Killer Summer

And neither could her husband, apparently.

I shook off the thought, plowing on, trying not to notice how many of the blankets I passed contained cozy little couples. Trying not to remember that I might have been one of those cozy couples this summer.

When I came to a break in the line of houses near the end of Kismet, I knew I was in the right spot, recalling the loneliness of the dunes that night. I wondered, not for the first time, why this land didn’t have a house on it, since it was prime oceanfront. Realized if there was a house here, maybe someone might have witnessed what had happened that night on the beach.

I looked out into the tide once I was standing right about where I had found Maggie. I think half of me expected to find her still there, rolling in the waves, forgotten.

Of course, she wasn’t there. In fact, I was all too aware that there was nothing about this particular stretch of beach that might indicate a woman had died there two weeks before.

I stared out into the ocean, watching the waves rolling over one another in the distance, trying to imagine someone—well, Maggie—stepping into that inky darkness alone.

Unless she wasn’t alone.

Stepping closer to the tide, I watched the waves crash in the distance, mesmerized by the constancy of it. A memory washed over me of my father, pulling me through the waves, hands braced under my armpits as I screamed, not trusting him not to let me go. I guess that first instinct had been right.

The tide washed over my feet and I jumped.

Fucking cold!

What sane woman would willingly jump into the Atlantic Ocean in June?

It had been hot that day, I thought, beginning to walk back along the shore, remembering how I had spent the unseasonably warm day in Adelaide Gibson’s air-conditioned living room. I knew, too, that by evening the water would have been warmer, having been heated all day by the near ninety-degree temperature.

Okay, so it wasn’t that cold. Maggie was simply walking along the beach on her way back from Fair Harbor and decided to take a little dip. Yes, the queen of the tasteful beach cover-up had decided to drop her drawers and take a dive, just for the hell of it.

Yeah, she’d been drinking, according to all reports, but I just wasn’t buying it. It just didn’t make sense that she would have gone into the ocean at night alone. Didn’t she watch all those teen movies where people died doing the same thing? She seemed like such a reasonable person. In fact, almost too reasonable, from what I could see. She had to have been forced, I thought, remembering a damp and angry Tom chopping vegetables.

But even that was too much to fathom—Tom drowning his wife. Yet there was something about him that spooked me. Something in his indifference that made me wonder if he was capable of pushing his wife underwater. What kind of man faced his wife’s death without so much as a tear? Opened the very beach house he’d named in her honor the week after her funeral and was planning his annual Fourth of July bash as if the fact that neither Maggie nor her esteemed potato salad were going to be around didn’t faze him? I couldn’t help but think of Scott Peterson, cheerfully making plans with his new girlfriend days after he had murdered his wife and unborn child.

What kind of men were these?

“Zoe? Is that you?”

I turned, shocked to hear my name being called in a town where I knew virtually no one, and found myself face-to-face with a man I once knew better than myself.

“Myles?”

“Hey,” he said, jogging closer until he was standing before me, bare-chested, his sandy brown hair looking even sandier in the sun, his golden brown eyes on mine. Before I could sputter out my surprise, he was bussing my cheek with a kiss, as if we were old friends rather than a freshly severed couple. “So I see you decided to take that share after all,” he said, as if my presence on the beach were the surprising thing.

“Of course,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

He ducked his head shyly. “Well, some friends from law school had a house with an open share and, I dunno, at the last minute I figured, what the heck.”

What the heck? my brain echoed. “Oh,” was all I said.

“So how are you?”

As if he cared. “I’m fine. You?” Even as I asked, I found my eyes roaming over that hairless, perfectly carved chest. Yes, he was fine. In fact, Myles had been born fine, I thought, feeling suddenly resentful of his naturally athletic build.

“I’m doing okay,” he replied. “You know…”

I looked up into his eyes, saw the hesitation there, and realized that maybe things weren’t so fine with Myles. “Everything all right at home? How’s your mom? Your sisters?”

“Everyone’s good, good,” he said, bobbing his head a bit too merrily. “How about your mom?” he asked. “She okay?”

“She’s fine,” I said, suddenly feeling swamped by sadness. This was what we had come to. Polite questions and head nods. And separate summer shares. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to sob or smack him across the forehead for not caring enough to think of my feelings.

Maybe Myles sensed this—at least, I hoped he was somewhat aware of the grief his actions were causing me—because he said, “If I’d known you were going to be here, Zoe, I would have called. I just thought you’d given up on the whole idea. You said as much that night we…you know, decided to take a break.”

We decided? And if this was a break, no one told me. In fact, if I remembered correctly, Myles said he didn’t know if he was ready to take the next step. With me, anyway. I would have argued the point now, but something about his pensive gaze stopped me.

“Hey, if you’re here, then you must have been here the night—God, Zoe, did you take that share in Tom Landon’s house?” He reached out, taking my hand in his. “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

I looked into his eyes and saw the first genuine sympathy I’d seen from anyone yet, and Myles didn’t even know Maggie. “Yeah, me, too.”

“How’s the husband doing?”

“Fine,” I said, with a shrug, dropping my eyes to the sand, studying Myles’s feet, his long, even toes, already beginning to tan. “He’s here, too,” I said, looking up at Myles again. “This weekend.” I paused. “He’s out fishing as we speak.”

He nodded, his eyes on mine, assessing. Then he blew out a sigh. “The whole thing was just freaky, if you ask me.”