Edgewater Read online

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sheinmel, Courtney.

  Edgewater / Courtney Sheinmel.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4197-1641-6 (hardback) —

  ISBN 978-1-61312-828-2 (ebook)

  [1. Families—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S54124Ed 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015006547

  Text copyright © 2015 Courtney Sheinmel

  Jacket and title page photograph copyright © 2015 Shaunl/Getty Images

  Book design by Maria T. Middleton

  Published in 2015 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

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  FOR DORIS V. SHEINMEL

  IT’S VERY DIFFICULT TO KEEP THE LINE BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.

  —Little Edie Beale, Grey Gardens

  CONTENTS

  1 THE BET

  2 ONE FALSE MOVE

  3 HOME SWEET HOME

  4 LET ME HELP

  5 IT’S REALLY NOT THAT SIMPLE

  6 WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU

  7 NO STRINGS ATTACHED

  8 GRAVESIDE CHAT

  9 WELCOME TO OUR HUMBLE HOME

  10 I SPY

  11 A PEACEFUL SLEEP FOR OUR FRIENDS

  12 ACCLIMATION

  13 GOOD-BYE AND HELLO

  14 OUT OF SIGHT

  15 FOR RICHER, FOR POORER

  16 GHOST EYES

  17 SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME

  18 WE HAVE A PROBLEM

  19 LAST

  20 YOU KNOW THIS GIRL

  21 WIDE AWAKE

  22 CULPABILITY

  23 TRUER THAN THE TRUTH

  24 THE PARTY FOR CERTAIN

  25 EDGEWATER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  THE BET

  WHENEVER I LOOKED BACK ON THAT SUMMER, I’D think of the bet as what set all the changes in motion. Even though the actual trigger was something that had happened long before. Before Mom left, and before I walked out the door myself—going anywhere I could to escape home.

  Maybe there was some unknown event in my mother’s childhood that had shaped her into the kind of person who’d make certain choices that resulted in her absence. And maybe it went even further back than that—to who her parents were, and who her parents’ parents were, and all that they had passed down through the generations. Sometimes I think you can draw a line from today back to the beginning of time and see how everything that happened was made inevitable by what preceded it.

  But it was that bet, on a hot summer night, that I would come back to as the starting point. Like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when things go from black-and-white to Technicolor. A switch was flipped, and things began to unravel in earnest.

  When it happened, I was in North Carolina, attending Camp Woodscape, an equestrian program for advanced riders, for the second summer in a row. Thirty-two of us lived in a dorm adjacent to the barn and stables of Raleigh College’s south campus. Late June had seen a week of earth-scorching, record-breaking temperatures up the Eastern Seaboard, and Barrett Hall didn’t have air-conditioning. The smells of shampoo and perfume barely masked the stubborn odors of hay and sweat and girls radiating warmth and sucking up all the oxygen.

  But I didn’t mind. I loved anything even remotely related to horses, even the smells. The mustiness of the barn, the freshly oiled saddles, the fields after a summer rain shower—those scents covered me like a blanket and made me feel utterly at home, more at home than I ever felt in New York, in my own house. In fact, the only thing at Woodscape that really got under my skin was my roommate, Beth-Ann Bracelee. Yes, of the Bracelees, as my aunt Gigi would, no doubt, have noted. A Bracelee Candies Bracelee. While Beth-Ann might have been heiress to a half-billion-dollar confectionery fortune, as far as I was concerned, there was nothing sweet about her.

  Beth-Ann had had it out for me ever since the prior summer, when her palomino, Pacifica, got a stress fracture that made him all but unridable. Foolishly, I let her ride my horse, Orion, in a dressage competition that I hadn’t qualified for myself, and then she got it into her head that Orion would be better off with her. She went as far as to have her dad fly in from their Palm Beach home and take us to dinner at the Oakwood Café, the most expensive restaurant in town, where the cloth napkins were folded like origami swans, the butter was infused with different flavors, and the grilled-lobster salad was served with a citrus dressing that you dreamed about long after dinner was over. “Orion’s the perfect age, Daddy,” Beth-Ann practically cooed. “He’s no longer green, and he has all his best years ahead of him.” Clayton Bracelee waved his checkbook in front of me. “Name your price,” he said. But I told him there’d been a misunderstanding: Orion wasn’t nor would he ever be for sale.

  Beth-Ann had pouted for the rest of the summer. Frankly, I didn’t expect to see her back at Woodscape again, but on the first day, there she was. Already in our dorm room, having taken the brighter side by the window and moved things around so she ended up with more space. You don’t get to pick your roommate at Woodscape, but I wished I’d had the forethought to write on my housing form: anyone but Beth-Ann Bracelee.

  Beth-Ann had brought her brand-new prized Thoroughbred, Easter Sunday, that she’d purchased after—get this—the horse psychic she’d hired to tour different barns with her said that she and Easter had a special mind-body connection.

  But that kind of thing wasn’t out of the ordinary among equestrian circles. I was used to riders like Beth-Ann. Back home my tactic was to steer clear of them. It was just that Beth-Ann made it virtually impossible: She lived in my dorm room, and despite her apparent disdain for me, when we were outside our room, she still always seemed to be at my heels.

  I had dinner plans that last night with Isabella Reyes, a raven-haired, olive-skinned rider from Spain who’d had two of her Arabian horses, Razia and Sultan, flown across the ocean to Woodscape. But Isabella was down-to-earth, or as much as a descendant of the Spanish royal family could be.

  Unsurprisingly, Beth-Ann had invited herself along to dinner with Isabella and me, and then she insisted we stop at the CVS on the way, so she could junk up our shared sink with more random drugstore purchases. While Beth-Ann was in line to pay for an armload of nail polish and eye shadow, I wandered over to the ATM to get some cash, forty dollars, and I was denied “due to insufficient funds.”

  I’d purposely waited for the first day of July to make a withdrawal. Years earlier, my mother had set up a trust fund for my sister, Susannah, and me, right before ditching us to move abroad with her British boyfriend, Nigel. My aunt was named our guardian and the trust’s flaky executor. By the end of each month, we were usually living off fumes, waiting for the next stipend to be transferred into our checking account. But today was p
ayday, and—I looked down at my watch—certainly by ten after seven the transfer should have been made.

  So money, and the lack thereof, was on my mind as the host at the Oakwood Café, where we’d fast become regulars, led us through the throng of other patrons, men in summer sport jackets and women in pearls, to our table. I’d long ago perfected the art of keeping my face straight and impassive so no one would catch on to the meltdown I was having inside, and besides, Beth-Ann was too involved with her own battles to notice even if I hadn’t. She flagged down our waiter to demand olive oil for the bread, then flagged him down again when it didn’t come fast enough. “This is why waiters are waiters and not brain surgeons,” she stated in her slow Southern drawl before he was safely out of earshot. “Because they can’t even remember a simple request.”

  “Quiet,” I said under my breath. When I turned, our waiter was looking right at us, and I was certain he’d heard every word. I ducked my head, mortified.

  Beth-Ann barely lowered her voice and went on: “Daddy says it takes all kinds of people for the world to function. Some people need to be the ambitious ones and become doctors and lawyers.”

  “And candy-shop owners,” Isabella said with a smile. Her accent made the word candy sound foreign and fancy.

  “Candy-empire owners,” Beth-Ann corrected, her face as deadpan as her voice. Humor and nuance were lost on her. “And some people need to be the ones to serve those people and do all the things we don’t want to do.”

  “That guy’s handling, like, a dozen tables,” I said. “It’s not his fault he wasn’t born a candy empress.”

  “That’s not the point,” Beth-Ann said. “It’s simply not my destiny to serve anyone. But clearly I’ve offended you and your future plans to be in the food-service industry.”

  Heat rose to my cheeks, and my underarms were suddenly dripping with sweat. Even the restaurant’s full-blast air conditioner was no match for the kind of hot it was outside; besides which, feeling self-conscious always made my body temperature rise a few notches.

  “I’ve been thinking, you need a new passion project anyway,” Beth-Ann told me.

  I fought to keep my voice steady. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You and Orion haven’t exactly been in sync lately.”

  Orion had eaten a piece of moldy hay, and it had taken me longer than it should have to figure out the problem. But he’d been better for a week, and Beth-Ann knew it. “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” I said.

  “I don’t have a problem with Easter. No one knows him like I do—and vice versa. He knows I can be a bitch, he knows when I’m sad, and he even knows when he’s crossed me.”

  “Sounds like your horse is the psychic,” I said. “And yet the two of you haven’t been able to communicate when it comes to clearing the two-foot oxer.” Every time Beth-Ann had approached the double-railed jump on the North Course, Easter had slowed, and she’d had to turn away.

  “Are you saying Easter’s not much of a jumper?”

  Isabella’s gaze shifted back and forth between Beth-Ann and me, as if she was watching a tennis match. “Come on, you guys,” she said.

  But I paid her no mind. “I’m saying, I bet you twenty bucks,” I said.

  And there it was.

  At that moment, I was just another entitled teen having dinner at a restaurant that most people went to only for a special occasion. My horse was stabled at an exclusive riding program, and in two months he and I would return to Hillyer Academy, the boarding school I’d attended since the ninth grade. Back home in Idlewild, the small town on the eastern end of Long Island where I technically lived, everything was in ruins, thanks to Aunt Gigi. But I’d used my trust fund to get away and keep up appearances—I’ll be the first to admit, they were extraordinarily extravagant appearances—and it had worked: Here, all the other girls thought I was one of them.

  They couldn’t have imagined how different it really was for me if they’d tried.

  “You’re on,” Beth-Ann said.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning, before rounds.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  It was my turn to treat. As dinner wound down, so did my adrenaline rush from battling Beth-Ann, and I was a little nervous as I handed my Amex over to the waiter. With the “lack of sufficient funds,” chances were Aunt Gigi was late on paying our bills again. But, I reminded myself, she did always pay them eventually. The credit card companies knew it and extended our credit anyhow. They were probably happy about how Gigi conducted things; my family was good for the money, and they got what we owed them, along with all those extra interest charges and late fees.

  I planned to add an extra-big tip to our bill, to compensate for what the waiter had, no doubt, heard Beth-Ann say, but just as I’d dreaded, my Amex was denied. And then my backup Visa. Before I could ask the waiter to try splitting the bill across both cards, Isabella leaned over and handed him her Amex. My cheeks burned as I made a mental note to call home first thing in the morning, apologized to Isabella, and loudly promised that the next dinner was on me.

  But there would be no next dinner. By morning, everything had changed.

  We were on the North Course, Orion and I, and Isabella and Sultan, and of course Beth-Ann and Easter Sunday. My dark hair itched under my helmet. I could feel the tendrils that had escaped from my ponytail curling at the base of my neck. But if the heat was getting to Beth-Ann, you couldn’t tell. She looped around, showing off. Easter was in good form, as if horse and rider really had been communicating telepathically. The bet was on, and Beth-Ann pressed the horse forward, gathering speed. I knew at least five paces in that they’d do it, effortlessly sailing over, clearing the two feet and then some.

  “Guess you owe me twenty, Hollander,” Beth-Ann crowed as she reined in Easter.

  “Lorrie Hollander!”

  I turned to see Woodscape’s director, Pamela Bunn, waving madly from the end of the fence. She’d walked a long way from the administrative offices, and by the time she reached me, the underarms of her blue oxford were half-mooned with sweat, and her usually pale face had a baked-cherry redness.

  “Lorrie, can you hand Orion off and come back with me to Whelan Hall?”

  “Okay.”

  Beth-Ann and Isabella watched as I led Orion to one of the stable hands. I met up with Pamela on the other side of the building, and we cut across the flat pasture to the winding pathway behind the tack room. Pamela was breathing heavily. She couldn’t muster the strength for small talk to fill the space between us, and that was fine; I couldn’t, either. Something was wrong. I knew it. What had happened at the ATM had just been the first sign, the harbinger of doom.

  We finally made it to Pamela’s office, and I took the folding chair opposite her large, battered desk. “Lorrie,” she began, leaning forward on her arms. As if the weight of what she needed to say demanded the support. “I hate to say this, but it looks as if we’re going to have to send you home.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Your aunt has not paid your tuition, and you cannot stay here for free.”

  “She can get a check to you by the end of this week,” I insisted. “She’s really bad at managing the money, but the funds are there. I swear.”

  “I believe you, Lorrie. And if you could get her to transfer the money today, I’d overlook it. But she hasn’t responded to any of our calls or e-mails. Today was as far as we were willing to extend the deadline.”

  “Listen, I know Gigi is . . . erratic,” I said. “But she always—”

  “Lorrie, please don’t make this harder on me. This is a terribly regrettable situation for us, too. We decided to overlook the initial delays because you were here last year and because you’re a talented rider. But now we’re weeks into the program. It’s not feasible for us to provide you room and board free of charge. Not to mention the fact that it’s simply unfair to the other girls, whose families have paid.”r />
  A large drowsy fly had begun to bat the mesh window-screen behind Pamela. I felt the same way. Tired but looking anywhere for a way out.

  Pamela Bunn wasn’t a cruel woman. I knew that. We were both a bit like the fly. Trapped in this room, itching to escape. “Surely you’ve seen these invoices?” she went on, not unkindly. “In your in-box?”

  I nodded. And I’d also received a voice mail and had a pointed conversation with Pamela’s assistant, John, last week: “We’re gonna really be needing that payment soon, okay, Lorrie? If you could call your aunt? Lorrie?”

  I had called Aunt Gigi, a few times, even before John had tracked me down, to tell her to please make the transfer or send the check or do whatever she had to do to pay up. She’d said she would take care of it.

  She always said she’d take care of things.

  “My aunt isn’t the most together person,” I said.

  Pamela Bunn stopped me with a raised hand. “You need to speak with her today. Either she arranges for the transfer of funds, or she arranges for your travel home. There’s a flight today out of Raleigh at six that would get into New York by half past seven,” she said.

  Oh God. This was really happening.

  “I can recommend a service to transport Orion, which shouldn’t be more than a few hundred dollars,” Pamela continued. “He could be home with you in two days—three, max, if it comes to that. I think this is the best plan.”

  All I could do was nod. It was too shocking for us both, in a way. I was going to be kicked out of Woodscape, and Pamela had to do the kicking. We stared at each other, almost unable to breathe through our intense mutual discomfort. But now it was done. There was nothing to say.

  I said something anyway. “You’re making a big mistake,” I told her as I scraped back my chair and stood.

  “I am terribly sorry, Lorrie,” she answered. “I feel awful about this, truly.”

  But did she, really? Mostly, she looked relieved as she sat back and folded her arms across her chest.

  I left Whelan Hall and headed straight to the dorms. Back in my room I made one last-ditch call to Aunt Gigi, which, of course, went unanswered. And so I began to stuff clothes into my suitcase: underwear, socks, shirts, jodhpurs. I pulled my jeans out of the bottom drawer and dug through the pockets for spare bills. I also had a few dollars on my dresser, and I was pretty sure I’d stuck the change from lunch on Monday in the pocket of my barn jacket.