Summer Rental (13 page)

“What the hell?” Julia said angrily. “Does she think we’re a bunch of thieves or something?”

“She said she’s used to living in the city, and that she won’t sleep at
night until she feels secure,” Dorie said. She looked over at Ellis. “Maybe you could ask Mr. Culpepper if it’s all right to get the locks put on? Tell him we’ll pay for it?”

“I can do that,” Ellis said. “But I really don’t want to let him know we’re subletting that third floor room. He’s already charging us an extra fifty dollars a week to use the garage. I’m afraid if he figures out what we’re doing, he’ll hit us up for even more money.”

“You’re right,” Julia said. “Just don’t even mention Madison. Just blame it on one of us. Tell him we’re paranoid or something.”

“That’s not far from the truth,” Ellis said. “I’m really not a scaredy-cat, but maybe when we get the locksmith in, should we ask him to put locks on our bedroom doors too?”

“Why would we do that?” Dorie asked. She took the bills from Julia, and stuffed them back into the cash envelope.

“Because,” Julia said slowly. “We’ve just invited a stranger into our midst, and we actually know virtually nothing about her. Did you guys notice how evasive she was when I asked her about herself? If she’s that interested in locking us out, maybe we need to start thinking about doing the same for ourselves.”

“Oh, Julia,” Dorie said, flushing. “That’s not fair! I mean, I know you were pissed that I rented the room out, but honestly, I think I know a little bit about people. Madison seems perfectly nice. Perfectly normal. She’s just a little shy. And she wants her privacy. What’s so scary about that?”

“Nothing scary to me,” Julia said. “But if she can drive a car that costs nearly fifty thousand dollars and carry a two-thousand-dollar pocketbook, which, by the way, is the real deal, doesn’t it seem a little odd to you that she wants to rent a crappy bedroom in a fairly crappy house? And that she’s willing to pay all this money to do it—sight unseen?”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to agree with Julia, it really does seem odd to me,” Ellis said.

“And I for one intend to keep my eyes and ears open around the woman,” Julia added. “There’s a lot more I’d like to know about this Madison.”

“I really don’t care why she wants to live here,” Dorie said. “All I care about is that now I don’t have to call my sister and grovel and beg her to pay her share for the house. So you guys can go ahead and lock your doors and play detective all you want. Just don’t chase her off. Okay?”

14

The cable was out. When they turned on the television after dinner, the screen was as gray and fuzzy as a discarded sweater.

Ellis reached for her iPhone. “I’m e-mailing Mr. Culpepper. Honestly, we get one thing fixed, and something else breaks down.”

“Why don’t you just call him?” Dorie asked.

“I don’t have his phone number,” Ellis said, typing away. “And he’s pretty cagey about letting me know where he lives, or believe me, I’d be camped out on his doorstep until he got everything here squared away.”

Julia poured herself another glass of wine and leaned back in her chair. “Don’t get your panties in a wad on my account. I could care less about watching television. Especially in the summertime.”

Ellis loaded up the dinner plates and silverware and dumped them into the deep sink she’d filled with soapy water before sitting down to dinner. This part of the summer, she noted happily, was going just as planned, especially now that they had Madison, and her money, contributing to their financial well-being. Madison had been there three days now, and turned down all their invitations to join them for dinner, explaining that she didn’t really “do” dinner.

She was, as Dorie had said, shy around them, spending most of her time in her room, with an occasional walk on the beach. The day after she’d moved in, she’d brought a bike home, and now, when she left the house, it was usually on her bike. Despite Julia’s dire predictions, nothing out of the ordinary had happened since Madison’s arrival.

She was odd, a loner, evasive when asked for personal information. Ellis had suggested that Madison was suffering from a broken heart, and Dorie seconded the emotion. “That ring of hers,” Julia had commented, “would go a long way towards healing my broken heart.”

“Come on, Ellis,” Dorie called now from the dining room. “Leave the dishes ’til later. I’m glad the television’s on the fritz. Let’s do something together. There’s a bunch of jigsaw puzzles here. Let’s work on one of those.”

“Suits me,” Ellis said.

“Ugh, jigsaw puzzles,” Julia said, making a face. “Why don’t we just put on our Supp-Hose and eat some stewed prunes while we’re at it? Come on, you guys, we’ve got to figure out something livelier than that. We’re not dead yet, are we?”

“I brought some DVDs,” Ellis started. “Or we could play a board game. What’s over there, Dorie?”

“Mmm, let’s see. Uno, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit. Oh, I know, cards. Let’s play five hundred, like we used to do at the beach at home.”

“Yeah,” Ellis said, getting up from the table. “Five hundred. Shuffle the cards, Julia. And I’ll make some popcorn.”

“Open another bottle of wine, while you’re at it,” Julia ordered. “And not that cheap crap, either. I put a nice bottle of pinot grigio in the fridge before dinner.”

*   *   *

Ty read the latest e-mail from Ellis Sullivan and laughed despite himself. Maybe she wasn’t wrapped quite as tightly as he’d thought.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Cable’s out

Dear Mr. Culpepper, Hate to pout, but our cable is out.—Ellis

Of course her cable was out. His cable was out too. He had a pile of past-due notices on his desk, and the disconnect warning was on the very top. He toyed with the idea of trying to bypass the cable box. A buddy had shown him how to do this back in his college days. But with his luck, he’d get caught and get his ass slammed in jail.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Cable

Dear Ellis: Please don’t have a hissy. I’ve called Comcast, but the line is busy.

Pleased with himself for this small accomplishment, he pushed the send button. And then he forwarded her latest missive to the file where he had kept all the rest of her e-mails. It was getting to be quite a collection.

Without television and the Nationals game he’d planned to watch, the evening stretched out before him seemed as empty and depressing as the silent television screen perched on the plastic milk crate in the corner of his living room.

He went to the fridge, got a beer, and walked out onto the deck. He slumped down onto a chair and stared out at the water. Must have been a good sunset, he mused, looking at the orange-and-purple-streaked sky. He’d missed it, of course, because he’d been online, searching for a way out of his predicament. That’s how he spent most of his time these days, looking for a way out of the hole he’d dug himself into. It was a hell of a note. He’d risked everything buying this place, desperately wanting to live on the ocean again. Now he had it—Ebbtide, perched right on the edge of the Outer Bank
s, and he might as well have been living in a cave for all the good it did him. He hadn’t surfed, hadn’t gone for a morning swim, hadn’t even caught a decent sunset—not in weeks.

There had to be a way out. But how?

He took a long pull on the beer bottle. He heard laughter and music coming from the direction of Ebbtide. If he stood at the far end of the deck, h
e could see into the dining room, bathed in the golden yellow light of the chandelier.

The three women were sitting around the table, playing cards. There was a wine bottle on the table, and half-filled glasses. The tall one, Julia, was talking rapid-fire, waving her hands for emphasis. The cute little strawberry blonde was giggling helplessly, running her fingers through her hair. Ellis, he noticed, seemed to be the scorekeeper. She was arguing, and smiling, and writing something on a pad of paper. Suddenly she looked up. Ty ducked instinctively. Had she seen him watching him? Nah. One of the women said something, and Ellis pelted her with a piece of popcorn, and no
w they were having a full-on popcorn fight, and their shrieks of laughter floated over the dune and out to sea.

The cards and the golden light and the silvery peals of laughter reminded him of summers past. The whole family was staying at Ebbtide, and his mother and grandmother were having a meeting of what they called “the swill sisters.” He’d been, what? Six? His father had to explain that these ladies were not really his mom’s sisters, but just a few old friends his mom had known since she was a girl, nearly his age.

His grandmother had spent the day of the swill sisters meeting feverishly baking little cookies and making egg-salad, pimento-cheese, and chicken-salad sandwiches, all cut into tiny, crustless triangles. His mother had fluffed and fussed and swept and scrubbed the old pine floors to a fine, dull gleam. A flowery tablecloth had been spread across the battered dining room table, and from the big cedar chest that sat in the hall under the stairs, a set of gold-rimmed, rose-strewn dishes and delicate pink wineglasses he’d never seen before were produced.

At six o’clock, his grandmother had banished them. “No boys allowed,” she’d said, laughingly pushing them out the door. So he and his dad had walked down the road to the pizza parlor, where they’d slowly eaten a large pie and watched the Braves game on the television mounted on the wall over the bar. His dad had beer, and he’d given Ty a sip, warning him not to tell “the womenfolk.”

When they’d walked back home, the sandy driveway was stil
l filled with cars, so he’d waited by the kitchen door, and his father had tiptoed into the house, emerging a moment later with a paper napkin filled with the little cookies and cakes, and a can of root beer for Ty.

“Contraband,” his dad had called it in a conspiratorial whisper. They took their stolen treats and went to the garage apartment. Back then, they still called the apartment Tillie’s house, because it was where his grandmother’s maid, Tillie, and her three children lived every summer when they came down to the beach from his grandmother’s big house in Edenton.

Ty had only a vague memory of Tillie, a slight, stoop-shouldered black lady who colored her hair bright red, chewed gum nonstop, and wore what looked to him like a white nurse’s uniform. He did remember how Tillie put ice in her coffee in the morning, and how she liked to boss his mother around. But Tillie had quit coming to the beach in the ’80s, because, as his father reported, she wanted to be paid a living wage, “and your grandmother, bless her heart, is tight as a tick.”

So Tillie’s house had become a place to store unused furniture and an overflow of houseguests. The night of the swill sisters meeting, his father dragged two rickety wooden chairs out to the deck, and they’d sat there and gorged on desserts. They could see his grandmother and his mother and a gaggle of women, arrayed around the gussied-up dining room table. Music was playing, and some of the ladies were playing a card game, and everybody was laughing and having a real party.

Ty had been mesmerized by the glimpse of his mother and his usually dignified grandmother, acting like the girls in his class at school. “What are they talking about?” he’d asked his father, who was leaning with his back against the deck railing. “What’s so funny?”

“Who, them?” Ty’s father glanced in the direction of the big house and shrugged. “Son, there ain’t no telling what’s on a woman’s mind. You get a bunch of hens together like that, and all bets are off. They might be talking about shoes or clothes. Or they might be talking about whoever’s not there tonight. Probably they’re talking about how sorry somebody’s husband is. Doesn’t really matter. ’Cause even if you and me were right in there with ’em, we probably wouldn’t understand what’s so funny. Not in a million years.”

*   *   *

“Rummy!” Ellis shouted jubilantly, slapping the cards faceup on the table.

“Oh no, not again,” Dorie said. She fanned her own cards for the others to see. “You caught me holding a handful of aces and kings. Again.” She ticked her fingertips across the cards. “That gives me, like, minus sixty.”

“I’m at forty,” Julia reported, laying down her own cards. “Where’s that put us, Ellis?”

“Hmmm. I’m at 485. Julia, you’re at 410. And Dorie, honey, you’re at 220.”

“I’m hopeless,” Dorie said, yawning. “And tired. It’s what, nearly midnight? I think I’m gonna take myself off to bed.”

“Not yet,” Ellis protested. “It’s still early. And you could still have a comeback. Come on, Dorie, don’t go to bed yet. Not when we’re having so much fun. Hey, what about some ice cream? I’ve got Fudgsicles in the freezer.”

“Chocolate?” Dorie raised an eyebrow. “Well, why didn’t you say so? I may suck at cards, but I’m grrreeatttt at chocolate.”

“You didn’t always suck at cards,” Julia observed. “You used to whip us all single-handed. I never saw anybody who could memorize cards like you, Dorie.”

Dorie pushed her hair back from her face. “My mind’s not in it,” she said lightly. “I’m having a blonde spell. A strawberry-blonde spell.”

“What
is
on your mind?” Julia asked. Ellis shot her a warning look, but Julia never took her own eyes from Dorie.

“Oh, you know,” Dorie said. “Money. Work. The usual stuff. Never mind me. I’ll be better once Ellis hands out those Fudgsicles she’s bribing me with.”

“Dorie?” Julia slid her chair over so that it was beside her friend’s. “Come on, girlfriend. We know something is upsetting you.”

“Julia!” Ellis said. “You promised.”

Julia shrugged. “I lied. Now, come on, Dorie. Out with it.”

Dorie’s face paled. She swept all the cards on the table into a pile, and busied herself rebuilding the deck. “I’m that obvious?” she asked, looking from Julia to Ellis.

“No poker face at all,” Ellis said, taking a seat on Dorie’s other side. “But you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“It’s Stephen, isn’t it?” Julia broke in, ignoring Ellis’s glare.

“Oh God,” Dorie whispered. “Yes. Stephen…” A single tear slid down her face. She bit her lip. “Stephen and I … God. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t even make myself say it.”