’re my grandfather’s, but we get along fine, don’t we, boys?”

  Jack picks up a small branch and launches it up the path, and the dogs tear off after it.

  “I’ll teach you their training words, but you aren’t going to have any issues with them, I can tell. Romulus isn’t a people person, he fell in love the moment he saw you. Just like I did.”

  “Awww. He’s a beauty. His fur is so soft.”

  Jack gives me a small kiss, and the dogs come back, dancing merrily around him. He heaves the branch again and off they go.

  I glance back down the path, but my view of the pier—and the body—is obscured. I can see the circular top deck of The Hebrides, the helicopter landing pad like a spaceship rising over the trees. The clouds gathering in the distance are ominous, but for the moment, the sun is out, and the birds sing in the trees. Idyllic as a postcard. Except for the old bones.

  Jack seems consumed by nervous excitement, hurrying ahead to pick a bright red flower to tuck behind my ear, running back to retrieve the dropped hairclip he knocks loose, throwing the branch for the dogs again and again. I laugh obediently at his antics, but my heart isn’t in it. He is trying to distract me. He’s always been so good at creating distractions.

  Or maybe he is distracting himself?

  Don’t ascribe your emotions to him, Claire.

  I run my hands through my now-freed hair, which has taken on a life of its own in the salt air. I twist it back up in a chignon and secure it with the clip he hands over. A rock has somehow found its way into my shoe. I stand on one foot, balancing with a hand against his shoulder, dump it out and slide back into my Converse.

  Every motion feels like a delay. Jack finally stops goofing around and squeezes my hand.

  “Darling, what’s wrong? You’re a million miles away.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m right here, on this gorgeous, lovely island.”

  He pulls me close. “You might be here physically, but you’re distracted. You aren’t worried about the wedding, are you? Getting cold feet?” He’s joking, but I can see the tiny furrow between his brows.

  “No cold feet. I guess I’m just a little bothered by the body down at the pier. On top of the break-in. It’s a lot.”

  Not exactly true. Not exactly a lie, either.

  The horn of the hydrofoil ferry floats up from the base of the path. I’m relieved to hear it. I’d like some of my people around to buffer the Compton grandeur.

  “Ah. Good. Some of our guests are arriving,” Jack says.

  “So it seems. Should we wait for them?”

  “No. Let’s hurry ahead so we can get a few more minutes alone. I want to talk to you for a second.”

  He sounds grave and it makes me nervous.

  “We’re alone now. Talk.”

  “Come on. I’ll race you.” He grins and starts jogging backward, gesturing with both hands for me to follow. I rise to the challenge. I’m pretty quick; I ran track in school and getting out of the blocks fast was my biggest strength. I’m not much of a runner now, I prefer yoga and my bike, but back then, I was a cheetah, built for blisteringly fast but short sprints. I burst into motion and beat Jack to the top of the hill by two whole seconds.

  “Take that, Compton.”

  He reaches me a heartbeat later, barely out of breath, and kisses me on the nose.

  “Look,” he says, and spins me 180 degrees to see the Villa.

  7

  Villas and Pearls

  Up close, the Villa is even more magnificent than I expected. Five stories of imposing wind-worn stone crouch on the side of the hill, holding on to the cliffside for dear life. It wraps around out of my sight. From the water’s view, I know that hidden edge is where it meets up with the walls of the ancient fortress. Plenty of room for us, our guests, Jack’s family, and of course, the staff.

  Staff. Something else I’ll have to get accustomed to.

  Like the terrace above, overflowing pots of petunias flank the front doors, two massive slabs of weathered wood thrown open in welcome. A wide grass-and-slate courtyard with iron tables shaded by jaunty striped umbrellas waits to our right. Ahead are stairs down to a second courtyard that looks out over the water. The only thing that feels off are the cameras, mounted on every corner. An elaborate, state-of-the-art security system enhances the feeling that we’re standing in front of a fortress.

  It is impossible to take it all in, the sheer size and beauty of it. I wander toward the patio, drawn to the water. The gray stone is warming in the sun and two cats—one calico, one tuxedo—nap on the ancient stacked stone wall overlooking the sea. The dogs bark at them, but I can tell it’s a game—the cats ignore them.

  The view. The view. Roman kings and explorers and ancient witches had killed to possess this spot, to gaze at the sea, at the jutting knees of volcanic rock ringing the island. These conquerors would stand in this very spot and think themselves safe. They could see their enemies approaching, have days to make preparations. They thought they could never be overthrown.

  All things, all people, can be conquered. I’m not silly enough to believe otherwise.

  The beach below is raked clear of rocks and seaweed; there are chaise longues and umbrellas, though currently being stacked and lashed to the rocks in preparation for the storms to come. Two stone jetties abut each side of the beach, creating a natural cove. The Hebrides, looking even more imposing and elegant from afar, is back in full view, being serviced by the crew at the pier. The hydrofoil has put in at the other pier and people are wandering off, taking pictures or simply staring up at the Villa, then getting in line for the funicular that will bring those less inclined for a hike to the top of the hill.

  It’s such a shame that everyone’s taken a week off to be with us and it’s going to rain most of the time. About as fair as getting your period for the wedding night. Ah, well. Life is cruel.

  I scan the people disembarking for familiar faces. Most of our guests are friends Jack has collected over the years, and the Compton family. I’m expecting only my mother and stepfather, my sister Harper, and my best friend Katie. I don’t see any of them.

  I’m not the type to surround myself with acquaintances. The curse of the introvert, Jack calls it. I don’t see it as a curse at all. I just don’t play well with others.

  “It’s quite grand, isn’t it?” Jack asks.

  “What? Oh, the Villa? It’s absolutely beautiful. But what did you want to tell me, Jack?”

  He walks me to the stone wall. The calico blinks and yawns, and I run a hand down her silky back. The cat’s eyes slit with pleasure and she stretches two long front legs contentedly, claws unsheathed, purring like an outboard motor.

  “That’s Rosa and the tuxedo is Nina. They’re my mother’s cats.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  Jack takes my hand, gently kisses my knuckles.

  “Oh, Claire. It’s so good to have you here. I love you, and I am so happy to be marrying you.”

  “Me, too.” I watch him, eyes searching his, sensing there is more. He’s being so formal, so unlike the Jack I know. He looks away.

  “Maybe now isn’t exactly the time.”

  My heart stutters. Oh, no. He’s changed his mind. He doesn’t want to marry me. He’s figured me out. I’m being jilted. I tense, fighting my instincts. Run, Claire. Run. Get away, now!

  “Not the time for what?”

  “For this.” With a sly grin, he pulls a long flat box from his pocket and hands it to me. The black velvet is warm from where it was nestled against his body.

  I hold my breath as I pry it open.

  The pearls are so luminous they shine up from the velvet as if lit from within. They are graduated, smaller near the clasp, growing in size to the center pea
rl, which has to be the size of my thumbnail.

  “Oh, Jack. They’re gorgeous.”

  He looks very young in that moment. Though he is ten years my senior, he sometimes looks as vulnerable as a teen. His words are soft.

  “They were my great-grandmother’s originally. Eliza wore them every day, and when she...died, they passed to my grandmother, May, who also wore them until her death. I want you to have them. To wear them, always, like my grandmother and great-grandmother did.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” I truly didn’t. I’d never owned anything fancy or beautiful before Jack. Now, thanks to a chance meeting a year ago, I’m being bedecked in bright diamonds and a dead woman’s pearls. You’ve come a long way, Claire.

  “They can be your something old. If you like them.”

  I swallow back the tears. “Jack, I love them. Thank you. I’m...so touched.”

  He snakes the pearls around my neck. I feel them settle at the base of my throat like they were made for me, specifically measured to fit into the sharp, hollowed notch between my collarbones. Jack steps back and looks at me approvingly.

  “They are perfect on you. I knew they would be.”

  I touch them self-consciously. “I never thought I was a pearls kind of girl.”

  “All women are made for pearls. And you most of all.”

  He settles his mouth on mine, warm and soft, and in our rising passion, the intense connection I feel to him whenever we touch, I am able to push away my traitorous thought.

  Did Jack give his great-grandmother’s pearls to his first wife, too?

  8

  Dead Wives

  I didn’t know, when I met Jack, the details of his life before me. I didn’t press him, and he didn’t offer. Maybe I was naive. Maybe I was just a girl in love. We existed that first month of our courtship in a kind of bubble, with eyes only for one another. And when he finally shared his story, I wasn’t deterred.

  A month into our courtship, Jack took me to his brother Elliot’s wedding, where I met his family for the first time. They were as intriguing, smart, and lovely as he was. I guess my own prejudices about wealth and privilege made me assume the worst, but I found the Comptons as intensely fascinating and philanthropic as their son. Brice hadn’t exactly started Compton Computers in his garage—his money was inherited—but he’d grown it into a rival to Microsoft and Apple. Ana was editor emeritus of Endless Journey, the travel magazine started by Jack’s grandmother. Elliot worked with Brice on the day-to-day running of the business. Jack, of course, was in charge of the Foundation, and the youngest, Tyler, was a doctor. The family’s most recent project of note was working with Bill Gates on getting universal sanitation to some of the poorer African nations, for heaven’s sake.

  The Comptons were doing real work to make the world a better, safer place. They were warm, funny, and kind.

  I was enchanted.

  It didn’t hurt that Jack’s elegant mother, Ana, talked nonstop about my painting, the one Jack bought the night we met. She was having it hung in the lobby of their Manhattan office, where everyone would see it. She admired my talent. She wondered if I would be willing to discuss a series of pieces for their private collection.

  Um...yes?

  After Elliot’s wedding, I started getting commissions. Magazine features. I was painting like crazy, and people liked my work. It was surreal. I think anytime an artist has a modicum of success, you distrust it, as do the people around you. Too good to be true. What did you do to get it? Who did you blow?

  In my case... I was blowing Jack Compton, and my career was on fire.

  I had love. Success. And yes, for the first time, money. These are the elements of many dreams come true.

  When he asked me to marry him, I couldn’t say yes quickly enough.

  Jack completed me in ways no one had ever before. Not family. Not lovers. Not friends. He was the other half of my heart. He drove away all of my insecurities with his love.

  There was only one thing, one tiny, bothersome issue that cast a shadow on my happiness.

  Jack did not talk about his dead wife. Nor did anyone in his family.

  It struck me as strange, in the beginning. There were no reminiscences, no regrets. Certainly, no comparisons. He sat me down one night after dinner, three weeks after Elliot’s wedding, said, “I have something to tell you,” and recited the facts.

  He’d been married before, the marriage was a short one, and had happened a decade earlier. She died only a few weeks in. He didn’t like to discuss it, but felt I should know, considering the path we were clearly on.

  Then he kissed me, and as we joined together, I realized what he was actually telling me. I didn’t see then the lack of intimacy of the admission, nor feel any sort of fear or warning. What I took away from the conversation was this: He’d just declared his intent. He was planning a future with me.

  I overlooked the fact that he didn’t tell me how she’d died, nor did I ask. Not then, at least. It was all very mysterious and speaking about it was completely off-limits. It felt...dangerously romantic in a way. There was so much about him I did not know, and I clung to those mysteries like a child. I’d been disappointed by people so often in my life that I suppose I was just hoping he wouldn’t let me down.

  No, in the beginning, none of it mattered to me. I’m a practical woman, logical to a fault sometimes. I was only eighteen when Jack was so briefly married, in the throes of my own cataclysmic life earthquakes that I had no desire to revisit. I didn’t see the story in the news. Even if I had somehow come across it, why would I care about some gazillionaire’s missing wife?

  I’ve learned not to look back. Never. That way lies madness.

  Jack and I had a long life ahead of us. He’d talk about Morgan if he wanted.

  If I was that curious, there was always the internet. The Comptons were a very public family, after all.

  Katie thought I was crazy not to press Jack for every little detail. When I refused, she dug up everything she could, invited me out for coffee under the pretense of a catch-up, sat me down at the Frothy Monkey, and forced me to listen. This is what I learned:

  Jackson Compton met Morgan Fraser at a cocktail party in Tiburon, California, at the house of a famed literary agent, a stunning arts and crafts renovation across the bay from San Francisco. Their courtship was brief and glamorous. Jack was a party boy then, on the circuit, dating models and actresses, in the gossip columns all the time. Most eligible bachelor, all that. Feckless. Wealthy. Fun.

  Morgan, a well-educated former foster child who studied computer science on scholarship at Stanford, was the exact opposite of the kind of woman Jackson Compton was attracted to, according to the salacious stories. There was nothing simple or easy about her. Her background was murky, her business interests bordered on the unethical, and she was clearly not interested in settling down.

  But she was a stunner. Breathtakingly gorgeous. Beautiful, and brilliant. The night they met, she was out celebrating. She had secured the first round of venture capital for an eponymous IT company that was making waves with a nanotech microcamera that would eventually change the way the security industry handled smart home technology. Heady stuff. The Comptons bought out her company and made her a small fortune.

  “See? He has a pattern of seducing women away from their passions,” Katie cried, getting even angrier when I laughed and told her I’d heard enough. She refused to stop, plowed ahead as if anything, anything, could change my mind.

  I learned that after only a few months of dating, Jack and Morgan eloped. The move angered his parents, who felt he was too young to settle, and caused all the gossip magazines to launch covers with a grainy, out-of-focus telephoto shot of Morgan from behind in a slinky white dress that clung to her curves. It could have been anyone.

  Three weeks later, on the last day of their honeymoon, she went missing.
>
  There weren’t a lot of details. They were sailing off the coast of Monterey, having a last afternoon on the water, nothing risky. A storm blew up unexpectedly. Jack wrestled with the boat, but the boom sprang free and Morgan was swept overboard.

  He circled, called the Coast Guard, but they couldn’t get to him for over an hour. By then, she was well and truly gone.

  Her body wasn’t found right away. Eventually, a piece floated ashore. A hand, with a bent pinkie finger, wrapped in black cloth, the same color of sarong she was wearing when she went missing from the boat.

  The hand was identified through DNA as belonging to Morgan Fraser. There was nothing else left of her. Sharks were blamed.

  After a period of solitude ascribed to overwhelming grief, Jackson Compton threw himself into the family business, took over running the Foundation, traveled the world doing good for all mankind, and by all accounts, hadn’t been on the dating scene until that evening in Nashville, when I caught his eye.

  Katie was not at all happy this story didn’t move me. What does it matter, I asked, heatedly at last? It was a decade ago, and he’s clearly over her. He wouldn’t be dating me, we wouldn’t be getting serious, otherwise.

  She insisted I needed to be careful. I disagreed. We didn’t speak for a month.

  Jack didn’t talk about his dead wife. So what? It was a matter of respect between the two of us. I didn’t ask. He didn’t tell.

  Though sometimes, when he got quiet or short, I wondered if he was thinking of her. Mostly, though, I didn’t let it bother me. Not at the beginning. Not while I still thought Jack and I were destined for happiness.

  9

  Yes, Dahh-ling

  A shrill scream comes from our left, and we jump apart like naughty children.

  “Claire Elizabeth Hunter–soon-to-be-Compton, you are the luckiest girl in the world. Look at this place! It’s insane!”

  “Katie! I’m so glad to see you.” I glance at Jack, expecting him to be grimacing—Katie Elderfield isn’t his favorite person, nor, obviously, Jack hers—but he is smiling broadly.