since the island was not yet the address it is now-and made it all the way to the island before a security guard noticed us trying to walk off the ferry by ourselves. We were taken to the resort and sat in the guard shack there for three hours while we waited for one of our parents to pick us back up after security finally managed to finagle our phone number out of Nate. We both prayed it would be our mother who'd show up, but it was dad who rolled up in our old Ford Fairmont station wagon. We could see him through the window, his face scraggly with a week's worth of beard, a Marlboro dangling between his lips, his eyes covered by those narrow black Ray-Ban sunglasses he used to wear, even though it was near dusk by then. He didn't bother to turn the car off and come inside the shack; he just leaned on the horn.
'That your pop?' the guard asked. When neither of us answered, he sighed deeply and opened the door. I don't remember if the guard seemed pained by the experience, embarrassed or just happy we were leaving, though I'd like to think it was pain I heard in the sigh. 'Well, get on, then,' he said and we did. I expected Dad would snap at us or take a swipe at our heads, but he just drove home in stony silence the entire way, chain-smoking and listening to talk radio, which was even more upsetting. It was predictable that he'd blow. This new quiet was something larger and somehow more aggressive, so that when we got home and found our bedrooms trashed, the posters torn off our walls, our beds turned upside down, Star Wars action figures and GI Joes tossed about, it all made sense and made me happy we'd sneaked out to this odd piece of paradise, if only to save ourselves from something that was apparently far worse.
'Here we are,' Sam said. We'd pulled up in front of a two-story cream-colored compound. As we made our way onto the property, I put down the windows in the Cadillac and inhaled deeply to erase the old memories and to get acclimated to the new situation. The house was surrounded by a dozen swaying palms and row after row of three-foot-tall rosebushes that sprinkled the light breeze coming in off Biscayne with a sweet, florid fragrance, but I noted that they were in desperate need of trimming. I turned and looked behind me and saw that the box hedges lining the front of the drive were more like dodecahedron hedges. There was an acre-wide expanse of lawn along the eastern side of the house; it was also overgrown. Clouds of aphids could be seen here and there, as well, moving about in the humid afternoon.
In front of the house was a circular drive around a tasteful marble fountain, the water blooming out from the center and falling down like strands of hair. The house itself was a testament to natural light, with huge picture windows dominating the face of the home and wrapping around the length of the residence, the ocean visible even from the front yard.
Clarity on my creeping nontopiary suspicions came when I stepped out of the car and noticed a sign plastered to the garage door of the home, its corners reinforced with duct tape, announcing a public auction of the property and its contents in ten days' time.
'You didn't mention this,' I said, pointing to the sign.
'Are you looking to move?' Sam said.
'It speaks to a certain amount of emotional and economic instability,' I said.
'I said she was difficult,' Sam said.
Before I could respond, the front door opened and a woman in her early fifties stepped out onto the front porch. Cricket O'Connor was tall, maybe five foot eight, and had shoulder-length blond hair, which she nervously tucked behind both of her ears when she saw us standing on her drive. I hoped she hadn't heard our conversation, but it was quickly apparent she had.
'I've tried to take the notice down,' Cricket said. There was an absent, resigned quality to her voice, which belied her confident demeanor. She was dressed in a yellow St. John knit sweater set that revealed a tan expanse of neck and a thin gold necklace bedazzled with diamonds. A matching bracelet was wrapped around her left wrist. She wore a single diamond ring on her wedding finger and what looked liked a charm bracelet that dangled a single item on her right wrist. 'But it's apparently against the law. Someone drives by every couple days to make sure it's still there, and if it's down, they put another up. It's not as invasive as the people who come to take photos, so I've learned to live with smaller inconveniences, even if it speaks to a larger instability.'
'That's all anyone can be expected to do,' I said. I walked over and extended my hand. 'I'm Michael Westen. You have a lovely home.'
Cricket forced a smile, shook my hand gingerly and then toyed with her single charm, which I saw was actually a military dog tag, before responding. 'Well, for now at least. Please come in.'
The difference between trained liars and your garden-variety fibbers is that specific training allows for certain insights into the human condition not normally acquired while playing shell games on the pier or trying to con your waitress out of more change. At the (grateful) expense of the American tax payer, you're taught to look for signals of weakness so that whatever your particular cover might be or whatever your particular lie is eventually targeted to mete out can have its most effective power.
But sometimes, all you need to do is listen to someone talk and you can work out the subtext of their lives without once checking for the slight rise of red into their neck when they're sad, the sweat that appears first along the hairline when the first hint of stress appears or the involuntary reflexive shift when your intestines pick up the speed of fear.
Sam and I sat beside each other on a down-filled sofa in the middle of what was probably once a very well- appointed living room, but now looked a lot like an empty living room, save for an antique coffee table covered with old issues of Architectural Digest, including one that featured on the cover the very house we were sitting in, and an ottoman missing its chair. Across from us was a marble-lined fireplace with an elaborate mantel covered in framed photos of two men, one old and one young. The older man was pictured aboard a yacht in one photo, in black tie in another and with his arms around a much younger Cricket in yet another. The young man was pictured as a toddler, as a teen and as a Marine.
Over a dozen other framed items lay beneath one of the picture windows atop a white sheet.
Cricket stepped into the room and set a platter of cheese and crackers on the coffee table and then sort of stared at us, like she wasn't sure what she was supposed to do, which was probably the case.
'Sam tells me you have a problem,' I said, because I was already starting to feel depressed about this whole situation that was about to be presented and I didn't even know what it was. Something about a six-million-dollar home up for auction and suspiciously missing most of its furniture tends to get me down. Plus, I had the general sense that every moment I wasn't figuring out the Natalya situation was another moment the target on my back got a little larger.
Cricket sat down on the ottoman and stifled a laugh as she sunk into it. 'Do you know what this ottoman is worth?'
Sam leaned forward and touched the fabric. 'What do you call that?'
'Chenille,' she said.
'Very nice,' he said. 'I'd say a grand.'
'I think it was a rhetorical question,' I said.
'No,' she said, 'I'm done with rhetorical questions. I'm hoping to just get a decent appraisal. You two seem just as qualified as anyone else. Everyone seems to want a little less for good work these days.'
'Looks like fine Italian craftsmanship to me,' Sam said. 'I'd give you fifteen hundred dollars for it.'
'Sold,' she said. 'I'll take cash.'
'I'm a little short,' Sam said, and the way things were going, it didn't seem like this was going to be one of those jobs that would change my financial profile, either.
'Yes, well,' she said and then made a sweep of her hand across the room and her eyes started to well up.
Crying women have never been my forte, nor furniture, so I said, 'Cricket, I don't mean to be rude here, and I appreciate the cheese and crackers and the emotional vulnerability, but could we jump to the part where you just start talking about things directly? I'm sort of a no-metaphor guy.'
Sam shot me a look that I ignored. It was probably meant to convey disappointment.
'I'm sorry, but this is all very embarrassing. I don't know where to start.'
'Why not try the beginning?' I said. 'But skip over the bits you don't think I'll care about.'
Cricket smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle on her shirt and smiled faintly at me, which made me feel bad about being short, but the problem with most people is that they could work out most of their problems if they didn't spend so much time qualifying their lives. Give me an assignment, let me fix it and we'll go from there.
'My late husband, Scott O'Connor,' Cricket said, pointing to the older man in the photos, 'was a very wealthy
