Breathless and reeling, Lily ran from the diner back to Something Fishy.
“Long line?” her mother said as Lily handed her the sandwich.
“Yeah,” said Lily.
Her mother opened the wrapping and picked the lettuce off the bread. “Are you all right? You’re white as a gho—” she coughed. “Never mind. Eat your sandwich.”
The rest of the afternoon Lily’s thoughts spun like hot socks in a dryer. If she had doubted that there were ghosts, she didn’t anymore. Max had practically wrecked the Good Fortunes Shoppe. But, Lily thought, he hadn’t really hurt anything, had he? At least, he hadn’t hurt her or Madame What’s-Her-Face. Did this mean that he wasn’t dangerous? Maybe he wanted Lily to do something, something that would put him, as Vaz had suggested, “at peace.” A boat, a brother, a beach. Clues, obviously, but what did they mean?
Boat, brother, beach. Like something from one of those bad books you had to read in first grade: See the MAN on the BOAT! Maybe Uncle Max had had a boat. She remembered something Vaz said about a boat when they were in Bailey’s library. What was it? Yes! One of the mysterious fires that Max set had burned a boat! But why would Max burn up his own boat? What was that stuff about the brother? Was he talking about Wes or himself? And what was she supposed to think about the strawberry jam? How did that fit in?
She rubbed her temples. She had found out so much in the last week, but none of it made any sense. It was like trying to understand a whale by pressing your nose up to it; she was too close to it to see the whole thing. She wanted to talk to Vaz.
But then she thought about what Madame Durriken had said. That Vaz was no good, that he had other girlfriends. Blonde girlfriends. Like Kami. Dandelion Woman hadn’t been able to read a single tarot card in the way that Max wanted her to. But then, Max didn’t seem to want her to read them the regular way. Madame was a greedy dried up old twig, but did that make her a total fake?
Lily slumped at the glass counter, too tired to think anymore. She rested her head in her arms and soon she was asleep, dreaming that she and her mother were sailing a boat — not on the water, but through a storm cloud — towards a pot of gold at the end of a fuzzy, indistinct rainbow.
* * *
That night dinner was popcorn, sliced apples and cheese in the TV room, with both a warm fire and bright TV flickering as distractions. Lily flipped the channels so fast that her mother claimed it was like looking out the window of a moving train. Lily was relieved when her mother got bored and dizzy and finally went off to bed, leaving Lily with her jumbled thoughts and a quietly purring Julep.
Three hours and the phone hadn’t rung, not even for a crank call. Lily wondered if Vaz had tried to reach her, but since there was no answering machine, there was no way to know. He liked Kami, Lily could tell, but he could have changed his mind. Didn’t people change their minds all the time? And, just this once, couldn’t someone change his mind to include Lily rather than cutting her out?
Her stomach felt like a living thing, like a crab scuttling around, pinching her from the inside. Lily thought about what Vaz had said, how he thought she had lived an adventurous life. It hadn’t felt like an adventure. She remembered all those dinners with all her mother’s boyfriends, remembered the expressions on their faces as they watched her mother talk, laughing, joking, waving her pink-tipped hands. Those guys thought that Lily’s mother was one big adventure wrapped in an orange cloak. What if Vaz thought Lily was like that and then found out that she wasn’t? Would he leave the way all her mother’s boyfriends, the way her father did?
Lily turned off the TV and stared into the flames. She found that if she let her eyes lose focus, the flames looked like tiny writhing people with streaming yellow hair and hearts of blue. She wondered if that’s what Uncle Max had seen in fires, if that was why he set them. Why had he set them? Was he a terrible person? Was he crazy? Was he jilted by A. B.? She wished she could ask him.
Why not ask him?
Lily sat up as straight as she could in the squishy furniture, her crab stomach jittering wildly. Never in a million years would she have imagined she would be trying to talk to a ghost. “Max?” she whispered. Louder. “Uncle Max?”
The fire danced and Julep stretched, but the rest of the room was still as a church. “I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. I don’t know what you want me to do.”
She closed her eyes and willed herself to relax, hoping that she would sense Max’s presence in her skin, a cold wind, a chill finger on her arm. “Uncle Max? My mom’s getting mad and I go back to school in a week. I don’t have much time. Do you need me to find something or someone? Would it help? Would you find peace then?”
A log in the fire snapped loud as a gunshot and Lily opened her eyes and whipped her head around to see not Max, but the larval head of Bailey Burton glaring in the window. She blinked and he was gone.
She hugged herself, feeling a pulse all the way down to her toes. She knew two things at once, as sure as she knew that snow was cold and the sun, hot: that it was Bailey Burton’s hand she had seen pressed in the window the first week they had arrived, that it was Bailey Burton who had been watching her that first day on the beach.
* * *
The next morning, Lily stumbled half asleep into the kitchen for breakfast. She’d hadn’t slept well, dreaming that her hair had gotten caught in the propeller of a boat that dragged her around the ocean. Her scalp ached.
Her mother’s eyes trailed her around the kitchen as Lily got herself juice, and made some toast. When she sat down to eat, her mother placed the coffee mug on the table and heaved a long sigh.
“I see now why you wanted to stay up late last night,” she said. “Fine. But understand that I’ve been there and done that. You’ll get sick of it in about a week.” She got up and stalked from the room.
Lily put her toast back on her plate. What would she get sick of? Vaz? Kissing? How about getting sick of her mother being a cryptic wacko?
Lily, who suddenly didn’t feel like eating, threw away her toast and poured the juice down the sink, then stomped upstairs to brush her teeth and take a shower. It was only when she was squeezing paste onto to the toothbrush that she looked in the mirror and understood what her mother was talking about.
Her hair was pink.
Not just pink, but bright hot pink from root to tip, as if someone had leached out all the natural color first and dumped the dye on afterwards. She lifted a hank and gaped at the nearly florescent strands, shiny and artificial as doll’s hair. But why? Why would Max do this? What could it mean? Her eyes stung as she realized that it was the only thing about her looks that she had ever been even a little proud of, the reddish hair she’d gotten from her father. And now it was gone.
Her mother paused at the door of the bathroom. “It looks terrible, in case you were wondering. But, hey, if that’s what you want…”
Lily bit back the tears and scooped up her comb. “Yes, it’s what I want,” she said, yanking the comb through, wincing, wondering what Vaz would do when he saw it. “I think it looks great.”
“Great!” her mother said, her bright tone as artificial as Lily’s hair. “But when you don’t want it anymore, don’t expect me to pay to get it fixed. It will have to grow out.”
“Fine,” said Lily, furious at her mother, furious at Max, furious at the world. She threw the comb in the sink, where it spun around and around.
* * *
That afternoon, so tired of her mother’s disapproving looks, so antsy and out of sorts that she had even tried finishing Oliver Twist, Lily begged her mother to let her go to the beach.
“I’m uncomfortable with the idea of you going without supervision,” her mother said, setting her mouth in a tight seam.
“Mom. It’s a public beach. It’s twenty degrees outside. My hair is the color of bubble gum. Trust me when I say it will be me and the seagulls. What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know. And that’s what I’m afraid of.”
Lily almost cried in frustration. “Are you going to keep me a prisoner the rest of my life?”
Her mother had the nerve to look hurt. “You’re not a prisoner.”
“You could have fooled me,” said Lily, throwing herself into a chair. “You let me drive a car when I was eleven years old. And now I can’t walk two blocks by myself without you freaking out. What’s wrong with this picture?”
Her mother plucked at the folds of her skirt. “Do you want to know what I heard on the radio the morning we left Montclair? Just a few hours before Frank, I mean, The Geek asked us to go?”
More riddles. Sometimes her mother talked like a character out of old Batman cartoons. So, Batman, do you want to know why I’ve kidnapped Robin and hung him upside down over a pit of snakes? “I have no idea what you heard on the radio.”
Lily’s mother sat, removed her rings one by one, shook them like dice in her fist. “British researchers found out that money really can buy happiness.”
“What?”
“I’m not joking. They studied a large group of people for years, especially those people who came into a large inheritance or won the lottery. Wanna know how much happiness costs these days? About one point seven million dollars. Apparently one point seven million would put a smile on the face of the most miserable person on earth.” She shook her head sadly. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard it. It was like the world was conspiring to prove me wrong.”
Lily had always worried that one day her mother would pass from kooky to totally nuts. “Mom, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know now that my family, your family, has suffered a lot of tragedies. The money was the only thing that stayed constant. Unlike people, money won’t let you down, money won’t die. Money will save you!” She laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “So everyone was obsessed with it. My parents, my uncle, all of them. I wanted no part of it. I wanted love, not money. That’s why I ran away with your father.” She laughed again, a bray, a sob. “And we both know how that turned out. Your father thought I was too straight laced, too rigid. Me!”
Her mother put her rings back on. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Maybe your father was right and it’s in my genes. Maybe my family was onto something. It’s a crazy world.” She looked around the shop, her expression saying that evidence of the craziness was apparent in the beach-glass lamps and bikini earrings. “I think about all those times you told me that you were worried about money and that maybe I should be, too, and I think you were right.” She looked pointedly at Lily’s hair.
An alarm bell clanged in Lily’s head. “No, I wasn’t. I was wrong. Totally wrong. I was just a snotty kid.”
“Even with the hair, you’re a wonderful kid.”
Lily didn’t want to be wonderful and didn’t want to be right. She had never seen her mother look so lost and uncertain, and it scared her in a way that no ghost could have scared her. No matter what crazy, crackpot scheme her mother cooked up, she had always seemed hopeful, sure the future would be better. Now Lily felt as if the ground were shifting, turning everything upside down. And what was worse, Lily was the one who had set the ground in motion.
“I just want to do the right thing,” her mother said. “I hope I’m not too late.”
Lily wriggled in her chair, too confused to find the words for the horrible feeling welling up inside her. She couldn’t stand to look at her mother’s twisted, cracked-egg face for another second. Nothing about this was normal. Not Arden Crabtree normal.
“In less than a week I’ll be back in school and I’ll have tons of structure and supervision and homework and everything else,” Lily said. “But now I’m going to the beach. I’ll see you back at the house.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She got up, put on her coat, and walked — practically ran — out, pulling her ski cap low over her head and tucking all her hair into it. She expected her mother would follow, but she didn’t.
As Lily marched away from the store, she couldn’t help but notice that cold and lifeless Cape May was shaking itself out of its winter coma. A few people now studded the streets and restaurants, and bills and signs announcing a family roller skating party and murder mystery dinner theater plastered many store windows. Lily wondered if her mother’s new, more responsible parental persona included roller-skating, or if she would now think roller skating was too dangerous. The thought wasn’t even a bit funny.
Lily reached the promenade and hopped down the steps to Congress Beach. She didn’t feel like sitting at the beach, but she did anyway, beginning a new sand house, all the while keeping an eye on the boardwalk for Bailey Burton. Scratching and digging and packing the sand until her hands were red claws and the sun began its daily drift to the west, she erased thoughts of her mother’s strange speech at the gift shop, her own flaming pink head. She gave the elaborate sand house one last once-over, straightening the stones she had used to line the front walkway, and then stood.
That’s when she saw Vaz strolling down the boardwalk. Arm in arm with Kami.
* * *
“You won’t believe what I saw,” said the balding man with the jelly belly, panting as he fell onto the beach blanket. “A kid with his hands on fire. Both hands.”
“You did watch were you were walking, didn’t you?” the woman asked, smoothing the skirt of her polka-dotted bathing suit. “You didn’t knock over that little girl’s sand castle again?”
“Did you hear what I said? A kid’s hands were on fire!”
“Yes, I heard you. And I think you’ve had too much sun. You may not think sand castles are important, but that girl worked very hard.”
The man grunted, wriggling his large body down next to hers. “Why are you always nagging me? For your information, I didn’t knock over the kid’s castle, all right?”
The woman yanked the skirt of her bathing suit out from under the man’s rump. “Then why is she hiding behind that dune like that? Why does she look so upset?”
“How the heck should I know? Maybe she’s a crybaby.”
The woman shook her head, the rubber flowers on her bathing cap fluttering like many multicolored wings. “You’re as cold as ice. Sometimes I wonder if you even have a drop of blood in your veins.”
The man frowned, scratching at his blue legs. “Sometimes I wonder about that, too. Hey, did you see the guy in the feathered hat? I think he’s got some sort of sword.”
“You’re not even listening to me.”
The man picked up a shell and pitched it at the water. “Why bother? You always say the same thing.”