by Jenn Bennett
I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. Foolishness—that’s what.
Because I don’t really believe he did it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a small voice is telling me that I’m just angry and raw over all the revelations about my father, and I’m taking it out on Lucky. But I’ve forgotten all my swimming lessons—forgotten how to kick and float. Now I’m going under the surface.
Now I’m drowning in my own despair.
“If you—” he starts.
“Deny it, then!” I sob loudly. “Tell me you didn’t do it!”
“You gonna let me answer?”
“No! You don’t get an answer. Because my best friend would never do that … and no boyfriend of mine will, either.”
He sucks in a quick breath through his nostrils and backs away.
Staring at me. Dazed. Horrified. And then, in a blink—
Nothing. All his emotions are wiped, and his expression goes cool and distant.
I can’t move. All the wet concrete in my chest is seizing up. I’m going to turn to stone any second now. Going to shatter into a million pieces.
Don’t need a ticking time bomb for that.
This is far worse. Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, the invisible wall went back up. And I wasn’t the one who pressed the button.
I’m no longer in control.
I’ve been shut out.
BEDECK YOUR DECKS: Signs posted in shopfront windows reminding locals to outfit their boats with white lights for the upcoming Victory Day flotilla celebration. (Personal photo/Josephine Saint-Martin)
Chapter 24
It’s funny how life keeps going after something monumental happens—or even a lot of monumental things. Life doesn’t seem to care or even notice. A war could end a thousand lives in one day, but across the globe, a family still sits down together to eat dinner.
A relationship can end in the boatyard of the South Harbor, but across the street, a mother is reopening the bookstore, because it’s never been closed unexpectedly in her lifetime, and she’s not about to let it happen on her watch.
Life keeps going, even when what I shared with Lucky doesn’t. Even when he’s right across the street. Even when I see his red Superhawk parked there, day after day …
After day.
Even when I stare out the bookshop window, hoping to catch a glimpse of his dark head walking through the boatyard office door, day after day …
After day.
There’s nothing between us. No texts. No coffee on the Quarterdeck. No visits to the Nook or getting handsy in my darkroom. No bad pizza or swimming lessons or Sunday dinners.
He’s back to being the outsider. All the beautiful closeness we shared has dried in the August heat. And I miss him. The old Lucky and Lucky 2.0 and all the Luckys I’ve known.
I wish they were here right now.
Wish I hadn’t ruined everything.
“Maybe you should try to talk to him,” Mom says when we’re coming out of the stockroom after totaling the cash, closing up the Nook later that week. It’s Victory Day, and as the shadows lengthen down the street and twilight approaches, everyone’s migrating toward the historic district. “I hate seeing you unhappy. There’s a lot going on right now, and you’ve been friends for so long, shutterbug. Maybe if you just started the conversation?”
I shake my head, but I can’t explain to her why that’s not possible. I haven’t even told her fully why Lucky and I aren’t a thing anymore, because that would involve more talk about that stupid photo. And Adrian. And maybe we’ve all had enough of this summer.
Maybe it’s best I just let it go and move on.
The funny thing is that I think I could tell her. As far as invisible walls go, things are better between me and Mom since that night after the island when everything came out about my father. Knowing that we’re staying here for now helps. Mom and Grandma have been talking about ways to make things work for all of us. There have been a few tense moments, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
It’s a process.
“Our breakup was mutual,” I say, and it’s not precisely a lie. I was an absolute dramatic dumbass to Lucky and he shut me out: mutual. So now I’m back to my original No-Romance stance that I took when we first arrived in Beauty. Straying from that policy was my mistake, but it’s not too late to correct it. Probably …
“I don’t like Mopey Josie,” Mom says. “She’s the worst of Snow White’s dwarves.”
“I’m not trying to bring down the flotilla,” I tell her, grabbing the trash bag out of the waste can behind the register.
She rolls her eyes. “I couldn’t care less about the stupid flotilla.”
“Oh, please. You love the flotilla.”
“I love you being happy more.”
“I’m fine,” I tell her. Then I think of Lucky telling me to be honest. “Okay, I’m not fine yet, exactly, but I’ll be fine eventually. It’s getting a little better … sort of. I miss him. But I’m trying?”
“I still don’t understand … who broke up with whom?”
“Mom,” I plead.
“Okay, okay. Backing off,” she says, giving me a gentle smile. “It’s just that you haven’t taken any photos in a week, and that makes me worry.”
“That’s not about Lucky,” I say, tying up the trash bag.
“Right. I was afraid of that.” Mom exhales heavily and folds up the end-of-day paperwork. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t told you the truth about Henry Zabka.”
“Nope. That’s the best thing you’ve told me in years.” It’s just not the easiest hurdle to jump. I wake up thinking I’m past it, then I realize I’m still bitter.
Evie emerges from the stockroom with a handful of mermaid pens and says, “You know what? My dad was a good man, and I miss him every day. If Josie needs to miss the idea of a father that she thought she had, then I think that’s okay. Mourn away. But eventually, you’re going to have to make peace with it.” She shrugs loosely. “That’s a little free advice from Madame Evie the Great, straight from the beyond. The spirits say give yourself a break, lady.”
Mom and I stare at her. Madame Evie’s been giving out a lot of free advice lately. Maybe getting rid of Adrian unburdened her.
“What’s wrong with the stool?” Evie says, frowning as she balances over it to refill the mermaid pens near the register. “Something’s different. Wait … where’s the squeak?”
Mom laughs. “It’s a different stool.”
Evie leans down to peer between her legs, a cascade of dark hair flipping over and back as she pops back up. Her freckles darken around her Cleopatra makeup. “What the hell? When did this happen?”
“This morning. It was a gift.”
I take a second look at the stool. Clean lines. Simple construction …
Lucky.
Mom feigns innocence, and I don’t say anything. I can’t. What’s this weird fluttering feeling in my ribcage? Oh, right. The bats are back. Hundreds of emotional bats flapping inside the hollow cave of my chest. I don’t know why Lucky would make a piece of furniture for the store, but it feels overly generous. Too personal. Like a bandage being ripped off a wound way too soon.
Or maybe I’ve just contracted rabies.
“You okay?” Mom asks.
“Am I up to date on my vaccinations?”
Mom’s face scrunches up “What?”
“Never mind,” I mumble.
I try to ignore Lucky’s gift—just a simple gesture of good faith, not a grand gesture of love—as best I can as we finish up closing the shop. And I keep ignoring it as we walk over to the historic district to meet Grandma and Aunt Franny. I shouldn’t be thinking about Lucky at all. After all, Victory Day in Beauty is a holiday bigger than Fourth of July. All our town’s fireworks budget is saved up for this, the last big hurrah of the summer. The waterfront in the historic district is completely jammed with tourists and locals. Everything smells of sugar and barbecue smoke, and there’s a really loud, really white,
really annoying jazz band playing in a grandstand stage at the end of Goodly Pier.
“This will be good to get your mind off things, shutterbug,” Mom says as we stop to survey the crowds by the pier and wait for Grandma and Aunt Franny, who are supposed to meet us here by the food truck area.
Oh, sure. It’s easy to tell myself I’m not nursing a broken heart of my own making and carting around a chest filled with fluttering rabid bats when I’m surrounded by throngs of garishly dressed, smiling strangers, baking in the summer heat and waving patriotic sparklers.
Forget Lamplighter’s Lane. This is the true portal to hell, right here.
Below us, Redemption Beach is crammed, and the crowds in this area are only going to get worse, because the beach and the Harborwalk are the prime viewing spots for tonight’s main event.
The annual flotilla.
Anyone with a boat to show off has it lined up in front of the Yacht Club right now. The big yachts from Regatta Week are leading things off—irony of ironies, Coast Life magazine is one of the festival sponsors, and their logo is on every banner down here. Regardless, fancy or plain, all the boats are awaiting things to get dark enough for the grandmaster to fire the signal, releasing the flotilla of boats into the harbor, all of them decked out in thousands of white fairy lights, where they’ll parade around massive torches.
Torches. Lit on fire. On the water.
Why? Who even knows, but people seem to love it. I’m not sure when this tradition started, but Beauty has been doing some version of it since my mom was a child. Evie says the chief of police’s boat crashed into a torch and caught on fire two years ago. Really wish I could’ve seen that.
Right now, though, I wish I could turn around and go home. The sun is setting, but it’s still so warm out that I’m sweating in shorts and a navy-and-white striped shirt. Just when I’m as miserable as I can possibly get, I spot an interesting group of people sitting around an outdoor café table at the worst-named best casual seafood restaurant on the edge of Goodly Pier: the Juicy Clam.
And inside my head, rusty wheels begin turning.
“What’s happening here?” Evie says, wiggling a finger in front of my face.
I glance at Mom, who has wandered off to convince the egg roll truck and the cookie truck to join forces and deep fry cookies wrapped in egg roll skins while we wait for Grandma and Aunt Franny to show up.
“Stay here,” I tell Evie. “I’ll be right back. I need five minutes, tops.”
Before she can argue, I push through the crowd and race up the ascending walkway onto Goodly Pier, maneuvering sideways on the outside of the ropes that section off the café area of the Juicy Clam. Stacks of wooden crab traps and fat dock ropes decorate the patio that overlooks the harbor, and everything smells of garlic butter. A couple of diners glance up at me sidling past their tables, surprised. Yeah, I know. Not supposed to be here. Super rude. But I have a backup plan.
A strategy. A plot. A scheme.
“Mr. Phillips,” I say, stopping at the table I’d seen from the walkway below.
“Josie? Why, hello.” He looks confused. “Ready to get back to school?”
“Just about. It’s been a strange summer,” I admit. Two other men are dining with him. One I don’t know—an old man with a balding crown and a long ponytail in the back—but the other I know vaguely from childhood and most certainly after he was the cause of me losing the magazine internship at the beginning of the summer.
I most definitely am acquainted with his son.
Levi Summers, the king of Beauty.
Extraordinarily tan, piercing blue eyes, dark hair and beard shot through with a healthy amount of white and gray. I think he’d be what people would call a silver fox. He’s also pretty much my enemy right now. But that’s okay. I try to remind myself that he isn’t Adrian.
And this isn’t about either one of them, anyway.
It’s about doing the right thing.
I stick out my hand. “Hello,” I say, “I’m Josie Saint-Martin, Diedre’s granddaughter.”
One brow lifts, but he accepts my handshake. “I’m well acquainted with your grandmother. A lot of your family, actually.”
I laugh nervously. “Well, that’s probably not good. But I would like to apologize formally for what happened to your store’s window. That was wrong, and I’m sorry. I’d also like to say that it was not my intention to destroy your property. I was aiming for your sign.”
Mr. Phillips coughs. The other man at the table laughs under his breath.
“Well, Miss Saint-Martin …” Mr. Summers starts.
“What I mean to say is that it was a moment of anger for what Adrian did to me and my cousin,” I explain. “But no matter what he did, what I did was wrong. I feel terrible, because that’s not who I am or more importantly, who I want to be in the future. And I know my grandmother talked to you about the window, and about Lucky Karras, and the whole mistake of him taking the blame for it, but that’s all in the past.”
“Oh?” he says, crossing his arms over a crisp white shirt.
“What I would like to do is to pay you back for the window,” I tell him. “But I can’t afford to do that. So instead, I was thinking … what if I took photographs of your window displays for your website? I’m a great photographer. You might even remember that I was up for consideration for an internship at Coast Life, but you thought I was too young.”
“That’s true,” Mr. Phillips says, scratching his ear. “She’s quite good, too. Has a professional portfolio. Her father—”
I shake my head. “I’d like to stand on my own merit, if you don’t mind.”
Mr. Phillips holds up both hands and smiles. “So be it.”
Mr. Summers looks me over. “I admire both your apology and your offer, Miss Saint-Martin. I’m not sure if I’m in need of a photographer right now, but I’ll think about it.”
The restaurant’s patio lights flip on and a buzz goes through the café tables. Uh-oh. That means the flotilla will be starting up soon. And now that I’m standing under mood lighting, a Juicy Clam waiter spots me and is coming to shoo me away from the patio ropes.
Time to flee.
“Um, okay, well … thank you for your time,” I tell Levi Summers quickly. “I’ll ask you again in the future. I’m tenacious. It runs in my family.”
Mr. Summers smiles, but not unkindly. “You don’t say …”
Ducking away, I wave goodbye to Mr. Phillips and head back down the pier to find Evie. She hasn’t gone far, and Mom still hasn’t found Aunt Franny and Grandma but is busy chatting at one of the food-truck windows.
“Hey,” Evie calls, waving me over through the crowds. “What was that all about?”
“Just attempting to right a wrong,” I say, and briefly tell her what I’m trying to do to pay for the window. When I look back up at Levi Summers and Mr. Phillips, I catch sight of the third man at the table. I should’ve introduced myself to him. Maybe it was rude not to have done so. “Hey, Evie? Do you know who that man with the ponytail is, sitting next to Levi Summers?”
She scrunches up her face to squint at the darkening pier. “Oh, him? That’s Desmond Banks.”
Desmond Banks … Bright red FOR RENT sign, darkened door. Next to the hand-dipped candle store that smells like Christmas. “The private investigator?”
“Former,” Evie corrects. “Or more like disgraced. He used to run his own agency in South Harbor, a couple blocks from the Nook.”
“I’ve seen his office.”
“Well, a few years back, his files got hacked by some anonymous Golden and ten years of everyone’s miscellaneous dirty laundry popped up in a Golden Academy forum. People’s bank records, photos of affairs—all that kind of stuff. It was only up for an afternoon, and he recovered most of it when they busted the kid who did it, but who wants to hire a dumbass PI who was stupid enough to get hacked by a nerdy teen? The damage had been done to his reputation, and after trying in vain to keep it afloat, he finally shut down fo
r good this past winter and is now ‘retired.’ ”
All at once, several bells chime in my head, tiny thoughts all lighting up and connecting.
The private detective that my grandmother hired to investigate my father years ago.
My mother’s nude photo.
“What’s the matter, cuz?” Evie says.
“Did you ever ask Adrian where he got the photo of Mom?”
“Yeah,” she says, “in his car, right before our wreck … He was coy about it. Said something smug about a trove of secret pictures that some of the Goldens keep on people around town. Decades worth of photos, or something. And when I told him that was super gross, he just said he was joking. I guess after the accident, I sort of forgot about it.”
Oh my God.
I’m going to be sick.
Of course Lucky wasn’t Adrian’s source for the nude photo.
It was Grandma’s bumbling private detective. If I had only taken one stinking minute out of my self-centered life to ask Evie about this. Communication breakdown number five-thousand-eighty-seven. Why didn’t I ask her?
“Cousin?” Evie says, placing a steadying hand on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing … I mean, so, hey? Question for you … What do you do when someone specifically asks you to trust them, and instead of doing that, you babble a bunch of emo nonsense at them and make wild accusations?” I say, feeling as if my knees might give out. “Basically, you’ve screwed up beyond repair.”
“Well,” she says, diplomatically, “most things that get screwed up can be fixed.”
“But this isn’t a thing. It’s a person,” I say in a panic.
Oblivious, Mom saunters back to us with a huge grin on her face and a red-and-white checked paper tray filled with hot food. “Ladies, welcome to the taste of summer. Chocolate chip cookie dough rolled up inside an egg roll skin, deep fried, swirled in icing. And it’s on a stick—” Her smile fades. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her and Evie, “but I can’t wait for Grandma and Aunt Franny. I need to talk to Lucky right now. I need to get back to the boatyard.”