Alex took her by the elbow and guided her up the porch steps. John opened the front door, a magnificent oak panel carved with the head of a lion.
The parlor was an overwhelming room with a cathedral ceiling, a double curved staircase, and rose marble floors. Cassie stared down at her feet, which rested in the reflected pool of light from a multicolored cathedral-style window over the door. Alex’s initials spread like a stain over her left shoe and her ankle.
“Cassie,” he said, and her head snapped up. “John has told everybodyPicture Perfect 99about your . . . little problem, and they’ll go out of their way to help you today before we go to Scotland.”
Cassie ran her eyes over the line of figures that stood at the bottom of the left-hand staircase like a row of toy soldiers. There was John, of course, who was not only the driver and bodyguard, apparently, but a majordomo of sorts. There was a man with a pastry apron wrapped around his large frame, a young girl in a simple black and white maid’s uniform. Another man stood off to the side, as if he was unwilling to be associated with the household staff. He stepped forward and offered his hand. “Jack Arbuster,” he said, smiling. “Your husband’s secretary.”
She wondered what in the world Alex needed a secretary for when he already had an agent, a publicist, and a personal assistant. She thought maybe he was in charge of answering fan mail, or paying the utility bills.
“I need to catch up on a few things before you fly out,” Jack said to Alex. He winked at Cassie apologetically.
Alex put his arm around her waist. “Give me an hour,” he said to Jack. “I’ll meet you in the library.” As Jack walked off, Cassie followed him with her eyes, trying to see what was around the corner. Tugging her sideways, Alex pulled Cassie past the maid, the cook, and John.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you as much as I can, and if worse comes to worst I’ll leave you with the blueprints till you can find your way around.”
He took her to a library paneled in cherry and filled with first editions of hundreds of British and American classics, pointing out one entire shelf filled with copies of scholarly journals and magazines that featured articles Cassie herself had written. He led her through a dining room whose table could seat thirty, a projection room with a pristine screen and ten overstuffed couches. In the kitchen, she stuck her head in the stainless steel refrigerator and counted the copper pots that were racked above the marble island, and was given a bite-size apple turnover by the cook as a parting gift.
There were six bathrooms and ten bedrooms, each decorated with pale silk wallpaper and French lace curtains. There were three sitting rooms and a recreation center with pinball machines, a bowling lane, a pool table, and a big-screen TV. There was a whole wing she hadn’t even seen when Alex brought her upstairs to the master bedroom. He opened the double doors to a suite, comfortably furnished with breezy striped sofas and thick Persian rugs. A stereo was recessed into the wall, in addition to a television and aVCR. Flowers were arranged in bowls on several tables, beautiful blooms that brought out the lavender and blue accents of the room and that, Cassie knew, were not native to California.
“We must spend a lot of time up here,” Cassie said, stepping behind Alex through an adjoining door that revealed a tremendous bird’s-eye maple sleigh bed.
Alex smiled at her. “Well,” he said, “we try.”
Cassie stepped up to the bed and traced the whorls in the patterns of wood. “This is bigger than a king-size, isn’t it?”
Alex flopped onto the mattress belly-first. “I had it made up special.
I have this theory about beds—they’re like goldfish bowls. You know how if you keep goldfish in a bowl, they stay the size of your thumb?
Well, when you move them into a pond, like we have out back, they grow ten times that size. So I figure the bigger the bed, the less I’ll be stunting my growth.”
Cassie laughed. “I think you’ve passed puberty.”
Alex grabbed her wrist and pulled her down beside him. “You’ve noticed?”
She rolled toward him, staring at the light beard that already broke the smooth line of his jaw. “Where’s my lab?”
“Out back. The little white building—the second one you come to.
The first one is where John lives.”
Cassie frowned. “He doesn’t stay in the house like Mrs. Alvarez?”
Alex sat up. “We like having the place to ourselves at night,” he said simply.
Cassie walked to the gaping fireplace that stood opposite the bed, then fingered the empty brandy decanter on the mantel.Aurora, she thought, and she felt Alex’s hands on her shoulders. “It’s only for show,”
he whispered, as if he could read her mind.
Cassie spun around. “Go earn your keep,” she said, smiling. “If I’m not back in an hour, send out the National Guard.”
When Alex left, Cassie stood at the open French doors, looking out over the suburbs of L.A. and the blue swells of mountains. A gardener she hadn’t met was rooting through a bed of fragile lilies, and in the driveway John was polishing the rear fender of the Range Rover. She located her laboratory, just to the left of a profusion of flowers planted in the shape of a fleur-de-lis. Beyond the garden was a white limestone path that led down a sloping hill toward something she could not see.
She flew down the opposite staircase, the one she hadn’t walked up, just to see if it felt any different. She walked out the door and tested a rocking chair and the hanging porch swing before running down the limestone path like a child. When she was far enough away from the house to be certain nobody was looking, she spread her arms to the sun and whirled around, laughing and smiling and skipping to beat the band.
There was a landscaped pool with a man-made waterfall that Alex had forgotten to tell Cassie about, and a genuine maze made of thick boxwood hedges. She wandered inside, wondering if she knew her way to the center and out again. The sharp corners of the maze came up quickly as she ran through the narrow aisles, scratching her arms on fresh-cut branches. Dizzy, she let herself sink to the cool grass. She lay on her back, overwhelmed by Alex’s house and Alex’s grounds.
If a bug hadn’t crawled up the inside of her arm, she never would have noticed the stone. She rolled over, which brought her eye-level to the cuttings from the boxwood. Neatly hidden inside the hedge was a small pink slab of rock.
