Killer Summer

I had to wonder about that as I watched him tossing out the meal she’d worked so hard on the night she died, in order to make room for all the beer he’d bought. I went out for a run to cool my head, only to come back to find him bagging up Maggie’s clothes in big black trash bags. “No point keeping this stuff around,” he said, when he caught me gawking at him. I recovered enough to suggest that he might at least consider giving her clothes to charity. I guess it was a point in his favor that he seemed to be mulling over my suggestion. Except for the fact that he actually had the gall to ask me if I wanted to have a look through, to see if I wanted anything.

What I wanted was his head. I mean, could you blame me for wondering about the guy? Though, the strange thing was, I seemed to be the only one wondering. “When’s Nick coming?” I asked.

“He said he’d be here before two,” Sage replied, looking up at the sun as if she could tell the hour by its position. “Looks like he’s already about a half hour late,” she finished, proving that she could. I wasn’t surprised. Sage was in touch with those sorts of things. Natural stuff, like figuring out north and south without a compass and what herbs you could eat without being poisoned. I used to think she was the kind of person you would want on your Survivor team, but now, as I watched her lift the magazine to smell a Calvin Klein fragrance ad, I wasn’t so sure.

“What’s he doing, anyway?” I asked. “He’s missing half the weekend.”

She shrugged, then looked at me as if I should talk, considering I had missed more than my share of beach time so far. What she said was, “Your thighs are getting red, too.”

I looked down at my thighs, which looked fine to me. Still, I flipped over again, just to be safe. I wasn’t so adept at sunscreen. I’d put some on earlier, but only succeeded in increasing the amount of sand sticking to my body.

Slipping my sunglasses on, I gazed up at the house, which stood high on the dune in front of me, trying to remember that this was the beach and I was supposed to be having fun, though fun seemed out of my grasp. I had a lot on my mind. I guess I always had a lot on my mind. Oh, to be young and carefree, I thought dryly, watching as a young and carefree-looking girl made her way down the wooden steps to the beach.

She was dressed in a soft cotton sundress that I might have called innocent if not for the fact that it was cut a bit shorter than most. I studied her face as she approached, a soft, confident smile freshly painted in pink, eyes shaded by black sunglasses, her shoulder-length dark brown hair smooth, as if she’d just had a professional blow-dry, her bangs perfectly trimmed. She looked familiar.

“Isn’t that Tom’s daughter?” I asked, finally recognizing her from the wake and funeral.

“Daddy!” she shouted, answering my question.

Sage looked up as the girl skipped gaily by—or she seemed to skip anyway—stopping once she reached Tom at the shore.

I watched as they embraced, then spoke animatedly for a few minutes.

“I wonder what she’s doing here,” Sage said.

At least she wondered about something, I thought irritably, studying father and daughter on the beach. I watched as Tom gestured to the house, as if he were giving instructions.

“Didn’t you tell me she lived down in Florida with her mother?”

She nodded, her eyes on Tom and his daughter as they made their way back up the beach, toward us. “She goes to school down there, I think.” I saw her gaze narrow behind her brown-tinted frames. “I guess school is out. Or maybe she even graduated. I think Tom may have mentioned she was graduating this year.”

“Have you girls met my daughter?” Tom said, approaching us. “Francesca, meet Sage and Zoe. Your new housemates for the summer,” he continued, his smile broadening. “Francesca has decided to spend the summer up here with us.” He shrugged. “It’s not like we don’t have room.”

I tried to contain my surprise at that little remark. Mostly for Sage’s sake. Because I was starting not to care what our happy host thought. What the hell was wrong with this guy, anyway?

“I’m going to go get settled in, Daddy,” Francesca said, beaming up at her father.

But Tom’s gaze had already returned to his fishing rod. “Hey, looks like I got something! Must be my lucky day!” he announced, before jogging back toward the shore.

I watched as annoyance flashed across Francesca’s face, before her creamy features moved back to her formerly cool expression. “Nice meeting you both,” she said. Then, turning on her high-heeled flip-flops, she headed back toward the house.

I saw Sage frown. Finally, a reaction out of her.

“Good thing we came last night,” she said. “Now we have a claim to the green room. I mean, I know she’s his daughter, but I don’t want to lose one of the best rooms in the house.”

Fortunately, I had my sunglasses on, so she couldn’t see me roll my eyes. God forbid anyone should encroach on our beloved room, which just so happened to be the second biggest after the master bedroom, complete with its own private bath and a lovely view of the lighthouse in the distance.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said, jumping up and dusting the sand off me as I did.

“You better put sunscreen on those legs.”

“I’ll be fine,” I muttered, sliding my shorts on, more for modesty than anything else.

With one last glance at Tom, who had just let out a whoop as he began to reel in his first catch of the day, I headed up the beach.

I had only gone about fifty yards when I realized where I was headed. And remembered…

Maggie’s sightless eyes staring up at me with a look of surprise…or was it resignation?

It was neither of those things, I thought, chastising myself. The woman was dead. A dead woman couldn’t feel anything.

And neither could her husband, apparently.

I shook off the thought, plowing on, trying not to notice how many of the blankets I passed contained cozy little couples. Trying not to remember that I might have been one of those cozy couples this summer.

When I came to a break in the line of houses near the end of Kismet, I knew I was in the right spot, recalling the loneliness of the dunes that night. I wondered, not for the first time, why this land didn’t have a house on it, since it was prime oceanfront. Realized if there was a house here, maybe someone might have witnessed what had happened that night on the beach.

I looked out into the tide once I was standing right about where I had found Maggie. I think half of me expected to find her still there, rolling in the waves, forgotten.

Of course, she wasn’t there. In fact, I was all too aware that there was nothing about this particular stretch of beach that might indicate a woman had died there two weeks before.

I stared out into the ocean, watching the waves rolling over one another in the distance, trying to imagine someone—well, Maggie—stepping into that inky darkness alone.

Unless she wasn’t alone.

Stepping closer to the tide, I watched the waves crash in the distance, mesmerized by the constancy of it. A memory washed over me of my father, pulling me through the waves, hands braced under my armpits as I screamed, not trusting him not to let me go. I guess that first instinct had been right.

The tide washed over my feet and I jumped.

Fucking cold!

What sane woman would willingly jump into the Atlantic Ocean in June?

It had been hot that day, I thought, beginning to walk back along the shore, remembering how I had spent the unseasonably warm day in Adelaide Gibson’s air-conditioned living room. I knew, too, that by evening the water would have been warmer, having been heated all day by the near ninety-degree temperature.

Okay, so it wasn’t that cold. Maggie was simply walking along the beach on her way back from Fair Harbor and decided to take a little dip. Yes, the queen of the tasteful beach cover-up had decided to drop her drawers and take a dive, just for the hell of it.

Yeah, she’d been drinking, according to all reports, but I just wasn’t buying it. It just didn’t make sense that she would have gone into the ocean at night alone. Didn’t she watch all those teen movies where people died doing the same thing? She seemed like such a reasonable person. In fact, almost too reasonable, from what I could see. She had to have been forced, I thought, remembering a damp and angry Tom chopping vegetables.

But even that was too much to fathom—Tom drowning his wife. Yet there was something about him that spooked me. Something in his indifference that made me wonder if he was capable of pushing his wife underwater. What kind of man faced his wife’s death without so much as a tear? Opened the very beach house he’d named in her honor the week after her funeral and was planning his annual Fourth of July bash as if the fact that neither Maggie nor her esteemed potato salad were going to be around didn’t faze him? I couldn’t help but think of Scott Peterson, cheerfully making plans with his new girlfriend days after he had murdered his wife and unborn child.

What kind of men were these?

“Zoe? Is that you?”

I turned, shocked to hear my name being called in a town where I knew virtually no one, and found myself face-to-face with a man I once knew better than myself.

“Myles?”

“Hey,” he said, jogging closer until he was standing before me, bare-chested, his sandy brown hair looking even sandier in the sun, his golden brown eyes on mine. Before I could sputter out my surprise, he was bussing my cheek with a kiss, as if we were old friends rather than a freshly severed couple. “So I see you decided to take that share after all,” he said, as if my presence on the beach were the surprising thing.

“Of course,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

He ducked his head shyly. “Well, some friends from law school had a house with an open share and, I dunno, at the last minute I figured, what the heck.”

What the heck? my brain echoed. “Oh,” was all I said.

“So how are you?”

As if he cared. “I’m fine. You?” Even as I asked, I found my eyes roaming over that hairless, perfectly carved chest. Yes, he was fine. In fact, Myles had been born fine, I thought, feeling suddenly resentful of his naturally athletic build.

“I’m doing okay,” he replied. “You know…”

I looked up into his eyes, saw the hesitation there, and realized that maybe things weren’t so fine with Myles. “Everything all right at home? How’s your mom? Your sisters?”

“Everyone’s good, good,” he said, bobbing his head a bit too merrily. “How about your mom?” he asked. “She okay?”

“She’s fine,” I said, suddenly feeling swamped by sadness. This was what we had come to. Polite questions and head nods. And separate summer shares. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to sob or smack him across the forehead for not caring enough to think of my feelings.

Maybe Myles sensed this—at least, I hoped he was somewhat aware of the grief his actions were causing me—because he said, “If I’d known you were going to be here, Zoe, I would have called. I just thought you’d given up on the whole idea. You said as much that night we…you know, decided to take a break.”

We decided? And if this was a break, no one told me. In fact, if I remembered correctly, Myles said he didn’t know if he was ready to take the next step. With me, anyway. I would have argued the point now, but something about his pensive gaze stopped me.

“Hey, if you’re here, then you must have been here the night—God, Zoe, did you take that share in Tom Landon’s house?” He reached out, taking my hand in his. “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

I looked into his eyes and saw the first genuine sympathy I’d seen from anyone yet, and Myles didn’t even know Maggie. “Yeah, me, too.”

“How’s the husband doing?”

“Fine,” I said, with a shrug, dropping my eyes to the sand, studying Myles’s feet, his long, even toes, already beginning to tan. “He’s here, too,” I said, looking up at Myles again. “This weekend.” I paused. “He’s out fishing as we speak.”

He nodded, his eyes on mine, assessing. Then he blew out a sigh. “The whole thing was just freaky, if you ask me.”

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