by J K Ellem
Annie didn’t mind, as long as they didn’t bother her. She just kept to herself in the one-bedroom cottage she rented out of town along the ocean road. It was a life far from what she had once had, but she relished the solitude and peace.
Annie continued to watch the man, curiosity more than attraction getting the better of her. He didn’t look like one of the fisherman from the boat harbor either. No, they typically had rough weathered faces covered with stubble, wore grubby overalls stained with fish guts and scales and tended to leave an aroma of brine and diesel oil trailing behind them wherever they went.
The bell on the counter rang and Annie broke from her voyeuristic thoughts.
An old dignified woman stood at the counter, books in hand and a warm smile on her face.
“Sorry, Mrs. Plover,” Annie said. “I didn’t hear you come in.” Edith Plover was a regular in the library who ran the Erin’s Bay Reading Group.
“That’s quite alright dear, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Mrs. Plover slid three books across the counter to be checked out. The Erin’s Bay Public Library was probably the last library on earth that didn’t use scanners and bar codes for lending books. It was trapped in time, but Annie liked it in a strange, old fashioned way. Progress didn’t necessarily mean better in Annie’s mind.
Opening up the first book, Annie retrieved the worn lending card from the sleeve at the back. “My, where has the year gone,” she said rotating the dials on the date stamper.
“I know dear,” Mrs. Plover replied. “When you get to my age, every day above ground is a blessing.”
Annie smiled and stamped the first two books and slid them back across the counter. Then she stared at the image on the cover of the bottom book.
Handcuffs?
Annie raised an eyebrow at Mrs. Plover as she stamped the borrowing card before sliding the most borrowed book in the library back towards her. “Really Mrs. Plover, you shouldn’t be reading a book like this.”
Blushing, Mrs. Plover quickly hid the book under the other two.
“What would your husband, Mr. Plover, say?” Annie said innocently.
“My husband!” Edith Plover scoffed. She leaned in close, a twinkle in her mischievous eyes. “Annie dear,” she said in a hushed tone. “The last time my husband sailed his boat into my harbor, Truman was in the White House.”
Annie laughed.
“When you’re as old as me, you need to find excitement wherever you can.” She tucked the books into her shopping bag then asked, “Tell me, Annie.”
“Yes,” Annie said, straightening the pens and ink pads on the counter for the tenth time this morning.
“Someone as young and as pretty as you shouldn’t be wasting your days here, working in the library, in this town. I thought someone like you would want to be in the city, you know, with all the bright lights and a bit of excitement.”
Annie shrugged, “I guess I like it here, in Erin’s Bay. I like the slower pace.”
Mrs. Plover, nodded. “Except for the summer months when all those spoiled brats turn up. I heard they made quite a ruckus last night.”
“It’s summer, things will pick up here. I don’t mind. And it’s good for business in town I imagine.” It was true, most of the small businesses in the bay made their money for the entire year during the summer months. And the “spoiled brats” as Mrs. Plover had put it tended to bring their “spoiled brat” friends with them and they, too, had fat wallets.
Mrs. Plover squeezed Annie’s hand before leaving, trying to read her face. “You take care dear.”
"Oh, Mrs. Plover, just one thing before you go."
Edith Plover turned, "Yes, what is it dear?"
"The Ballard house up on the cliffs," Annie said, "I thought they had gone away for the summer, you know, to Europe."
Edith Plover gave a frown, "They have my dear, do so every summer, pack up the entire family and leave before the tourists and kids come home from college and descend on the place. Why, dear?"
Annie hesitated. It was a well-known fact around town that the Ballard family never spent summer break in Erin's Bay. Their house was a huge mansion that sat high on the cliffs, away from the other mansions along the peninsula. "Well, it's just that I thought I saw lights up there last night, around the outside of the place. I could be wrong."
Edith shook her head, "You must be mistaken dear, they left about two weeks ago, I believe. It should be all closed up."
"Maybe a caretaker, looking after the place?" Annie suggested.
"Maybe," Edith replied, then paused. "Come to think of it, you're the second person today who mentioned seeing strange lights in the night sky.”
"These lights weren't in the sky, Mrs. Plover," Annie corrected her. "Why? Who else has seen something?"
Edith seemed to be thinking. "Ralph Jacobson. I bumped into him, he came into town this morning." Ralph Jacobson was a local recluse who lived down on the coastal salt marshes amongst meadows of cordgrass, bur reed and sea lavender. He had an old fishing hut perched out over the labyrinth of shallow saltwater channels that fed into Long Island Sound. It was rumored that Jacobson used to own a fleet of fishing boats in his day and was once one of the wealthiest islanders around. However, gambling and the drink got to him, and so did the banks who foreclosed on his business. Nowadays he lived like a hermit fishing for blue crabs with his net or tending to his crab traps. He rarely came into town, but when he did, in his old beaten-up pickup truck, he usually could be found at the hardware store stocking up on supplies and kerosene or down at the docks.
Edith Plover made a show of thinking. "He said something about seeing UFOs or flying saucers, lights in the sky at night, out towards Moors Island near the lighthouse. Talking gibberish, if you ask me. Old fool."
Annie smiled cordially and began stacking books on to the trolley again. She hadn't personally met Ralph Jacobson but knew of him through the town's grapevine, which Edith Plover propagated on a regular basis. The library provided a good source of local information, Annie just had to eavesdrop at the counter or as she drifted between the shelves replacing books.
Edith Plover stepped outside into the sunshine. She liked Annie Haywood. She was like a breath of fresh air in the town. Yet Edith wasn’t entirely convinced about her. There was something about the young woman that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, something hidden and guarded behind her lovely sweet smile and those deep green eyes.
2
Atomic blonde, that’s what they called it; the color of her hair, that blinding shade of white you see just before the mushroom cloud billows up from the point of detonation. They say at times Abigail Brenner, or Abby to her friends, was like nuclear fission; hard to contain and almost impossible to control.
The speed limit said fifty-five but Abby didn’t care.
She checked her look in the rear-view mirror, the wind ruffling her blonde bob cut.
Perfect.
With a physique that was both lithe and lethal, her trademark cherry-red lipstick and the cherry-red sunglasses that contrasted with her deathly pale skin, Abby Brenner cut a striking figure, especially around these parts. She had been blessed with a metabolism that that burned off whatever she ate allowing her, much to the envy of others, to maintain her willowy, statuesque shape.
Her looks and her sometimes doe-eyed demeanor had fooled many a boy, young man, and ogling husband.
She could pout when needed, look sultry when required and bring on academy-award-winning tears if it meant getting her way. Some said she was spoiled, that her private school education had been wasted. But behind those flint-gray eyes lay a shrewd and calculating young woman. Yet, once in a great while, her armor would crack ever so slightly to reveal the still young and vulnerable girl underneath.
One summer, her mother had made the unenviable trip to Paris after receiving that dreaded midnight phone call from the French authorities. Abby, who was in Europe at a prestigious finishing school for young women, had gotten into an altercation with
the police who had raided a party she was attending. Intoxicated on all levels, Abby lashed out at a police woman and was promptly taken into custody.
Needless to say, Abby Brenner didn’t graduate that summer from the Parisian School of Deportment and Fine Learning for young ladies. Let off after a stern warning, she returned home to the family property to lick her wounds and lay-low.
But she didn’t care. While others saw family wealth as a privilege, Abby at times saw it as a burden.
She pressed the gas pedal a little further, enjoying the sun on her face, the wind in her hair, and the fresh smell of the ocean and beach. The Mustang convertible surged again, the speedometer needle nudging seventy miles per hour as she hammered along the ocean road, the big throaty V-8 and twin-pipe exhausts belting out a roar in its wake.
The car was the first thing she’d bought herself last year when she turned eighteen and could access the first portion of her trust fund.
But she was cautious with her money and didn’t squander it on frivolous things as most of her friends did. She did, however, invest heavily in her wardrobe, even though in the last few months she had curbed back on her spending at the insistence of the Brenner family lawyer who, with Abby’s more-often-drunk mother, was co-trustee of her fund.
A flock of gulls burst from the rocky shoreline and took flight as the Mustang roared past, the shriek of the birds lost amongst the roar of the car and the shrill of excitement of the woman behind the wheel.
Ahead the asphalt rippled a watery black ribbon that curved along the coastal road. On the right was a spread of sand dunes, rocky outcrops, torn cliffs and timber boardwalks that ran down towards the beach and an infinite expanse of blue. The Atlantic glistened and rolled like a carpet of diamonds on a bed of sapphires.
In the distance through the salty haze, the township of Erin’s Bay was nestled along a curve of the peninsula. Past the township further along the peninsula sat an imposing line of sprawling beachfront estates of glass and stone, and eye-watering wealth, old money that had come to Erin’s Bay long before it was fashionable.
The Brenner property was the last one on the peninsula, at the very tip, and it was the largest. Across the channel from the Brenner property set amongst the crashing waves was the dark brooding shape of Moors Island with the lighthouse atop.
Abby gripped the wheel tighter, her grin growing wider, and gunned the engine as the road dipped inland between plains of low scrub and sandy dunes speckled with tufts of sand grass. The road straightened again for the final run into the town.
It was then she spotted a shape in the distance along the shoulder of the road, a person, moving through the shimmering haze.
“Well, what do we have here?” Abbey tilted her sunglasses down and gazed over the frames as a man came into view.
Yes, definitely a man. A decent one, too, from what Abby could tell from behind.
He cut a lonely upright figure amongst the surrounding flatness, walking along the shoulder of the road in the bright morning sunshine, heading towards the town.
The Mustang whined like a spoiled child as Abby touched the brakes then downshifted, slowing the grumbling vehicle to within the speed limit for the first time since she had hit the coastal road five miles back.
Erin’s Bay was a small place and she knew everyone and everyone knew her. But the man growing in size through the car’s windshield in front of her was something new. No one walks along the beach road and certainly not carrying a rucksack. He didn’t look like a tourist either.
Abby checked her review mirror. The road was deserted. Good.
She kicked down another gear, the car protesting loudly, her momentum slowing.
Still the man hadn’t turned around. Either he was arrogant or not desperate for a ride. Abby’s eyes narrowed, and the tip of her tongue slid mischievously back and forth across a row of sharp and perfectly white teeth. Both possibilities intrigued her.
She pulled off the road and on to the shoulder, the wide tires crunching on the gravel and dirt as she slid up next to the man who had now turned to face her.
“Need a ride?” Abby peered over the frame of her sunglasses, put on a subtle smile, almost feigning disinterest, like she was doing her Good Samaritan deed for the day.
Ben Shaw stood still and looked down at the young woman looking back at him from within the bright red Mustang, heat radiating off the hood. And what he saw was the devil and an angel rolled into one. Blood red on white. Red lipstick, red sun glasses, white skin and limbs, and a beast of an engine grumbling under metal forged at the Flat Rock Assembly Plant in Michigan.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Shaw replied. “I like walking.” Shaw took everything in; the idling car, the young woman, the way she looked, the way she looked at him. “I like your car by the way. It suits you.”
Abby’s face froze at the remark. If a painting captured the moment, it would be called, Blonde woman in red car with a look of shock. It was at this exact moment that Abigail Brenner needed to know everything about this man. Who he was, why he was here, where had he come from. The questions came thick and fast inside her head as she stared at him.
No one ever had said that to her. It usually was the typical “Oh, your parents’ car?” or “Aren’t you a little too young to be driving something that powerful?” or “Rich little bitch.” But the car was her car, paid for with her money. And, the car was a reflection of Abby, her personality. She was a reflection of it; brash, ballsy, restrained wildness. People had tried to talk her out of buying the car, to buy something European, more reserved, more lady-like. But as soon as saw it on the dealership lot, she knew it was waiting there for her, like a predator, hunkered down, ready to pounce. She wasn’t a car person, but once she saw it, she knew she had to have it. The salesman had tried to steer her away from it. “Oh you don’t want to get mixed up with a car like that. You couldn’t handle it, too hard to tame for a woman like you. Now, over here, I have a nice little compact sedan.”
No one had ever picked up on that. Until now.
“The town is a good two miles further along the road,” Abby sat up a little straighter. “Are you sure? It’s no trouble at all.” Gone was the subtle look of indifference, replaced by another smile in her armory. Not provocative, not sultry. That might scare off this rare animal that stood in her crosshairs. She gave Shaw just the right quantity of attraction mixed with placid concern.
Shaw looked towards where the township was nestled in the distant haze. Then he looked back at Abbey. “Look, I really appreciate the offer, but I’m happy to walk.”
“Abigail Brenner.” Abby leaned across the passenger seat, extending her hand. “But you can call me Abby.”
Shaw held her gaze, smiled and took her hand. Her grip was cool, firm. “Ben.”
“You’re not from around here are you, Ben?” Abby asked. She had to know. The man was just too damn interesting.
“No, I’m just passing through.” Shaw offered no more as an uncomfortable silence grew between them. “Is there a place around here where I can get a coffee?”
Yeah, my place, Abby felt like saying, but held her tongue. “There’s a restaurant about a mile further along the road, blue building, called Snappies. Should be open for breakfast, can’t miss it. A mile after that you’ll be in town. Plenty of places there.”
“Snappies?”
“Crab, seafood,” Abby replied, “best around here, straight off the fishing boats in the harbor.”
Shaw nodded, “Thanks.”
Abby sat back in her seat, adjusted her glasses, and gunned the engine. “Might see you around.” She flashed a smile.
Shaw smiled, “Just might.”
And with that Abby kicked the car into gear then skidded out on to the asphalt in a flurry of dirt and spinning tires.
Shaw watched as the blur of red faded into the distance.
Abby Brenner was definitely trouble he needed to stay well clear of.
3
The sign said, “Best Cra
b in Long Island.” The building was a squat rectangular affair built during the 1970s out of white-washed cinder block. A blue cloth awning ran along the front and there was a big red neon sign that said, “Snappies” on the roof held up between two giant red crab claws. It was midmorning. The parking lot - a sea of grey crushed gravel with evenly spaced wheel bumpers - held only a few cars.
The beach road deviated from its straight line then wrapped around a hill overlooking the ocean, the restaurant perched on top. Shaw made his way across the lot towards the entrance then stopped. A race red Mustang was parked in a disabled parking spot near the front door despite the parking lot being almost empty.
Shaw let out a sigh of frustration. He really didn’t want to see the woman again but the board in the window said, “fresh coffee,” that called to him like an insect towards a light.
Maybe he could find a quiet seat outside. There were a few picnic benches with beach umbrellas along a paved area at the front that were screened from the parking lot by a tall hedge.
Inside, Shaw ordered at the counter and told the waitress he would be sitting outside. Glancing at the menu, he ordered a crab breakfast burrito then exited to the outdoor seating area, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, before finding a table tucked away.
The waitress arrived with his order and Shaw slowly ate, drank his coffee and watched the passing traffic and the view of the ocean.
