Edgewater Page 2

  As soon as I finished packing, I’d call Lennox. My best friend would put my flight on her parents’ credit card and pick me up from the airport. And she wouldn’t even ask why, because she’d already know.

  My final financial tally was twenty-eight dollars, in fives and ones. At that moment, it was all the money I had access to in the world. I folded eight ones into my wallet. The rest I slipped into an envelope and left on Beth-Ann’s bed.

  Woodscape could go ahead and toss me, but I was still a girl who honored her bets. Even if I was no longer a girl who could afford to place them.

  2

  ONE FALSE MOVE

  LENNOX PICKED ME UP HERSELF IN A CAR I’D HEARD about but never seen, a silver Audi with a tan interior that still had the new-car smell to it. It had been an early summer birthday present from her moms.

  Lennox’s moms, Allyson and Meeghan, were partners in life and in business, they always said. They’d founded an architecture firm together after graduate school and set up a home office on the Idlewild estate that had been in Allyson’s family for two generations. When they decided to start a family, Lennox and her sister, Harper, were carried by Meeghan, using sperm from Allyson’s brother, Craig. “My uncle who is also my dad,” Lennox sometimes joked. “Just your average American family.” Lennox had Meeghan’s brown skin, stirred a shade lighter, with Allyson’s (and Craig’s) angular face and catlike eyes.

  Lennox and I had met the first day of Pony Club at Oceanfront Equestrian Center. We were six years old, and neither one of us had ever been on a horse. But somehow Lennox already had the whole place figured out, and she grabbed my hand to show me the peephole in the tack room. In exchange, I gave her a plastic Pegasus key chain. That same summer, we tied for the Marmalade Junior Cup. We’d been best friends ever since, and as we exited the Long Island Expressway, I could feel her restlessness with everything she wanted to ask me. She paused longer than she needed to at the first stop sign, turning to give me a look.

  “You’re not ready to talk,” she said. An observation. Not an inquiry.

  “Not yet.”

  The morning’s memories were too fresh—Pamela’s sad eyes, the walk to John’s truck, head-down like a criminal being led to her cell, the judging stares of the other girls as I’d climbed into the van to the airport.

  “That’s all right,” Lennox told me. “In the meantime . . . maybe you’ll come out to Oceanfront tomorrow? Claire has jumps school, and I told her I’d watch for moral support.”

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to see Claire just yet,” I said.

  Claire Glidewell had started out in Pony Club with Lennox and me, and she never missed an opportunity to ask me about the state of my house. “How did you let it get so dirty?” or, “Why don’t you clean it up yourself?” Meanwhile, I was certain that Claire Glidewell herself had never so much as made her own bed. Lennox always said she didn’t think Claire meant any harm by her questions. But if you asked me, Claire had a little bit of the Beth-Ann Bracelee Superiority Complex in her.

  “Sorry,” I told Lennox.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “What if we meet for lunch after? Just you and me. With ice cream.”

  With ice cream meant: long talk. Lennox and I had had a lot of those over the years. Her goal was to be a political journalist and expose all, but when it came to my life, she guarded my secrets like Fort Knox.

  “Mmm,” I said. “With ice cream.”

  “Okay, cool,” she said. “In the meantime, want a Twizzler or five?” She produced a fresh pack from her purse. Lennox was the kind of person who always had snacks on her. If ever I were asked to make a list of my favorite things about her, it would be quite long, and that trait would be right at the top.

  I took the pack from her and ripped it open. Lennox pressed the gas and a few minutes later made a left off Route 77 onto Richmond Hill Road. Now we were officially in Idlewild.

  In the old days Idlewild had been a farming and whaling community, with wide open fields and sunsets over the ocean in all shades of pink. But then a group of investors “discovered” the area and bought out miles of beachfront property. A central village popped up between the bay and the ocean. As the town grew, more well-known (and expensive) retailers moved in. There’s an ordinance in place to keep up appearances that Idlewild is still just a small beach town—storefronts have to be red brick with celadon shutters, and no retail building can be over three stories, so as to preserve the views. But the shops on Main Street are all high-end boutiques. We have a Tiffany & Co., a Chanel, and an Armani. You have to turn onto the side streets to find anything practical, like a supermarket or a drugstore. And then you’ll never bump into an actual Idlewild resident in them; Idlewilders send their housekeepers and personal assistants out to buy things like orange juice and tampons.

  If you walk west of town, you’ll hit the bay, and if you walk east, you’ll hit the ocean. Everyone who’s anyone belongs to the Crescent Beach Club on the ocean side. There are massive homes sporting their own golf courses and helicopter pads and pathways to private beaches. It’s not exactly a lemonade-stand and trick-or-treating kind of community. More a community of breathtaking ocean views and bragging rights.

  Lennox made another left onto Break Run Road, the most exclusive address in Idlewild and the gateway to my own family’s saga.

  My grandfather had made his fortune building suburban communities. The kind where all the houses look the same, save for the color of the front door and the shutters. But my grandfather couldn’t abide living in one of those cookie-cutter homes. So he designed a one-of-a-kind waterfront estate for his family. Edgewater was set on five acres, with stone walls imported from Italy and a rose garden befitting a castle, which overlooked the Atlantic. When my grandparents died a couple decades ago, the house was left to their two daughters—my mother and Aunt Gigi. Today it remained an impressive property.

  From a distance, that is.

  “Can we stop at the Point?” I asked Lennox.

  The Point is what we called the outcrop of cliff that made a lookout over the ocean, lapping fiercely at the jagged rocks a hundred feet below. If you were intrepid enough to climb over the guardrail, there was just about enough room for two lean picnickers sharing a blanket and a basket.

  Lennox obliged and pulled over. As I looked toward the horizon, the water was like a pane of glass, clear and still. But that wasn’t the view I was interested in; it was the view of Edgewater I wanted.

  I’m sure there are people who like to look at their homes up close, where they can see the things that make them theirs: a last name stenciled on a mailbox, a welcome mat at the front door, pansies in the window boxes. But the Point was the only place from which I liked to look at my home: from a distance, where things were blurry and not at all shameful. I stared out at it now—gray clapboard stretching three stories high. It was wider than it was tall, part of the row of mansions that ran along Break Run. One was owned by Franklin Copeland, the legendary senior senator from New York, another by the actress Miranda Landis, who’d just nabbed her second Academy Award. And then there were those homes that belonged to your run-of-the-mill hedge-fund billionaires. Families who had it all. Families to be envied.

  Once upon a time the Hollander family had been one of those families. Now I would trade mine in for any of the others, and the knowledge of that caught in my throat.

  “Check that out.” Lennox had pushed her sunglasses up into her mass of dark curls, and she peered forward, squinting over the wheel. “Someone’s out there, climbing up the rocks.”

  “Whoa.” I eyed the jagged shore break below and shivered. “One false move and he’s shark-bait.”

  We waited until he had gained solid footing, whoever he was—it was too hard to tell from that distance. He stood there, still dangerously close to the edge of the cliff, facing the ocean as his T-shirt whipped against his body in the sea breeze.

  “Ready to go?” Lennox asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I t
urned to keep watching as Lennox pulled away, and kept my eyes on the boy until the moment the road curved and he disappeared out of sight. “I wonder who that was.”

  “I can’t think of any freaks offhand except Brian.”

  The mention of Susannah’s boyfriend made my skin crawl. A user and a loser who, nonetheless, had my sister enthralled. His dad was a local fisherman who supplemented his income working shifts at the Route 8 junction Exxon–Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk. But as far as I could tell, Brian himself didn’t do anything besides figure out where to cadge a few bucks so he could score his next dime bag. Sometime last year he’d moved out of his parents’ apartment by the railroad tracks and become a de facto boarder at our house. I’m sure he thought he’d moved up in the world, flawed as our home may have been.

  But Brian was tall, his limbs connecting at awkward angles, like a crane. This guy, whoever he was, looked strong and firm. “No, it’s definitely not Brian,” I said. “I don’t think it’s anyone we know.”

  Lennox wound the car around with the road, and we lapsed into silence. I had that sense of dread I experienced whenever I drew closer to my family’s property. We twisted up the driveway, and the knot in my stomach became a fist. I always, always wanted it to be different. And it never, ever was.

  Up close, Edgewater was a shocking vision of neglect. A wreck of its former greatness. It didn’t help that it was sandwiched between two perfectly manicured estates. On the left, the Gould family’s “Cloud House” was a modern structure, all sharp angles and glass, with a sprawling, military-cut lawn. On the right stood the Deightons’ stately mansion, “the Ramble,” one of the very first homes built in Idlewild. Over the years, Richard Deighton had made regular calls to Idlewild’s chief of police, Tim Blum, to report the “nuisance” of Edgewater. But, thankfully for us, being an eyesore did not rise to the kind of thing the police department could do anything about. Finally, two years ago, Richard Deighton had solved the problem himself by having a hedgerow planted. Now it was nearly two feet taller than when it’d been put in. Tall enough to block us out. I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  Lennox steered the Audi up the final stretch to the house. We were close enough to see that it wasn’t actually meant to be gray. It had once been white, but its paint was now soiled and falling off in strips, as if Edgewater was being peeled like a banana. I made myself look up, past the row of broken dormer windows on the third floor, to the heather-colored sky above. The sunset was breathtaking, per usual. You could always count on nature.

  Lennox cut the engine. “I’m going to run in and get your money first,” I told her. “Wait here, okay?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I know the drill.”

  She knew the drill, that I didn’t let anyone—not even her—into my house. I opened the car door, and the ubiquitous roar of the ocean sounded off in the distance. Being in Idlewild was like having a conch shell permanently pressed against your ear. It practically made me seasick.

  I ran up the porch steps and took one last deep breath of outside air. Then I pushed open the front door. The foyer was dark—darker than it was outside. The bulbs in the chandelier had long ago burned out, so now the fixture hung down uselessly from two stories above, with dust dangling from the prisms like tinsel. In the center of the room was a fountain, dried up for years, and, beyond that, a winding staircase once famous for its mahogany banister and custom-carved pineapple newels. Back in the day, it had actually been pictured in Architectural Digest.

  Trying to keep the house clean on my own was a losing battle. We had more creatures living in Edgewater than I could possibly keep count of. Despite Claire Glidewell’s suggestion to just clean it myself, there was simply no way for one person to keep up with such a massive estate. I’d called in a housekeeper once, but as soon as she stepped inside, one of the cats dropped a decapitated mouse at her feet. She screamed and ran straight back out. That was five years ago. Now the house was even more far gone.

  I switched on a floor lamp and crossed the room to the squat Victorian dresser at the base of the stairs. Susannah and I always called the top drawer the Money Drawer, because it was where Gigi stashed the cash she withdrew from the bank. At times the drawer was practically bursting with twenties and fifties and sometimes hundreds. Other times the offerings were a bit leaner. Still, you could count on there being something—a couple hundred bucks at least—and Susannah and I were allowed to dip in, no questions asked. Usually I took only what I needed, but this time, I decided, I’d take whatever was in there—all of it. I’d give Lennox the cash for the plane ticket, and if I had enough left over, I’d pay my way back into Woodscape. I could spend the summer there with Orion, after all, and I’d play off my abrupt departure to the other girls as if it had all been a misunderstanding—Can you believe it? Pamela Bunn is lucky I don’t get her fired.

  I yanked open the Money Drawer and rooted around. But all I found was . . . nothing. Not so much as a lone dollar bill. My throat burned with the need to gulp fresh air. I ran back outside and hurried across to Lennox, careful to avoid the plank on the porch that had partially rotted through. I held my hands up to her to signify that they were empty. “I’m sorry,” I told her through the car window. “I can’t believe this.”

  “It’s all right. Really.”

  “I can’t believe I’m back here,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “But I have an idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “So you’re home, and you don’t want to be home, and that blows. But what if you just think of it as starting senior year early? We have a couple extra months together that we didn’t think we’d have. We’ll make it really good, starting now.”

  We had talked about that—making senior year the best ever, packing in as many memories as we possibly could before we were off, most likely to separate colleges.

  “We can head to town and grab a bite,” she went on. “How about a lobster roll on the boardwalk? There are a lot of cute guys in town this summer.”

  “You know I have no interest in meeting anyone,” I said.

  “I’m talking people-watching,” she said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with meeting anyone.”

  “I don’t want a boyfriend.” With my house, with my family, it would be too complicated.

  “You will,” she assured me with the wisdom of an older person who has seen much more. “When you meet the right person.”

  “You don’t have a boyfriend,” I reminded her.

  “That’s because Nathan and I just broke up,” she said.

  “Well, apparently there are a lot of cute guys in town this summer,” I told her.

  “All right, point taken. So how about just us and no ulterior motives? It’s not like Twizzlers are enough of a dinner. We’ll get lobster rolls and waffle fries, and we’ll split the brownie sundae. What do you say?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, not tonight,” I said. “I have to get this over with. Can you pop the trunk?”

  “Done.”

  “Thanks, Len. I mean, for everything.”

  “I’m here whenever, Lorrie. A phone call away.”

  “I know,” I told her. “We’ll start senior year tomorrow. I promise.”

  I waited until Lennox’s car was out of sight before I forced myself to face the house, to really look at it. In just three weeks it seemed to have fallen into even greater disrepair. Storm-fallen branches crisscrossed the porch, just as they had the driveway, like the start of a game of pick-up sticks. The porch swing hung at an angle, the rope so frayed, it had finally snapped on one side. I dragged my duffel up the steps. It was no use holding my breath this time, and as I pushed the door open, I was met by the trademark smell of Edgewater, something between cat urine and sour milk. It was almost a physical thing that moved through the rooms, up your nose, and into the little crevices of your closed mouth.

  I headed back to the dresser by the stairs and rummaged through the rest of the drawers, just to make sure I hadn’t m
issed anything. An enormous Maine coon cat—either Abeline or Carolina; I didn’t know and didn’t care—squatted on the second step of the staircase to relieve herself. Oh, good: This pee stain would match all the other pee stains on the carpet runner. And if you looked carefully where the carpet had worn thin, you could spy vegetation growing through the floorboards—mushrooms or mold. In middle-school science class, we’d read about how long it would take nature to invade the spaces we’d worked so hard to keep clean, should humans ever cease to exist. Our house could be a case study in that concept. Not exactly Architectural Digest material any longer.

  From around the corner came a noise I couldn’t quite make out, but someone was in there, in the kitchen. Once, I’d heard a kitchen described as the heartbeat of a house, the place where everyone gathered for sustenance and restoration. Ours was more where things went to die.

  It was time to find my aunt, and that’s where I’d start.

  3

  HOME SWEET HOME

  GIGI WASN’T IN THE KITCHEN, BUT SUSANNAH WAS, bent over a cardboard box on the table. I didn’t need to peer inside to know that something frail and sickly was contained within. Instead, I observed my sister, who remained oblivious to me, to the smell—possibly even worse in the kitchen—and to the harsh static of the radio on the counter. Her thick strawberry-blond hair was in its customary braid down her back, her checked dress, while “new” to my eyes, was likely some discard she’d found at a tag sale. Her feet were, as usual, bare and caked with dirt. When we were young, Gigi had called Susannah the “child of light” because of her hair, not to mention her sunny personality. Which I supposed made me the child of darkness.