Good Boy

Chapter One: Two Suitcases

The road into Cliffmere ran along the top of a headland with nothing on the left but fog and, somewhere under the fog, the sound of water hitting rock two hundred feet down.

Jessie Duran drove it at thirty miles an hour with both hands on the wheel. The check-engine light on her Civic had been glowing amber since Tillamook, and the passenger seat held everything she owned that wasn't in the trunk: a portfolio case, a shoebox of fabric swatches, a travel mug of gas station coffee gone cold.

Eight months ago she had owned a design firm with her name on the door. She had owned a leather chair she'd saved four years for and a wall of shelving filled with tile samples she'd chosen herself, tile from a workshop in Guadalajara run by a family who sent her Christmas cards. Now she had two suitcases and a sister who had begged a favor on her behalf.

The fog thinned as she came around the last curve, and there it was.

The Oriel sat on the cliff like it had grown out of it. Cedar and glass, low and long, a slate roof gone silver with salt, three stories stepped down toward the drop so that every room looked at the ocean. Landscaped beds of lavender and beach grass. Fire pits ringed with basalt. A gravel court where a valet in a charcoal jacket was carrying a golf bag like it was a newborn.

Jessie parked in the staff lot at the back, where the gravel ran out and the asphalt was patched, and sat for a moment with her hands in her lap.

"You look terrible," said her sister, opening the passenger door.

"Hello to you too."

"You look terrible in a way that makes me want to feed you." Luisa Duran leaned in and hugged her across the gearshift, hard, the way she'd hugged her since they were kids and Luisa was the smaller one. She smelled like hotel soap and peppermint gum. She had their mother's face and their father's stubbornness and a front-desk smile she could switch on like a lamp. "Also your hair's amazing. Did you cut it yourself?"

"With kitchen scissors, in a motel in Salem."

"It's amazing. Don't do it again." Luisa took the portfolio case out of the back seat before Jessie could stop her. "Come on. I've got twenty minutes before I'm back on desk."

The staff entrance smelled like bleach and bread. Luisa led her through a corridor lined with laundry carts, past a walk-in cooler, into a break room with a coffee maker and a corkboard covered in schedules and a laminated sign that read PHONES IN LOCKERS DURING SHIFT — M.K.

"M.K.," Jessie said.

"Malcolm Kent. The owner." Luisa poured coffee into a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST FRONT DESK AGENT. "He laminates things."

"Is he as bad as you said on the phone?"

"I never said bad." Luisa considered. "I said exacting. Last spring the flooring crew stained the lobby the wrong shade of walnut. Not wrong-wrong. Half a shade. He sent them home, rented a sander, and redid four hundred square feet himself over three nights. Then he paid them for the week anyway."

"That's not reassuring."

"It's supposed to be. He's not cheap, he's not cruel. He's just—" Luisa turned her hand over, looking for the word. "He needs it right. And nobody's ever right enough."

Jessie wrapped both hands around the mug. "And you told him about me."

"I told him my sister is the best designer in the Pacific Northwest and she's between things."

"Between things."

"I'm not going to say the other version."

The other version had been printed, more or less, on a design industry blog with a readership of forty thousand people, most of whom hired people like Jessie. The headline had used the word ORIGINALITY in quotation marks. The photo had been of Chase Metcalf standing in the lobby of the Ansel — a 1920s bank building in Portland that they had spent fourteen months turning into a twenty-four-room hotel — with his arms crossed and his jaw set and his expression suggesting a man wronged.

Her concept. Her drawings, her palette, her insane, stubborn, four-months-of-fighting-the-landmarks-board idea to strip the marble facing off the old teller wall and leave the bones showing. Chase had done the client dinners. Chase had done the press. Chase had, it turned out, also done the interviews in which he described the design as the culmination of his personal vocabulary and expressed sadness — real sadness, he was very good at sadness — that his partner had, quote, struggled with the line between influence and appropriation.

She had been living with him at the time. She'd found out he'd given the second interview when a client forwarded it to her with three question marks.

By March the firm was dissolved, the lease was broken, her savings had gone to a lawyer who explained gently that reputation is not property and defamation is expensive to prove. By April she was subletting a room from a college friend and drawing kitchen backsplashes for a flipper who paid in installments.

"Hey." Luisa knocked her knuckles on the table. "You went somewhere."

"I'm here."

"He's agreed to meet you. Tomorrow, nine a.m., east wing. Don't be early, he thinks early is a kind of pressure."

"What is the east wing?"

Luisa's smile got complicated. "Come see."

They went out through a side door onto a flagstone path that ran along the cliff edge behind a cable railing. The wind came up hard and cold and clean, and Jessie stopped for a second because the ocean did that to her — flattened out everything in her head, wiped the slate.

The main building glowed. Warm windows, low amber light spilling onto the terrace, a bartender shaking something in a room where every seat faced the water.

And then, past a break in the cedars, the east wing.

Three stories, same footprint, same beautiful long slope of roof — and dark. Every window black. A sun-bleached construction fence had been zip-tied across the entrance, and the planters along its walk held nothing but gravel and a dead hydrangea.

"Twelve suites," Luisa said. "Plus a lounge on the ground floor with a fireplace. Nobody's touched it since about 1994. It's mothballed. He closes it every season and every season Will Chatham — that's the investor, he bought in two years ago — says Malcolm, that's twelve keys, that's a million two a year you're sitting on, and Malcolm says when it's right."

Jessie stepped closer to the fence. In the last of the daylight she could see through the glass door: a lobby floor of gray-blue carpet, a brass luggage cart, a wall sconce that had been fashionable during the first Clinton administration.

Under the carpet, at the threshold, a strip of something else showed where the binding had pulled loose. Old-growth fir, she thought. Maybe. Please.

"Twelve suites," she said.

"And a lounge."

"Luisa. He's not going to give twelve suites to somebody with my last eight months."

"Which is why you're going to walk in there tomorrow and make him forget your last eight months." Her sister pulled her scarf tighter and looked out at the water and said, in a lower voice, "I've worked here four years. I've watched him say no to designers with awards. He looked at your portfolio for forty minutes, Jess. I timed it. He didn't say anything nice, but he looked for forty minutes."

The fog was coming back in, taking the horizon first. Somewhere below them the water kept working at the rock, patient, in no hurry at all.

"Nine a.m.," Jessie said.

"Not early."

"Not early."