“Must be nice to be able to buy all your friends.”
“I’m sure you’d find it helpful.”
Little had changed in the weeks since I’d last been to Xavier’s, and I felt a familiar roll in my gut as I sped up the long drive. I hated this place. Despite the gilt and grandeur, it had always been my personal prison. I’d fought like hell to get out of this gilded cage, and walking back in-even in Olivia’s skin, even with her welcome-was like voluntarily shackling myself again. Still, Xavier was my best chance of getting to the Tulpa.
“Does Xavier know we’re coming?” Chandra asked as we headed up the palatial white steps leading to the umbrella portico and the front door. I shot her an arch look.
“Olivia Archer doesn’t need an invitation to visit her own home,” I said loftily and grabbed the big gilt door handle. I pushed in. It didn’t budge.
“Hm,” Chandra said, crossing her arms over her chest as she leaned against an ivory pillar. “But perhaps she needs a key?”
I looked up at the camera with its steady red light. When had they begun locking the door? Between the guarded gate, the attack dogs, and the extensive electronic security system, there had never been a need. I raised my hand to knock but the door swung open, cutting Chandra’s laughter short.
“Ms. Archer, so good to see you again.”
I held back a sigh as a man the width of a flagpole popped up in front of me. He wore a double-breasted suit sagging in all the wrong places, and looked as if a stiff wind could blow him over. For all that, he was impossible to evade. I knew. He’d practically shadowed me when I was growing up here. It made him the perfect butler, a loyal sycophant…and an eternal pain in my ass.
“Mr. Deluca,” I said, voice pitched somewhere in a soprano’s upper register. “Why, you look more handsome every time I see you. Have you lost weight? Done something different with your hair?”
He straightened visibly as my eyes scanned his body, belly inverting so quickly, I thought he’d pop a lung. “Well, I have been exercising a bit more lately.”
“I’ll say,” I said, pinching his biceps between two fingers. He might’ve flexed beneath my touch, it was hard to tell. “You look fabulous.”
Deluca blushed, a grand feat if you considered that I’d never even gotten him to crack a smile. “Thank you, Ms. Archer. Is there anything I can do for you this morning?”
I stepped forward, insinuating myself into his personal space so that he had no choice but to step back, and put a delicate hand on his chest to keep him doing so. He edged backward like we were dancing the tango. “I was in the neighborhood, and thought I’d pop by to see if Daddy was in.”
“He’s on a conference call to Macau. Looks like construction is back on schedule.”
“Marvelous,” I said, like I gave a shit about Xavier Archer’s expanding empire.
“Would you like me to tell him you’re here?”
“No,” I said, too hurriedly, and had to cover with a frilly little laugh as I handed over my sweater and handbag, dropping my keys into a crystal container on the marble-topped console. I motioned Chandra forward, and she did the same. “Don’t you dare. I know how he gets when he’s interrupted. We’ll wait in the drawing room until he’s finished up.”
Deluca made no effort to hide his relief. “I’ll get your refreshments.”
Refreshments? Chandra mouthed to me when he’d walked away. I turned my back on the follow-up eye roll, and led her into the living area.
The room had recently been redecorated. There was new cream-colored paint and white casings on the floor-to-ceiling windows, new curtains in a burnt orange to match the season, a color that was picked up in the silk pillows angled along the milky chenille couch. The tables were all glass, the fixtures chrome and crystal. Xavier had been remodeling a lot lately, taking the house apart piece by piece and putting it back together in a different, though unimproved, state. I think it was his equivalent of a sports car in a midlife crisis. The only thing that’d remained were the trio of oil portraits he’d commissioned of Olivia in different years of her life, but the portraits were glossy and posed-hardly personal-and the furnishings had been appointed by a decorator with a modern sensibility and a blank check. Still, Chandra was impressed.
“No wonder you don’t have a job,” she said, dropping onto the couch, sinking into the tangerine sea of pillows.
Actually, Xavier didn’t want Olivia to have an opinion, much less a job, and only barely tolerated her charitable activity. He was happiest when she was flitting mindlessly about town, a theory I’d recently tested by going on a shopping spree at Mandalay Place that made her credit card look as lethal as an Uzi. Despite the danger to his bank account, Xavier had all but applauded. It was sick.
But the twisted family dynamics that’d had Xavier shunning me, coddling Olivia, and forbidding anyone to mention my mother, ever, wasn’t even his worst offense. Nothing could top his ingratiating status as the Tulpa’s pet, which made him indirectly responsible for his own daughter’s death. If it were up to me, I’d have made sure he knew it. Why should I be the only one grieving over her daily, or shouldering the responsibility of having failed in my obligation to protect her?
Yet rubbing salt in that wound would accomplish nothing for the troop, so instead I’d sworn to make him pay for his spinelessness. From his pocket, I thought, staring up at the final and largest portrait of Olivia. From his soul.
But first he was going to make himself useful. We’d only get one sweep through the mansion, and it’d be a surface one at that, but a feeble mind wasn’t one of Chandra’s innumerable faults. It would be a start.
Deluca returned bearing a tray of tea and scones, and after he’d poured, he excused himself and backed out of the room. I remained where I was long enough to take an obligatory sip, then rose and motioned for Chandra to do the same. “Come on. I’ll take you on a tour.”
If the room was bugged, and I already knew it was, Olivia’s offer to show her new friend around wouldn’t attract suspicion.
I led Chandra through the upper levels-there were three-purposely skipping the rooms that used to be mine. It’d been years since I lived there, but residual emotion was a funny thing; someone with Chandra’s keen perception might be able to scent me in there. She mixed the compounds covering our natural scents, and had almost certainly memorized the hooks of my genetic makeup. One sniff and she’d figure out my secret.
More, I didn’t want to risk releasing more emotion into that room. The furnishings were different from when I’d lived there, but I knew the secrets it contained. The hidden compartment behind one floorboard, another tucked into the northeast corner of the crown molding. The vows I’d etched on the tops of the doorframes. If I walked in that room, my thoughts would flit to those things like heads turning toward a car accident, an unwilling act of compulsiveness. One Chandra would sense.
“Your fucking photo is everywhere.”
I glanced at Chandra, but she was gazing around, her words apparently sincere, momentarily forgetting that I wasn’t really Olivia Archer.
It was then that we hit the wing housing Olivia’s childhood bedroom, and even I had to wince in embarrassment. It would’ve been eerie even were she alive, but with her dead it was a virtual mausoleum. The three giant portraits downstairs were only Xavier’s favorites. The rotunda leading to her suites was lined with photos from every year of her life, the antique accent tables lining the hallway topped with the less formal snapshots.