“Sarah! Sarah Conley. Sarah. Conley. Hawkins.” The voice in her ear was soft but persistent. “Come on now. Wake up.”
She rolled onto her stomach, but now someone was tapping her shoulder. Tap. “Sarah.” Tap. “Wake up.” Tap. “I’m not going away, so you’d best just get up so we can all get going.”
Conley groaned and sat up. Winnie stood by her bed with a steaming mug of coffee in her outstretched hand.
“That’s better. If you don’t get dressed and get downstairs right this minute, I swear your grandmother is going to finish loading the car and drive herself out to the beach, and ain’t nobody wants that,” Winnie said.
“What time is it?”
“It’s quarter ’til nine. Lorraine called me at seven, told me to get myself over here no later than eight.”
Conley took a sip of coffee and yawned.
“Late night?” Winnie raised an eyebrow.
“Too late,” Conley said as she headed toward the bathroom. “You can tell G’mama I said to hold her horses. I’m already packed. I’ll be downstairs in fifteen minutes, and then we can get started.”
Winnie was dragging the potted fern out the front door just as Conley reached the hallway.
“For Pete’s sake, Winnie. I’ll get that.” She sat her suitcase near the bottom step. “Where’s G’mama?”
“Been setting out in the car for ten minutes. You didn’t hear her honking the horn?”
“I was in the shower,” Conley said. She picked up the fern and steered her rolling suitcase out onto the front step and was greeted by a long blast from the Wagoneer’s horn.
Lorraine sat in the front seat, arms crossed over her chest, Opie draped across her lap.
Conley raised the Wagoneer’s hatch. Suitcases, coolers, garment bags, the television, and Opie’s dog bed took up the entire cargo area. She managed to shove the fern inside the dog bed, but there was not another spare inch in the car as far as she could see.
She sighed and shook her head, then turned back toward the house.
G’mama rolled down the window and stuck her head out. “Where do you think you’re going? It’s blazing hot in this car, and I’m not getting any younger, you know.”
Conley didn’t bother to answer. When she got back to the car, she used a pair of bungee cords to strap her own suitcase to the Wagoneer’s roof.
Lorraine sulked in silence for the first ten minutes of the drive.
Conley decided to ignore her grandmother and instead engaged in a friendly conversation with the housekeeper.
“How’re your nephews doing, Winnie?”
“Real good. Jesse, the youngest, got out of the army, and he’s back working at the auto body shop and driving their tow truck, says he’s fixing to buy the shop from old man Widener. Jason’s down in Tampa, working as a longshoreman at the port authority. And Jerry just got promoted to head teller at the bank. Everybody says he’ll be the next branch manager.”
“That’s amazing,” Conley said. “I know Nedra would be so proud of them, and grateful to you, for raising them into such successful young men.”
“Those boys gave me a run for my money, that’s for sure,” Winnie said.
“Not to mention a lot of gray hair,” Lorraine put in. “Same as you did me, staying out all hours of the night last night.”
Conley rolled her eyes but kept quiet.
“I almost called the sheriff’s office last night to ask them to put out an APB on you,” Lorraine said. “But then I finally fell asleep. What time did you actually come dragging home?”
“It was after three,” Conley admitted.
“Three o’clock in the morning? No wonder you’re a mess. Like I always used to tell your mother, nothing good happens after midnight. What kind of foolishness were you up to?”
“I went to the American Legion. You’ll never guess who I ran into there.”
“Nobody decent, I bet.”
“Skelly was there,” Conley said. “It’s all his fault. We got to talking and catching up.”
Lorraine’s face softened at the mention of Sean Kelly’s name. “I always did like that boy. Such a shame about Doc, and of course, now June.”
“What’s wrong with Skelly’s mother?” Conley said, alarmed. “Don’t tell me she died too. G’mama, you never said anything about Miss June dying.”
“Be better if she had passed,” Winnie put in. “Poor woman has dementia. I heard she thinks young Sean is her husband. You know he moved back home after that wife took off and left. He’s got a lady comes in and stays with Miss June, but still, that’s a boy loves his mama.”
“He didn’t mention anything about his mom,” Conley said sadly.
“Did he tell you he’s single again?” Lorraine asked eagerly.
“He mentioned it.”
“I never liked that girl,” Lorraine said. “She put Sean through hell and back, and then she up and leaves him again. He deserves better.” She gave her granddaughter a meaningful sidelong glance.
“Forget it, G’mama,” Conley said flatly. “Skelly’s like a brother to me. And I am definitely not interested in romance.”
“We’ll see about that,” Lorraine said. “But you still haven’t said what kept you out so late. I didn’t know there were any bars in town that stayed open ’til three.”
Conley exhaled slowly. They were approaching the turn onto the beach road. The memory of the previous night’s inferno came rushing back, and her stomach churned.
“There was a terrible one-car wreck on the county road, about fifteen miles out of town,” she said. “It must have happened right before we got there. An SUV had flipped completely upside down. As soon as we saw it, Skelly called 911, and we ran over and tried to get the driver out, but…” She shuddered at the memory. “We were too late. The engine was already smoking and the doors were locked, so we were trying to break one of the windows, but then flames were coming from under the hood, and the heat and smoke were so intense we had to back away.”
“Oh my Lord,” G’mama said. “How awful.”
“It really was,” Conley agreed. “There was nothing anybody could do. The firefighters got there as quickly as they could, but really, we knew it was too late.”
“Any idea who it was?” Lorraine asked. “Nobody we know, I hope.”
“Not sure. The car did have Griffin County tags, and there was also a country club parking decal on the windshield.”
Lorraine looked shocked. “What kind of car did you say it was?”
“A black Escalade. It looked pretty new.”
“I don’t really know one car from another these days,” G’mama admitted.
“An Escalade is a kind of Cadillac,” Winnie said.
“Did you call Grayson and let her know about the wreck?” G’mama asked.
“I didn’t get a moment’s peace this morning, because somebody was in such a hurry to leave for the beach, it was all I could do to swallow some coffee and strap my suitcase to the roof of the car,” Conley said. “Besides, I’m not sure Grayson wants to hear anything from me. We kinda had words yesterday when I went by the paper to tell her I was moving you out here today.”
“I’ll call her myself when we get to the Dunes.”
“Be my guest,” Conley said, adding as an afterthought, “I guess you could tell her I took some photos and some video of the wreck with my phone. Just in case she’s interested.”
“Oh!” G’mama said abruptly as they were passing through the island’s tiny business district. “Pull in here, Sarah.” She pointed at the island’s IGA. “Winnie and I need to get our groceries.”
“G’mama, we can’t fit as much as a stick of gum in this car right now. We’ll make a grocery run after we get unpacked.”
Five minutes later, she steered the Wagoneer onto Gulfview Lane, and a minute after that, she turned into the sandy driveway at the Dunes.
G’mama exhaled deeply and turned around in her seat to face Winnie. “The old girl’s still standing.”
“No thanks to that last hurricane,” Winnie said.
Conley was surprised to find herself blinking back tears as she surveyed the rambling old wood-frame house that had been the family’s summer home for the past sixty years.
The house had been built in the 1920s by a wealthy Birmingham department store owner who’d been one of Conley’s great-grandfather’s golf buddies. In the 1930s, after the man died suddenly, her great-grandfather agreed to buy the house, sight unseen, from the widow.
Hurricanes had buffeted this part of the Florida Panhandle for decades, but because the house was built on a section of beach that resembled a bite out of the curving coastline, it had somehow escaped the fate of other nearby Gulf-front homes.
The Dunes’s cedar-shingle exterior was painted a dark spruce green. The trim was white, and the front door was dark red. Mindful of hurricane-force winds and the threat of flooding at high tide, in the early sixties her grandfather had the house jacked up and placed on concrete pilings. Four cars could pull underneath the house now, and a wide screened-in staircase led to the porch that wrapped all the way around the house.
Lorraine pulled a huge brass ring from the depths of her pocketbook. She looked at the stairs and sighed. “You know, when Pops insisted on putting in that doggone elevator fifteen years ago, I told him he was crazy to spend that kind of money. Wasn’t a reason in the world why able-bodied people like us couldn’t use the stairs. Told him it would keep us young.”
Conley recoiled in mock surprise. “Are you saying you were actually wrong about something? Stop the presses!”
“Smart aleck,” Lorraine said. “Go ahead and take Opie for a potty break. Winnie and I will take up the first load and get the house unlocked.”
“Leave the heavy stuff for me,” Conley said.
The front porch floorboards creaked with each step she took. G’mama had left the front door ajar. With a suitcase in each hand and a wriggling Opie tucked under her arm, Conley bumped the door with her hip and stepped inside.
She set Opie down on the floor, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply, letting the old beach house scents settle into her bones. It was a peculiar bouquet unique to this shabby but beloved home of her heart; of old wood and lemon oil, salt air, and maybe a hint of mildew.
Winnie and Lorraine were already busy, tugging at the heat-swollen sashes of the dozen windows that ran across the front of the house, separating the porch from the main house. Tattered cotton curtains fluttered limply in the faint breeze.
“Bring up the cooler next,” G’mama instructed. “I want one of those cold sodas we brought from the house.”
An hour later, Conley was drenched in perspiration, and her legs felt like rubber after making dozens of trips from the car to the tiny two-person elevator and into the house.
She sank down onto a wicker armchair near the fireplace, and a fine dusting of paint chips fluttered onto the hooked rug beneath her feet. There must have been two dozen pieces of wicker just in this room alone—a combination of living room, dining room, and library, united by the age-darkened, heart pine shiplap walls and the worn wooden floors. None of the sofas, chairs, rockers, and tables were an exact match, but all wore the same shade of pale aqua G’mama had been painting them for decades.
The lumpy cushions were in a faded deep green bark cloth pattern featuring ferns and caladiums, and Conley knew that when this generation of cushions got too threadbare, her grandmother would have Jacky, her seamstress in town, run up another set from the huge bolt of the same fabric that she’d purchased decades ago, long before Conley was born.
Her grandmother approached with a broom in her hand. She’d already changed out of her “town” clothes and into a neatly pressed flowered cotton top and pastel cotton pants. She had a silk scarf fastened over her hair and wore a pair of white Keds without shoelaces. This was G’mama’s cleaning uniform.
“I’m putting you upstairs in the big room,” Lorraine announced. “Winnie and I will stay down here.”
“In the girls’ bunk rooms?”
“It’s cooler down here,” Lorraine said matter-of-factly. “And Winnie doesn’t need to be climbing all those stairs, what with her bad hip and all.” She raised the broom and began batting at the long strands of cobwebs that crisscrossed the mantel and whitewashed brick fireplace surround.
Conley set her suitcase on a luggage rack she found in the cedar-lined closet of the “big room” on the second floor, trying not to feel guilty about occupying what was indisputably the best room in the house.
This had been her grandparents’ bedroom for as long as she could remember. Unlike any of the other five bedrooms in the house, including the two others on this floor, this one had a small, attached bathroom, featuring a claw-foot bathtub, a commode with the original pull-chain flush, and a minuscule corner-mounted sink.
The heavy brass bed was dressed with a white chenille bedspread with a pattern of blue-and-green peacocks that Conley had always loved as a child. As G’mama had pointed out, there was no air-conditioning up here, only a ceiling fan whose blades whirred ineffectively overhead.
The room was stifling in the late-afternoon heat, the wooden floor littered with the dried corpses of long-dead bugs.
She wrenched open the heavy french doors at the foot of the bed and stepped onto the porch.
The shimmering turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico beckoned beyond the dune line. The water was calm, but she could hear waves lapping at the sand. She needed to unpack and find sheets to make up her bed. She needed to sweep the floor and find a putty knife to pry open the heavy wooden window sashes that were nearly impossible to open. Then she needed to go downstairs and take her grandmother to the grocery store.
But Conley did none of these things. Instead, she kicked off her flip-flops, peeled off her sweaty clothes, and climbed into her bathing suit. Then she hurried down the back stairs, through the path across the dunes. She waded into the warm Gulf water and dove headlong into the first medium-size wave she could find.