But I guess I assumed Fen would contact me and not Dad to arrange the rest of it. Now I felt weird. Like maybe they’d talk about something while I wasn’t there. Not that my dad was a big gossiper. Or any kind of gossiper at all. Still. It made me feel strange.
Nothing I could do now. Velvet was out with some friends and had left me with the important task of rearranging her closet. But Exie stopped me in the kitchen to ask me and Starla if we wouldn’t mind helping her cart some food to a small outbuilding where Mad Dog was setting up a temporary studio for mixing an album. I pulled a small red wagon loaded down with drinks while Starla and Exie schlepped bags.
Birds chirped as we made our way down a tree-lined winding path dappled in sunlight. There was a fallen pine tree with big fungi growing all over it that Frida loved to inspect every time we came this way on walks. Two mornings ago, we saw a herd of blue butterflies—or whatever a congregation of butterflies are called. But the most magical thing in this area was definitely the place where Mad Dog was setting up shop: the Grotto Cabin.
It was very rustic and small, just a bedroom and an ancient bathroom, and an open floor plan for the rest of it, sparsely furnished—and most of that furniture had been moved aside to make room for Mad Dog’s mixing equipment and various musical instruments that he used for recording backing tracks when he was tinkering with alternate mixes. Out back there was a patio that opened to a craggy rise of shoreline rock, and tucked beneath a vine-covered overhang, you could follow a curving path into a shallow grotto. Lights had been installed into a narrow ledge in the rock, on which there was just enough room for a few people to sit and enjoy drinks or lounge in the water. And if you got tired of that, you could just paddle out of the hidden cavern and swim right into the lake from there.
“Let’s get everything staged here,” Exie said, gesturing toward the cabin’s kitchen island after we’d hauled it inside, all of us a little winded. “I have a list to check off, and Norma will be out here soon to get the linens done and the place dusted. The walkies are hit-or-miss this far out, you know, so I want to be done before she shows up with no warning.”
Amen to that. “This is a hella bunch of food,” I observed,unhooking Frida from her leash to let her explore. “Is Mad Dog moving in here for the rest of the summer, or what?”
“You know how he gets when he’s working,” Exie said, unpacking meals that had been portioned into individual containers, along with bags of fruit and cut-up vegetables. “He’ll be in here until three in the morning. Sometimes he’ll sleep here.…”
“Sometimes he’ll wander down here at five a.m. in his kimono and get attacked by a grizzly bear?” I joked, lifting bottled water onto the counter.
Starla laughed, running fingers through her mermaid-dyed ponytail. “Rosa said he can have this cabin all to himself because grottos are gross.”
“Don’t blame her,” Exie said. “After what went down at the Playboy grotto?”
“What went down at the Playboy grotto?” I asked as Frida sniffed her way around the kitchen.
Exie sighed. “You’re way too young. Playboy Mansion. Hugh Hefner? He had a famous grotto in his basement. Before Hefner died, like two hundred guests at a party got sick. They thought it was the flu, but the L.A. Department of Health investigated and discovered it was Legionnaires’ disease—they’d caught it from bacteria in the dirty grotto.”
“Ewww!” Starla and I both made faces.
“Thanks for ruining this cabin for me,” I complained. “I thought it was cozy. You think it’s safe to let Frida sniff around?”
“It’s fine,” Exie said, waving her hand as she watched the little dog jump on the couch.
“Was Mad Dog ever at the Playboy Mansion?” Starla asked.
“Are you kidding?” Exie said. “Mad Dog at a party?”
We all chuckled. He never went to large public gatherings if he could avoid them.
“I wonder how many sex parties have happened in this grotto?” Starla mused. “Bet if we hunted around here, we could find hilarious nudie pics from the fifties. Kamal told me that a few summers ago he found a condom with no expiration date taped under his bedside table. He searched for the brand online, and they stopped manufacturing it forty years ago.”
Exie unloaded the last of the bags. “If there were sex parties years ago, it was probably because folks were just bored.”
“Right?” Starla agreed. “Rosa says no there’s no Wi-Fi in this cabin.”
“You just know that Mad Dog’s going to be calling Norma from that old landline over there, all day long, like, ‘Mother Superior, will you bring me my favorite wool blanket? It’s c-c-cold down here.’?”
We all laughed. Better Norma than me. This cabin was a long walk from the main house. No way did I want to haul stuff all the way here for him on the regular. Was bad enough to fetch stuff for Velvet from the carriage house.
“So, Jane…” Exie said, counting up her food bins and checking them off on a list. “What’s all this about Leo fixing one of the Sarafian boys’ cars, hmm? You’re getting awfully chummy with that entire family.”
“And I thought you were dating the older brother,” Starlasaid. “Wasn’t this the boy who was kicked out of the family house for doing massive amounts of drugs, or something?”
“Drugs?” I said, offended.
She shrugged. “It’s always drugs.”
“Fen isn’t doing drugs, and he’s not bad.”
“Fen is not a bad boy,” Starla repeated, making a face at me. “Did you hear that, Exie?”
“I heard. Stop teasing the girl.”
