Page 16 of A Dark and Stormy Night

THE RELATIVES

by

Christina Dodd

When relatives invite themselves to visit a wealthy couple’sVirtue Fallshome,events take an unexpectedly dark—and fatal—turn.

Day One

“We do ask that you watch your step and use the handrails.” Gwen Ricci indicated the stairway leading up to the guest cottage and the broad ironwood porch. “We added traction strips to each tread because . . . you know the Pacific Northwest! Always raining, especially here in Washington, and we don’t want our guests to fall.” She smiled back at Mario's cousins from Minneapolis, Minnesota. “Also, Cecily, please be careful with those heels that they don’t slip between the boards!” Gwen found herself mentally adding, Stupid inappropriate heels.

Funny. Gwen was already talking to herself. Usually it took three days of unrelenting company before she was adding sarcastic mental asides. With Cecily and Landon, it had taken less than thirty minutes.

“I didn’t realize there would be so many steps.” Cecily paused halfway up the stairs and put a hand on her richly endowed chest.

Gwen paused, too. "Do you have a heart problem?"

"No. No, I don't think so, although my mother died at an early age of a heart attack so that's always a concern."

"What a relief!" Gwen started up the stairs again.

“My father died of an accident when I was only sixteen, leaving me an orphan."

"I'm sorry for your loss." Why were they talking about her father? It looked sixteen was quite a few years back for Cecily.

"And I do have a joint disease that makes all this climbing is tragically difficult.” Cecily took a long, martyred breath. “But don’t pay a bit of attention to me, I can handle the pain.”

Okay, I won't.Yet Gwen kept her tone encouraging as she said, "Once you get inside the guest cottage, you'll decide that it's all worthwhile." She reached the porch, turned and waited while Cecily continued her laborious trek up the stairs.

Mario, honey, what were you thinking?He had located his cousins through a genealogical service, emailed with them for a month, and then one day, the phone rang. It was Landon Ricci, accepting an invitation to stay with Mario and Gwen; an invitation Mario swore he had not extended. But Mario, being Mario—tall, handsome, expansive, hospitable and Italian to his bones—had assured them they were welcome.

Then Mario—being the owner of an expanding electrical firm with locations from Portland to the Canadian border—had an emergency call this morning, leaving Gwen to welcome his guests.

Yep. When Mario got home, Gwen was going to kill him.

Cecily managed to get to the porch. She clutched the handrail and pulled in deep breaths of air. She looked back along the gravel path that they had just traversed, past the goldfish pond, the bubbling fountain, the hot tub and the lush green lawn to the main house and said, "Your house . . . you say you designed it yourself?"

As always when Gwen viewed their tall, narrow Venetian-style home, she smiled. "We did design it ourselves. Mario and I took a tiny one-story built in the thirties and remodeled it. Of course, we needed more room, so we deliberately built up three and a half levels to keep the same footprint and reduce environmental impact. That is so imperative in a fragile ecological area like the Olympic Peninsula, don’t you think?”

Most people were impressed, or at least pretended to be, by the Riccis’ care for the ecosystem.

Cecily said, "That explains why it looks out of balance."

You're one to talk. Gwen's mental sarcasm was getting louder.

Cecily was a tall woman, architecturally top heavy; strip off her top and bra and she could pose as the figurehead on the bow of a ship. Her tiny waist flared out at the hips, giving her an extreme hourglass figure. She wore a low-cut button-up white shirt that showed eight inches of long cleavage and a tight black skirt.

And those heels. Gwen didn't remember the last time she'd seen stiletto heels outside of a Hollywood awards show. They were a rare sight anywhere in Washington and almost extinct in the nearby small town of Virtue Falls.

"I simply don't know how I'll manage these steps"—Cecily pointed toward Landon, laboring up beneath the combined weights of two bags—"back to your house and up to the second floor to the kitchen every day." A delicate pause. "I mean, Landon and I are allowed in the house, aren't we?"

"Of course, you're welcome anytime." Gwen felt her smile become fixed, and she could not bring herself to make eye contact. "It's only ten steps up to this porch, there are no steps in the cottage, and in the house, our living room is on the ground floor. I can serve your meals there on a tray if you like."

"Oh, no." Cecily sounded shocked. "I'll come to the kitchen table. I don't want to be a bother."

Landon arrived on the porch in time to stop any unwise retorts from Gwen, so she unlocked the cottage, flung open the door, and waved Cecily and Landon inside. “You’ll love it here, I promise.”

The guest cottage was actually a luxury suite, with a small kitchenette, a bathroom with a shower and soaking tub, and a main room big enough for a king-size bed, a gas fireplace, and a sitting area. The idea of a cottage had been forced on the Riccis by the realization that people—friends and relatives—were going to want to visit Washington in the summer when the days were long, the weather was warm, and every turn in the road revealed another snow-capped mountain peak or long reach of dunes that led down to an isolated beach.

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