Death Will Extend Your Vacation (13 page)

I pushed my shades up to the top of my head and opened my eyes.

“Bully for you,” I said. “You’re an industrious woman. I can’t tell you how much I admire that.”

“Less sarcasm and more gratitude, please.” Ice rattled pleasingly as she poured herself a glass of lemonade. “I’m offering to do yours.”

“Does this offer involve any fetching and carrying on my part?” I held out my hand, and she refilled my glass.

“Not exactly.”

That sounded ominous. I sat up.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’ve got a cunning plan.”

“I do.” She perched on the edge of my chaise longue, shoving my legs over to make room for herself. “Does ‘don’t tell me’ mean you want to hear it?”

“Do I have a choice? Lay it on me.”

“The good news is I’ll gather up your laundry.” She settled her tush more comfortably on the seat, almost knocking my legs overboard.

“Saving me an arduous task.” She knew as well as I did that all my dirty clothes and towels were in plain sight on the floor and other available surfaces in my room.

“I’m doing my good deed for the day,” she announced, “as we used to call it in the Girl Scouts. I’ll do everybody’s laundry, the whole house.”

“Wow, I am impressed,” I said. “For people who go around practically naked from dawn to dark, we get a huge amount of stuff dirty.”

“It’s mostly towels and T-shirts,” she said. “Easy enough to throw in the machine.”

“And the purpose of this exercise?” I inquired.

“That’s the best part.” She drained her glass and set it down on the wooden side table with a triumphant bang. “It gives me an excuse to go through everybody’s things, especially Phil’s. And while I’m doing the wash, you can sneak into his room and look for that notebook.”

“Oh, goody.” I chugged the last inch of lemonade, put the glass on the table, and settled my shades back down over my nose. “Phil might have something to say about that.”

“He isn’t here.” Barbara flashed me a broad grin. “He went off to see some art show in Southampton. That’s what gave me the idea.”

“How about the rest of them? It’ll be hard to miss me tiptoeing into Phil’s room.”

“They’re leaving in fifteen minutes to go to a meeting.” She had all the answers. “I already told them you’re helping me with the laundry. Bruce, we’ve got to find that notebook!”

Twenty minutes later, as I plunged my arm up to the bicep into the smelly socks and shorts in Phil’s laundry basket, I thought that Phil would have been an idiot to leave the notebook in his room. Lewis had wanted to see it more than we did. I already knew the cops had the notebook in which Clea had mentioned me. She might have written anything in the one they’d missed. I hadn’t told anyone but Barbara and Jimmy about the scene at the dump. Who had Lewis told? Not Karen. He didn’t want her to know he’d had a fling with Clea. If I were Phil, I’d either carry that little black hot potato around on me until I could take it into the city or lock it in the glove compartment of my car.

In the next forty minutes, Barbara and I went through every drawer in the place, the pockets of every shirt and pair of pants our housemates had worn since the last time they’d done laundry, the underside of every mattress, and as far as we could penetrate into every closet. No notebook.

“Do you think we should take down their suitcases from the tops of all the closets?” Barbara, a pile of sheets in her arms, appeared in the doorway of Lewis’s room where I was nosing through a metal box of fishing tackle. It was marginally possible that Lewis had gotten the notebook away from Phil already.

“No way.” I snapped the tackle box shut. It was bad enough we’d pawed through their underwear. I could imagine the hoopla if they all came back and caught us tossing their luggage around. “Give it up, Barbara. It isn’t here.”

“I guess you’re right. We had to try, though.” She thrust the sheets at me. “Here, follow me. We need to take the first load out, throw it into the dryer, and put these sheets in the wash. Then you can help me hang them on the line. They’re too big for the dryer, and anyhow, clean sheets smell fresher when you dry them in the sun.”

“What a treat,” I said.

“Don’t bellyache about it,” she said. “It’s a gorgeous day. Think of hanging sheets as a meditation.”

“The fireworks don’t start till dark,” Barbara said, sniffing the air like a pointer as we trudged across the parking lot of the biggest public beach in the area. “Do you think we brought enough food?”

“Enough for a bar mitzvah,” Jimmy assured her.

“It’s a long wait,” she said. “I don’t want you guys to get bored.” She looked up at the sun, still high in the sky, and flashed a glance over her shoulder at me. “Are you okay?”

“Just fine and wonderful,” I said. She had loaded me down with chairs and blankets, extra layers of clothing for the Arctic night that might follow this tropical Fourth of July day, and a folding picnic table.

“Remind me why we had to get here three hours early.” Jimmy shifted his shoulders beneath the weight of a giant cooler bag stuffed so fat that it made him look like Atlas carrying the world.

“We promised to save places for everybody. You were there when we talked about it, you just weren’t listening. Besides, look what a great parking spot we’ve got. Corky told me that by seven-thirty they’re parking people way down on the residential streets. Some people even walk the whole way from the village. Anyhow, I didn’t want to miss anything.”

I refrained from pointing out that all those cars that would have to park farther away would be ahead of us on the road out when the fireworks ended. You have to give Barbara points for enthusiasm.

“How come the rest couldn’t get here early?”

“Some of the gang at Oscar’s are making fried chicken, but it was so gorgeous at the beach this afternoon that they didn’t get into the kitchen till late. Karen and Lewis decided they wanted to hike along the beach, if not all the way from Dedhampton, at least from Amagansett. They started this morning. The others should be here any time, they had to stop for gas.”

“Or was that a rhetorical question?” I asked.

“Carrying all their stuff? Sounds like the Long March.”

Barbara looked guilty.

“We’ve got their chairs and blanket and their food for the picnic,” she said, “all except the fried chicken. I couldn’t not offer, could I?”

We reached the weathered rail fence that separated parking from soft white sand. Tribes of picnickers streamed past the fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances at the head of the road. Firefighters and local cops directed traffic, collected contributions, or just hung out enjoying the festive occasion, greeting neighbors, and rescuing the occasional kid from running into a car. Long lines had already formed in front of a row of Porta-Potties.

Barbara led the way onto the sand. The beach was already crowded. Large groups had set up picnic tables, lit candles, built small pit fires, and broken out the six-packs. Screaming kids ran everywhere. Vendors made their way through the crowd selling glow-in-the-dark necklaces. Lazy rollers broke up into lacy surf that foamed and clung before receding. A faint white moon hung in the deepening sky. Up on the dunes, blades of beach grass with the western sun behind them gleamed like light swords.

“Hey, Barb, wait up,” Jimmy called. “Where are you going?”

Barbara stopped and swiveled, waiting for us to catch up. Her flyaway hair whipped in the breeze. Her brown eyes sparkled. She wiggled her bare toes in the sand, dancing in place with impatience. She wore her backpack and carried her sandals in one hand and a plastic shopping bag with a bag of potato chips and two loaves of French bread sticking out the top in the other. She gestured behind her with the hand holding the sandals.

“There’s room up by the fence,” she said. “Let’s sit in the front row. I love it when the fireworks go off right over my head and thump inside my chest.”

“All that way?” Jimmy whined.

“Yup. C’mon, Jimmy, it’ll be great.”

“You can pretend it’s artillery fire,” I consoled him. Jimmy’s the consummate military history buff, but he would have hated being in the army.

The sun was sinking in a pink and golden glow when we finally got settled to Barbara’s satisfaction. She laid down a wide swath of blankets so that nobody would encroach on our encampment before our gang arrived. Jimmy and I plunked ourselves down into beach chairs. Barbara walked the perimeter, sniffing the air and nudging various bags and shoes in place to weigh down the edges of the blankets.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “You can’t pee to mark our turf.”

“I’d love to make our area is a no-smoking zone, but with this crew, I’d get lynched, right? The wind’s in the right direction, though, blowing away from us, and I don’t see any smokers close around us.”

“I’ll exhale the other way,” I promised. I’d probably get up and stretch my legs, maybe even go down to the edge and get my feet wet, when I wanted a cigarette. But I didn’t want to make things too easy for her. She says herself we shouldn’t enable her when she gets too controlling.

“Yo! Hey, guys!” Cries and hollers announced the arrival of the rest of our party. Everybody bustled around setting up more chairs and finding room for an enormous quantity of food, including the still-warm fried chicken and a giant watermelon. Lewis and Karen came up from the water side only a couple of minutes after the others, slipping around the orange slatted fence that marked the point past which they didn’t want unauthorized persons screwing around while they set up the fireworks. It didn’t take long for everyone to dive into the food and start chattering away.

“Don’t tell anyone,” I muttered to Jimmy, “especially Barbara, but I’m having fun.”

“Don’t worry, dude. Your secret is safe with me.”

“Who wants watermelon?” Oscar roared. He swung a chef’s knife that was little short of a machete over the fat green-striped melon. He raised his arm and sliced downward. The blade bit into the taut rind with a satisfying crunch.

“Like a guillotine on an aristo’s neck,” Jimmy said.

“I dated a doctor once,” Corky said. “He had great pills, and he could get hypodermic needles, too. Watermelon with IV vodka, mmm.”

“Listen long enough and you hear your story,” Lewis said. He sprawled on a sling chair like an unwieldy spider. Karen, on the blanket at his feet, used his knees as arm rests. “Raise your hand if you ever shot up a watermelon.”

Hands waved, including mine. Jimmy and I used to go camping in New Jersey until it started interfering with our drinking. We’d had enough disasters that nowadays Barbara couldn’t get either of us into a pup tent.

“We never laced a watermelon in Girl Scout camp,” Barbara said, “but we made s’mores.”

That got a mixed response of jeers and “Ooh, I love s’mores.” Oscar started to hand around thick wedges of watermelon. A lot of clowning accompanied the spitting of seeds.

“Everybody got some?” Oscar asked.

I looked around.

“Where’s Cindy?” I asked. She’d been seated on the far end of the carpet of blankets. We hadn’t talked. But I had kept her in my peripheral vision. We had some kind of chemistry going, and I wanted to get to the explosion.

“Took a walk,” Jeannette said.

“Save her some watermelon, Oscar,” Karen said. “If she went to the loo, she won’t be back for ages. The lines were endless when I went.”

“Thank you for sharing,” Lewis said. He gave her ear an affectionate little tug. She slapped his leg.

“Where’s Phil?” Barbara asked.

“He stayed home,” Lewis said.

“He said he didn’t care about fireworks,” said Stewie.

“His loss,” Karen said. “He turned up his nose at picnicking on the beach, too.”

Snotty of him. I didn’t like sand in my food either. But I was making an effort to socialize sober. To tell the truth, it surprised me that I could do it at all.

“Damn! I wanted the house to be empty,” Barbara muttered in my ear. “I thought maybe one of us could rush back early and search his room again.”

I laughed out loud.

“One of us? Which one would that be?”

“Shh! You two, of course. Jimmy because he wouldn’t mind missing the fireworks and you because you’re a lot more larcenous than he is.”

“Well, it isn’t happening.”

I spat out the last slippery little seed and threw my watermelon rind in a plastic bag already bulging with accumulated garbage.

“My knees have locked up,” I announced. “I think I’ll take a stroll.” I stood up and shook off sand. “And shut up, Grandma,” I told Barbara. She knew perfectly well that I was going to look for Cindy.

It was hard to believe the beach could get any more crowded. But people were still streaming in from the parking lot and points beyond. Loaded for bear, too, even though these late arrivals had probably had dinner at home or in town before they came.

The kids, some already in pajamas, had gotten wilder. I tripped over several little screamers and runners. One almost pitched me into a roaring campfire. I thought fires on the beach were forbidden, along with alcohol, unleashed dogs, and loud music. I saw all those rules being broken as I wove through what Jimmy might have called a bivouac.

Once I reached the fence, I stopped to light a cigarette. It was twilight by now. A fiery but subdued red glow, like burning embers, lay low behind the dunes. People with glasses in their hands had popped up all along the grassy humps of sand. Tonight the prohibition on walking on the dunes went unenforced if it hadn’t been suspended altogether. On the ocean side, the crescent moon had turned from translucent fingernail white to cantaloupe orange. It rode higher in the sky every time I looked.

I scanned the crowd. Amid the cheerful hubbub, Cindy’s laugh caught my attention first. Then I saw her some distance away, near one of the parked police cars. She stood nose to nose with a stocky African American woman with close-cropped hair. Or maybe it was breast to breast. What was Detective Butler doing here? Did detectives do crowd control? Maybe they all pitched in for an event like this. Or she’d simply come to see the fireworks. Were they arguing? Most people tried not to provoke a cop. Those I’d known who did had been drunk, high, or otherwise out of control.