The wedding invitation was a card fronted by that first photo of the Robicheaux girls, a picture as vibrant as it had ever been: four young women sitting on a back porch of the sprawling Sorrento Hotel, the girls lined up in age, smiling at the camera with the clear gazes of youth.
Even though it had been taken in black and white, colour seemed to leap from the photo, particularly from those young faces.
The twins were in the middle: just seventeen, lean and athletic, almost identical with what people knew was long strawberry-red hair, faintly curling around their faces. But they weren’t identical, if you looked closely enough.
One had a dreamy gaze and fewer freckles, as if she stayed inside with her head in a book, lost in her imagination. She was twirling a strand of strawberry hair in one hand. Fey, you might say. Savannah. Her name suited her, made her sound like a sweet-natured girl who’d lie on the grass with her friends and discuss what shapes the clouds made.
Her twin, Eden, looked altogether more knowing, as if books were the last thing on her mind. Eden Robicheaux was anything but fey. She wore very tight jeans and her shirt – the photographer had apparently insisted they all wore shirts and jeans – was opened just down to her breast bone from where perky, Wonderbra’d breasts pushed up.
Eden had nearly been expelled twice from the local school. She was on her last chance, by all accounts, but the arrogant look in her curious sea-green eyes made it obvious that she didn’t give two hoots.
At the other ends, were the youngest and oldest of the girls. The youngest was an altogether stockier girl of perhaps fifteen, who was staring at the camera with ill-disguised irritation: Aurora, who never answered to this fairy-tale name. She was Rory, she insisted.
You could easily imagine her snapping, ‘Can you get a move on, Steve?’
She had a clear gaze, dark straight hair, wasn’t yet as lovely as the others, if you wanted to be pedantic. Steve Randall, the photographer, had taken a photo of the sisters every year since then: same positions, same simple outfits.
Steve had exhibited his photos – they were mildly famous in photographic circles, those Robicheaux girls, famous in a quiet sort of way for the twenty-something portraits of them as they grew up. Age, life, sisterhood in elegant black and white.
The people who lived near the Sorrento Hotel who knew Stu and Meg, sometimes laughed that the Robicheaux clan were infamous…
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