Summer Rental (3 page)

Dorie always trailed a wake of would-be boyfriends, so they’d traveled in a pack, cruising the beach road in Julia’s mother’s big Fleetwood Caddy. It hadn’t mattered that Ellis didn’t have her own boyfriend. The Caddy was white with a moonroof and the fifth tire mounted on the trunk, a total pimp car, which they all thought screamingly hysterical—that Julia’s churchgoing mother drove a pimpmobile. They loved the Fleetwood because it could fit six or seven people on its big leather bench seats. They’d roll the windows down and blast their favorite song, screaming the tagline—“
WHOOMP, There It Is!”—over and over again, and the Fleetwood would rock with the heavy bass beat.

They’d dance at a club whose name Ellis had long since fo
rgotten, but she could still remember the boy she’d met and danced with all night long the last summer weekend before her sophomore year of college. His name was Nick, and he went to Boston College, and she’d gladly let him grope her while they swayed to “I Swear,” and she’d allowed herself to fantasize that it was Nick who was promising—by the moon and the stars above—to love her forever. Then school had started, and he’d e-mailed a couple of times, and then nothing.

Ellis looked down at the iPhone. She opened an e-mail window and typed in the address:

[email protected].

Dear Mr. Culpepper. I realize that my group’s check-in time for Ebbtide technically isn’t until 2 p.m. today, but I find myself in the area earlier than planned, and wonder if it would be possible to have access to the house any earlier. Say around noon? I’d be totally grateful. Sincerely, Ellis Sullivan.

She pushed the send button and a moment later heard the soft whooshing noise that notified her the message had been sent. Not for the first time, she pictured Mr. Culpepper as a wizened but kindly old duffer. She imagined him in a faded but starched Hawaiian shirt, with knobby knees protruding below madras Bermuda shorts, and wearing high black socks and beat-up sandals. His face would be weathered, his head nearly bald. He would take an instant liking to her and the girls, calling them “sweetheart” and “dearie.”

She couldn’t wait to meet Mr. Culpepper in person.

3

Maryn drove south, switching between the interstate and winding back roads, with no specific destination in mind. Away. That was the only place she knew she was going. Away from her home, what little family she had left. Away from Biggie; that one really hurt. But there was nothing she could do about that. She could still see Biggie’s melting brown eyes watching as she rushed around the house, throwing her things in a duffle bag. He’d followed her from room to room, and then, when she was about to leave, he’d met her at the back door, his red leather leash in his mouth, convinced they were go
ing to the dog park.

It broke her heart to leave Biggie behind. She told herself the aging golden retriever would be all right. He would never harm Biggie, not even to get back at her. He adored Biggie, had raised him from a puppy. Biggie had been there before her, and he would be there after her. Wouldn’t he? Anyway, the main thing was that she had to get away. From him. And that meant leaving Biggie behind.

Thinking of him, she twisted the diamond solitaire on her ring finger. She’d wanted to fling it at him so many times, tell him yes, he’
d bought her with it, but he’d gotten the deal of a lifetime. She’d almost left it behind, along with her other belongings. But at the last second, she decided she would keep wearing it, a reminder—as if she needed one—of how easily and cheaply she’d sold herself to the devil.

Maryn glanced down at her arm. Her sleeve hid them, but she could still feel the bracelet of ugly purple bruises on her left forearm. Another reminder of the real Don Shackleford. The bruises would fade, she knew, but she doubted she would ever forget his icy rage, the way he’d so easily clamped a hand around her arm—squeezing until she’d cried out in agony, his expression never changing as he told her exactly what he’d do to her if he ever caught her snooping around in his private business again.

“I’ll bury you,” he’d said, a strange light coming into his pale blue eyes. “Someplace where you’ll never be found. Nobody will even know you’re missing until it’s too late. Not Adam, not your mother, nobody will know what happened, where Maryn has gone.” He’d smiled at the thought of that. A moment later, he’d released her arm, but not before bending his head to her forearm and tenderly kissing the angry red welts he’d left there.

By the time she heard his Escalade roar out of the driveway, she’d already started planning her escape.

She locked the front door and ran to her bedroom. When she retrieved the money from the Ugg boots at the back of her closet, she was startled to discover that she’d amassed nearly six thousand dollars. Her seed money was twenty-seven hundred dollars in winnings from an April trip to Atlantic City, money she’d won at blackjack, and which she’d told Don she’d spent on clothes and shoes. Lying to him came easily to her and didn’t seem wrong. The rest of the money was added in spurts: a twenty picked up from the wad of bills Don tossed on his dresser at night, a hundred saved back f
rom the money she told him she needed for a new jacket, five hundred dollars realized when she exchanged the ridiculously expensive (and ugly) watch he’d given her for her birthday for a more suitable model.

Maryn couldn’t say why she’d been squirreling away those twenties and fifties. Was it really for that Hermès Kelly bag she’d been eyeing, or was it more the vague memory of her mother’s cynical advice, del
ivered with a cigarette dangling from colorless lips? “A woman always needs to have her own money. Always. Get-outta-town money.”

Thank God for the one good piece of advice her mama had given her. The packing hadn’t taken long. Twenty minutes? She’d changed blouses, putting on a long-sleeved silk top to hide the bruises on her arm. So here she was, back on the road. Again.

How long had she been driving? Her eyes burned with exhaustion, her arms and shoulders ached. She should stop soon. Stop for sleep. For food, although her stomach roiled at the thought of eating.

She’d crossed the Virginia line, saw that she was in North Carolina now. The sun was coming up. She flipped the Dior sunglasses down over her eyes and squinted at a billboard advertising a place called The Buccaneer, a motel on Nags Head.

Nags Head. Her parents had taken her to Nags Head the summer after her father was transferred to Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She’d been what, twelve? They’d stayed in a tiny motel, right on the beach, and her father took her fishing on the pier, just the two of them. The motel had a pool and a little coffee shop, and they’d eaten out every night, a real treat. One night they’d played putt-putt golf, another time they rode bumper cars in an amusement park.

Had that been the last happy summer? The divorce came a year later. Just as she was settling into her new school. Not that she’d made many friends there. She’d been a goofy-looking kid, all knees and elbows, with hair the color of dirty dishwater and a head too big for her body. Maryn had been appalled when she became the first girl in her sixth-grade class to need a bra. Her mother, of course, had celebrated this fact by buying Maryn the tightest-fitting tank top she could find. “If you got it, flaunt it,” Mama told her. To avoid a fight, Maryn wore the tank, but topped it with a
baggy shirt the minute she left the house for school.

She’d just started cracking the social code of her new school when Mama loaded her into the faded blue Buick that May and announced they were going to visit Aunt Patsy in New Jersey. “If you think I’m stayin’ in this godforsaken excuse of a town while your daddy parades around with that whor
e girlfriend of his, you’ve got another think coming,” Mama said, throwing the car into reverse and slamming into the mailbox at the end of the driveway. She didn’t even stop to look at her crumpled rear fender.

Visit? How about move in with her mother’s older sister, Aunt Patsy, a part-time hairdresser and full-time alcoholic? By fall, Maryn had emerged from puberty and entered junior high, two inches taller, wearing a B cup, tight-fitting new acid-washed Jordache jeans, and a glamorous blond hairdo courtesy of Aunt Patsy. Also by fall, Maryn’s mother had joined Aunt Patsy at the hair salon—and the liquor store.

Maryn’s first few weeks of junior high had been a triumph. A petite brunette named Brooke sat in front of her in homeroom and took pity on the new girl, inviting her to sit at the cool girls’ table at lunch. She’d gotten invited to sleepovers and skating parties and spent hours on the phone with Brooke every night, rehashing who-likes-who, with her mother and aunt relishing every second of Maryn’s newfound popularity.

In October, she’d gotten invited to her first boy-girl function: a Halloween party. The invitation threw her mother and Aunt Patsy into a frenzy of sewing and thrift-store shopping. On the appointed night, Maryn slithered into Heather Palumbo’s basement rec room dressed in a towering black wig and a flowing, long-sleeved black sheath with a deeply plunging neckline. Her face had been whitened with pancake makeup, her eyes rimmed and outlined with stark black liner, her lips lacquered bloodred, matching her inch-long fake red fingernails.

All these years later, Maryn could still remember the impact her entry had on the party. Brooke and Heather and Colleen, dressed in ’50s-era poodle skirts, bobby socks, and letter sweaters, gathered in a circle around her, staring at her as though she’d just been beamed down from another planet. “What are you supposed to be?” Colleen demanded, hands on hips.

“You know,” Maryn said, taken aback. “Elvira. Mistress of the Dark. Like from TV?”

“You look,” Heather sneered, “like a prostitute.”

Maryn’s cheeks burned with shame. She’d slipped upstairs to try to call
her mother and ask her to come pick her up early, but Mama and Patsy had dropped her off and headed straight to Harlow’s, their favorite bar.

When Maryn got back to the basement, she’d found that the girls had turned on her. The boys, however, had been a different story. They’d swarmed around her, laughing and talking too loud, bringing her Cokes and asking her to dance. In what seemed like an instant, she’d simultaneously become both the belle of the ball and the school skank—depending on your gender.

If Brooke and Colleen quit calling, Alex and Nathan and Jordan (an eighth-grader) took up the slack. At first, Maryn was devastated at the loss of Brooke’s friendship. But her mother and aunt reveled in her sudden status as a femme fatale.

“You don’t need those silly little bitches,” Aunt Patsy advised. “Every single one of them is jealous of you because you’re cuter and the boys like you better than them.” As the weeks and months passed, and it became clear that she held a surprising new power over the opposite sex, Maryn decided she liked boys just fine.

Not that she didn’t miss having a best girlfriend. When Aunt Patsy lost her job at the Stylesetter Salon at the beginning of Maryn’s sophomore year of high school, forcing them to move to a smaller rental house in a different school district, Maryn made a conscious decision to reinvent herself.

Before school started that year, Maryn hung out at the mall, studying what the other girls were wearing. She bought button-fly Levi’s 501 jeans and pastel Gap tees, quit bleaching her hair, and toned down her makeup.

And for what? Despite her best efforts, Maryn found herself frozen out of the cliques and circles in her new school. So when Wesley Bates, the cute, dumb jock who was her chemistry lab partner, asked her out for the third Saturday in a row, Maryn had finally agreed to go, even though she’d heard through the school grapevine that Wesley was supposedly dating a girl named Janelle Rivenbark.

One date. She’d gone out with Wes exactly once, but to Janelle Rivenbark and her coven, that had been more than enough to seal her fate. The next Monday, she’d found hate notes stuffed into her locker. Every night, there
were crank phone calls and hang ups. Bags of flaming dog poop were left on her doorstep, her mother’s car was egged, her aunt’s yard festooned with toilet paper on a weekly basis.

“Screw ’em,” her mother advised, and finally, Maryn had come to the same conclusion. From that point on, Maryn made her own rules. She was never without at least one boyfriend and wasn’t shy about stealing a boy, especially if his previous girlfriend was friends with Janelle Rivenbark.

All the while, her mama and Aunt Patsy cheered her on, living vicariously through her romantic conquests. No matter how late she came in on a Friday or Saturday night, her mother waited up, eager to rehash the night’s events.

Thinking of her mother now made Maryn wince. When had they last talked—three, four months ago? Maryn’s eyelids drooped, then fluttered. She had to get off the road. She hit the button to open her window, let in some fresh air. Nags Head, she decided. She would stop in Nags Head. It was far enough away from New Jersey. Far enough away from him.

4

Ty Bazemore went around to the back of the house and tried the doorknob. Good. It was locked. God knows, there was nothing really valuable in the house, but it was better to make sure about stuff like this.

He unlocked the door and stepped inside the kitchen. “Christ!” he muttered, looking around. The place was a disaster. Dirty pots and pans were piled in a sink full of sludgy gray water. Every dish in the house seemed to be piled on the countertop. The trash can in the corner was overflowing with empty beer cans and wine bottles, and there was a distinct fishy smell.

He peered down into a pot that had been left on the stove top. Yup. It was full of shrimp peels, and it had been there a day or two. He picked up the pot and went to dump it out, and for the first time, noticed the slurping sound his flip-flops were making on the linoleum floor.

He looked down and lifted his right heel slightly. The flip-flop stuck to the floor.

“Fuckin’ college punks,” he said aloud.

He should have known better. The e-mail address for their reservation had been [email protected]. The VRBO and Craigslist a
ds clearly stated that rental of the house was restricted to adults. But Cooter and company had paid for a week in advance, and the American Express card they’d paid with had gone through with no problem. He’d had a bad feeling about it from the start, but, hey, thirty-four hundred dollars was nothing to sneeze at, not these days.