The Moonlit Earth Read online

  The subject of her father always paralyzed her, and she wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing. A therapist she had visited right after graduating from Berkeley had assured her that the anger we harbor toward certain family members has the power to poison all of our relationships if we don’t find ways to hold it in check while we engage in the deeper process of addressing the source. The woman had suggested a cute three-word slogan for Megan to repeat to herself whenever anger toward her father threatened to take over her day, but Megan couldn’t remember if the slogan was “stop, look, and listen” or “stop, drop, and roll,” the latter of which could also come in handy during a house fire.

  Better to be paralyzed than furious, she thought. Better to remind your brother that you love him before he spends fifteen hours hurtling across the world at more than five hundred miles per hour.

  She would let nothing come between her and Cameron. She knew how miraculous their relationship was, and unlike Cameron, she wasn’t willing to attribute it to what they had been through as kids. Drop other brothers and sisters into the same situation and they would come out engaged in ferocious competition with each other over the affection of the parent who didn’t leave. No, what they had was too rare to mess with; it was worth fending off jealous boyfriends and even other family members for. It was an ironclad mutual respect, and she believed it was imprinted in their DNA. There was only one adversary that could pose a threat to their relationship: her anger toward their father. And the two of them had shared in this anger for so long, Megan had never even stopped to consider that the two aspects of her life might have to go head-to-head one day.

  Go with stop, drop, and roll, she told herself. I bet it’s a bigger hit at parties.

  In the hallway, she took up a post at the same wrought-iron grate through which her brother had observed the proceedings below.

  In one corner of the living room, Lilah was engaged in animated conversation with a strikingly tall, silver-haired woman whose nose reminded Megan of Greek statues. After a minute, Megan recognized her as Lucy Bryant, the widow of the former head of thoracic surgery at the Graves Institute. As she spoke, Lilah fluttered her hands in the air in front of her face and rolled her eyes halfway back in her head, a sure sign that the story she was telling involved her spending massive amounts of money on something inconsequential.

  The double doors to a giant patio were open, and Lucas held a champagne flute in one hand and a freshly lit cigarillo in the other as he regaled a small group of guests with the triumphant story of how he had been one of only a few investors in the country to bet against the housing market. Megan had heard the story so many times she could practically recite it along with him. Upon realizing that mortgage-backed CDOs were essentially junk investments that passed off huge margins of risk to unknowing buyers, he had set about buying massive amounts of credit protection insurance in the event that large numbers of homeowners would start defaulting on their mortgages. When the housing bubble burst, the value of Lucas’s hedge fund had increased by almost 400 percent. Whenever he told her the story, he wrapped up by detailing all of the charitable contributions he made from the windfall. But Megan was willing to bet that his current audience would find his triumph over the market to be a happy enough ending to the story by itself.

  Uncle Neal could have told the same story with far more tact and humility than his only son was using now. As she studied her cousin more closely, Megan could see only a frenetic impersonation of her late uncle, an impression disrupted by the fact that Lucas stood about a foot shorter than his father, and his face was all sharp angles, devoid of the baby fat that had softened Neal’s features right up until he started to waste away from the chemo. Her grief for Uncle Neal seemed like a real and legitimate thing, the kind of pain she had read about in novels and seen demonstrated by fine actresses. But her feelings toward her own father were far more difficult for her to define; they were as slippery as a freshly skinned fish, and just as repulsive.

  There had been gatherings just like this one throughout her childhood, where her father would park himself in the nearest available patio chair with a pack of Parliaments and a Bud Light and a disdainful glare for all the rich fancy-pants Neal had managed to draw close to him with his success. She and Cameron would be left to fend for themselves while their mother tried desperately to fit in with the other women, even though their father’s police officer’s salary didn’t allow her to dress like them. And Uncle Neal would work the room with aplomb, young Lucas nipping at his heels, studying his father’s every move with the intensity of a child who knows great rewards will come to him as long as he learns the rules and plays along. Occasionally people would make strained jokes about the apparent and unavoidable difference between the two brothers, Neal and Parker. The investment banker and the small-town cop. Weren’t they like something out of a television show? How could two men so apparently different from each other be sprung from the same genes? Good goddamn question, her father would respond, in the low growl he acquired after transition from beer to straight gin, and the guests would leave him to his patio chair and his resentments and his wreath of cigarette smoke. To Megan, the irony always seemed to be that her father was twice as handsome as Uncle Neal, but he had drawn no confidence from this fact. Trust funds had been the measure of success in their family, and Parker Reynolds had never earned enough to fund one.

  After the Sturm und Drang of her entrance, no one at the party seemed to have noticed her absence. No heads tilted back to observe her peering down on them, no eyes lighted over cocktail glasses to notice her spectral presence hovering overhead.

  Fine, she thought. That’s exactly how I prefer it.

  3

  Lucas pulled up outside her apartment at twelve thirty on the dot, and within minutes, they were cruising through the Village in his black Maserati sedan. As usual, the traffic obstacles on Adams Street consisted of shopping-bag-toting housewives trailing miniature dogs, and well-dressed European tourists with expensive digital cameras.

  At the spot where Adams Street dead-ended at the ocean, the Alhambra Hotel threw its shadow across the grassy park that ran along the Village’s rocky coastline. Seeing the hotel’s brilliant gold dome atop its seven-story adobe tower had the ironic effect of transporting Megan back to her apartment in San Francisco, where she had watched endless news footage of her hometown after one of its more notable residents was implicated in the gruesome murder of a gay Marine.

  Megan had never met the infamous family, and her most vivid memories of that strange time were the panicked phone calls from her mother about how the media had made it impossible to get around town. At Megan’s insistence, Lucas had promised to send Lilah someplace far away and tropical until the melee died down. But before Lucas could ring his in-house travel agency, the case had ended in a manner that made headlines around the world.

  “You haven’t said anything about the car,” Lucas said.

  Megan was watching two of her mother’s lunch buddies who had been at the party the night before try to cross the street without missing a beat in their excited conversation. Both women wore enormous sunglasses. Maybe that’s why they were making such a slow go of it. Either they couldn’t see, or it was hard for them to move with several pounds’ worth of plastic resting on the bridges of their noses.

  “I like the car,” Megan said.

  “Better than the last one?”

  “The last one looked like something out of Back to the Future, so you had nowhere to go but up.”

  “I was trying for something tasteful. And I thought I’d finally reached a certain age where I should have a backseat. You know, just in case I got someone pregnant.”

  “How’s that going by the way?”

  “Mirasol decided that she needed to be with someone who was more spiritual,” Lucas said, with no trace of emotion. “She wanted us to spend New Year’s in Tibet and so I went online and got her all this information about this new luxury train that leaves from Beijing. Apparently
that wasn’t salt-of-the-earth enough for her. She thought we should backpack and climb mountains and a bunch of other cool things she’s watched people do on reality television.”

  It was another version of the exact same story Lucas always told about the women he dated. The only part of it Megan didn’t buy was the crazy idea that Lucas had actually gone online himself to research the trip. Long ago, she had learned that when a man like Lucas said he had performed some menial task it meant he was too modest to admit he had asked an employee to do it.

  “Hey,” Megan said. “Speaking of travel, did your buddy Zach Holder have a problem with one of his planes?”

  “My buddy?”

  “Your client. Holder owns Peninsula Airlines, right?”

  “He does,” Lucas answered. “A problem? What do you mean?” Megan couldn’t tell if he was being cagey because he was afraid of breaking client confidentiality, or if he was just trying to find a place to park. Zach Holder was not only one of her cousin’s wealthiest clients, he was also one of the most high-profile. He had astonished the business world when he chose to launch a commercial airline as his vanity project; not just any commercial airline but a long-haul luxury airline designed to compete on transpacific routes with top-rated foreign carriers like Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific.

  “Well, a source of mine very close to the airline, who just happens to be my brother and your cousin, told me they were in between Hawaii and L.A. when they almost lost both engines. Apparently, the passengers didn’t find out how close to death they were, but it was a big deal. For Cameron at least.”

  “Peninsula doesn’t fly to Hawaii,” he said.

  “I know. They were on a return from Hong Kong.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Megan.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Flights to and from Asia don’t fly straight across the Pacific. It takes too long. If he was on a return from Hong Kong, it would have gone due north over Japan and then it would have started to head south again over Alaska. The distance is a lot shorter that way. They wouldn’t have gone anywhere near Hawaii. It’s too far south and about five hours out of their way.”

  Alaska. Cameron had basically told her this very thing last night, before the unexpected phone call from their father had sent him off balance. She had asked him about his drinking and he had told her he would sleep it off during first break, somewhere over Alaska.

  “It could have been when he used to work Bangkok.”

  “Same story,” he answered.

  “Well, Bangkok is farther south than Hong Kong, right?”

  “And they probably still would have used the Great Circle Route. Megan, trust me, I take those flights all the time. Hawaii … it just doesn’t make sense. And the answer’s no. I haven’t heard about a problem with any of Holder’s planes, but the guy doesn’t call me every time one of them loses engine power. Maybe Cameron was just overreacting. When did he tell you this anyway? Last night?” When she didn’t answer, he reached across the gearshift and squeezed her knee. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine. Maybe I didn’t get the story right. I don’t know.”

  Or he lied to you, a voice in her head said, a voice that sounded like her own after a pack of cigarettes and one too many Amaretto sours. Thirty minutes later, the voice still hadn’t gone quiet, as she and Lucas sat in the Garden Room at the Alhambra Hotel, eating Chilean sea bass off blue-and-white china plates while a tuxedo-clad waiter responded to her cousin’s every request with a slight bow.

  She was tempted to tell Lucas about her brother’s big revelation the night before. But she couldn’t. Violating the confidentiality of her relationship with Cameron would require firm and incontrovertible proof that he had lied to her. And she didn’t have it. Maybe she had remembered the details wrong. Or maybe Cameron had bungled the details himself because he was nervous. Not just nervous. Frightened.

  And maybe none of this was the point. Lie or no lie, engine failure or no engine failure, she couldn’t look past the fact that her brother had been acting deeply strange the night before and she wasn’t sure why.

  “A derivative for your thoughts,” Lucas said.

  “A little close to the bone right now, cuz.”

  “Sorry.”

  He smiled and took a sip of his Chardonnay. Lucas could order one drink in the course of an evening and never finish it. Given her mother’s love of prescriptions and her father’s marriage to the craps table, Megan made it a point to be cautious around alcohol.

  “I thought you would want to meet closer to your office,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, I thought we were talking about work today, and we had talked about me taking something temporary at the firm, so I just—”

  “No, you mentioned the idea of you taking something temporary at the firm. I just listened politely.”

  The startled expression on her face amused her cousin to the point of laughter. Was he announcing the end of his financial support for her move now that she had actually completed it?

  He gave her a warm smile as he got to his feet. Then he laid his napkin neatly on the seat of his chair and started for the exit with a determined walk that told her it was her job to follow him. She almost asked him if he had paid the bill before she remembered he had an account with the hotel.

  A few minutes later, they had entered a boutique-lined alleyway that cut between two major thoroughfares. Two giant potted cycads guarded the alleyway’s entrance, and the majority of the frontage belonged to a Ralph Lauren store and a specialty furniture shop with Murano-style chandeliers hanging in its front window. She would have missed the doorway at the center of the alley altogether if her cousin hadn’t stopped in front of it. The frosted glass panel didn’t bear the name of any store or company, but Lucas opened the door with confidence, so she followed him through it.

  They climbed stairs padded by thick burgundy carpeting. At the top, the petite brunette receptionist lifted her head at their approach and gave them a warm smile, as if she had been waiting patiently for them all morning. The office supply catalogs on her desk had been arranged in neat piles. The massive Dell computer looked like it had just come out of the box. The rest of the office was nothing but empty, unmarked carpet that looked like it had been laid the day before.

  The receptionist rose and extended one delicate hand toward Megan. Megan shook it, distracted by the fact that the girl had one of the most perfect nose jobs Megan had ever seen. When the strangeness of the girl’s wordless greeting started to settle over the room, Lucas said, “Megan, meet Hannah. Hannah is your new assistant.”

  Lucas gave her a moment to absorb her shock. There was another large room with three individual offices attached. “So I was thinking maybe something having to do with environmental issues. There’s a real need for that here. Because the truth of the matter is that most people in Cathedral Beach care about the environment, but when you try to engage them on the issue, all they hear is Al Gore standing on a cherry picker, telling them that the world is going to end if they don’t get rid of their Mercedes. So I was thinking that perhaps you—”

  “Lucas, wait a minute. What’s going on here?”

  “I’m trying to tell you that in this town the environmental movement needs a different face and it could be yours. Megan, you have the talent and the class to build a bridge from the real issues of concern to the people who live here. To the very rich people who live here. You’ve just got to bypass all that far-left groupthink that’s poisoned the dialogue. What do you think?”

  “I think I don’t know what’s going on,” she answered.

  “The office is yours, Megan. Hannah is a capable assistant whom I reluctantly released from my own firm to your care. And the door downstairs is waiting for you to put whatever words on it you need to. But I thought I’d make a pitch for the environment just because you’ve always had such a … soft heart for the earth.”

  “You can say bleeding heart, Lucas.
I won’t get offended.”

  “I’m also throwing in some seed money to get you started.”

  “How much?” Megan asked.

  “Two hundred thousand.”

  “Lucas!”

  Hannah jumped at Megan’s outburst and then excused herself. It took Megan a few seconds to realize that her hands had literally flown to her mouth.

  “Take a moment,” he said. “Look around. Process. That sort of thing.”

  She moved into the neighboring room because she couldn’t think of anything to say. The walls were freshly painted, without a visible nick or scrape anywhere on them. The wiring she could see looked state-of-the-art. A large picture window provided a view of the blue Pacific beyond the low, slanted rooftops of the Village.

  She was so overwhelmed and out-of-body that she almost didn’t hear it when a shrill series of tones came from the other room. Her cousin’s BlackBerry, she figured. He answered in a low but friendly voice. Then he fell silent and she heard his footsteps scrape the carpet, followed by the sound of the door to the street closing with a heavy thud. Like any good salesman, he didn’t want to distract her from considering his offer.

  Her own office? Her own nonprofit? Only now that this offer was before her could she accept how truly humiliated she would have been to accept a job as file clerk at Lucas’s firm. At the Siegel Foundation, she had been in charge of a small staff dedicated to getting homeless kids under a safe roof. To have gone from that to shredding incriminating documents for budding white-collar criminals might have been more than her character could have endured.

  Now that she was alone, an electric silence closed in around her, and she allowed her ego to begin picking the offer apart. She had never been all that committed to environmental issues, beyond her desire to see trash kept out of the cove. There had to be some kind of agenda behind her cousin’s sudden interest in a greener planet. Did he have a client with a shitty environmental record? Would her nonprofit turn into a puppet PR firm for said polluter? Lucas was generous, but he was no saint.