Rather than head inside, Arietta walked around the side of the house and toward the driveway, where a collection of twentysomething drivers waited, all in white button-down shirts. Arietta handed one of them her car keys, and another agreed to follow them to pick up the other. It didn’t feel like the most practical service, but Arietta didn’t care.
Arietta led the driver to her car, which was parked on the outer edge of the lot, outside the ornate gate that kept everyone in. There, she unlocked the door and dropped onto the passenger seat. Something crinkled beneath her. She assumed it was a receipt or a spare piece of paper. But when she pulled it out from under her, she saw it was an envelope.
It was an envelope with her name on it: Mrs. Arietta Peters.
Her heart dropped into her stomach.
“What’s that?” the driver asked as he adjusted the seat and started the engine.
Arietta’s hands shook. She wanted to throw the letter out the window. She wanted to scream.
“You don’t see people writing letters these days,” the driver said before pressing the gas and getting them out of there.
Arietta didn’t read the blackmail letter till the driver had disappeared down the road with his backup. She walked through their house, where Shannon was asleep on the sofa, then collapsed at the kitchen table, frightened at how much she was shaking. With a kitchen knife, she tore open the letter, then unfurled it to read:
Mrs. Peters,
It has come to our attention that you are ignoring us. This is not in your best interests. It means that the cost of our silencehas gone up. That’ll be one hundred thousand dollars into our accounts by the end of the week. No negotiation possible.
Your Guardian Angels
Arietta read and reread the letter, her heart pounding. Her mouth tasted of wine and salty cheese, and her stomach sloshed so much that she thought she might vomit.
Suddenly, she heard a creak, and she jumped to her feet, petrified. But it was only Shannon, rubbing her eyes. “Hi, Mom,” she said. And then, when she saw the letter on the kitchen table, she added, “They sent you another one?”
Arietta burst into tears after that. She couldn’t control it. One moment, she was an academic journalist with her life in complete control, and the next, she was sobbing on her daughter’s shoulder. “I don’t understand,” she cried, shaking her head. “I don’t understand.”
Shannon whispered, “Let me help you, Mom. Please. Let me help.”
19
But Shannon knew that tonight it was too late to help her mother understand. Arietta was too upset; she’d had wine and made herself dizzy with laughter. She’d been on an emotional roller coaster on all counts, up to the highest of happinesses before crashing to this. Slowly, laboriously, Shannon helped her mother upstairs to bed, then went downstairs to tend to her father. This was the first time she’d gone through the entire regimen: the bathing, the changing, the toothbrushing, all of it. She felt dutiful and, as a result, a deeper connection with her mother.This is what it means to show you love someone, no matter what, she thought. But a deeper, more private part of her thought,We can’t keep doing this forever.
When her father was ready, Shannon pressed the automated button on his bed to ease him down for a night of rest. She turned off his light, then muttered into the darkness, “I do still love you. I always will.” But hearing herself say it broke her heart.
That evening, Shannon hadn’t managed to get into her father’s computer. But she knew that her mother could be of help in this. She knew her mother could find Fred’s passwords,and Shannon could crack this code if she wanted to. Only then could they understand what Fred was hiding. Only then could they decide what Arietta was frightened of and what the blackmailers thought they knew.
Shannon slept fitfully, as was her way. Circling her mind were thoughts of Mimi and Russell and, of course, thoughts of the blackmailers and what they were up to and whether they were watching the house.
She imagined that Mimi had already contacted Russell and told him she wanted him back. Probably that was for the best, all things considered. Based on the past few weeks, it was clear that Russell needed to be in a relationship. He needed someone to eat brunch with and watch movies with. Shannon had been that for about five minutes before she’d run away from him, frightened of her feelings.
If Cole called Shannon to ask her to get back together, what would she say?
Shannon almost laughed aloud at that. In the midst of her mother’s blackmailers and her father’s stroke and all the change and chaos around her, she would never return to Cole’s so-called love. She felt as though he’d tricked her, somehow. She would never let her guard down again.
Long before the sun rose, Shannon was downstairs again, writing a plan for herself in her notes app. Step one was to figure out Dad’s passwords. Step two was to go to the police. Step three was to call Isabelle and Felicity and tell them what was going on. But she wasn’t sure step three was entirely necessary. Maybe she and her mother could figure this out on their own.
Was there a world in which they could fight back against the blackmailers without letting her father’s dirty laundry be revealed to the public? Shannon was a scientist; she was terribly good at math and logic problems. Why did this seem like an equation she couldn’t solve?
When Arietta came downstairs, she had party makeup all over her face. She wore a big T-shirt, and her hair was in wild tangles all over her head. But behind the chaos, she looked focused. It was clear she remembered everything that had happened last night. She remembered the letter.
“Okay,” Arietta said firmly. “I have to make sure your father’s all right, and then I’m ready to get to work.”
It didn’t take long for Shannon to explain why they needed Fred’s cell phone. But it surprised her that Arietta had brought Fred’s cell phone to Nantucket from Boston. Although she didn’t ask for her reasons, when Arietta procured it from a kitchen drawer, Arietta explained, her shoulders drooped, “I kept thinking your father would wake up from this one day and want his phone. I even kept it charged. Look.” She showed it off: 83 percent. The photo on the screen showed Fred and Arietta on vacation somewhere. It took Shannon a minute to realize that the photograph had been taken in Greece, not long before her father’s stroke. Her heart shook with dread. Was that the last photograph of her parents when they were happy and in love and fully conscious?
Then again, what if her parents had never really been happy and in love? What if that was what the blackmailers wanted to reveal? Could Shannon’s heart take it?
“All right, honey. Let’s get into your dad’s phone,” Arietta said.