by Lynda Curnyn
“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 inbox, 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 [email protected] 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?
* * *
Chapter Nine
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 spe
ctacular 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 pre-cariousness 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.
* * *
Chapter Ten
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.
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, II 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 fac
e 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.”
