Elin Hilderbrand - The Rumor

Hope agreed, but not because she wanted the ID or the money.

She wanted Brick.

For two years, Hope had assumed there would be no way Brick would ever break up with her sister. They would be one of those couples who grew up together, made it work long distance through four years of college (if Allegra got into college, which at this point seemed doubtful), and then married, had children, and found themselves celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Although Brick might have shared this vision, what neither he nor Hope had considered was that Allegra was Allegra, which meant not smart enough to know a good thing when she had it. Allegra was a seeker and a climber and an opportunist, and she had a short attention span. Allegra would get caught with Ian Coburn, and that would be the end of her and Brick. Hope just had to wait.

Hope and Brick texted each other regularly about their honors chemistry homework, a fact that Hope did not share with her sister, and she knew Brick didn’t either. Allegra hadn’t been selected to take honors chem; she was in regular chem with other underachievers like Hollis and their friend Bluto.

At five thirty, when Hope knew Brick would be home from baseball practice, she shot him a text: Hot glass looks like cool glass . This was how they started every conversation about their chem homework, an inside joke referring to the enormous sign hanging over the Smart Board in their classroom. Mr. Hence lived in mortal fear of one of his students picking up a beaker that had recently been over the Bunsen burner.

No response. Maybe Brick wasn’t ready to tackle chem yet. Maybe he was taking a shower or hanging out with his parents. Brick liked to spend time with his parents-whereas Hope, and especially Allegra, avoided it like the plague-because Trevor and Madeline were so cool, and the three of them in their family were, like, friends.

Sometimes Hope thought that she might not want to date Brick as much as become his adopted sister.

She texted: Have you looked at the questions on page 242? Inert gases?

No response. Hope could send two unanswered texts but not three. That would make her look desperate and pushy.

A second later, her phone pinged.

Brick wrote, Was your sister really at class on Saturday? Or did she ditch and go to the mall?

Hope ogled her screen. Here it was, then, at a time she least expected it. Brick was on to Allegra. It was all Hope could do not to spill the beans.

She wrote: Class, I think. Why?

Brick wrote: Someone said they saw her at the mall .

Hope wrote: Which someone?

Brick wrote: Someone .

Hope wrote: Come on. Who .

Brick wrote: Parker Marz. He said she was with some guy in a Boston College sweatshirt. Doesn’t your cousin go to BC?

Hope chewed her pencil eraser. Her cousins were all older, although one of them-the biggest, most pompous jerk of the bunch- had gone to BC, prompting Eddie to tell his favorite joke. How do you know if someone goes to BC? They’ll tell you .

Hope wrote: One of our cousins went to BC. A while ago .

Brick wrote: Oh. Okay .

Hope wrote: Did you ask Allegra about it?

Brick wrote: Nah. Not a big deal. Never mind .

Burying his head in the sand, Hope thought. She couldn’t blame him. The truth was too awful to contemplate.

Hope went to church every week with her mother. She was a spiritual person, she believed in God, she bought most of the tenets of the Catholic Church but not all of them. She did believe in prayer, and so she said a heartfelt one for Brick, and then she opened to page 242 and started learning about the inert gases.

He bounced up the cobblestone street in his Porsche Cayenne, wearing his lucky Panama hat, waving at everyone he saw. Grace liked to accuse him of what she called “indiscriminate waving.”

“You didn’t even know that person,” she said once. “Why did you wave?”

The fact was, Eddie was a little nearsighted, and he feared not waving to the wrong person more than he feared waving to a complete stranger. A not-wave in the real-estate business could mean a killed deal or a lost rental; it could mean missing out on thousands of dollars of potential income.

Next to Eddie, on the passenger seat, were four bills from the spec houses on Eagle Wing Lane. Or, more correctly, four bills from 13 Eagle Wing Lane, because Eddie had been forced to stop construction on numbers 9 and 11. He simply didn’t have the cash.

Getting four bills in one day should be illegal , Eddie thought. Three should be the maximum. But today’s mail had brought four; his secretary, Eloise, had handed them over, pinched between her thumb and index finger, as if she were giving him someone’s snotty handkerchief.

The first bill, for putting in the foundation, came in at twenty-two grand. Eddie blinked, then felt a rush of relief when he realized he had already paid that one. But a call to Gerry, the foundation guy, revealed that Eddie had paid for the foundations of numbers 9 and 11 but not for the foundation of number 13.

His Panama hat was not lucky. He would have taken it off and thrown it into the way back, but he so believed in its powers that he feared taking it off in anger would cause him to crash the Porsche and die, leaving Grace and the girls in debt.

Before he’d left the office, he’d stopped by the desk of his sister, Barbie, who was the only other broker that worked with him, because she was, essentially, the only person on Nantucket that he trusted other than his wife and children.

He said, “What am I gonna do about money?”

Barbie looked up at him through her frosted bangs. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman on the island, but she presented what she had to maximum advantage. She always wore a dress-she favored Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses (Eddie had no clue, but Allegra had schooled him as to Aunt Barbie’s tastes), always heels (Manolo Blahniks), always the perfume (he didn’t know what it was called, but it was so distinctively her that it might as well have been called Barbie). She was wearing her signature piece of jewelry: a black pearl that was the same size as the jawbreakers they used to steal from the five-and-dime when they were kids.

They had grown up on Purchase Street in New Bedford, dirt poor. High school for Eddie had been two pairs of corduroy pants (gray and beige) and two pilled sweaters (gray and beige), two button-down shirts (white and red plaid), and a pair of zippy red-and-blue running shoes that his mother had found at Goodwill. The shoes had come to define him as he proceeded to break every sprinting record at New Bedford High School and other high schools across the Commonwealth, earning himself the nickname Fast Eddie.

Eddie was able to run away from his disadvantages, but Barbie, eleven months his junior, had been forced to face them. She had been teased mercilessly about her clothes, her shoes, her hair, her smell-and she had gotten into fights and was suspended three times before she graduated from high school. In Barbie’s mind, he knew, there could never be enough money.

“I have a novel idea,” she said. “Try selling a house.”

“Funny,” he said. The market was a frozen tundra.

“Well,” Barbie said, checking her desk calendar, “that guy is coming with his group to Low Beach Road next week.”

“What guy?”

“You know what guy,” Barbie said. “The guy who asked.”

The guy who asked: Eddie wished he didn’t know what his sister was talking about, but he did. She was referring to Ronan Last-Name-Withheld.

One of the perennial aces in Eddie’s hand was the house at 10 Low Beach Road. This was a showcase house right on the Atlantic Ocean with six-count them, six-master suites, an infinity-edge pool, two gourmet kitchens (one indoor, one outdoor), a grass tennis court, a five-thousand-square-foot basement with a movie theater, an arcade filled with vintage pinball machines, a gym that was exactly like the one the New England Patriots worked out in during the off-season, a sauna, a mahogany-paneled billiards room, and a walk-in cigar humidor. Also, there was a stucco-walled wine cellar with a table that had originally been built for William of Orange. The house rented for fifty thousand dollars a week, and Eddie had the exclusive listing. The owner was a thirty-year-old graduate of Nantucket High School who had gone to Cal Tech, where he invented a computer chip that was used in every ATM in America. The owner had married a supermodel and lived out in L.A. The owner and supermodel came to Nantucket for two weeks every August; the rest of the season, the house was Eddie’s to rent.