“Well, she made a good point. My mother, I’m sure, was afraid of having any more children after Polly and I were born, fearing that another child might have Down’s syndrome. Mom would have been in her late forties by then, so if she had been pregnant, that would have been a realistic concern. Mrs. Wheeler suggested that my mother might have gotten pregnant and decided that leaving the baby on the beach was the way to go.”
“I don’t remember your mother all that well, but I can’t imagine her doing something like that,” Daria said.
“I don’t know,” Rory said. He unlocked his hands from behind his head, and leaned his elbows on his knees, looking out to sea.
“It’s been bothering me all day,” he said.
“She did have some psychological problems later on in her life. I didn’t think she had them then, but maybe they were already brewing. I mean, someone did it. Someone was a little crazy that night. I guess it could have been my mother as well as anyone else.”
He sounded despondent, and Daria rested her hand lightly on his back. The gesture felt awkward and alien to her, but it was the sort of thing he would do, and she knew how good it felt to be comforted that way. It was the least she could do for him—or the least she was willing to do, at any rate. She had the ability to put his doubts to rest, completely and forever, but there was no way she could tell him what she knew. “What would you do if you found out that it was Polly or your mother?” she asked.
“Would you still do the story?” “Are you kidding?” He turned his head to look at her.
“No way.”
“Then I’m asking you,” she said gently, “to remember that the woman you’re trying to expose might also be someone else’s sister or someone else’s mother, and people can be hurt by the information you uncover.”
Rory studied his bare feet. She could not see his face.
“Most likely it was Cindy,” she continued, “and she probably has a family who would be devastated by learning about Shelly. You need to” — “Oh,” Rory interrupted her, sitting up straight again.
“I found out where Cindy is.” “You did?” This was news Daria did not want to hear. “Right. The Wheelers said she lives up in Corolla with her husband and kids.”
“I didn’t know that.” Daria had no idea Cindy still lived in the Outer Banks. “Are you going to talk with her?”
“Absolutely,” Rory said.
“I’d get on it right now, if it weren’t for the storm coming up. But I figure I’d better spend tomorrow battening down the hatches.”
“Good idea,” Daria said, still shaken by the news about Cindy. It had been easy to pin the blame on Cindy when she was little more than a hazy figure from the past. Knowing that she was a living, breathing woman just up the coast a few miles was something else again.
1 he lumberyard smelled of wood and worry as Rory and Zack fought their way through the crowd. Everyone was buying sheets of plywood to cover the windows of their vulnerable homes, and Rory overheard many of them grumbling about ruined vacations, lost revenue from their rental properties and how long it was going to take to drive over the bridge to escape the Barrier Islands.
He and Zack tied the plywood to the top of the Jeep, then headed back to the cul-de-sac. The sky was still clear, the sea still calm, when they reached Poll-Rory. Across the street, Daria and Chloe were closing the storm shutters on the Sea Shanty, and Rory waved to them as he and Zack unloaded the plywood. They rested it against the side of the cottage facing the ocean, near the windows most in need of protection, then Rory went into the cottage to get a couple of hammers and some nails.
The phone rang as he was pulling the toolbox from the storage closet.
He’d left a phone message for Cindy Trump about the possibility of getting together in a couple of days, and he figured she was returning his call. He picked up the receiver. “Rory?” It was Grace. He had not spoken to her since the other night, when he’d confronted her with her lies. He was glad to hear her voice.
“Hi, Grace,” he said.
“Are you getting ready to evacuate down there?”
She hesitated.
“That’s why I was calling,” she said. “Eddie—my husband—and I usually go to a hotel on the mainland, but I can’t go with him. I just can’t.” Her voice quivered.
“Maybe it would be good,” Rory said, although he would rather she were with him. “Maybe the two of you need some enforced time together.”
“I don’t want to be anywhere near him,” she said. She hesitated a moment. “I wanted to find out where you were going to be,” she added.
“Zack and I are getting a room in a motel in Greenville,” he said.
“We’re leaving early tomorrow morning.”
“Is that … is that where Daria will be, too?”
“Yes. And Chloe and Shelly.”
“Do you think it’s too late for me to get a room there? Would you mind if I’m there?”
Maybe she was ready to talk with Daria about her daughter’s death, he thought. Maybe that’s why she’d asked if Daria was going to be there.
He didn’t want to deprive her of that opportunity. “Of course not,” he said. “But it’s so far for you to” — “I want to, Rory.”
“All right.” He heard hammering on the side of the cottage and was surprised that Zack would start covering the windows without him. He gave her the name and phone number of the motel.
“I’ll see you there,” he said.
Daria handed her hammer to Zack, and while she and Chloe held the sheet of plywood in place, Zack pounded nails into the woodwork. Rory walked out of the cottage, and she saw the surprise in his face at finding her and Chloe there.
“Hey, thanks,” he said, helping her lift another sheet of wood in place. He looked toward the ocean, and she followed his gaze. The sea was glassy and calm, and the blue sky was reflected in the water. It was still hard to imagine that something foreboding lurked beyond the horizon.
Rory shook his head.
“Are you sure we’re not wasting our time with this?” he asked her.
“Unfortunately, I’m sure,” she said.
“The storm is picking up speed as it heads this way,” Chloe said.
Chloe was merely being neighborly, coming over to help Rory with the windows. Daria knew the gesture changed nothing about her ill feelings toward him.
“I just can’t believe the ocean could get up as far as our cottage,” Zack said.
The sheet of plywood in place, Daria lowered her arms to her sides and faced Zack. “When your dad and I were little, there was a cottage right there.” She pointed to the sea-oat-covered sand where Cindy Trump’s cottage had once stood.
“A storm swept it away. It could make our cottages disappear just as easily.”
“Scary,” Zack said.
“Yes, indeed,” Daria said. Her stomach still had that unsettled, agitated feeling that always dogged her when a storm was heading to Kill Devil Hills, but she knew her anxiety was nothing compared to Shelly’s. Backing away from the windows for a moment, she stood at the edge of Poll-Rory’s porch, looking north and south along the beach.
Shelly was out there somewhere, walking. She’d grown very quiet and pensive over the last twenty-four hours, and Daria knew it was not the storm itself that terrified her; it was the prospect of leaving her beloved Outer Banks.
“Does everybody have to leave?” Zack asked as he helped Chloe lift another sheet of plywood against the cottage.
“Is that what they mean by ‘mandatory’?”
“They always say ‘mandatory,” ” Chloe said.
“But what it really means is, if you stay behind, you’re on your own.
There might be no services available to help you in an emergency. “
“Does anyone stay?” Zack asked.
“There are always people who think they’re being brave to stay behind,” Chloe said, “but they’re really being foolish. Some of the emergency workers will still be here, but even they—the sheriff’s department and the ambulances-aren’t allowed on the streets once the wind hits sixty miles per hour. It’s too dangerous.”
Daria and Rory hammered the plywood into place, and when they stood back from their work, Rory looked at her.
“Grace is planning to meet us at the motel,” he said.
She wondered if her disappointment showed on her face.
“Why would she come all the way to Greenville?” she asked.
“Well” — Rory stepped back from the window to admire their work “—two reasons, I think. One, she doesn’t want to be with her husband. And two, I think she wants to talk with you. She asked me specifically if you would be there.”
Great, Daria thought. Once on the mainland, she would have to worry not only about the fate of the Sea Shanty and the well-being of her anxious, phobic sister, but she would have to answer Grace’s questions about an accident she could not honestly discuss.
Rory must have picked up her dismay. “Maybe I should have told her not to come,” he said.
“It’ll be all right,” Daria said, and she helped Zack lift the next sheet of plywood into place.
That night they packed their suitcases, carried Daria’s tools into the cottage from the first-story workroom and brought the porch furniture inside. Shelly threw up half the night, and Daria felt nearly as sick.
Early the following morning, she sat up in bed and looked out the window toward the ocean. The waves were distinctly swollen and frothy, the sea oats blew nearly parallel to the sand, and the sky was low and thick with bloated gray clouds. Even in her room, Daria felt that shift in the atmosphere that was so hard to describe but so clearly an indicator that the storm was well on its way. The air seemed to lack oxygen; it was hard to breathe.
She dressed quickly and went downstairs, where Chloe was making a fruit salad for breakfast.
“Where’s Shelly?” Daria asked. Shelly was usually first up in the morning and her absence sent an instant chill up Daria’s spine.
“I haven’t seen her,” Chloe said.
“I told her last night that she should be ready to leave by eight this morning.”
It was already seven-thirty.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Daria said.
Chloe looked up from the peach she was slicing.
“Maybe she’s on the beach,” she suggested.
“One last chance to gather shells before the storm.”
“I’m going upstairs to see if she’s at least packed.” With a mounting sense of dread, Daria climbed the stairs. Her knock on Shelly’s door was not answered, and she went into the room. Shelly’s bed was neatly made, but there was no sign of a suitcase. Maybe she hadn’t packed yet. Then Daria spotted the note taped to the mirror above Shelly’s dresser. She moved closer to read it.
Go on without me, it read. ‘/ be all right.
Daria and Chloe set off in one direction on the beach, while Rory and Zack headed in the other.
“If Shelly’s out here, we’ll find her,” Rory had reassured her. Daria had alerted them to Shelly’s disappearance after combing the Sea Shanty from top to bottom. She’d looked in the work room, the closets and under the beds, but Shelly was no where to be found. Pete had been right, she thought. Shelly’s judgment was atrocious. She needed more super vision than Daria was able to give her.
There were still a few hearty souls on the beach, dressed in windbreakers, their hair whipping around their heads as they stared out to sea to watch the sky darken and the water chum. Daria and Chloe didn’t speak as they walked. It was too difficult; the wind threw their words back in their faces. Even walking itself was a chore, and it distressed Daria to think that Shelly might be out here some where, expecting to weather the storm alone on the beach. But by the time she and Chloe had thoroughly scoured the beach to the south, and Rory and Zack to the north, Daria was convinced her sister was not on the beach, after all. Those few people who had been out to watch the storm’s approach had disappeared as well by then, wisely heeding the warnings to leave the Outer Banks.
She searched the Sea Shanty once again, checking the nooks and crannies, peering inside her car and Chloe’s car and Rory’s Jeep. It was close to noon, and Jill and her family, Linda, Jackie and the dogs had long since left the cul-de-sac.
Only the Wheelers remained, and they were packing up their minivan and station wagon, filling them with suitcases and kids.
Daria stood on the bare porch with Rory, a well of frustration in her chest. Her hair was thick and woolly as it blew around her face, and she tightened her windbreaker across her chest.
“You and Zack need to get out of here,” she said to Rory.
“What are you going to do?” Rory asked.
“I’m not leaving until I find her,” Daria said. She felt the quivering of her chin, betraying her worry, and Rory reached out to squeeze her arm.
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