Killer Summer

by Lynda Curnyn

  What the hell…?

  Suddenly the leash flew out of my grip, and I watched in horror as Janis became smaller and smaller, practically disappearing against the darkness. Shit! I started to run faster, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was happening in the tide.

  finally caught up, but only because Janis had come to a dead stop, letting out a howl that sent a shiver through me as I looked down on those sightless eyes, wide and blue, staring up at me.

  Maggie.

  Naked. Her hair matted with seaweed.

  And, from the look of things…

  Dead.

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  Maggie

  It’s all over but the shouting.

  My funeral depressed me. Not because I was the main event, but precisely because I wasn’t there. Not really. First there was the priest, who kept calling me Margaret. I guess that’s what it said on my birth certificate, though no one has ever called me that except my mother, and I hadn’t seen her for years. It was nice of her to come, though the way she stood huddled in the corner with two of my brothers, sobbing like an idiot, embarrassed me. But at least someone was crying. Outside of Zoe, which was pretty weird, since the girl barely even knew me. The other surprise was Sage, who I discovered was behind the big wreath of lilies by the coffin. Probably out of guilt.

  Tom, of course, was the perfect host, though I hadn’t seen him shed a tear yet. But that was Tom. Onward and upward. Life goes on, etc., etc. I know I made some mistakes in my life. Some pretty damn big ones, too. But watching Tom greet people, dry-eyed, accommodating, I wondered if perhaps the biggest mistake of them all had been marrying him.

  He didn’t even remember to put a rock ballad in the funeral program. I always loved a good rock ballad. Funerals are such dull affairs. I thought a little Queen might liven things up. Or even something more rousing, like Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.” Tom played that one for me on our third date. He’d taken me back to his place, and after he’d cued up the track, he gave me that look guys always get when they’re in the early throes of courtship— hungry, a bit gooey-eyed—and asked me if I was going to break his heart like Maggie May. Of course I fell for that type of doomed romantic talk—especially when it was set to music.

  I should have realized then it would be Tom who’d break my heart first.

  I guess after everything that happened between us, I shouldn’t have expected my husband to remember my funeral request. After all, it had been ten years since I’d made it. We’d just been married and, filled with the kind of paralyzing fear that the great big bubble I’d stepped into when I’d entered Tom’s world would burst, I had given him my last request. “You’re crazy to even think that,” he’d said, kissing my head, much like a father would a child. “You’re only twenty-nine.”

  Well, now I’ve just barely cracked forty and I’m about to be buried. Who’s the crazy one now?

  I wasn’t surprised when the police ruled my drowning accidental. What else was the medical examiner going to find beyond a woman who had had a little too much to drink and was skinny-dipping on a balmy June night? I knew I shouldn’t have taken the Valium. Now they’re blaming the whole thing on me.

  I suppose I couldn’t really complain about the funeral. If there was one thing I could always count on Tom for, it was to throw a good party. In fact, it was one of the things in our marriage we did best together. We put on a good show. Though I was a little surprised when he chose oak for my coffin. Oak? Have I ever liked oak? Ten years and two houses of furniture later, you’d think he’d know I was a solid mahogany girl. But it just goes to show you how many years you can live with a person and not pay attention. It bothered me though. If nothing else, I’m all about the details.

  It wasn’t that Tom and I didn’t have a good marriage. In fact, some would call it fairy-tale. I know my friend Amanda did, but then I had gotten the fairy tale that she was hoping for. Others, mostly Tom’s family and even some of the more snide in his circle, saw it as a classic case of Midlife Crisis Meets Gold Digger. Mostly because I was a decade younger than Tom. Those people really annoyed me. Gold Digger. I hadn’t even been interested in marriage when I met Tom. I had just started working for WQXY radio. It was my first job in my field of choice, though I had studied communications in college with some vague idea of doing something a bit more glorious than working for the accounts payable department, I had discovered I was good at what I did. I had a good head for numbers and had one of those filing systems so organized some might attribute it to mental illness. I was happy enough though. I was young and, mostly due to Amanda, who was in PR, I got to go to my pick of parties. I could give a shit about all those things that seemed to fuel Amanda—like marrying well and before thirty. Thirty seemed like light years away and marriage like one of those things you did when you started thinking about IRAs and 401Ks. And since I was barely supporting my half of the two-bedroom apartment Amanda and I shared on the West Side, I was nowhere near that mindset. But according to Amanda, that was exactly when you met your proverbial Mr. Right. When you weren’t looking.

  I didn’t even feel like going out the night I met Tom. But Amanda insisted. She had gotten invites to some kind of fundraiser. I had been dragged to enough of them by Amanda to know that they were boring as hell. Filled with the kind of people who identified themselves by what class they came out of Harvard or Yale. I usually went and entertained myself by making up identities as I went along. When I had too much to drink—and I drank at lot at these humdrum affairs—I was Maggie Germaine, reporter for Rolling Stone. Or Maggie Germaine, brain surgeon.

  But the night I met Tom Landon, I didn’t care about impressing anyone. I was simply Maggie Germaine, the fifth child of an otherwise unremarkable family living on the South Shore of Long Island. Usually I never admitted to South Shore, except to give some vaguish impression that I lived somewhere near Southampton, the more desirable part of the South Shore. But the truth was, I grew up in Shirley, later restyled Mastic Beach, though the real estate values never came up to par with the kind of name that suggested cocktails and cabanas. Mastic Beach was more Budweiser and monster truck shows. To Tom, the only son of a North Carolina manufacturing family, Long Island was the legendary home of Howard Stern and the Shoreham nuclear power plant. It was bizarrely exotic in the way a seven hundred pound cat on the cover of the National Enquirer is. Though you don’t want to understand the forces that could bring such a thing into being, you can’t look away.

  It seemed Tom couldn’t look away the night we met, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the Long Island upbringing I’d tossed in his face. But when I forked over my phone number, it was with the kind of blase indifference born of having had this kind of conversation one too many times already.

  Of course, it was just the kind of indifference that works like a charm, at least according to Amanda.

  He took me to La Grenouille on our first date. I figured he was trying to impress, but the truth was, dining at places like La Grenouille was a way of life for Tom. Not so for me. My typical culinary experience in Manhattan included the All You Could Eat Ribs Night at Dallas BBQ. Which was probably why, over four courses filled with foods I had never heard of, much less considered, my indifference morphed into insecurity. I was suddenly very aware of the cheap rayon cling of the dress I wore, embarrassed that I could barely choose a wine and a bit overwhelmed by the understated elegance of it all. “Old Money,” was what Amanda had called Tom Landon. “Old man,” was what I had thought at first. Not so once I was sitting across that pretty table from him, surrounded by lush flowers, soft candlelight and simpering waiters with French accents. Tom brimmed with the kind of confidence I had not experienced in men up to that point. Maybe that’s what attracted me most to him. That and the fact that he opened up to me a world I had been shut out of for most of my life. He had everything a man could want. An Upper East Side palace, a garment industry empire. You might scoff at Tom, thinking he’d been
handed that empire on a silver platter. It didn’t hurt that his father was the man behind Landonwear, a moderate ladies’ wear line that Thomas Landon Senior ran from the manufacturing hub in North Carolina. But Tom struck out on his own, moving to New York after getting an MBA at Harvard. By the time I met him, he had just made a name for himself with his own company, Luxe.

  Amanda didn’t understand why I came home that night scoffing at everything from the fingerbowls to the fancy French menu. She couldn’t comprehend my resistance.

  Not that I really resisted. I went out with him again. And again. A part of me secretly enjoyed the raised eyebrows and whispers that broke out at the sight of me, young, blond and wide-eyed on Tom’s arm. I guess everyone assumed I was simply soothing whatever ills lingered after Tom’s divorce from Gillian, his first wife and the mother of his daughter, Francesca. But that was just it. There were no wounds to heal. Tom accepted his lot as divorce and weekend dad with the same pragmatism that guided his business deals. Out with the old and in with the new. And since I had all the glitter and good wine and food that went along with being “the new,” I didn’t allow myself to wonder at his apparent lack of feeling for the woman he had left not a year earlier, the child he traveled to see for a few short hours on the weekend. I simply accepted his devotion to me like a kind of amused spectator. I threw my past up into his face, my underachieving alcoholic father, my bipolar mother, my pack of redneck brothers. It was as if Tom didn’t hear me. Or didn’t care.

  Which was why when he declared, on our fourth date, that he would one day make me his wife, I laughed mercilessly. But my insides clamored with a mixture of fear and maybe even longing. I hadn’t heard this sort of confident declaration from a man since I was sixteen and Luke, my then-boyfriend, told me he would love me till the day he died. Which I suppose was true, since not two weeks after I dumped him he did die, in a drunk-driving accident. But I wondered what it was that made Tom so certain about me when I wasn’t sure of anything. My life. My career prospects. I felt challenged by his faith in me, challenged to be the cool, confident woman he saw staring at him across that candlelit table. I suppose the fact that I succeeded can be measured by the gap between the hard-living rock-and-roll groupie I once aspired to be to the careful, perfect wife I became.

  Tom always wanted the perfect wife. I just wish he could have loved her a little more.

  I wish I could have loved her a little more.

  * * *

  Chapter Six

  Zoe

  Is it hot in here or is it just me?

  “She looks, um, good,“ I said to Sage once we were seated at the back of White’s Funeral Home on East 71st.

  Sage gave me a look, and I knew exactly why. I hate when people say that at wakes and funerals. Who looks good when they’re dead? But the truth was, Maggie did look good. At least better than the last time I saw her. I couldn’t get the image of her sightless eyes and pale skin out of my head. I guess that’s what wakes were for, I thought, remembering the last one I’d been to for Myles’s father. But that had been a whole different thing. One of those sprawling affairs on Long Island, sprawling mostly because Myles’s father was not only a father of five and brother to six, but a Suffolk County cop, killed in the line of duty. You can imagine how big that wake was. It even made the papers. People came from miles around, in such numbers that they had to limit the viewing hours just so Myles and his family could have some time to grieve in peace. And grieve they did. I’d never seen Mrs. Callahan so broken up. And Myles’s sisters. I had always been so close to them, especially Erica, the only one who was still single and close to my age. I didn’t even know what to say to Erica—to any of them. Myles had been so sweet, so good, trying to stay strong, keep it all together while everyone else fell apart. I knew he was grieving, had held him tight when he finally did cry the night after they buried Mr. C.

  Which was why this sophisticated and utterly dry-eyed event had me wondering. If it wasn’t for Maggie’s mother, sobbing silently in the corner with Maggie’s brothers, I would have wondered if anyone here even cared that Maggie had been cut off in the prime of her life. I looked over at Tom, standing up front near the entrance, smiling and greeting people just as merrily as he had during the first dinner party on Memorial Day weekend. Only it was his wife’s wake. I turned to Sage again. “Don’t you think it’s kinda strange how unfazed Tom seems to be?”

  Sage flicked her gaze over to Tom. “People grieve in different ways,” she said.

  That was true, I thought, looking at Sage now and wondering what she was feeling. She knew Tom and Maggie better than I did. But she wasn’t one to cry either. Her toughness was legendary. It was rumored that she’d barely shed a tear when her kid sister died. I hadn’t known Sage at the time, having moved with my mother to Babylon in my sophomore year of high school, but I had heard the stories, from Nick mostly. Hope had been eleven when she died, and Sage was fourteen, which was pretty young to keep things so bottled up.

  “The whole thing just seems weird to me,” I said, remembering how calmly Tom had responded when I had gotten back to the house. Like he was following some guidebook: What To Do In The Event Of Your Wife’s Death. I had run back to the house, and in one breathless burst told him about finding Maggie on the beach. I didn’t say “dead.” I couldn’t. Tom had picked up the telephone and dialed 9-1-1. I think he might even have given the sauce a stir before he threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and headed down to the beach. Of course, I hadn’t seen his reaction to the sight of his wife. He had insisted I stay at the house and wait for the police to show up so that I could direct them. Though I felt like someone should go with him, I was glad not to be the one. I was spooked enough by the memory of Maggie’s sightless eyes looking up at me, her pale white flesh glowing in the darkness. By the time I led the Marine Bureau cop who showed up down to the beach a short while later, Tom was still under control. I nearly lost it, especially later at the house, when the questioning by the homicide detective began. All of us had to talk to the police—Tom, Nick, Sage and me. I was a bit freaked out by it, especially when I was asked where I had been, what I had been doing. If I had seen anyone else on the beach. I guess Tom got the same questions, and I imagine he answered them with more aplomb than I had managed.

  I was startled by the questions, mostly because I had thought of Maggie’s death as an accident.

  “They always ask those questions,” Sage had said on the way back to the city early the next morning. “You’ve seen Law and Order.”

  “Yeah, but that’s because they’re investigating murder on that show.”

  Then Sage calmly explained that accidental deaths or deaths that occur at home are always investigated by the police as a matter of course. I had to take her word for it, Sage was a bit of an authority on accidental death scenes, seeing as her sister’s death had been an accident, too.

  If all those questions opened up the doubts in my mind about Tom’s behavior that night, damp from God-knows-what and chopping garlic with barely restrained fury, apparently the police hadn’t been fazed. In fact, that was the thing. Nothing seemed to faze them, I thought, remembering the weary face of the homicide detective who had questioned me, jotting down notes as if I were giving him one of Maggie’s famous recipes rather than filling in the blanks about how she might have wound up floating in the tide. Accidental death by drowning was what the medical examiner came back with. I wish the medical examiner were here to witness this, I thought, watching as a pretty brunette sidled up to Tom, latching herself to his arm.

  “Who the hell is that?” I whispered to Sage, nudging her away from the program she had begun to read.

  Sage looked up, her green eyes bland as she settled on the brunette in question, then withering once she turned to me. “That’s Francesca, Tom’s daughter.”

  “Oh.” Okay, okay. So maybe I was being a bit overdramatic.But

  what was I supposed to think with Tom over there yuckmg it up with some woman who was half
his age? Especially considering that Maggie was nearly half his age, too. Actually, I was surprised to learn from the dates on the coffin that she was closer to forty than my own thirty. She looked pretty damn good for her age, I thought, watching as Tom merrily greeted a tall blonde. But maybe not good enough, I thought next, as Tom leaned to kiss the blonde, his hands roaming over her back as he hugged her.

  “Hey, whatever happened to Tom’s first wife?” I asked.

  Sage practically glared at me. “She’s alive and well and living in Boca Raton.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re so worked up about this. The woman drank too much and went for a swim.”

  My eyes widened, but I kept my mouth shut. Sage was my best friend, but sometimes she was a total mystery to me. She could be the most generous person in the world—witness that whopping cluster of lilies up at the front of the room that she’d purchased on our behalf. But when it came to things like Maggie’s death, she just closed right up. After a harrowing night of recounting the night’s activities for everyone from the Marine Bureau cop who answered the call, to a detective from the homicide squad at the Suffolk County Police Department, we had ridden the train back to Manhattan the next morning in near silence, Sage lost in her own thoughts and Nick dozing off, only waking periodically to clutch his cell phone in his lap with a look of alarm, as if he’d just missed an important call. Tom had stayed behind, of course, and though at first I assumed he was under arrest, I later learned he had gone back to the house to secure it before leaving the beach. And to pick up Janis Joplin, who likely had to be sedated if the state I’d seen her in last was any indication.

  “Where’s Nick?” I asked now.

  “He had some sort of a business meeting,” Sage said, finally looking me in the eye again. I knew that look. She was wondering, like I often did, how a man who barely earned a living managed to have so many “business meetings.”