AT THE END of her shift, Pearl stepped through the patio doors into evening heat and held her breath, listening. In the distance, a motor hummed. One of the zero-turn mowers, somewhere near the golf course’s ninth hole. Dad.
As always, the club seemed to observe her as she crossed the western lawn toward the golf course. Measuring her, taking stock. It was Pearl’s habit to keep her tie knotted until she was over the cobblestone bridge spanning the pond, well out of range of the many gleaming windows.
The club was an imposing three-story block of New England architecture, all white clapboards and Victorian-style gingerbread trim. It was due to turn one hundred years old in July, celebrated by a monthlong series of gala events that had the members buzzing. It was a determined sort of buzz, white noise to cover the steady pulse of unease. Six months had passed since tragedy had soiled their summer playground; not nearly time enough for the dead to rest easy. Better to bury the Garrisons in talk of formal balls and silent auctions, of ladies’ teas and regattas on the bay.
Usually, you had to be ready to duck and cover on the links, but at this time of day most of the golfers had headed home or to the bar. The groundskeepers’ main building was off to the left, silver-shingled and gambrel-roofed. The guys were locking up for the night, but Dad wasn’t among them.
Dickie Fournier saw her coming, hooked his thumb toward where the links curved off into invisibility. “He’s way the hell out there. Take a Gator.”
“Thanks.” Grabbing a set of keys, she tossed her bag into the passenger seat of one of the utility vehicles and put the pedal down, loving the shock of breeze through her hair.
Around the bend, the links opened into a panoramic view of Frenchman Bay and Little Nicatou Island, which sat a mile offshore from their corner of Mount Desert Island. Living on an island sounded romantic, but MDI was the second largest on the Eastern Seaboard, and easily accessible by bridge—no storm-tossed ferry rides required. It was starkly beautiful here; academically, Pearl knew this, but she’d also lived the other side, post–Labor Day: shutters on most of the shop windows, the single stoplight blinking yellow, the whole world buried under feet of suffocating snow.
Most of the course had been freshly mowed lengthwise, green to the tee and back again, but here, the lines ended. She spotted the zero-turn abandoned near a sand trap, Dad nowhere in sight. She hit the horn lightly and parked. “You here?”
No answer. Pearl climbed out and walked the ragged edge of the bluff, running her hand along the wire fence. She finally spotted him, out there on the embankment, standing on the ledge, facing seaward.
She gripped the fence posts, afraid to speak and startle him. After a moment, he sensed her and turned, a man torn from a dream. “Hey, Pearlie.” He sounded fine, same old Dad, but the late haunted nights had seamed his face, already full of sharp angles, like her own. He was responsible for all of it: her small build, the slight wave in her hair, her habit of biting her lips whenever she was nervous or upset.
“It’s five o’clock.” She still couldn’t move. He seemed to understand, then, how much he was scaring her, and walked over, squeezing through a rolled-back panel in the fencing, where she immediately hugged him hard around the waist. “What were you doing out there?”
“Looking around.” He kissed the top of her head. She caught a hearty whiff of him: spearmint gum, fresh sweat, and booze, but not recent—hopefully none since this morning, Irish in his coffee while she was out of the room. “Hey, I got something for you.”
“It’s not a golf ball, is it?”
“Hey. You used to love that when you were little.” He took something from his pocket and pressed it into her palm.
She opened her fingers and saw a tiger-striped sea scallop shell, perfectly intact. “You found this out there?”
“Thought you’d want it for your collection.” The gesture almost made her forget that he hadn’t answered her question. “How was work?”
Memories of Tristan flickered by. “Typical. Doing stuff for rich people.”
“Sounds like we had the same day. How about I grill tonight? Got some burger half off at Godfrey’s.”
“Sure. But the grill needs gas.” He swore. “I can fry it up on the stovetop instead. Make pasta salad?” She was rewarded with a nod, half a smile. “Race you back.”
Dad made for the zero-turn. She ran to the Gator, already rolling before he even had the mower started. She kept him in her side-view mirror the whole way. Better to focus on that than on how her stomach had plummeted at the sight of him on that ledge, how everything she’d become so afraid of seemed encapsulated in that moment. Better than asking him the hard questions, the ones that really needed answering: When are you going to be okay? Were you thinking about them?
Dad’s Beetle Cat sailboat sat on the boat trailer in the front yard with a spray-painted For Sale sign leaning against it: $3,500 OBO. The original prices of $4,500, then $4,000, were blacked out. Dad stood with his back to it, hosing road dust off his battered pickup, the first Bud Light of the evening in his free hand.
It was the final ass-kicker in the whole ordeal, selling the boat. Dad had owned it since before she was born. When Pearl was a kid, sometimes they’d drop a line in the harbor on a Sunday—never with Mom, that wasn’t her thing. Her parents had so little in common it was amazing that she’d ever been conceived. So, it was Pearl and Dad, fishing buddies; poker buddies; throwing the ball around on warm evenings and tinkering with projects in the shed. Mom used to complain about feeling left out of their little club of two, but whenever she and Pearl tried mother-daughter stuff, it always ended in a fight; they just didn’t seem to speak the same language. When the divorce finally happened, Pearl was thirteen, and the judge had let her decide for herself who she wanted to live with. She was surprised he’d even had to ask. And Mom never forgave her. Why else would she have taken that job down in Kittery, almost a four-hour drive away?
Now a sedan drove down Abbott Street and slowed, checking out the Cat. Pearl sat up in her lawn chair. After a second, the driver accelerated again. Relaxing, Pearl pulled her feet back up to sit cross-legged and continued reading Sense and Sensibility on her tablet.
“Maybe I should knock the price back.” Dad popped the tab on Bud Light #2.
“It’s too low already.”
“Not if we want to unload the damn thing.” Dad’s profile was stony as he sprayed the mud flaps.
They didn’t want to, but they were drowning. The mailbox was crammed with notices from collection agencies; snail mail was the only way they could reach the Haskins household now that Dad had canceled his phone service, both to save money and escape the reporters begging for comment, to find out what he’d seen that night. Dad’s caretaking business, which kept them afloat during the off-season at the club, was bust. All because of the Garrisons, and what everyone in town was saying: it was Win Haskins’s fault. A few tips of the flask, and he’d let the wolf in the door.
The image brought back the memory of Tristan today, sitting close enough for her to add his brand of aftershave to her cache of Garrison knowledge. Pearl slouched down, closed out of her social media accounts—Mom was always trolling, hoping to catch her online; after their latest fight, it probably seemed the safest way to communicate—pulled up Google, and entered the familiar search criteria David Garrison family deaths with the sound of Mom’s old wind chimes pinging off each other in the background, miniature anchors.
Pearl had reread those first Mount Desert Islander and Ellsworth American articles countless times. She knew the photographs they’d run to the smallest detail, starting with the full-color spread of the Garrison house with a scorched hole in the roof, the blackened clapboards, the second-story east window a gaping hole into what had been the master bedroom. Firefighters were roaming around the front yard, their gear smudged with soot. The American headline read “Multimillionaire David Garrison, Three Family Members Killed in Tenney’s Harbor Blaze.”
The fire—cause undetermined at that time—had originated in David and Sloane’s bedroom, spreading down the second-floor hallway to where Cassidy and Joseph slept, and up through the ceiling to the attic level, which had been converted into a loft for Tristan when they bought the house three years ago. On the morning of December 24, David’s, Sloane’s, Cassidy’s, and Joseph’s bodies had all been transported to the county morgue; Tristan was unaccounted for.
Pearl straightened her spine. She’d woken up to an empty house that morning, and a message on her phone from Dad, received at three a.m. Something came up, be home as soon as I can. Turned out he’d been calling from the hospital ER, where he was receiving treatment for second-degree burns on his hands and lacerations from punching through window glass. She could still see the Christmas tree tinsel swaying with the throb of the furnace as she’d eaten breakfast, facing the front window so she could watch the street for him. Then Dad had called back, with the rest of the story.
“Garrison Blaze Ruled Arson, Multiple Homicide.” The next article was the first to use that family portrait, the one that would haunt the case to its current state of open, unsolved. Taken maybe two years ago, the photo showed the whole family wearing various ensembles of navy and white. The photographer must’ve told them not to smile.
Pearl’s phone went off and she jumped, answering without taking her eyes off Tristan’s face. “What’s up?”
“Nothing. It’s just that we’ve got way too much cake over here.” Reese chewed as he spoke.
She’d hoped he’d call; he always kept her in suspense until dusk. “Cake sounds good.” She watched Dad, now sitting on the front steps. She’d lost count of the Buds. “You could bring it over here.”
“Yeah, but then I’d have to move.” He waited. “Pe-arl, come on. I’m going to watch Evil Dead 2.”
Now that was fighting dirty. “Text you in a sec.” She hung up, turning the phone over in her hands.
“Reese?” Dad watched the sunset above the roofs of neighboring houses.
“Yeah. But I think I’ll stay in. The dishes—”
“I’ll do them. If you want to see your boyfriend, go ahead.”
“He’s not—”
“Whatever you call him. I can hold down the fort.”
But chances were, he couldn’t. Chances were, Dad would get to thinking, and there’d be nothing on TV, nothing to keep the walls from closing in, so he’d decide to drive down to the Tavern for a few. And she’d lose another little piece of him.
A text popped up from Reese: chain-saw hand just sayin
“I won’t be late. Promise.” Dad waved her off as she jogged up the steps past him. In the bathroom, she combed her hair (no visible change) and spritzed on the tiniest bit of Chantilly from the sample bottle Mom had forgotten in the medicine cabinet. Reese would laugh his ass off if he could see her.
She drove her old Civic over to the Dark Brew bakery and coffee shop, where Reese lived with his technically ex-stepmother. Dark Brew was on the ground level of an old general store built in the 1800s, and as manager, Jovia had been given a break on renting the second-story efficiency.
Pearl found them in the kitchen, Jovia doing her nails at the table, Reese sitting on the counter, eating what was most likely his second or third piece of chocolate cake.
Jovia shook her head at Pearl. “I don’t know how you stand him. Having a metabolism like that should be against the law.”
“Did you save me any?” There was one slim piece left in the takeout box. “Seriously? That’s disgusting.”
“Back off. I skipped breakfast this morning.”
“Only because you didn’t haul your butt out of bed until ten minutes before you had to be at work.” Jovia blew on her nails and pointed at him. “I am not your wake-up service, mister. Next time, you’re on your own.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Pearl dug into the cake. “Thanks, Jovia. This is awesome.”
“Better be. I made it.” Now that tourist season was in full swing, the kitchen would be stocked with day-old muffins and croissants; by the time Jovia got home, she was usually too wiped out to cook. Jovia and Reese were physical opposites: she was short, dark, and plump, fortysomething, favoring tight jeans and trendy tops; Reese was wiry, his eyes gray and lively, his uniform composed of thrift-shop finds, band tees, and the leather cuff bracelets he wore even to work, defying dress code. Their personalities were oil and water, but somehow they made the living situation work, probably because Reese did most of his living on the second floor of the carriage house out back.
Reese drummed his fingers, jumping down to his feet as soon as Pearl took her last bite. “Let’s go.”
Jovia jerked around. “You two aren’t watching that psycho crap now, are you?”
“Yep,” Reese said.
“Oh God. People getting heads chopped off, guts ripped out. Give me a nice romantic comedy any day, people being good to each other.”
“Rom-coms suck.” Reese held the back door for Pearl. “Two idiots meet cute, find insta-love, get in a fight over something stupid, and spend the rest of the movie figuring out what the audience has known since ten minutes in. Roll credits.”
“Listen, smart-ass, love is stupid. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth the ride.”
“We’ve got to get you your own line of Hallmark cards.”
With a growl, Jovia turned to Pearl. “He tries anything out there, just slap him, okay?”
“Okay.” As Pearl stepped through the door, Reese dodged her and ran down the steps. She gave chase, following him along the flagstone path into the shadows of the carriage house, where towers of boxed napkins and coffee stirrers stood as tall as she was. Up the spiral staircase to the unfinished second floor, where Dark Brew stock took up most of the space except for Reese’s corner. A mattress on the floor, a set of plastic drawers, a box for a bedside table, and a standing lamp. Jovia had offered him the fold-out couch when he first moved in, which he’d flatly refused because he wanted his own space.
Reese tackled her onto the bed, and she shrieked, laughing. Pearl tickled his sides, and he yelped, rolling off. When he lifted her shirt and blew a raspberry on her stomach, she shrieked for real, scooting back on her heels and yanking down her hem.
Reese dropped back against his pillows, breathless and grinning. “If you really want to be safe, you could staple your shirt to your underwear.”
“Shut up.”
“Not like I saw anything.” A silence. “So, bras come in negative cup sizes. Who knew.”
She pummeled him. He covered his head and laughed until she tired herself out, kicking him once for good measure before flopping back and starting the movie on his old laptop. “Jerk.”
After about half an hour, he rolled onto his side and hung his arm over her waist. “You can’t fall asleep,” she said softly. He nearly always dozed off when they watched something together.
“I’m not.” It seemed to be growing between them, this closeness, in awkward fits and starts. Dad didn’t know how much freedom they had over here, how much privacy, and she wanted to keep it that way.
She and Reese had been friends since the start of junior year, when Reese had moved here from Portland. Why he’d picked her of all people to hang around with, she didn’t know; proximity, most likely. Same school, same job. She’d always been a square peg in both places: no good at currying favor with the queen bees, too old now to run with the boys. She and Reese had never kissed except for the night before Christmas Eve, such a humiliating memory that she’d tried to bury it as deeply as possible. Now she reached down and linked her fingers with his, feeling a small charge when he didn’t pull free.
His phone began vibrating on the bedside table. Groaning, he reached over, checked the screen, and put it back on the table before she managed to glimpse the screen. Indigo, maybe. He lay down and put his hands behind his head, watching the mayhem on the screen. “You okay?” he said finally.
“Me? Yeah.” But she was tense now, and she sat forward, hugging her knees. “Feel like a drive?”
After texting Jovia that they were going out—she wrote back not too late, be SAFE—they set off, Pearl driving, Reese riding shotgun with a Coors Light from his stash held below the sight level of any passing police cruisers, which were a common sight since December. The night smelled like ocean, car exhaust, the stifling perfume of peonies.
“She has to know you’re taking those.” Pearl headed down Ocean Avenue, passing a stretch of sprawling bed-and-breakfasts and inns lit by streetlamps, quaint little shops displaying souvenirs and work by local artisans. For those who found Bar Harbor ostentatious, Tenney’s Harbor was the place to summer, to leave behind the hectic pace of New York City, Boston, Chicago. Tenney’s Harbor’s population more than doubled from late June to mid-August, wealthy families returning to their summer homes and their yacht and country club memberships.
Reese shrugged, popping the top and sipping the foam. “I think Jov’s just glad I’m not cooking crystal in somebody’s basement. A couple beers missing from the fridge are no big.”
“Has she heard from your dad lately?”
Another sip. “Nope.” Jovia and Reese’s dad, Liam, had divorced almost three years ago. Reese’s mom was caught up with the two young children she had with her second husband, and Liam’s current wife, his third, hadn’t exactly loved the idea of having a teenager around, especially not one with Reese’s mouth. It was decided among the adults that Reese would move in with Jovia to finish high school. Liam had ignored his promise of financial help ever since. Last Pearl knew, Reese hadn’t spoken to his dad in over a year.
As they cruised down Ocean, Reese shook his head, reading aloud, “Vacationland,” from the license plate of the car in front of them. “That has to be crappiest state slogan ever.” He raised his beer to a Toyota Tundra from New Hampshire that cut them off at the lights. “Live Free or Die. Damn straight.”
A flock of summer kids strayed into the crosswalk, texting, talking, paying no attention to traffic. They were the same ones who sunbathed poolside at the club in chaise lounges, held languid tennis matches on the courts, and set the standard for unstudied cool around the bandstand in the town square. As Pearl hit the brakes, Reese’s hand shot over and honked the horn. He stuck his head out the window. “Hey, Alligator Shirts? Lacoste outlet is that way. You’re blocking the road.”
One boy flipped him off, and Reese returned the gesture, settling back with a grin.
“Feel better?” Pearl exhaled slowly, accelerating again. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?” His voice dropped to a whisper as he looked skyward. “You think the club’s got drones up there?”
“No-o-o, I think if those guys recognize us from the dining room and run to mommy and daddy about it, we’re screwed.”
“Oh, come on. They loved it.” He brushed at some drops of beer he’d spilled on the console. “That’s why they come up here to the land of the lost, right? Rich people get off on local color. We fulfill some salt-of-the-earth delusion they have. They seriously think we sit around the woodstove eating whale blubber and singing sea chanteys all winter long.” When she finally smiled, he reached over and ruffled her hair. “Relax. Nobody’s getting fired.”
They continued out of downtown to where the woods deepened, toward Millionaires’ Row, the local nickname for Cove Road, which was reserved for the summer getaways of the ultrarich. The Spencer mansion was first and oldest, a Georgian colonial with three smaller guesthouses arranged on the lawn below like a tiny village. The grandfather, Frederick Spencer, now lived in Tenney’s Harbor year-round, where he was rarely seen anywhere but the club, although his name was ubiquitous in town: the Spencer Wing on the public library, the Frederick L. Spencer athletic track at the high school.
“Flag’s out. Brats must be in town.” Reese nodded to the guesthouses below, where a bright nautical flag hung outside one of the cottages, an eccentric Spencer custom that meant family was visiting. Pearl remembered Bridges, considered telling Reese about being hit on by a Spencer. Better not. If she talked about Bridges, then she might talk about Tristan, and she wasn’t ready to do that yet. Reese glanced at her. “Did your dad ever work down there?”
“No. Spencers go through some guy from Winter Harbor.” Dad was just one of many caretakers on MDI who maintained these grandiose homes, most of which were occupied for only a few weeks or months a year.
Each driveway was marked by a single, understated sign bearing the family name. Wooten. Montgomery-Hines. Mertz. Langstrom. She’d been this way many times, first as a kid, accompanying Dad on his duties—clearing snow, checking locks, making sure all the furnaces were maintaining a steady sixty degrees so the water pipes didn’t freeze—and now, since December, on solitary drive-bys, defying the empty, winterized homes with her presence. They could shun Dad, but they didn’t own Tenney’s Harbor.
All the little sounds Reese usually made to fill silence—finger tapping, humming—grew quiet. He must’ve figured out their destination by now: 168 Cove Road, the long, winding driveway marked with a carved granite block reading Garrison.
They didn’t speak as she urged the car up the crushed rock drive. The gatehouse was first to emerge from the darkness, a small brick structure with a window, an intercom system, and the controls to open the sixteen-foot steel gate beside it. The modern fencing contrasted with the home itself, set far back from the gate, another two-and-a-half-story colonial worthy of a Down East double-page spread. Instead, it had appeared in Time, accompanying the article “Study in Flames: The Slaying of Millionaire David Garrison,” which Pearl had pored over until she’d memorized entire paragraphs like a catechism. Dad was mentioned in that article. How he’d been filling in as night watchman for the regular guy, who had an off-season job he couldn’t leave at the Garrisons’ last-minute notice, yet someone had gotten into the house anyway. Someone who still hadn’t been caught.
She and Reese sat there, thinking their own thoughts in the face of the house, a puzzle box waiting for someone to figure out the first move. There was a new caretaker now: the crime scene tape had been removed, the burnt rubble hauled away from the yard, the grass mowed. A tarp had been laid over the hole in the roof, and David and Sloane’s ruined window was covered with a sheet of particleboard. Pearl recalled the diagram from the Time article, detailing the killer’s route through the sleeping second floor, the path of the accelerant.
“Why do you think he stayed?” Her voice sounded far off. It wasn’t necessary to name Tristan.
Reese shifted. “No clue. Seems like he’d get out of here and never look back. I would.” He hesitated. “They’re not buried in town, right?”
“No. Connecticut.” Tenney’s Harbor had been stunned when news got out that Tristan had rented one of the new homes in the development over on Narragansett Way, had been seen driving his father’s Bentley, playing alone in the club racquetball courts. Why, after everything, wasn’t one of the richest young men in the country going back to his life? To Yale, or the family home in Greenwich? Why stay in a Maine tourist town where he had no one, where people either turned their backs on him or gawked as if he were the equivalent of a wreck on the highway?
“Dad thinks it’s his fault.” Now her voice sounded thinner than ever. “I know it.” She took a breath. “He wasn’t drinking that night. He swore to me.”
Reese was silent nearly ten seconds, a new record. Then she felt his hand close on the nape of her neck, a gentle pressure.
They sat together until a scraping sound made them both turn wide-eyed on the night. It was the tarp, a loose corner shifting in the breeze. Reese swore and sat back. “Let’s go. Too many freakin’ ghosts out here.”
She took him home, watched until his silhouette moved past the carriage house’s second-floor window shade. When she got to her house, Dad was gone. He hadn’t washed the dishes.