The Villa

“She looks different these days, thinner and blonder, but I can still see the girl I met the first day of fourth grade at Johnson Elementary, just outside of Asheville. The girl with a splash of freckles across her nose, big eyes and wide cheekbones, who’d leaned forward and conspiratorially whispered, ‘I’m glad I’m sitting next to you.’”

At lunch with Chess Chandler after a long absence, Emily feels the connection to her oldest friend. The imagery used to describe young Chess (then called Jessica) suggests a girl still in flux, before she becomes famous and grows up. The mention that Chess whispers “conspiratorially” in the fourth grade foreshadows the actual conspiracy to kill Matt and reclaim their lives at the end of the novel.

“Even if we are ships in the night most of the time, she is still my oldest and best friend. Which these days means we text when we can, call hardly ever, and see each other once a year if we’re lucky.”

Emily explains their distance, as their paths diverged. Emily remained close to home, writing comfortable books, and remaining in a pleasant marriage, while Chess chased her dreams. Using the metaphor of ships passing in the night, Emily stresses how rarely they see each other and how little their meetings mean. Signifying the chasm between their past and their present, this figurative language points to their distance, even as Emily continues to say that they are friends.

“That was a detail I was pretty sure my editor was going to make me cut—you can get away with some violence in a cozy mystery, but for the most part readers want their victims very cleanly dead. No blood, no mess, certainly no horror or pain. A quiet, picturesque death by poison, and not one of the ones that made you vomit or, god forbid, shit yourself.”

Blocked from finishing her 10th book in the Petal Bloom series, Emily adds in some graphic violence. Assuming her editor will excise the words, Emily uses imagery to stress how uncomfortable her readers will be—invoking blood, horror, and pain. This detail, which she erases, comes back figuratively, as she researches the murder of Pierce later in the novel, foreshadowing that she will be able to write about these gruesome details.

“After months of being trapped in my house, trapped in my own body, I am somewhere new, and the thrill of it races through my blood like champagne.”

Recovering from a months-long illness, and isolated alone, Emily describes both literal imprisonment in her house and metaphorical imprisonment in her body. Using a simile to illustrate her excitement, Emily compares this excitement to champagne, suggesting she’s drunk on pleasure.

“I don’t know, and moments like this are a cold splash of water on my nostalgic musings about how close we are. Her life is so different than mine it’s like we’re practically different species at this point, but I nod anyway.”

As Chess lays out her plan to expand into brick-and-mortar stores, using her team—she’s successful enough to have employees—Emily realizes how different they are and their paths. Emily is late on a book and divorcing her husband, and she uses a metaphor to suggest reality will destroy her nostalgic feelings for her friend.

“Bookshelves haphazardly line the other long wall. They look like an assortment of flea market finds or estate sale treasures, and while the effect might be disordered and sloppy elsewhere, like most things at Villa Aestas, it somehow comes across as homey and comfortable.”

After Matt texts Emily, Emily deletes her messages, attempting to console herself with the knowledge that she’s in Italy and he’s not. Feeling uneasy, Emily sees disordered bookshelves, which match the atmosphere of the home, and uses a simile to compare these ill-matching bookshelves to flea market finds or objects at an estate sale.

“She watches me with this oddly benevolent expression, like she’s waiting for me to tear up or have some kind of epiphany.”

As Chess and Emily sit together in the villa typing, they discuss Matt, and Chess tells Emily that to receive peace and blessings she must release her anger and resentment. The moment jars Emily, as she had considered the self-help books and posture a routine to make money. Emily now sees that Chess isn’t pretending. The use of quasi-religious imagery like “epiphany” and “benevolent” suggests that self-help and Chess’s writing have become like a religion.

“[L]osing their baby turned her into a ghost for months on end. But that memory belongs to cold gray England, not to this sunny bedroom in Italy, and she pushes it away even as she pulls Pierce closer.”

Arriving in Italy makes Mari and Pierce reconnect. When Pierce tells Mari that he’s missed her, she thinks of her dead child, Billy. Losing her child symbolically killed Mari, turning her into a ghost, representing not just her distance and absence from Pierce but from her own identity. The idea of the mother’s death mirrors the death of her own mother in childbirth, when Mari herself lived. This quotation makes explicit the escapist effect of Italy and the villa on the characters.

“Mari moves to one of the little tables lining the hallway now, and sure enough, there’s a candlestick and a matchbox from some club in Rome. Setting her notebook down on the table, she feels like a Gothic heroine as she lights the candle, laughing at her own reflection in the window.”

As Mari walks around upstairs in the dark, she lights up a candle, aware that there are no lamps. The effect is striking and comical, as the setting and candle suggest a Gothic novel with a dark and foreboding house. She employs a simile to compare herself to a heroine from a Gothic novel, battling darkness and evil. While she laughs, her laugh proves temporary, as it foreshadows that soon she will write a Gothic horror herself, driven to put the horror of the villa into words.

“Things had mostly gone back to normal after that tense moment at the table the other day, but I’ve felt the memory of it hanging there between us, a dark cloud neither of us wants to mention. Today is the first day I’ve finally started to feel like we’re back on track, back to being Em and Chess.”

After Emily thanks Chess for her advice in a way that feels dismissive, Chess responds by alluding to her popularity and fame. The tension rises between them, as Emily acknowledges that Chess’s posture as a self-help guru is real. Using a metaphor that recalls trains on their appropriate rails, Emily expresses gratitude that they have stepped away from their angry and frustration.

“Mari can’t help it. She opens her mouth wide and screams, literally screams at the sky, a howl of frustration that hurts her throat, but at least relieves some of the pressure in her chest.”

After she and Pierce have sex with Noel, Lara sees them sleeping together. As Mari attempts to avoid drama with Lara, Lara criticizes her for doing what Lara and Pierce have already done. Wounded and hurt by the apparent double standard, Mari screams like an animal, signified by the imagery of a wide mouth and a howl she releases.

“Neither had I. I’ve always liked my stories fictional, preferred inventing characters and situations rather than just reporting them as they happened, but this was different. This felt like…unearthing something. Exorcising it, maybe.”

Emily finally acknowledges that she has moved on from the Petal Bloom books to writing about Mari and her novel. Sensing Chess’s discomfort and feeling like she has encroached upon her friend’s territory, Emily explains away her new genre. Using a simile to describe what she’s doing with nonfiction, Emily foreshadows the figurative demons buried in the past that she uncovers in the house.

“She doesn’t tell Johnnie about the rest of it: the grief that ate her alive, the long days she can’t even remember now. How she’d wanted nothing more than to go home, but how even the death of her child hadn’t softened her father’s heart toward her.”

Mari opens up about the death of Billy, her child with Pierce, and how even his death couldn’t remove her father’s anger. She confesses that she leaves unsaid the worst pain, as grief becomes personified, as a predator that eats her.

“Victoria’s story has been frozen in amber for weeks now, but suddenly Mari feels it coming back to life.”

During her stay in the villa, Mari has worked on her novel for a while before losing the energy to write, echoing Emily’s own issues with writer’s block. Remembering Pierce’s bloody dream and the statement that she’s inevitable, Mari compares her novel to a fossil or a dinosaur. Stuck in suspended animation inside amber, Pierce’s bloody imagery awakens Mari’s desire to write.

“She approaches the bed cautiously, the way you’d try to get close to a skittish animal, but Lara scoots over, making room for her, the strings of her guitar twanging softly as she adjusts it.”

Mari hears music as she works on her novel, and she goes outside her room, expecting that Pierce is playing in another room. She discovers that Lara’s responsible for the music and that she’s talented. Hurt that she’s been dismissed and overlooked, Lara acts wounded, and Mari describes her approach using an implied simile—as she treats Lara like a skittish and afraid animal.

“Mari’s papers are burning a hole under my mattress.”

Having found Mari’s papers, Emily hides them under her mattress, unsure that she can trust Chess. Using figurative language to express her excitement to look at them and share them, Emily discusses the figurative need to get them out—the papers aren’t actually on fire.

“He lets her go then, limping off back toward the house, and Mari stands there on the lawn, wondering how, on such a sunny and warm day, she can feel so cold.”

As a strange car arrives, Noel approaches Pierce and Mari with a telegram, alerting them that Frances, Pierce’s wife, has died by suicide. As Mari and Noel consider Pierce’s cold detachment at the thought of his wife’s death, Noel tells her to cut her ties to Pierce. The imagery she uses to describe the dissonance between her feelings and her environment recalls a passage from Lilith Rising that foreshadows that the blue sky and yellow sun Victoria sees mark her last good season. Likewise, for Mari, Pierce will soon be dead, and she will battle grief for the rest of her life.

“I’m trembling as I walk upstairs, and when I pass one of the hallway mirrors, my face doesn’t even look like mine. My skin is pale except for two bright spots of color on my cheeks, and my eyes are shining, my lips pressed together in a tight line.”

Having read Chess’s short draft, Emily grows angry and agitated that Chess has stolen her idea and her likeness potentially to sell self-help books. Walking upstairs, Emily looks at a mirror and sees Victoria on the cover of Lilith Rising, a similarity in imagery that demonstrates to Emily she knows where the last of Mari’s diary can be found.

“The words come out in an angry torrent, every one of them stinging, and Mari looks at this man she thought she liked, this man she thought she understood, and realizes he might as well be a stranger.”

Toward the end of Pierce’s life, Johnnie criticizes Mari for giving up her family and reputation for Pierce, who, Johnnie claims, has driven his wife to her death. He will also destroy Mari, Johnnie tells her, echoing Noel earlier. Describing his vitriolic words, Mari uses metaphors to describe the flood of words and the pain they cause.

“I think of Mari, bringing that statue down on Pierce’s head, and I understand how she did it. How you can love someone, but be so angry at them that only their blood on your hands will quiet the screaming inside you.”

Having read the ending of Mari’s diary, Emily relates to Mari’s anger at someone she loves—finding out that Chess has slept with her husband, she confronts the contradiction of loving someone and wanting to hurt them. These complex feelings allude to Victoria in Mari’s novel, who kills her family, and to Lara, whom Mari loves, but against whom Mari still harbors anger.

“So Matt didn’t just want my money, he wanted my joy, too. All of it squeezed out of me because he had written his own version of how our marriage was supposed to go, what his life was supposed to look like. He was supposed to be the successful, happily married father with the successful, dutiful wife. That was his story.”

After discussing Matt’s phone calls to Chess, Chess admits that Matt seemed happy that Emily couldn’t write. Angry that Emily broke free of his control, he acts like an author, who has written a figurative version of their lives, depending on Emily to follow his script or story.

“A seed that sprouts in dark, dark soil, a vine twisting into an idea, an idea that should horrify me, but doesn’t.”

As Chess and Emily confront the reality that Matt will try to take a cut from their potential bestseller, they make arrangements to stop his rapacious efforts to take their profits and work. They formulate a plan to murder him, the genesis of a plan which Emily compares to a seed growing in dark soil, using a metaphor that appears Gothic.

“No one has asked about another Petal Bloom book, of course. Petal and Dex will forever be frozen in amber at the end of A Deadly Dig, and I’m happy to leave them there.”

As Emily considers her new co-authored book and recent fame, she acknowledges that Petal and Dex, like Victoria decades earlier for Mari, have become fossilized and frozen, using almost identical figurative language that Mari used in Chapter 9. With Matt dead and Emily having moved again, they no longer need to come alive.