That Wednesday morning, Merry pulled her police SUV halfway onto the brick sidewalk of narrow Fair Street, a few feet from the entrance of Tattle Court, and left the hazard lights flashing. The sky was gray, and the faintest mist—not quite fog, not quite rain, but something her father called soft Irish weather—had blanketed Nantucket overnight. Against the backdrop of houses uniformly clad in charcoal-colored shingles, the mist leached all life from landscape and sea. The island and everything it contained was monochrome and dripping.
Tattle Court’s neighbors would neither notice nor worry to find a police cruiser nearly blocking their access; for nearly sixty years, two chiefs of the Nantucket Police in succession had lived on this cul-de-sac off Fair Street. Merry hurried around to the rear of her family home and nearly tripped over a storm cellar door, flung wide on the unmown grass.
She clutched at the side of the house to keep from pitching into the cellar’s darkness. A snow-white head bobbed slowly upwards through the opening as Ralph Waldo Folger climbed deliberately to ground level, then swiveled in surprise as he caught sight of his granddaughter’s trousered leg. She was massaging it painfully with her free hand.
“Meredith Abiah!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing in uniform?”
“Pocock has all hands on deck,” she explained. “I’m not working a case at the moment, so I get to cruise the ’Sconset Bluff and tell any homeowners still out there that they ought to evacuate.” The Bluff had been eroding for decades, despite the most ingenious efforts at recapturing its beaches’ sand. More than one multimillion-dollar place would fall into the sea by week’s end.
Merry grasped Ralph’s hand. With a grunt, he hoisted himself upright from the final cellar step. “What were you doing down there?”
“Sweeping it out and making it comfortable,” her grandfather said. “Shoved all the fishing gear and Christmas decorations aside, and set up a couple of deck chairs, blankets, a propane stove for coffee and baked beans, and a shortwave radio for your father and me. Worked well in ’91, so why change a thing?”
“Have you got bottled water? Flashlights and batteries?”
Ralph shrugged. “I prefer beer. Hundred-year-old oil lamps last longer than flashlights, and cast more light. How about you, Meredith? Has Young Peter got that roof walk tied down tight? You’re a tad exposed on Cliff Road.”
“Oh, the house’ll be fine.” She helped Ralph heave shut the heavy cellar doors and secure their iron hasps. “It’s everything else that’s gone to hell in a handbasket.”
Her grandfather quirked a ferocious eyebrow. “I had no idea women your age are familiar with that phrase. It’s archaic.”
“Yeah, well, I was raised in isolation.”
“Is the wedding off?”
“It’s profoundly rearranged.”
“But everything is well, between yourself and Peter?”
“Of course, Ralph,” Merry said impatiently. “We’re too crazed with storm prep to get cold feet or last-minute nerves. The tent people arrived this morning to pull up all the poles they’d carefully planted Monday—and refunded our deposit. The florist called to explain I had a choice: accept a bouquet of whatever she has on hand, which will probably be wilted by Saturday—or carry silk flowers.”
“No shipments with the ferries canceled the next few days, of course,” Ralph sighed. “But your dress is done! And the food will be excellent!”
“Even there, we may have a problem.” Merry glowered. “No tent means no tables. No space for a sit-down dinner. Eighty-three people are coming, Ralph. I’m meeting with Tess da Silva right now, on the way to work, to see if she can turn her entire menu into finger food. We’ll be balancing plates on the arm of a sofa.”
“It’ll be lovely,” Ralph Waldo soothed. He reached out and gathered Merry close, kissing her temple. “The church will still be standing—as it has for three hundred years. Peter will be standing, too, right next to you. If we all get our feet damp walking back to the Cliff Road house—so much the merrier.”
“No dance floor,” Merry mourned. She had resisted the whole notion of one six months ago, but lately the idea of whirling around on Ralph’s arm under the stars had grown on her.
“Then I’ll waltz you down the middle of the table, dear heart.”
Her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket. “Hello, George?”
Ralph waited patiently. But the conversation was brief.
“That was Peter’s sister,” Merry explained, as she stabbed the call to silence. “His mother is grounded in Manhattan. She sends all of us her regrets.”
The drink at Lola’s had turned into two: bourbon for Howie and wine for Dionis. The quick detour had stretched past an hour, then an hour and a half—as the wind tugged at the bar’s roof and Howie told her stories that made her laugh. The nagging regret she’d felt since she’d dumped him had fled, replaced with giddy happiness. Howie was still there. Howie still cared.
She’d stopped returning his calls weeks ago—somewhere in the middle of the August caretaking craziness. But as her father drove her out to Madaket this morning, Dionis stopped lying to herself. She hadn’t dumped Howie because of work. She could name the exact day and minute she’d decided he was dangerous. And better cut out of her life.
She’d been loading bag after bag of someone else’s groceries into the belly of her work skiff: a flat of fresh strawberries, fresh baguettes of bread, a case of white wine and a case of red. Filet mignon, shitake mushrooms, and pounds of fresh tomatoes; corn and lettuce she’d picked up at Bartlett’s Farm. Logs of goat cheese. Expensive flatbread crackers imported from England. Harpooned swordfish steaks from 167 Raw, and containers of Straightwarf’s bluefish pâté. Bottles of artisanal tonic and small-batch gin. Warm Scotch-Irish cake and doughnuts from the Downyflake.
And she had thought to herself: I can’t go on like this. It wasn’t the disparity between the menu she was delivering and the one that sustained her at home, or the fact that so much luxury seemed vital to these clients living beyond civilization. It wasn’t a conviction born of class resentment. Dionis had grown up on Nantucket—she understood that it thrived because of seasonal money and the folks who served it. The backbreaking work of every summer, the runs across the roiling green chop of Madaket Harbor, the sun on her tanned back, and her long hair pulled like a rope through the eyelet of a fisherman’s cap, had felt carefree when she was eighteen. They’d felt like freedom. But she was nearly thirty now, and she wanted more from her life.
She wanted to move to the mainland. Find a teaching job, and use her degree. Write a book, maybe, in her free time—
Howie would prevent all that.
Because it was as she was lifting the flat of strawberries, and the smoky-sweet scent of ripeness flooded her nose, that Dionis closed her eyes and saw Howie’s face. He was feeding her a strawberry, one late morning in bed, his gaze fixed on her mouth with an intensity that sent fingers up and down Di’s spine. She craved Howie on her tongue.
I’m in love with him, she’d thought. And, horrified, she’d dropped the entire flat of strawberries all over the skiff’s floor.
She couldn’t let Howie hold her back. He loved everything about Nantucket and his job, and he intended to stay forever. He’d told Dionis that. Their dreams did not align.
Never mind, she thought now as Jack pulled their truck into the Jackson Point lot and killed the engine. Never mind that I kissed him when we left Lola’s last night. I won’t let it happen again.
The Radleigh boys had skipped school and were waiting for them, hoodies pulled tight over their ears and hands stuffed in their jeans, at the end of the boat landing. Madaket Harbor was steel gray under a lowering sky, Dionis saw, and the wind that had kicked up overnight was blowing in gale-force gusts. Well above yesterday’s thirty knots, she suspected. She hunched her shoulders against it, eyes scanning the horizon. Tuckernuck’s outline was impossible to discern in the aqueous light.
“Jake, you come with me, and Ryan, you go with Di,” Jack told the boys. Ryan was the elder of the two; he immediately jumped into Di’s skiff and started the engine. He was a good kid. His dad taught history at the high school. Dionis had bumped into all of them at Nantucket Bookworks in the off-season, buying paperbacks of classics Mark Radleigh wanted his boys to read. Dionis had noticed how Ryan and Jake held the books as delicately as butterflies, as though a binding and paper were alien in their digital hands.
She waited for Jack to lead the way out of the harbor and guided her skiff after his. Then she let Ryan take the skiff’s helm and slipped back into thoughts of Howie. When his arms encircled her, Dionis felt safe. Felt the profoundest sensation of home. Impossible to talk to Ryan, anyway, with the competing roars of engine and wind. Her father would tell Ry what to do once they reached land. The skiff bucketed over the increasing chop, and Dionis grasped the gunwales firmly as she sat amidships.
Merry found Tess Starbuck da Silva alone in the kitchen of the Greengage, the restaurant she owned on a quiet side street not far from the Folger family home. Tess had raised her son, Will, in the neatly shingled house she’d inherited from her late husband. But when Will left for college in Boston—he was now a sophomore—she’d opened up the entire main floor for dining, and upgraded her kitchen to gleaming commercial standards. Tess and her second husband, Rafe, no longer lived above the restaurant; during the tourist season, the Greengage’s hours ran too late and its clientele were too noisy. As foreman of Mason Farms, Rafe was early to bed, early to rise. He and Tess now owned a diminutive saltbox on the Polpis Road, and met halfway between their work lives each night.
“I’ve got a backup generator here,” Tess was saying as she handed Merry a cup of coffee, “so my burners and ovens should work, regardless. I can’t believe you don’t have a generator on Cliff Road.”
“Nobody lives there off-season,” Merry pointed out, “when a backup is usually needed. Peter has a number out at the farm, of course.”
“Which is why I asked Rafe to bring one over to the house.” Tess smirked. “He thought the sheep needed light and heat more than you did. I told him not to argue.”
“That’ll be great, Tess,” Merry said with relief. “Even if the main power goes out, George’s kids will still be able to charge their laptops and cell phones. I was dreading life with a bunch of media-starved teenagers.”
“Tell George to expect my girls today,” Tess warned. “Cara and Brittany. I’m sending them over before the deluge with glasses, linens, and plates.”
“You can still pull off a feast, then?” Merry asked, worried. “Without a tent or tables?”
“I can.” Tess hugged her. “My kitchen didn’t meet commercial code for years. I was cooking out of a shoebox. And strangely enough, the local police never turned me in. I owe you my best on your wedding day, Mer—and that’s what you’ll get.”
“The condition of these roads is a disgrace,” Honoria Cabott declared as Jack’s truck rocked over the ruts leading from Vineyard View to the unpaved track heading south and east to Tuckernuck’s cove. She was sitting in the passenger seat of the cab, her fingers clutching the armrest. “Don’t you people grade anymore?”
“Dad brings a grader over in May,” Dionis told her. “It’s just the end of the season now, Miss Cabott—and there’s no point in doing the roads again until the winter’s passed.”
“I don’t know what we pay for,” Honoria said fretfully.
She was nervous, Dionis knew, about leaving her home and returning to the assisted living facility. Nervous, perhaps, about crossing the sea in gale-force winds. Honoria weighed less than a hundred pounds and looked ready to take flight when she was sitting on her own porch. Perched in the exposed body of the work skiff, she’d be tossed overboard if they weren’t careful.
When they reached the cove, Dionis helped the frail woman out of the truck and watched Jorie guide her carefully down the dock to the steel gantry. Ted Whittaker was already loading his luggage into Jack’s work skiff. His golden retriever, Barney, was at the skiff’s stern, wearing a bright red canine life jacket.
“Take Jake with you,” Dionis suggested to her father—the younger Radleigh boy played defense on the Whalers’ lacrosse team and his bulk was excellent ballast—“and seat him next to Miss Cabott, to buffer her from the swell. He can help you with the luggage in Madaket.”
“I’ll put Jorie on her other side,” Jack agreed. “That’s all we can do, short of tying Miss Cabott down.”
“She’d bite your hands off before you even got close.”
But her father was no longer listening to her. He was squinting at something over Dionis’s shoulder, a puzzled expression on his face. She turned, and glimpsed a young woman in jeans and a short down jacket hurrying toward them, a duffel bag over her shoulder and a large suitcase rolling disjointedly over the sand. Dionis narrowed her eyes to make out the face—she couldn’t place it. About her own age, with a mane of strawberry-blonde hair coiled in a knot.
“Who the hell is she? And how did we miss her over the past three days?”
Her father sighed heavily. “Oh my Gawd. That’s the woman who works at Northern Light. Mandy. Maddie? You know—takes care of the Benson horses?”
Dionis swore. The Bensons hadn’t handled their own hurricane prep. If the groom was still on Tuckernuck, so were Honeybear and Afterglow, the Bensons’ palominos.
The woman raised an arm in the air and waved at them frantically. “Hey! You guys! Wait for me!”
It took Dionis several trips from the truck to the skiff to transfer Vineyard View’s luggage. Jorie Engstrom was a weaver in her spare time; she’d brought a large hand loom on a collapsible stand and all her wool supplies to Tuckernuck for the protracted stay between May and October. Miss Cabott left nothing behind in the Assisted Living facility when she departed—“those crones will steal everything not nailed down”—and her entire worldly goods were returning, now, to Madaket. By the time they were loaded and the Vineyard View pair had joined Ted Whittaker in the skiff, Jack was walking away from the Northern Light stranger with a troubled expression on his face.
“She left the horses behind,” he told Dionis.
“So—the circus, and all its monkeys, are dumped now in our laps?”
“She says Todd Benson was supposed to call. About the arrangements.” Jack pursed his lips. “She was shocked he hadn’t. Walked all the way here, too, from Northern Light, when she realized we were evacuating Tuck.”
“My heart bleeds. What about the Palominos?”
“They’re loose in the paddock. So they can graze.”
“In other words, completely vulnerable to a Category Three hurricane.”
Jack looked at Dionis helplessly.
“You are not going to run that woman back to Madaket, Dad,” she protested. “We have a schedule. Priorities.”
“There’s not much time, Di, to dick around with this. If we leave her here now—and the storm hits . . . are we certain we can get back out to save her?” Jack halted. “Hey, Ryan—take a golf cart and head to China Trade. Make sure Ms. Chamberlain and Brad are awake. Tell ’em Di is coming along behind to load ’em up.”
Dionis snorted. “Does that woman really think she can just leave two palominos alone in a field in a hurricane? Does Todd Benson think so?”
“I’m sure they have access to the barn.”
“That can’t be good enough. Not with the whole world blowing into the stalls at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.” Dionis knew next to nothing about horses, but she figured they felt nervous in bad weather.
Jack shrugged. “I can’t get cell coverage here, Di. I’ll call Benson’s assistant when I get back to Madaket, see what he wants to do.”
“Dad.” She fought back her impatience. “Nothing but a barge will float off a pair of horses. And we can’t use our barge today.”
The Mathers’ barge hauled everything massive—like a fully loaded horse trailer—to and from Tuckernuck, but it was moored at Madaket Marine, on Hither Creek, near the powerboat required to tow it. Even with the Radleigh boys’ help, it would take hours to mobilize that kind of multi-vessel transport operation—and today, at this hour and with terrific wind gusts and increasingly rising seas, a barge could founder. Horses and all.
“I know. Dammit.”
Dionis marched purposefully over to the Benson groom, who was shifting her luggage to the end of the dock’s steel gantry. She would probably coil the mooring painter around her neck rather than be left behind, Dionis thought, if they refused to take her.
“Maddie?”
“It’s Mandy, actually.” She lifted her head but failed to meet Di’s eyes; not as old or as confident as she’d like to suggest. A few years younger than Di, in fact. Without Di’s toughness.
“Great. I’m Dionis,” she said. “My dad and I can’t possibly get the Bensons’ horses off Tuckernuck today. You need to stay with them until we’ve got a plan in place.”
Mandy glanced at her watch. “My plane leaves in three hours. How long do you need?”
“Until Sunday. At the earliest. I suspect your plane is grounded anyway.”
“Oh, no.” Wildly, Mandy shook her head. “I’m done working for Benson. That guy thinks he’s some kind of fricking king. Expects me to ride out a Cat Three hurricane all alone in this godforsaken place! With everybody else evacuating? And all the houses boarded up for the season? He can’t pay me enough. I told him he was out of his fricking mind, so he tried to fire me. But he couldn’t,” she finished with palpable satisfaction, “because I quit.”
Dionis gathered her fraying patience. “When did you talk to him, Mandy?”
Again, the groom glanced at her watch. “I sent him a text. About forty-five minutes ago. I’m not sure it went through, because cell coverage is spotty at Northern Light . . .”
Forty-five minutes ago. While Dad and I were on the water, Dionis thought. Jesus. “Look. We’ve got a lot of people to evacuate. Once we’ve got them all back to Madaket, we’ll call Mr. Benson. But we can’t do anything about the horses until we have his authorization.”
“I’m going with you, now, to Madaket.”
Dionis threw up her hands. “You’d really leave the palominos all alone out here? Don’t you care about them?”
“Sure. But they’re Benson’s problem, not mine,” Mandy retorted. “I’m not responsible.”
“No,” Dionis agreed sarcastically. “I can see you’re not.”
Mandy wrapped her arms protectively across her chest. “I’ve got a seat out on a Cape Air flight to Boston this afternoon.”
“Yeah, I’m guessing that’s canceled.”
The groom reached into her tote bag and pulled out a wallet. “Five hundred bucks. For a spot in your boat.”
A few raindrops struck Dionis’s face, then a few more. She and Jack charged homeowners and guests two hundred dollars apiece, round trip, for transport to Tuckernuck, along with their supplies and luggage.
“Otherwise,” Mandy threw in defiantly, “I’ll radio the Coast Guard as soon as you leave! An SOS. I’ll tell them you abandoned me here, alone.”
Mandy would be a pain in the ass until they got rid of her. Dionis snatched the wad of cash from the groom’s fingers, pulled up her hoodie against the rain, and walked back to her father.
“We’re going to have to come back and get those horses safely into their stalls tonight,” she told him, “because there’s no way we can get them off this island. That woman’s poison. She’s threatening to report us for abandoning her in an evacuation zone.”
“I’ll take her,” Jack said grimly, “and call Benson as soon as I reach Madaket. Give him a piece of my mind.”
“Tell him he’s about to lose his prize palominos. Better yet—tell his wife. She may actually care.”
Her father rubbed his left arm fretfully. “Of all the lame-ass stunts to pull, this is the lamest. Summer people. And their privilege—”
“Dad. Are you okay?”
His faded blue eyes drifted over her. He stopped massaging his arm. “Nothing a good drunk through a hurricane can’t solve.”
Dionis watched until he’d fended the loaded skiff away from the Tuckernuck dock and circled out to sea. Then she jumped back in the truck and turned it toward China Trade. She hoped Brad Kramer was sober enough to break down the stuff in Elsa’s darkroom. And that something would go right on this shitstorm day.