Page 8 of Saltwater Secrets
“You’re kidding me,” Estelle said under her breath, all the act gone from her voice. “She hasn’t had anyone over in years. Not that I know of, anyway. Maybe she has a cleaner come by. I’dimagine she does.” Estelle was quiet for a second. “She must be in her mid-eighties by now.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Hilary said. “I was just telling Aria that she hasn’t really left her house in a while. But I have memories of her, which makes me wonder when this all started. Why did she disappear from public life?”
Estelle took another few moments to think. “It must have been twenty years ago,” she said. “Maybe twenty-five.”
“She was younger than you when she quit coming out,” Hilary said.
“Yes.” Estelle made a sound in her throat. “I’ve missed her. You’re really going to see her?”
“Tonight,” Hilary said.
“Wow.” Estelle sounded breathless. “Sorry, this is just a lot to take in.”
Aria’s heart pumped with the mystery of it all. It seemed incredible—a woman, locked away for decades, calling Hilary and Aria into her midst. What was it all for?
Hilary drove Aria to Dorothy Wagner’s place at six thirty. Throughout her life, Aria had driven past what she now understood to be Dorothy Wagner’s “estate” many times and had always been curious about the tall iron gates around the green lawn of the property, the mansion that seemed taken from another time, even another continent. It evoked thoughts of the English countryside.
Hilary got close enough to the little kiosk to press a button to alert whoever was inside that she wanted to drive through the gate. A second after she buzzed, the gates parted to draw themdeeper into the perfectly manicured estate, where they parked next to a flowing fountain.
“Wow,” Hilary said after a pause. “Here goes nothing.”
As soon as they got out of the car, a valet driver in his twenties hurried up to park the car in a separate area of the grounds. Aria couldn’t understand why all this had to happen in a place where so few people came by to visit. She wondered if Dorothy had hired the valet driver just for today, or if he always sat around, waiting for a car to come in.
Then again, maybe Dorothy had more visitors than she let on.
After their car disappeared, the front door opened, and a woman wearing all black appeared and beckoned for them to come closer. The woman was very tan, maybe of Italian origin, and explained that she was the housekeeper of the estate. “Mrs. Wagner will see you in the parlor,” she said, guiding them through the foyer, down the hallway, and into an ornate little room that strengthened Aria’s view that the place was like an old-fashioned English estate.
In a little rose-pink chair sat a very old and slender woman in a soft and lacy white dress. Her hair was as white as the dress, but her eyes were a startling blue color, not unlike the photos Hilary had shown Aria of their trip to the Mediterranean Sea.
“Mrs. Wagner,” Hilary said when they entered, sounding mystified. “It’s wonderful to see you.”
Dorothy smiled in a way that suggested she was mischievous and up to no good. “Mrs. Halton, I presume?”
“My professional name is still Hilary Coleman,” Hilary said with a soft laugh. “But I get a little gooey inside when I think of my last name as Halton.”
“He’s a handsome man, your new husband.” Dorothy winked. “And quite powerful. I read about his career out West.”
“He’s something else,” Hilary said.
Dorothy’s eyes slid over to Aria. Aria had the sense that the woman could see all the way through her, could even spot how busted and bruised her heart was.
“And Aria,” Dorothy said, “it’s a pleasure to meet you in person.”
“You as well,” Aria said. She considered apologizing for not passing along her call sooner, but thought better of it. She was tired of apologizing for the mess of her current life.
Dorothy urged them to sit. Hilary got out a notepad, and Aria set up her phone so they could record their conversation. Sometimes clients said something offhandedly that became central to the way they designed their space. It was important to document everything.
Aria tried to imagine what it had been like to live solely in this English-esque estate for twenty-five years and decided that here in the parlor, it was almost as if nothing in the real world existed at all. It was almost like they’d gone back in time.
Soon enough, it was clear that this was something Dorothy wanted to fix about the space.
“I need updates,” Dorothy said, clasping her bony fingers together. “I need to feel like I exist in the twenty-first century. My late husband was the one who decided on everything in this house, everything from the furniture to the chandeliers, and I’m tired of it. I want it to feel like mine. I want it to feel like a place I can relax in. A place I can grow old in.” She giggled at her own joke. Obviously, she’d already grown old.
How much older would she get?Aria wondered. From her vantage point of twenty-three, mid-eighties felt ancient. But maybe it didn’t feel so ancient if you were in your nineties.
Aria knew everything was relative.
Hilary asked Dorothy a series of questions about her taste. Although she’d been “locked away by choice,” so to speak, Dorothy had kept up with modern aesthetics and had a seriesof photographs and stills, which she’d arranged in a binder for Hilary and Aria to peruse. As Hilary asked another stream of questions and jotted things down, Aria flipped through the pages and tried to imagine how they would display this particular aesthetic in the tremendous space around them. It would be time-intensive, that was clear.
