Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

Lynne sighed. She wasn’t getting anywhere. “Demeter, what’s going on with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s going on? Something is funny. Something is wrong.”

“I’m working,” Demeter said. “I spend all day on my knees weeding. If I’m very, very lucky, I get to water. Or deadhead.” She held up one hand and clutched at her backpack with the other. Her hand was blotched with purple stains. “Daylilies.”

She clutched the bag, clutched the bag. Lynne said, “I’d like you to open your bag, please.”

“What?” Demeter said. She tightened her grip on her bag, which only made Lynne more determined to see what was inside it. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Set the bag down and unzip it for me, please,” Lynne said.

“I suppose the cavity search is next,” Demeter said. “Do I need to call my lawyer?”

“Just do it,” Lynne said.

Demeter did not release her hold on the bag. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. What is wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with you? ” Lynne said. Her voice sounded positively lethal; she felt herself losing her grip. She rarely got like this. If Al had been home, she would have ducked out of there already. She would have made herself a cup of chamomile tea and gotten into a cool bath, played some Mozart, read some poetry. “Put the bag down, please, and unzip it.”

Demeter did as she was told. The backpack gaped open. Lynne took a step forward and peered inside, as though she expected to find someone’s severed head in there. But all she saw was a flannel shirt. She rummaged a little deeper. Two bottles of water, one of them with a lime floating in it-more Zoe water-and another rotting banana. That was all.

Lynne extracted the banana. “Waste of a perfectly good banana,” she said.

“Call the fruit police,” Demeter said.

Lynne held the black, weeping banana. She was so relieved, she thought she might cry.

Demeter collapsed against the closet door; it closed with a sound like a gunshot.

“Mom,” she said.

“What?” Lynne said.

“Get out, please?”

“Yes,” Lynne said. “Okay.”

Lynne was so embarrassed by the incident in Demeter’s bedroom that she said nothing about it to Al. She laundered Demeter’s sheets and towels and left them in a neat pile outside her daughter’s bedroom door. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t use the pin to force entry again. Demeter was a seventeen-year-old girl. She needed her privacy.

On August 14, Lynne was working in her home office. She was listening to a Bruce Springsteen CD, drinking freshly brewed iced tea with mint. She and Al had a date to meet at Ladies Beach at four o’clock. They did this every August, right when Al realized that summer was almost over and he hadn’t taken any late-afternoon swims. And this year, because of all that had happened, they hadn’t gone to the beach even once. Jordan was gone, and Lynne had been afraid to call and inflict herself on Zoe.

Lynne was looking forward to the swim. Afterward she would try to convince Al to go to Dune for dinner.

Downstairs, the phone rang. Lynne ignored it. God knew, if she picked up every phone call that came in to the house, she would never get any work done. Because of all that had happened this summer, she was running behind. The answering machine picked up. The Castles had to be the last family in America that even still had an answering machine. Everyone else used automated voicemail. Lynne tried not to listen to the voice on the machine-if she was so keen to know who was calling, she told herself, then she should have just picked up the phone in the first place. But she listened anyway, just long enough to discern that the voice belonged to Zoe.

Zoe. It was Zoe, finally calling her back. Lynne sprang from her desk and rushed down the stairs to get the phone, but by the time she picked it up, she was talking to a dial tone. She was just about to call Zoe back when the phone rang in her office, and Lynne thought, Of course, Zoe would call my office phone next since she couldn’t reach me on the home phone. Lynne hurried up the stairs, calling out pointlessly, “I’m coming, hold on, here I come!” When she picked up the phone, she was out of breath. She was too old for this. But it was Zoe. At last! She couldn’t wait to talk to her.

“Hello?” she said.

“Lynne,” Al said. “I need you to sit down.”

Twenty minutes later Lynne and Al were meeting in the hot, unvented offices of Frog and Toad Landscaping with Kerry Trevor and a hysterical Demeter. It was difficult for the adults to talk about what had happened with Demeter making so much noise.

“Honey,” Lynne said. “You have to calm down.”

But Demeter was a volcano intent on erupting. She hadn’t emoted nearly this much after the accident or after Penny’s funeral, which was probably why she was such a mess now. All of that difficult stuff was surfacing.

“Actually, maybe Demeter should wait outside,” Kerry said.

Was that a good idea? Lynne wondered. At this point, she knew, Demeter was a flight risk. If she was left unsupervised, she might just get into her car and drive away. She might do something stupid.

“Jeanne will keep an eye on her,” Kerry said.

“Okay,” Lynne said. Jeanne, Kerry’s right-hand woman, had grown up in Brockton, where, she liked to tell people, she had earned her doctorate in badass.

As soon as Jeanne took Demeter by the arm and led her from the room, it was much quieter.

Lynne said, “Maybe you should start again at the beginning.”

“Demeter was caught trying to steal two bottles of vodka from a client’s house,” Kerry said. “She had a bottle in each hand; she was hurrying for the side door. The clients weren’t home, but a member of their staff caught her.”

“A member of the staff?” Lynne said.

“I have to tell you this in extreme confidence,” Kerry said. “The clients were the Allencasts.”

Lynne thought she might vomit in her lap.

“And the person who caught Demeter was their personal chef, Zoe Alistair.”

“We know Zoe,” Al said. “We’re close friends.”

“I realize that,” Kerry said. “And Zoe handled the situation sensitively. She called me right away. She said she had taken the bottles from Demeter and decided that she wasn’t going to tell the Allencasts. She said she would let the three of us handle it.”

Lynne thought about the phone call from Zoe. She had been calling to warn Lynne of what was coming. To let her know that her daughter-the girl who had survived-was a thief.

“Anybody else would probably have alerted the owners,” Kerry said. “And called the police.”

“Of course,” Al said.

“Now,” Kerry said, “I have more bad news.”

“Oh God,” Lynne said. The room was quiet for a second, and they could all hear Demeter sobbing on the other side of the door.

“I’ve had three separate complaints about missing bottles of alcohol from clients, which I dismissed because my crews never go inside the houses. However, when I spoke with Demeter’s crew members, they indicated that she enters clients’ homes all the time-most frequently to ‘use the facilities.’ My employee Nell, who worked closely with Demeter, told me that Demeter used the bathroom only when the clients weren’t home. I cross-checked the names of the clients who complained against the assignments of Demeter’s crew, and they all matched up.”

“So now you’re accusing my daughter of… what?” Lynne said.

“Honey,” Al said.

“I don’t think this stealing today was a onetime thing,” Kerry said. “I think it’s possible she’s been doing it all summer.”

“Stealing alcohol? ” Lynne said. “But what for? I just don’t get it. What for? We don’t drink at home. Not a drop.”