I’m getting sleepy. Her voice is slightly husky and soothing. “Hmm,” I say to keep her talking. “I can see that.”
“I still want to write the article, but do you know there’s almost nothing about her childhood?”
“Have you asked her?”
She snorts. “No. Trust me, she’s not going to talk to me about anything.”
“Do you know why the police are talking to everybody about his death?” I ask, out of left field. Some distant part of me wonders if it might have been Norah, that maybe she poisoned him. With some discomfort, I eye my empty teacup.
But what would she stand to gain? She loved him.
“No,” she says slowly, “but I think he was sick. Like, really sick, and wasn’t telling anyone.”
This stirs my attention slightly. “Sick how?”
“I don’t know.” She lifts her shoulders. “When I first met him, he was very energetic and vigorous.” She pauses, and I know she at least partly means sex, and I’m grateful she doesn’t say it aloud. “But the last couple of months, he just seemed less and less himself. He didn’t want to go on hikes or even really a swim. He just worked and slept, that was it.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“Yes, but he just kept saying he was getting old, that’s all.” She sighs. “I know he was going up to Ojai to see Meadow a lot after you went to rehab, so maybe he was just sad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the autopsy shows something was wrong with him.”
I don’t know what to think of this, and my eyelids are very heavy. I close them and say, “I think the police want to talk to everybody, so you’re probably on the list.”
I feel her take the cup out of my hand and pull the blanket up over my shoulder, and there’s something I should say on the tip of my tongue, but sleep washes it right away.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Norah
When I startle awake, I can’t figure out where I am. It’s dark and I’m curled up in a chair beneath a blanket. It’s ultra soft and smells of ginger, and when I open my eyes, the soft gloom of not quite dawn spills through the french doors.
I’ve been dreaming of Augustus, who said, “I’m not really dead, you see? I needed to come tell you something.” I was leaning forward to hear whatever it was when I woke up with a start. For a moment, I see him sitting on the end of the couch, Maya’s feet in his lap. He is watching her intently, as if he’s worried. Afraid to disturb the mirage my brain has manufactured, I peer at him through narrowed eyes. He seems to be talking, but I can’t make out the words.
And then Maya makes a whimpering noise and the vision vanishes in a poof. Swiftly, I get to my feet to check on her, but she settles back into sleep. I pull the blanket over her more carefully, and she nestles into the pillows of the couch, turning her face away.
Her profile slays me. That curve of cheekbone and nose is so like her father’s; even her ear is shaped exactly like his. It makes me want to fall to my knees with grief.
But there’s no time for that now. I had an idea last night. Before Maya wakes up, I want to get into the library Augustus used as his office at home. I hadn’t thought to look there for information about Meadow. This is my chance.
Moving silently on bare feet, I pad down the hall on the main floor. I make no sound on the cold tiles. The door is closed, but not locked, and I ease it open carefully, closing it back again behind me, again without a sound. If Maya finds me, I’ll tell her I’m looking for my passport.
As if I’ve ever had the means to go anywhere a passport would take me. But she doesn’t know that.
It’s dark and I pull the chain for the light on the desk, an art deco beauty I think might be pretty valuable. Lots of things like that in here, left over from the original owner. Augustus said it took them two months to get all the stuff out of the house, mostly paper, which had to be sorted because the guy was a big director and there might have been a script or notes from some of his movies. They didn’t find anything valuable, but once the junk was out, they found things like this lamp, a blue pottery woman holding up the lampshade made of mica. Books, original editions, which I’ve reverently read, sitting right in this room, like a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Odds and ends like that, all through the house.
Right now, I need to focus. I sit in his chair and suddenly smell him, that fragrance of chocolate and coriander and hints of bourbon that puff up from the padding. The scent stirs up the grief I felt looking at Maya, and for a moment I can’t breathe for all I’ve lost, Augustus and living in this house, and ease, and comfort, and the best sex of my life.