ALLISON
There was something about Opal Beach. The strange sense of both having nowhere to hide and feeling insignificant. The lack of trees, which gave the feeling of being more open, exposed. The small streets, with buildings that seemed to lean, squared up with one another in a defensive way, as if to say to outsiders, You don’t belong here. And yet—from the neatly trimmed bushes lining the edges of the streets, those immaculate golf courses everyone fawned over, and even the light music pumping from the gift store next door—so much of it seemed so perfect. Maybe Dolores had been right when she’d been so disdainful of the place. I couldn’t help but wonder what was underneath the surface. What the locals said and did to one another behind closed doors. What happened to the teenagers late at night, under the boardwalks.
I stood at the door to the Gund art gallery, unsure whether I should knock or just walk in. I’d told Dolores I was going to drop by to finally see the gallery, but I had other motives in mind as well. I couldn’t help but wonder if Dolores sent me Maureen’s necklace or knew who had. I kept focusing on that word disposable in the note—and Dolores was the one who’d told her entire team about my video. Had her dad somehow found the charm in his archives?
The tiny dollhouse gallery stood right across the street from Tammy’s coffee shop, its blue paint, no doubt once vibrant, faded and flecked from the salty surf air, giving the building a shabby look. A crooked sign on the front door listed the hours, with a handwritten addition in purple Magic Marker: “May change abruptly in the off-season.”
I wondered if Tammy could see me through the window of her shop. I hadn’t told her I was going to see Dolores. I didn’t want Tammy to get excited, to think that I could help her. I was still holding on to any semblance of peace I could muster, even if the arrival of the necklace had thrown me off.
A gust of wind kicked up, convincing me to try the door. It opened easily, and immediately a dry wave of heat from the radiators welcomed me. The dark wooden floor creaked beneath my feet as I entered a small, stark gallery. A few beach scenes hung on the walls—abstract oceans, collages of the pier, crabs stranded on the sand.
In the back of the room, Dolores sat behind a desk, scooping French fries out of a grease-stained paper bag and watching something on her laptop. When she saw me, she waved one hand in greeting and shut the laptop with the other.
“Is it lunchtime already?” I asked, glancing at my watch. My belly protested at the scent of fried food, and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything yet.
“All the good places downtown close in the off-season, so I’m forced into fast food,” she said, pushing aside the bag and standing up. “Did you want to see Dad’s art?” She was in salesperson mode now, her tone measured and hushed, like she might wake up the artwork if she spoke too loudly. “He’s got the collages up now, as you can see. He’s been big into those lately. Different from what Patty and John have at the house?”
I peered at an image of a crab made up of bottle caps. “I like how three-dimensional they are.”
Dolores rolled her eyes, but I could see the affection in them. “He’s been experimenting with trash. He uses all kinds of stuff, old book pages, scraps he finds on the beach. I call them his trash collages. It riles him up.”
“It’s cool. And are these photographs underneath?”
“Oh yeah, all photographs. He’s been digging up the archives. Come on, I’ll show you his library.”
She pushed aside a black curtain I hadn’t even noticed. Behind was a large room lined with metal shelves on both sides, with worktables, supplies and canvases in various states of completion. Directly in front of me was a large painting of a lounging woman, half in the surf, her long, wavy hair crafted from what looked like pieces of tire. Beyond her, on an old table, sat stacks of newspapers, tubes of paints and inks, and a banker’s lamp that looked like it had seen better days. There were more crabs, a series of them in different positions, some colored in with bright reddish-pink paint, others sketched in haste in dark pencil. The room felt crowded, but still pleasant, with an underlying creative energy.
“And so we meet again.” Jim Gund hunched over a small wooden table, half-hidden by a rickety, paint-speckled metal shelving unit. I was surprised he’d remembered me, but then I recalled the mantra: small town. He had a red bandanna tied around his head, and he was using some sort of knife tool to cut a piece of thick canvas.
“Yes, and I’m afraid I still haven’t gotten used to bringing a hat and gloves around with me,” I said.
He nodded, wiped his hands on his apron and went over to a shelf that had dozens more plastic bottles of paint.
“He doesn’t like to be disturbed when he’s at work. Interrupting the genius,” Dolores said playfully.
Gund grunted, a noise that could’ve meant agreement or dismissal, I wasn’t sure. When he moved back to his work, I noticed a large table behind him with several boxes of photographs. On each box were dates labeled in black Magic Marker. So this is where Tammy’s photos had come from. “Wow.”
Dolores caught me looking. “Yeah, so this is what I call ‘the library.’ He’s basically got an archive of Opal Beach. The actual library’s been trying to get their hands on it for years.”
Gund piped up, “And if they knew how to store and organize anything, we could talk.”
“This is amazing,” I said, wandering over to a box labeled 1995. I flipped through the photos, many of them of the pier, of tourists with souvenirs, musicians playing in the bars, their saxophones and guitars glinting like Christmas trees in the stage lights. I looked around for the 1985 box, but it was nowhere to be seen.
“This isn’t even half of it,” Dolores said. “Every year, my dad goes back ten, twenty, thirty years to his photos. He does a special series of paintings based on a few of them.” She tapped me on the arm. “Let’s go back up front so I can finish my food while we talk.”
We ducked back through the curtain. Dolores motioned to an empty chair across the desk, and I sat obediently. She took a bite of a sandwich and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “So whatcha been up to all this time?”
“Oh, you know, a little bit of everything,” I said. “I was at the fall festival dinner at the club last week with the Bishops. How come you weren’t there?” I asked, half teasing.
Dolores raised her eyebrows. “Me? Lord no. A team of derby girls couldn’t drag me to one of those things. Besides,” she said, cracking her knuckles, “I was up in Philly visiting Sharon. Just got back last night, actually.”
If that was true, then Dolores couldn’t have been the one to drop the necklace on the porch. But that didn’t mean she didn’t know who did.
“So what’s the deal with Tammy and that friend of hers who went missing?” I said. “Why’d you wave me off the subject that night at the bar?”
Dolores rolled her eyes. “Oh man, I knew it. I knew she was trying to rope you into it, too.”
“So you don’t believe her?”
Dolores put down her sandwich and took a sip of her soda. She sat back, unzipped her fleece jacket. Underneath, I could see part of a tattoo peeking out of the collar of her shirt. I imagined what it must’ve felt like to have needles and ink drilling into skin so close to your neck. “It’s not so much that I don’t believe her as I can’t really help her.”
She handed me a French fry over the desk. I waved it at her reproachfully before I ate it. “Really? It didn’t seem that way at the bar.”
“Eh, it’s just that I didn’t want it all to come bubbling back up again, you know? Tammy’s been through a rough time lately.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. “What happened?”
Dolores shrugged. “No idea. She was fine—and then all of a sudden a few months ago it was ‘Dolores, you have to help me find out what happened to this random friend I had years ago.’ It was right around the time her mom got sick again.” Dolores made quote signs with her fingers. “This one seemed particularly bad, though, and her mom had to go to a hospital for treatment.”
“Is she an alcoholic?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. More like depression. Helplessness. Frankly, I think she just likes someone to wait on her. Tammy doesn’t like to talk about it.” Dolores’s voice thickened with conviction. “I know that sounds harsh to you, but trust me, I’ve seen it in action. Tammy’s always trying to save people. She’s been in this town her whole life, always helping her mother out with whatever new affliction she gets. Tammy hasn’t had much of a life of her own.”
“So is that what is going on with this friend of hers? Some kind of savior complex?” I asked.
“Something like that. I mean, I tried to help. I did a good job, too. But I didn’t find much.” She opened a desk drawer. “I still have it all here. I should be a private eye.”
I stared at the thick folder. It certainly looked like Dolores had found more than she’d implied. She flipped through. “This was like three months ago? Tammy came in, asking about old photos. Like I said, Dad keeps everything. So she wanted to look through ones from thirty years ago. First she said it was some project she was doing, and I thought she meant like a scrapbook or something. Then I find out it’s about this friend of hers. She said she thought something bad happened to her.”
I nodded. “That’s what she told me, too.” I didn’t say the word murder, but Tammy’s words still echoed in my ear.
“Well, honestly, something probably did,” Dolores said. “But not here in Opal Beach. Maybe after, and that’s what I told Tammy. She had no proof the girl died here or anything. Just a hunch.”
“Tammy thinks Maureen might’ve been involved with an older guy,” I said, not wanting to mention Clay Bishop quite yet. “That he had something to do with it.”
“Yeah, she told me that, too. Some mysterious married guy or something. It seemed like she was just grasping at straws, though. To me this is more of a classic case of teenage runaway.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So you think she just left town? Without telling her best friend?”
Dolores ignored that. “Did you know that Maureen’s not even her real name?” She smirked with pride. “Well, not her first name anyway. I had to widen my search terms to find her at all.” I suspected that even though Dolores hadn’t gone into library science, she was feeding her habit in another way—as a hacker in her spare time. “Her full name is...” She stopped and rummaged through the papers. “Here it is. Her driver’s license. Janet Maureen Haddaway.” She slid the printout of the license over to me. Maureen had shorter hair than in the pictures I’d seen, but it was definitely her. “Haddaway,” Dolores was saying. “I remember that because it sounds so much like ‘hideaway,’ doesn’t it? And that’s kind of what she was doing.”
“Hiding?” I said. “From what?”
“Whatever runaways hide from. In her case, sounds like her mom. Her mom was a druggie. Overdosed in 1989. No father on the birth certificate. Sad story.”
She opened her folder and started ticking things off. “Our Janet went to high school in Maryland, but she never finished. I couldn’t find any evidence that she worked at the carnival, like Tammy said, but I don’t think they kept any real employee records. Paid off-the-books.”
“Wow, you found a lot,” I said.
Dolores closed her folder. “I mean, none of this solves anything about where she went when she left here.”
My fingers flew to the necklace tucked under my shirt, and I had to stop myself from pulling it out. I didn’t think Dolores knew anything about it. She was blunt, and I couldn’t see her sending something anonymously—she’d want the credit. And I didn’t want to show it to her. I was afraid of how she’d react—that she’d laugh in my face or tell half of Opal Beach about it before I even stepped off the gallery’s front porch.
“What about Clay Bishop? Did Tammy tell you he was dating Maureen?”
Dolores’s face changed. “Every time I bring up the Bishops, Tammy gets all weird. I think she had some kind of thing for that guy, to be honest, but she won’t talk about it.”
“Really?” I frowned. I never got that vibe from her. Friendly affection, sure, but I’d never gotten the impression there were romantic feelings there.
“Hey look, I’m not saying that family’s full of Mother Teresas or anything. Who the hell knows? But, dude—I wouldn’t touch that with a one-hundred-foot pole. When I told her that, she got really mad, told me to forget she’d ever even said anything. I feel bad, but I can’t really help.” She lowered her voice. “Listen, for whatever reason, this whole thing’s stirred up a bee’s nest in Tammy. She’s—she’s grasping at straws. This isn’t about this girl. It’s about Tammy. It’s about her feeling guilty about anyone and everyone in her life that she can’t save. If she starts going around accusing random people of stuff here...well, let’s just say it’s not good. You want to be her friend? Just drop it. For her own good.”