Killer Summer

Shari nodded, her eyes wide, as if I had just somehow blasphemed Maggie by dismissing her last decision at Edge. What a joke. This wasn’t a eulogy. It was business. And I knew this business, probably better than anyone at Edge.

Living or dead.

8

Nick

It’s a sign from the universe. Well, Federal Express. Whatever.

I should have waked and baked. I wanted to from the minute I woke up this morning, even reached for my bong to fill it, until I remembered my roommate had borrowed it the night before. And since Doug was still shut inside his bedroom with my bong and his girlfriend, I dropped the idea. I didn’t like to roll joints. It was wasteful. Plus, I figured I probably shouldn’t smoke anyway considering it was a workday—I should make some effort, despite the fact that everything I was working for seemed to be slipping out of my grasp at every turn.

So I turned on my computer and checked my e-mail, which was my second mistake of the day. Nothing but bullshit seemed to arrive over the Internet these days. Today was no different. Sixteen spam messages, offering everything from Viagra to invitations to view college coeds uncensored. Then there was the e-mail from Lance, my Web developer, who informed me that if I couldn’t come up with the first payment for the site by next week, he’d be forced to take on another project. He was sorry, he said. He had to eat, he said.

Fuck you, Lance. The truth is your ass could stand to lose a little weight. Hell, his whole life could stand to lose a little weight. I’d warned him when he agreed to work with me on the Web site for the label that the financing might be tricky. That there might be some belt tightening and that he needed to be prepared to face lean times until we got this thing up and running. “No problem, dude,” he’d said. “I’m with you all the way, dude. Revelation Records is going to be a revelation.” Now he was fucking bailing in the name of grocery money. Where was the integrity there?

And he wasn’t the only one. The other non-spam e-mail I got was from Bernadine. I didn’t even have to open it (I did anyway) to know what it said. She didn’t want us to hurt each other anymore, she said. Trying to keep the relationship going long distance was tearing us apart, she said. She loved me, she said.

Yeah, love. If love means bailing out on your boyfriend the second you get a better offer, well, good riddance, Bern.

I almost deleted the message right off, except that I always liked Bern’s e-mails. Even the breakup ones. I had a small collection of them—sixteen in total—that I kept in a little file on my hard drive. Clicking on my mouse, I added the latest one to the folder.

Till next time you get horny and call me at three in the morning, Bern. I’ll have the Astroglide ready.

Not even the thought of phone sex with Bern made me feel any better.

I lay back on my bed, picking up the remote for my stereo—complete with fifty-disc changer, a parting gift from Bern—and hit CD #47, which I knew was Metallica since I had been playing it ever since I got back from the beach almost two weeks ago. Yeah, you could say it was an act of regression. I’m not a metalhead anymore. Hadn’t been since I was a pimple-faced teen. Nowadays I despise metalheads in general for their drooling love for the kind of clashing guitar riffs any twelve-year-old could replicate on a six string with only mild manual dexterity and a lot of hair spray. But even I’ll admit that every once in a while, a man needs a few pounding chords to get by. Besides, I thought, adjusting the volume higher as the song began, maybe I’d get my roommate out of bed and get my hands on my bong. Might as well smoke. Nothing else going on today. Or tomorrow, for that matter.

I was just rolling into the second guitar solo, even went as far as raising my hands to air-guitar to it, when I came out of my headbang long enough to realize Doug was standing in my doorway, dressed in a pair of boxer shorts and blinking sleep out of his eyes.

He looked pretty annoyed. Fuck him. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t even have a place to live.

Though truth be told, if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have been able to afford this place after Bern moved out.

“Dude, bring it down a notch.”

“Sorry, man, were you sleeping?”

“Well, I was, but between you and the fucking door buzzer—”

“Door buzzer?”

“Yeah, dude, didn’t you even hear it?”

“Well, who was it?”

“Fucking FedEx. And the worst part of it was, they had the wrong buzzer. Some sort of package for Revelation?”

“Dude!” I sat up, stared at him. “I’m Revelation.”

Doug blinked at me. “What?”

“The label, man,” I said, shrugging jeans over my boxers and sliding into my sneakers.

“I thought you were calling it Bootleg Records?”

Fucking burnout. That was my last record company. Not that he remembered that.

I ran past him for the door, hoping to catch the FedEx guy before he left. It was the third time they’d come by—I had gotten a couple of “sorry we missed you” notes stuck to the door. I wasn’t sure if they would come again, but I damn sure didn’t feel like having to haul my ass to FedEx to spend a half a morning in line waiting for a package that might not be anything than more contracts to sign for Lance. For a guy who was in this allegedly for his love of music, he sure did create a lot of paperwork. And since Lance was bailing, who fucking cared about his damn contract?

But it could also be something else. Maybe something from the executive I had met with at the Music Festival three weeks ago. I had given him the demo of one of the bands I was planning to sign, as well as an overview of the label. He had seemed interested.

I ran down the steps, all three flights, spotting the telltale blue uniform just before the front door shut behind Mr. FedEx.

I leaped onto the final landing. “Wait!”

He stopped, turned to look at me with a bored expression.

“The package for 3C—Revelation Records? I can take that.”

He handed it over, along with a pen, and I signed the line for “receiver’s signature,” my eyes running over the address label as I did. “Thanks, man,” I said, handing back the pen.

I could barely make out the tiny, flowery scrawl, but once I did, my heart nearly stopped at the name above the E. 64th Street address.

Maggie Landon.

A bong hit might have been good about now. I mean, come on. It’s not every day a guy receives a letter from a dead woman.

More than a letter, I thought, noticing the envelope had some heft to it. I hesitated before opening it—I mean, I was seriously freaked out.

Curiosity got the better of me and I tore it open, sliding out a package of neatly typed pages, all clipped together and topped by a lavender piece of stationery, monogrammed at the top with a big ML.

The note was short, and in the same flowery script I’d seen on the address label.

It was dated June 9th. Three days before I’d tried to tell her who was in charge of Revelation.

Three days before she…

Dear Nick,

I jotted down a few notes for the business plan for Revelation. Let’s talk about them this weekend at the beach. I can’t tell you how excited I am about working on this project with you. I can’t wait to get started!

Maggie

A few notes? I thought, flipping through the packet of pages and seeing that she had not only included song lists, but financial projections, graphs charting the label’s development, publicity angles—you name it.

Jesus Christ. This woman was a piece of work.

Was being the operative word.

I shuddered, remembering how gung ho she had been about the label when I’d told her about it. Then how angry she’d seemed when I tried to tell her that I was the man with the business plan, not her. It was, after all, my label. I even said as much, which was probably a mistake, considering that Maggie’s spirits had dampened a bit. If only she would have listened to reason.

I shuffled through the papers once more, peering inside the envelope as if I expected to find a demo tape from Maggie herself (she had also told me that night that she had dreamed of being a singer once) and was amazed at what I did find floating down at the bottom of the cardboard mailer.

A check. For twenty-five thousand dollars.

Hell, if I knew Maggie had already forked over the cash, I would have done things differently that Saturday night. Apparently, she hadn’t been planning to renege on her offer to put up a little money.

A little money. Fuck. This was more money than I’d ever had in my life. At least, all at one time.

The front door opened, letting in a waft of humid air and my neighbor from the fifth floor, some guy I barely knew—yet I still found myself stuffing everything back in the envelope.

“How’s it going?” I said, nodding, a smile plastered on my face that I hoped might mask the unease pumping through my system.

“Hey,” he replied, blowing past me with barely a glance and heading up the stairs.

Once he turned on the second landing to ascend the next flight, I followed suit, slowly climbing the steps as if my body were weighted down with the thoughts whirling through my head.

The first woman to believe in me. I mean really believe in me. To the tune of twenty-five large.

It was like a sick fucking joke. It was, in fact, the story of my life. The minute I finally get somewhere, the bottom falls out. Like my last start-up, which crashed about five minutes after I finally got some good people on board. Now I lose my first big investor on the brink of signing my first promising band.

Then I remembered that, in the envelope I clutched in one sweaty hand as I trudged up the steps, I still had the investment.

Yeah, I really had lost it. That check wasn’t any good now, was it?

I reached my apartment door, sliding the envelope under one arm to somehow camouflage it, as I headed through the door.

Doug was now on the couch with Lou—short for Louise, though she looked more like a Lou, with a short, butch haircut and shoulders of a linebacker. Doug, who was about six-one and slender as a rail, liked his women large, and Lou was no exception. They made kind of a funny couple, especially right now, swaddled together within an afghan with a box of Pop-Tarts, watching TV. Doug looked up from where he’d been nuzzling Lou’s neck. “Did you get your package?”

“Yeah, I got it,” I said. No thanks to you. “Don’t you guys have to go to work today?” Doug and Lou worked together in IT support and were usually nine-to-fivers, not that I begrudged Doug that. He always paid his rent on time. But right now, I needed to be alone.

“Nah, man. This weekend is the Fourth of July and Lou and I had a few floaters, so we figured we’d get an early start on the weekend.”

Great, I thought heading straight for my room, filled with the reminder that not only did I have a check I couldn’t cash, but I had blown a wad of cash on a beach house I wasn’t even sure I was going to see again.

Once inside the privacy of my room, I nearly stumbled over a pair of shoes I had left lying in the middle of the floor as I reached for the remote on my stereo to shut out a refrain of Metallica’s “Am I Evil?” before I had to give the question the first real consideration I’d given it since I was a teenaged metalhead.

I sat on the bed, dumping the contents of the envelope once more, letting the sheaf of papers flutter free from their clip and grabbing the check.

Twenty-five thousand dollars. I could do a lot with that money. Like sign my first band, get Lance back on board, finally get this show off the ground. Hell, I’d still have money left over for expenses.

It was almost too good to be true.

It was too good to be true. There was no way I could cash that check. I mean, it probably wasn’t even good anymore now that Maggie was…

I studied the check, which was also dated June 9th. Two days before Maggie…

Which meant that it was probably still good. I mean, it’s not like Kismet Market wouldn’t be cashing her check for all the food she’d purchased that Friday night.…

Okay, now that I was officially disgusted with myself, I got up, headed to the desk and, without even thinking, clicked on the e-mail from Bern, as if to ground myself. Skimming past the first paragraph, which went on about how we didn’t have a future together (it was her usual refrain in letters of this type), I came to the part where she went on to wish me well. Because she always wished me well.

I never want to be the one to cast a shadow on your dreams. Your dreams, your intelligence, your integrity—it’s these things that I love most about you. And in order not to destroy the memory of how good we were together once—how good you are and always will be—we need to make a clean break. I love you, Nick. I always have and I know I always will.…

See? I’m not evil. Bern loves me. And Bern is good. So good. Do you know Bern used to volunteer for Big Sisters? God, I love that woman. She kills me with these letters. Kills me.

Maybe I’ll call her later.

My eye fell on the e-mail from Lance, which I’d left in my in-box, hoping to take the time to prepare a properly scathing reply for bailing on me.

But he wouldn’t bail on me if I cashed the check. I mean, I could just try it. See if it worked. I studied the check once more, noticing that only Maggie’s name appeared on it and remembering how she had leaned into me, her eyes glistening, her breath warm on my ear as she whispered, “Let’s just keep this between us, okay?” Which meant this was Maggie’s own money she was investing. She was free to do what she wanted with it, I thought, my gaze falling on the massive business plan that still lay in a heap on my bed.

Reaching over, I picked up the first page, which was a Power Point presentation outlining the various steps, with special fonts and colors—the works. Clearly this woman needed to get a life.

Shit. I didn’t mean that like it sounded.

I skimmed the page, which outlined her ideas for the first phase.

Not bad, not bad. Not that I hadn’t thought about this stuff already.

I looked back at my screen at Lance’s e-mail message, taunting me, beckoning me. Then nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of the cheerful musical tone that alerted me I had a new message.

Sage, I thought, seeing the familiar [e-mail] address pop up in my in-box and feeling a prickle up my spine at the subject line: “Maggie’s Dream.”

Fucking weird, right?

I clicked on the message.

Hey, guys,

Looks like we’re on for the beach this weekend. See below. xoxo Sage

I scrolled down to find an e-mail she had forwarded to me and Zoe from Tom.

Sage,

Thanks for all your help holding the fort while I took care of things. I’m off to Chicago to deal with that buyer from Wentworth’s, so we’ll catch up at the beach this weekend. The weather is supposed to be fabulous! Just perfect for the annual Fourth of July bash.

Tom

Tom was opening the house. This weekend. Not only opening the house, but having a fucking party.

Clearly Maggie’s husband had no qualms about living in Maggie’s Dream now that his beloved wife was gone.

And I wondered why I should have any qualms about keeping Maggie’s other dream alive.

After all, it was the least I could do for the poor woman, right?

9

Maggie

It’s like a nightmare. Only, I won’t be waking up.

That bastard. I can’t believe he’s opening the house. My house. Okay, he bought it, but he bought it for me. During the second year of our marriage. It was probably his last act of love.

Now it just seemed like a cruel joke.

Look at Sage in my kitchen. Already mixing up the pot lids and creating chaos in my recipe-filing system. Who the fuck does she think she is?

This is my house. Nothing can change that. Not even death.

Of course, that’s going to be a little hard for me to enforce. Already I could see my marigolds, the sweet little plants I’d potted on the front deck only weeks ago, dying from neglect.

It was almost too much to bear. Who am I kidding? It was too much to bear.

Maggie’s Dream was the only thing I’d ever called my own. Because the house on Fire Island was mine in a way that the apartment on E. 64th never was. The apartment was hers—Tom’s first wife, Gillian. Oh, Tom let me repaint the living room and choose new area rugs for the bedrooms, but it was Gillian who had met with broker after broker looking for the perfect home for her life with Tom. If it were up to me, I would have gone for prewar elegance, rather than reconstructed modern grandeur. But a woman isn’t supposed to complain about these things. What did I really have to complain about? In the space of a year, I had gone from a poorly heated, ramshackle two-bedroom in midtown to a triplex in one of the best neighborhoods in Manhattan.

Still, it was hard being second. I tried to explain this to Tom, but from his viewpoint, it would have been foolish to give up the apartment. He had bought it for a song back at a time when real estate values in New York weren’t as astronomical as they are now. It just wasn’t practical to sell the apartment and buy new, and Tom was, if nothing else, a practical man.

Then there was the decor. Antiques passed down through generations and deemed too precious to put away or sell off to strangers. It didn’t matter that the chandelier in the living room didn’t speak to me—it clearly was still having some cosmic conversation with Victoria Landon, Tom’s long-deceased great-aunt. Then there was the Art Deco furniture that Gillian had salvaged at antique fairs from the Hamptons to Paris. We certainly couldn’t get rid of that stuff, because, as Tom said, unique pieces such as those were hard to come by.

And Gillian, of course, no longer wanted the furniture. Why should she? She got a brand-new house in Boca Raton and an alimony settlement fat enough to allow her to move on to a whole new period of furniture.

But Maggie’s Dream was mine. Had been from the start. Well, mine and Tom’s anyway.

I remember the first time I saw the house. We had gone out late one afternoon on a Saturday when Dolores Vecchio, the broker who was working with us, called to say she had found exactly what we were looking for. I was a bit distrustful, since she had already ushered us through some less than spectacular homes in the neighboring town of Saltaire, which was Tom’s first choice since he had friends with homes there. I wasn’t fond of the houses—or Saltaire, for that matter. Too many rules. No barbecues or riding bikes at night. I mean, really, who ever heard of a beach house without barbecues or nighttime bike rides? This new place was in Kismet, and when I saw it, I felt like this house was fated to be mine.

It was so beautiful, hovering on stilts high above the ocean, as if that great swirling mass might swallow it whole. The beach had eroded a lot that year due to a hard winter, but somehow the precariousness of the house, which sat a bit too close to the crashing waves back in those days, only added to its majesty.

Of course, Tom resisted. “One good storm and that house will go right into the ocean.” But I stood firm. The house would last. It had to. I could see myself spending my summers there.

It was one of the few battles in our marriage that I won.

Now, as I watched my house infested with the very shareholders I hadn’t even wanted to take on, watched them lie about my sofas, sipping cocktails (and leaving rings on the furniture, mind you), I wondered if I had really won at all.

I felt a little like Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, dying in parentheses.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’m no Mrs. Ramsay, despite the lovely view of the lighthouse from my house. No one would be writing books about me, least of all Virginia Woolf. No, there would be no books, no songs about Maggie Landon. Even the police had reduced me to a four-page report, which I wouldn’t exactly call lyrical. Or even just, for that matter.

I wondered if anyone would even think of me now. Or ever. Well, I knew at least one person would. Out of fear, if nothing else.

Fear of getting caught.

10

Zoe

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water again…

“Who’s up for striper tonight?” Tom said, startling me from where I lay on the blanket, eyes closed. Not that I had been sleeping. More like closing my eyes against the brightness of the day. Or reality.

I sat up, blinking at the sight of Tom heading down the beach toward us, outfitted in long khaki shorts, a T-shirt and baseball cap and sporting two long fishing poles. Janis Joplin loped beside him, tongue lolling.

Ah, a man and his dog and his fishing rod. With that grin on his face, Tom looked like he was posing for an ad in American Fisherman magazine.

I hate sports. Especially sports that involve killing.

“Hey, Tom,” Sage said, smiling up at him from where she sat in her beach chair, a copy of Vogue spread across her legs. “Finally decided to get out of the house, huh?”

“Yeah,” he replied, stopping next to us, his gaze going pensive. “Too nice a day to stay inside.”

Too nice a day to feel depressed about the fact that your wife died two weeks ago, I thought, watching as he tied up Janis a short distance away from us, underneath the umbrella Sage had set up earlier. Then he waved and grinned as he headed down to the shore to set up his fishing pole.

“Don’t tell me you don’t think that was weird,” I said to Sage once I was sure he was out of earshot.

She looked up from her magazine, regarded me for a moment behind brown-tinted sunglasses. “What was weird?”

“Tom. Smiling. Soaking up the sun. Fishing!”

She turned back to her magazine. “We gotta eat, don’t we?”

I stared at her until she finally looked at me again. “Okay, Zoe, tell me what’s weird,” she said, giving in.

“The fact that Tom hasn’t so much as wrung out a tear since Maggie’s death,” I began. “The fact that he barely even reacted the night her body was found—”

“You don’t know what was going on in his head.”

“I saw him, Sage. I mean, I was the one who told him about…about Maggie. If you could have just seen how he acted. He was a little too cool about the whole thing. As if he somehow expected it. I felt like I was watching one of those videos they show you during safety week in high school, demonstrating how you should act in an emergency.”

I saw her look up, running a hand through her sun-streaked waves while she watched Tom dig out a hole in the sand to stand his rod. “Tom was always good in an emergency. Very organized. You should have seen him during the blackout last summer. He had both floors of the office evacuated within fifteen minutes.”

“But this wasn’t a blackout, Sage. His wife had just drowned!”

She turned to me again, lifting up her glasses to look at me. “You better put some sunscreen on those shoulders, Zoe. You’re starting to burn.”

“Oh, never mind,” I said, flipping onto my stomach and closing my eyes. I was able to ignore Sage for a full five minutes—until I felt the sun beginning to burn at the edges of the navy blue tankini I wore. I rolled over onto my back, feeling a sudden urge for fresh company, seeing as present company didn’t seem to want to acknowledge my worries, much less my existence at this point, judging by the way Sage immediately focused on her magazine again. I guess I couldn’t blame her. I had been harping on the subject from the minute we arrived at the house last night and I was faced with the lonely look of Maggie’s Dream sans Maggie. Okay, maybe I was feeling guilty for being here. I had just turned in my final edits on the documentary to Adelaide, and I was, well, curious enough about Maggie’s death to return to the scene of the crime. Now I was glad I had come. I don’t think I would have believed it if I hadn’t been here to see Tom arrive this morning, cheerful as can be, pulling a wagon loaded up with food for the big Fourth of July bash he was still planning, because, as he said, Maggie would have wanted it that way.