ALLISON
Her face went white. I know people say that all the time, white as a ghost, a sheet of paper, snow. Tammy’s face was usually a tad red and ruddy, a natural complexion that came with her fair skin and freckles, I imagined. But when she took a look at the necklace, her freckles turned into black polka dots on her drained skin.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered.
“So it is yours?” I asked.
“I haven’t seen it in thirty years.” Tammy was in her own world, murmuring to herself. “Why would she do this?”
“Who?” I asked.
Tammy looked up. Her eyes were shiny. “Maureen. Why would she leave this behind?”
“This was Maureen’s?”
“I have the other half. With her initials on the back. It was a gift—I—” She thrust the necklace back at me, and in the process, it fell to the floor. She stared at it like it was a live snake ready to strike. “I’m sorry. I can’t—I have to wait on my customers. Put it away, please, Allison.”
So Maureen was the “she” in the note. The disposable one. “But why would someone leave it with me?”
Tammy walked over to a young guy standing at the register. I was dumbfounded. The necklace was meant for me. It couldn’t have been a mistake. They used that word from my video—disposable. But why? I never knew Maureen.
The customer left, and Tammy came back to me. “Allison, I can’t do this right now—”
“I know she and Clay were dating,” I said gently.
She jumped as though I’d bit her. “Clay? He has nothing to do with this.”
“But why didn’t you tell me? That night in your apartment. You knew I was his family’s neighbor.”
“Not here, Allison,” she said angrily, as the bell above the door announced another customer. “Come to my house tonight. We can talk then.”
“I remember the day I bought these,” Tammy said later that evening in her apartment. She seemed calmer now. I was pacing back and forth in her living room. I’d brought pizza, but it was sitting on Tammy’s coffee table getting cold. Neither of us felt like eating.
Tammy slouched on the couch, fingering the necklace again. She’d turned the note upside down, as if she couldn’t stand to look at those words anymore. Was SHE Disposable? “I thought everything was going to be so great.”
I sat down next to her, trying to bring her back to the present. “Tammy, you have to think. If not Clay, who else was there that summer that could have had this?” And that knows about me? I thought.
There was Lorelei—she clearly knew about my past. But then again, half the town had probably seen my video by now. Yes, her son had dated Maureen, but I couldn’t see that woman giving Maureen the time of day, let alone keeping a necklace of hers for decades.
There was Dolores and her teammates—could any of them have known Maureen? They all seemed too young.
My intuition was still pointing to Clay. I remembered his casual reaction at dinner. There were lots of girls. Had it been so casual after all? Or had he loved her? Could he have hung on to her necklace all these years? Did he know something, something he couldn’t tell me at the club?
I sat back, ruffled my hair.
But Tammy still seemed to be slipping back to the past. “It was great, for a while. If only she’d listened to me. Things could’ve been so different.”
“It didn’t sound so great.”
Tammy stood up. “It was! Here, wait. I’ll show you. I mean... I was at my mom’s house last weekend. After we talked, I...went and found some stuff I had in her attic.”
While Tammy was gone, I tried to clear my head. On the television, Dilly—the Opal Beach weather forecaster I’d grown fond of—was predicting snow and ice for the next couple of days, frantically gesturing in front of the green screen about air patterns. Her graphics guy was a little off on his timing, so she kept having to change her report to keep up with him. She looked nervous, and I didn’t envy her at the moment. People were going to be planning their lives around her weather report—and in a beach area especially, bad weather hitting was big news. Panic-inducing, sell-out-the-bottles-of-water, cancel-plans kind of big news. If she got it wrong, people would be writing hate mail for weeks.
Yes, it wouldn’t be terrible to have a behind-the-scenes job. A nag of worry crept into my chest. Vaughn. Shit. I’d forgotten to email him back about the station visit. I needed to get in touch before he forgot all about me.
Tammy came back lugging a giant backpack and a few boxes, and that nag twisted, became something else as Tammy unloaded a wrinkled, faded yellow neon tank top and a few summer dresses, which she refolded and tucked beside her. “These were some clothes of hers that she left in my apartment,” Tammy said. “I never could bring myself to get rid of them.”
She also showed me a notebook, which she flipped through casually. “She never would’ve left this behind.”
The journal was mostly blank, except for the last few pages, on which were scrawled random quotes in pink ink. “Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans,” read one. Another: “I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depth and a great fear of shallow living.” The quotes were surrounded by sketches that Maureen had doodled, mermaid tails and hearts and music notes. It was like a precursor to those memes that people shared all over the internet.
The largest, in the center of one of the pages, surrounded by arrows: “It’s not what you are, it’s what you don’t become that hurts.” I ran my fingers over the page and felt the indentations where Maureen had pressed hard with her pen. I liked her and her earnest quotes, her loopy teenage handwriting. And indeed, she was right: what you didn’t become did hurt. A lot.
“I also—Mr. Gund gave me more photos the other day,” she said shyly, in a way that made me think that Dolores didn’t know about it. “They’re from his archives.”
Some were in black and white, but most were in that faded Technicolor hazy rainbow that I recognized from my parents’ old photographs of my sister and me as kids. Gund had an eye for finding the right moment. He liked to capture the rides, it seemed, legs dangling from Ferris wheel cars, geometric close-ups of mechanisms and machinery, the rounded dip of the roller coaster against a cloudless sky. But there were images of people as well, teenagers and young kids, couples holding hands.
Tammy stopped me at a smaller print. I recognized Maureen, standing alone inside one of the carnival game booths, gazing off into the distance. Behind her was a pillar of cheap stuffed animals—prizes for whatever game she was manning—and the whole booth was covered in a floral print wallpaper. She looked introspective, maybe even sad, and I wondered if that’s why Gund had been compelled to snap the photo, one moment of solitude in an otherwise chaotic world.
Behind that was a photo of Tammy posing with another girl with dark hair and a crop top while they waited in a line.
“Mabel,” Tammy murmured.
I took a closer look, but I would’ve never placed the girl in the photo as the overbearing real estate agent with teased hair. The only similarity was the slightly haughty expression.
“Wait, Mabel lived with you and Maureen, right? Could she have had the necklace? I wouldn’t put it past her to know about my...past. She seemed to be the center of town gossip.”
“Oh god no,” Tammy said. “Mabel hated Maureen. No way she would want to bring her up again after all these years.”
My frustration was building. Nothing made sense. Every trail I tried to follow just dead-ended or circled back.
“And look here,” Tammy was saying, still flipping through the photos. At the end of the stack was another photo of Maureen, piggyback on a handsome, lanky guy with long light hair. “That’s Clay,” Tammy said, her voice full of affection. The young Clay was smiling, joyful, boyish, his hair half in his face.
He and Maureen were standing next to one of those strong-man games where you smashed a large padded hammer down on a pad to see how far up the scale you could move the bar. Behind them, someone was in midswing, but Gund had clearly been photographing Maureen and Clay, two young people in love. For they did look in love, happy, adoring. “Wow. He was really into her, wasn’t he?”
“He did like her, yes. A lot. He—” She stopped. “This is what I mean. He would never have done anything to hurt her.”
But maybe he knows someone who did. I narrowed my eyes in concentration.
Another photo of Clay and Maureen caught my eye. I picked it up and realized there was another photo stuck underneath it. I pulled it off and part of the photo underneath tore. “Shit, I’m sorry,” I said, and Tammy snatched it from me and tucked it in her backpack, but not before I could see it was a photo of her and a man sitting on a couch.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“Was that your boyfriend?” I teased her, but her face grew dark, and I regretted it.
“No,” she said quietly. She put the photos away in the box and shoved it under her coffee table.
“Allison, there’s something else. I don’t have any proof of this, but I think Maureen was involved with someone else that summer. I got the impression he was older, and Clay didn’t know about it. She wouldn’t give any details.” Tammy squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. “She’d go with him to these games—gambling, I think—I felt like he might’ve been taking advantage of her—I don’t know. I didn’t like it, and I told her so.”
Another guy. Maybe that was the thread that came loose, then. If Clay and Maureen had been an item, and she started dating someone else, well...the rich boy could’ve gotten angry. Ran her out of town. Or worse. Maybe that’s what whoever dropped off the charm had been trying to tell me with their note.
“Tammy, did you tell the police any of this?”
“They wouldn’t listen!” She stopped, as if shocked at how she’d raised her own voice. “Allison, I’m so sorry you got involved. I didn’t mean—” She broke off. Blotches of red started to creep into her cheeks, under all the freckles. “Remember what we talked about the other night? About no one listening?”
I nodded.
“Well, if some older man was involved... You can’t exactly go accusing powerful people in Opal Beach, right?” She chewed on her fingernail. “That’s why Dolores backed away. That’s why everyone backs away.”
So that was it.
“And what? You think I’m different?”
“You are different. What you did, Allison? It was so brave. You’re so much braver than I am. You stood up to your husband, despite all that it cost you.”
“Tammy,” I said. “It didn’t end so well for me, remember?”
“People will listen to you. You can ask the questions that I can’t. Look how much you’ve already done.” She held up the charm, her eyes filling with tears. “This was hers. Someone sent it to you. We’re close, Allison. I can feel it.”
I remembered the way Duke’s mother had stood in the middle of the living room the day I’d moved out of our house. Their house, really, since his parents had bought it for us. She hadn’t spoken a word, just watched as I moved box after box, as though I might steal something that belonged to her. She made me feel like I was scum—yes, disposable—like she couldn’t wait to get me out of her life. The satisfaction that I’d humiliated her son—and by extension her—publicly for his sins was the only thing I’d had to grasp on to those first few weeks. When it came to the wealthy, reputations were everything.
“Will you help me, Allison? Please? We can go to the police. I have a friend there—”
“I don’t know, Tammy.” Thanksgiving was only a couple of weeks away. I’d be out of Opal Beach soon and back in Philadelphia in time for the new year. There was a promise of a new job. New beginnings were ahead.
And yet, Tammy had been kind to me here. She reminded me of me—trapped, anxious, feeling helpless. I couldn’t just let that go. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to just investigate. And possibly help her. Or at least get to the bottom of who had sent the necklace. Why they had sent it to me.
“I can’t promise anything,” I said.
Tammy’s face melted in relief. “Thank you. Oh, Allison—”
“And no police yet.”
“But—”
“No, wait. You have to understand, I’m trying to—rebuild my reputation. So if it’s at all possible to resolve this without the police, I’d prefer that. If anything else happens, anything at all shady, we’ll go.”
“Okay,” Tammy said. “Whatever you think. Oh wait, I almost forgot.” Tammy reached into a box beside her and pulled out a reel of film. “I just found this. I’d forgotten about it completely, but Maureen had a Super 8 camera. She used it all the time that summer, just messing around, you know? I don’t even know where you find them anymore, or how to play this. I called around to a couple of places, but no one seems to have a player.”
I twisted the reel in my hand. It felt heavy. “My parents used to have a projector. They used to take films of our vacations and Christmases. If they still have it, I could borrow it?”