Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

So there remained the mystery: What happened?

Demeter’s phone buzzed in her hand. She was confused until she realized that a text was coming in at that very moment. She checked: it was from Jake. It said, R u awake?

Demeter was spooked. It was as if he could see her, but of course he couldn’t see her, she was walking down a deserted dirt road toward the ocean.

It occurred to her to ask him to meet her there.

Bad idea. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone.

The Alistair house wasn’t a real house. It was a summer cottage that Zoe had done a middling job of winterizing. It sat on the bluff overlooking Miacomet Beach, which made it a great place to live in the summer. It had a wide deck and a huge outdoor shower and a staircase down to the beach. There were sliding glass doors off the great room, and the whole place would be filled with light and the smell of Zoe’s cooking. But in the winter, the doors rattled in the wind. Demeter’s father sent someone over every year to help Zoe shrink-wrap them in plastic. Zoe kept the woodstove burning, but the house was always cold. The cottage consisted of two parts. The great room was the public part, living room, dining room, and kitchen, with a powder room. The private part was the three bedrooms-Hobby’s, Penny’s, and Zoe’s-and a full bath that the three of them shared. Demeter had slept over at the cottage numerous times as a child and had felt uncomfortable sharing a bathroom with an adult. At her house, her parents had a suite, she had a suite, and her brothers had the whole third floor to themselves. She couldn’t imagine using the same toilet as her mother-and yet that was what Penny did, every single day. In later years Penny had talked about sharing makeup and tampons and toothpaste with her mother, and she’d talked about how Hobby stank up the bathroom in the mornings, and Demeter had shuddered, while at the same time experiencing awe and wonder at how closely the three of them coexisted. It seemed indecent somehow. Demeter had once asked her mother if the Alistairs were poor, and Lynne had laughed and said, “Heavens, no! Beachfront property? Any idea how much Zoe paid for that place? A fortune. She could sell it for double that now and buy a mansion on Main Street. But she won’t. Zoe adores her ocean view. It makes her feel free. And God knows, Zoe likes to feel free.”

The Alistair cottage was dark. Thank God: Demeter had imagined it surrounded by cruisers, crisscrossed in yellow police tape, and encircled by Claire Buckley and company, all holding candles and singing “Kumbaya.” Demeter held out her phone to illuminate the sandy path that led through the eelgrass to the Alistairs’ front door.

Just like Demeter’s own house, the Alistair cottage was never locked, and so Demeter walked right in. It smelled like fresh basil and, under that, onions and garlic. Zoe was always cooking something delicious. Demeter debated turning on a light, then decided against it. She used her phone to negotiate her way into the kitchen. She saw the herb garden Zoe kept on the slate countertop, and a bowl of shrunken peaches covered with fruit flies. There were books and papers all over the counter, there was a wine glass in the sink, and Demeter imagined Zoe sitting out on her back deck the week before, enjoying the warm night air and the stars and the sound of the waves hitting the beach. She would have been thinking about the twins’ becoming seniors; she would have been remembering how beautifully Penny had sung the National Anthem during graduation.

Demeter opened the fridge. There was three quarters of a bottle of chardonnay. Demeter lifted the bottle, her hands shaking-not in fear but in anticipation.

She drank.

She was in the Alistairs’ house, drinking Zoe’s wine. What is wrong with you, Demeter Castle? she asked herself. But she knew the answer:

Everything.

The Chief had asked, “Can you tell me what happened?”

She was dead. Penny. His girlfriend. “Girlfriend” was insufficient; he was a wordsmith, he could do better. His lover. No, his beloved. His Juliet, his Beatrice, his Natasha, his Daisy Buchanan. What did it matter what had happened when Penny-the Penelope to his Ulysses-was dead?

Dead. He let out something between a cackle and a scream, and as he watched the features of the Chief’s face soften, then harden, he could see the Chief wishing that he would act like a man, and he wanted to grab the front of the Chief’s sweatshirt and say, “I am seventeen years old, and the girl I’ve loved for fourteen of those seventeen years-since I was old enough to think and feel-is dead. She died right next to me.”

The Chief cleared his throat and started again. “Had Penelope been drinking?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“You were… where tonight? Where did you start out?”

Jake glared at the Chief. “Why are you interrogating me?” This was brutality, wasn’t it, a barrage of questions like this? This was the Chief abusing his power. Jake’s father had talked about the police overstepping their bounds because it was a small island and they could occasionally get away with it. The Chief and Jordan Randolph had had their differences; there was bad blood over some political thing or another.

The Chief said, “Listen to me, young man, I know you’re hurting. And I’ve been there myself. I lost my best friends, three years ago now, lifelong friends, and now I’m raising their children. I know this is difficult. It may be the most difficult thing you ever do, let’s pray that it is, but I have to try and piece together what happened tonight.” He pressed his lips together until they turned white. “It’s my job to figure out what caused this accident.”

Jake lowered his eyes to his jeans. Penny had written on his jeans in ballpoint pen-a heart containing their initials. She had written on every pair of jeans he owned, and she had written on his T-shirts with Sharpies and on the white rubber of his sneakers, and she had written on his palms. I love you, Jake Randolph. You are mine, I am yours. Forever. It was old-fashioned, better than a text message, she said, more visible: he couldn’t just delete it. If he wanted the markings gone, he would have to scrub. But he didn’t want them gone, and especially not now. It was all he had left: the memory of the pen in Penny’s hand, drawing the heart, tickling his thigh.

“We started at Patrick Loom’s house,” Jake said. The Chief wrote that down, which was silly, because the Chief himself had been at Patrick Loom’s house and had seen Jake there. “Then we went to Steps Beach.”

“Who drove?”

“Me.”

“Why did you drive?”

“It was my Jeep.”

“But you’d been drinking.”

“At Patrick’s?” Jake made what Penny referred to as his “face.” Had the Chief seen him drinking, or was he just assuming? “Yes, sir, I had one beer at Patrick’s. But I was okay to drive.”

The Chief paused. Jake knew he could take issue with the beer he had drunk at the Looms’ house, but that wasn’t important now, was it? Or maybe it was. Jake couldn’t tell.

“Who threw the party at Steps?”

“I have no idea.”

“Please, Jake.”

“I have no clue.”

“Did you know anyone there?”

“I knew everyone there. It was a graduation party. The seniors were there. Probably they all kicked in money and found somebody to buy the keg.”

“Someone like who? David Marcy? Luke Browning?”

“You want to blame them, go ahead,” Jake said. David and Luke were trouble; Luke had an older brother named Larry who was doing time at Walpole for selling cocaine. “They were both there, but neither one of them was bragging about buying the keg. I don’t know who bought the keg.”

The Chief said, “Fair enough.”

Jake said, “I forgot. On the way to Steps we stopped to pick up Demeter Castle.”

“Where did you pick her up?” the Chief asked.

“At the end of her street.”

“At the end of her street? Not at her house?”

“Correct.” Did Jake need to state the obvious here?

“So she was sneaking out, then. Her parents didn’t know she was going out?”

“I didn’t ask her about that,” Jake said.

“And she had alcohol with her?” the Chief asked.

Jake felt relieved. He wasn’t ratting her out if the Chief already knew. “A bottle of Jim Beam.”

“Why did you pick up Demeter? Was it prearranged?”

“No, it was last-minute. She sent Penny a text message.”

“A text message.”

“Saying she had a bottle and she wanted to go out.”

“And for that reason, you went to pick her up. Because she had a bottle.”

“Well,” Jake said, “yeah, sort of.”

“So if she hadn’t texted saying she had a bottle, you wouldn’t have picked her up?”

“She texted saying, ‘Come pick me up,’ and we picked her up.”

“So you’re friends with her?”

“Sort of,” Jake said. “I mean, yes. I’ve known her my entire life. Our parents are friends. You know they’re friends. Why are you making me explain something you already know?”

“Who drank from the bottle?”

“Well, when we picked her up, it was already half gone. So it’s probably safe to say that Demeter had been drinking from the bottle. And then Hobby and I had some.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “A couple of swigs?”

“Did Penelope drink from the bottle?”

“No,” Jake said. “Penny didn’t drink. She didn’t like it. It made her sick.” Did he have to tell the Chief about the game of strip poker in tenth grade at Anders Peashway’s house, where they were drinking vodka and grape Kool-Aid and Penny puked into the Peashways’ clawfoot tub? “She had an incident a couple years ago and never drank again.”

“So what happened at Steps Beach?” the Chief asked.

Jake put his head in his hands. What had happened at Steps Beach? He wasn’t sure. He remembered swigging from Demeter’s bottle before they got out of the Jeep, he remembered taking off his shoes, he remembered trudging up over the dunes and seeing the orange blaze of the fire and hearing a Neon Trees song playing on somebody’s iPod, he remembered Penny in the sand next to him, she was drinking Evian water, always Evian water, it was soothing to her vocal cords, she said. She had to stay out of the path of the smoke from the fire, the smoke could harm her vocal cords, one cigarette or toke of marijuana could alter them forever.

At the party Penny had been in a fragile mood. She had been feeling fragile a lot lately, crying over things like graduation and how sad it was that the seniors were graduating and how scary it was that they themselves were now seniors and that this time next year it would be them graduating and leaving everyone behind. Penny was especially worried about leaving her mother. She and Zoe were best friends. After Penny lost her virginity to Jake, she had gone right home and climbed into bed with Zoe and told her everything.

Except lately, there had been things that Penny was telling only Ava.

“Like what?” Jake had asked her.

Penny had ignored this question, which infuriated Jake, though he realized that if there were things that she was telling only to his mother, then she wouldn’t be inclined to turn around and tell him what they were.

Penny had said, “I’ll be sad to leave Ava.”

And then-then!-Jake remembered another thing Penny had said:

“I just want to stay in this moment forever. Like in a bubble, you know? You and me and the fire, staring at the edge of adulthood but never quite reaching it.”

Jake repeated these words to the Chief, and the Chief wrote them down carefully, then cleared his throat. He opened his mouth to speak, and Jake thought, Don’t say it.

“What else do you remember about the party?” the Chief asked.

What else? Kids drinking, smoking cigarettes, smoking weed, pairing off and heading down the beach to make out, kids talking to Jake and Penny, asking them what they were going to do over the summer-Jake was working at the newspaper, Penny had a job hostessing at the Brotherhood, and the last three weeks before school started, she was going to music camp in Interlochen, Michigan. Jake and Penny had repeated these plans to half a dozen people. What Jake didn’t say was that he was planning on taking Penny away to Boston, where they were going to spend the night at the Hotel Marlowe, which would cost a fortune, but Jake had been saving his money for something spectacularly romantic, something that Penny would never forget, and that was what he’d come up with.

“We hung out,” Jake said. “And then we left.”

“Okay,” the Chief said, scooting his chair forward. This was what he’d been waiting for, of course, the details of their leaving. “So whose idea was it to leave?”