The Chesapeake Diaries Series (38 page)

Oh—one exciting thing did happen! Over the weekend, Beryl Eberle—the fabulous actress Beryl Townsend, for anyone in St. Dennis who’s been under a rock for the past quarter century—came back and opened up her family’s home as if she intended to stay awhile. I was at the market early in the week and overhead one of the clerks mention that Beryl—Berry, to those of us who have been lucky enough to have known her forever—had called in an order that morning and he was getting ready to deliver it, and just which of those big old houses out on River Road was hers? (I was able to tell him, of course.) There was a time when she and my cousin Archer were sweet on each other, but she’s a huge movie star and he’s a country lawyer, so anyone could tell that was going nowhere
.

Anyway. Berry’s nephew Ned had a fatal heart attack and died very suddenly two weeks ago. Berry, of course
,
dropped everything and flew from California straight to New Jersey, where Ned lived with his family. Berry is taking Ned’s children for the summer. Imagine Berry—who never had a child of her own, and, as far as I know, never missed the experience—having full responsibility for a seven-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old girl for the rest of the summer. Yes, I said full responsibility: It appears that while Roberta did bring the children to St. Dennis, she returned to New Jersey—alone—the following morning
.

Word has it that Berry had to back out of a movie she was to begin filming to spend the summer here with her grand-niece and -nephew. While many in town have expressed surprise over this, I do not. Berry adored Ned—he was clearly her favorite of her siblings’ children. It should be an interesting summer
.

~ Grace ~
      

P.S. I spotted the children with Berry at the park today. The little boy has hellion written all over his face; the girl looks lost and sad and is very quiet. Berry will have her hands full this summer, no doubt about that
.

Prologue
July 18, 1983

Everything in Dallas MacGregor’s life was wrong and she wanted to die. At least if she died, she’d be with her father, and the taunts of these hateful people wouldn’t matter. Her mother had promised her a summer of fun with lots of new friends at her great-aunt’s beautiful house by the beach, but she’d lied. She’d lied about everything.

There was no beach here, no ocean, just the Bay, and the river, neither of which had what a girl from New Jersey considered a proper beach, so that was lie number one. Lie number two: She hadn’t had a minute of fun since they arrived here in St. Dennis. Lie number three: The kids here all hated her and called her names like Pudge and Chub. And her great-aunt Berry’s house was like a museum. All the furniture was old and stiff and uncomfortable and there was only one small television, which her great-aunt rarely turned on except to let Dallas’s little brother, Wade, watch
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
or
Sesame Street
. What fun was there in any of that?

Dallas threw herself down on the riverbank and sobbed. Even if she died, no one would care. Why, she
could walk right into that river and drown and it would probably take weeks before someone missed her. Yeah, no one would even realize she was gone until her mother came at the end of the summer to pick up her and Wade.

Except maybe Wade. He’d probably miss her some.

The thought of her little brother missing her—maybe even crying for her—made her cry even harder. He was only seven, and he still didn’t really understand that his father wasn’t coming back or why. For that matter, neither did Dallas.

It was bad enough that her father had died, but dying so suddenly, without even having been sick, had denied his family the chance to say good-bye. Ned MacGregor’s heart attack, at age forty, had come totally without warning. Dallas had gone to the viewing and the funeral with her mother’s sister, Lynette, who’d flown up from Florida as soon as she’d heard, but the still man in the wooden box surrounded by flowers didn’t look anything like her father, even though everyone said it was really him.

Maybe that had been another lie.

And then to have her mother send her and Wade away for the whole rest of the summer … why, that all but made them orphans. Unwanted and alone like Anne Shirley, in
Anne of Green Gables
. Her eleven-year-old’s sense of drama awakened, she would now be Dallas of … of …

Did Aunt Berry’s house have a name? She wasn’t even sure what a gable was, so it was hard to tell if the house had any of those.

Dallas sat up and wiped the tears from her face with the backs of her hands. Her arms wrapped
around her knees, she stared out at the river, feeling immensely sorry for herself. She just wanted someone to tell her why her father had been taken from them, and why her mother seemed so far away even before they left home to come here, and why she’d left her son and daughter in St. Dennis when she returned to Dunellen where they lived.

Her father had always told her that the only stupid question was the one you didn’t ask when you didn’t know, but what if you ask and no one has an answer that makes any sense? Her mother certainly hadn’t made any sense when she told Dallas she just wanted “you kids to have a good summer and enjoy yourselves.” Obviously another lie.

Dallas began to sob again, so loudly that she didn’t hear the girls who had parked their bikes under the trees and were creeping up behind her.

“Look at the crybaby, crying like a baby.” One of the girls stood in front of Dallas, her fists on her hips, her face an ugly mask of derision. “Do you do anything but cry, little baby?”

“ ‘My daddy died, boo-hoo,’ ” one of the others mocked, rubbing her eyes.

“Maybe you should be riding that bike instead of sitting around,” the girl to Dallas’s left taunted. “Maybe you wouldn’t be such a pudge.”

Dallas’s stomach clenched, and for a moment, she was afraid she’d throw up. She tried to think of something to say that would make them shut up and go away, but there were five of them and only one of her, and humiliation had clouded her mind and cut off all hope of coming up with something smart or clever to say.

“Go away,” was the only thing she could think of. “Just go away and leave me alone.”

“Who’s gonna make us?” The girl who was standing behind Dallas poked her in the back.

“Maybe I will.”

The boy had come out of nowhere, but he walked up the riverbank with a fishing rod in one hand and a bucket in the other. “Brooke, why don’t you take your stupid friends and just get lost?”

“Or what, Grant?” A girl with dark blond hair in a long ponytail stepped out from behind Dallas.

“Or maybe I’ll toss this bucket of worms on you.” The boy held up the bucket.

“You wouldn’t dare.” She smirked.

He did.

The girls screamed, swatted the worms away, and ran for their bikes. When the girl who’d issued the dare reached the trees, she turned around and called back over her shoulder in a singsong voice, “Grant’s in love with Pudge!” and the others took up the chant.

The boy ignored them and sat down next to Dallas on the ground. For a long time he didn’t speak. When he did, he said, “You ever been fishing?”

Still so embarrassed she dared not speak, she shook her head no.

“Come on down by the water.” He stood. “If you want to, that is.”

Dallas couldn’t tell him that all she really wanted was to go home and have things be the way they used to be, with her mother and father and brother, so she didn’t say anything. He walked down to the river’s edge and sat on the bank and threaded a worm onto the hook that was hanging from the rod’s line. He
turned to look over his shoulder before casting the hook out into the river with a flick of his wrist. She sat and watched while time and again he reeled in the line, only to put another worm on the hook to replace the one that was missing, and cast back out again.

“Why do you keep doing that?” she called to him.

“What?” He half turned. “I can’t hear you. Come down here if you want to ask me something.”

She hesitated, then looked behind her and found the taunting chorus had disappeared. She got up and joined him. “I asked you why you keep putting more worms on that hook and throwing it back into the river.”

He shrugged. “I figure something out there must be eating the bait but is smart enough to avoid getting hooked. Maybe it’ll get careless and take the hook one of these times.”

“Maybe you’ll keep losing your worms.”

“Maybe. Plenty more where they came from.”

They sat for a few minutes in silence, then he asked, “How old are you?”

She looked up into his eyes. “Eleven.”

“You’re small for eleven. I’m almost twelve.”

“Maybe you’re big for almost twelve,” she said, and he smiled, the ends of his mouth turning up.

“I am. Everyone says so.”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Grant. What’s yours?”

“Dallas,” she told him. “Dallas MacGregor.”

“You’re Miss B’s niece, aren’t you?”

“Grandniece,” she corrected him. “Aunt Berry is my dad’s aunt.” Her throat constricted just to say the
word “dad.” When it passed, she asked, “Do you know Aunt Berry?”

“Everybody knows her. She’s a famous movie star. She’s the only famous person who ever lived in St. Dennis.”

He looked down into her face and stared at her for a moment, then said, “You do know that she’s a famous movie star, don’t you?”

“Of course. I’m not stupid.” She frowned. “She’s my aunt. Great-aunt.”

“No one thinks you’re stupid,” he told her.

“Those girls do,” she said softly.

“Those girls who were here before?” He shrugged. “They don’t know anything. None of them do.”

“Do you go to school with them?”

“Uh-huh. They were all in my class this year.” He reeled in the line and started over.

“Why were they mean to me?” she whispered.

“They’re mean to everyone. Especially Brooke.”

“Are they mean to you?”

He laughed. “Like I would care.”

She wanted to thank him for making himself a target for her sake, but couldn’t figure out the right way to say it.
Thank you for making them stop calling me names?
It just sounded dumb so she didn’t try.

“Why did you chase them away?”

“Because I hate it when people are mean and say mean things for no reason at all.”

They sat in silence again. Finally, Dallas heard herself say, “My father died. He had a heart attack and died while I was at camp.”

“I know.”

“Everyone says I’ll see him again when I get to
heaven, but I don’t know where heaven is. People say it’s up there”—she pointed toward the sky—“but if they’ve never been there, how would they know?”

“I don’t think grown-ups know as much as they pretend.”

“Where do you think heaven is?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I think it’s wherever God wants it to be. He doesn’t have to tell us where.”

She thought this over and it made sense. It was the first thing that had in weeks.

“I think I’d better get back to Aunt Berry’s,” she told him after a while. “She might start to worry.”

“I’ll walk you back.” He started reeling in the line.

“You don’t have to, but thanks.”

“I want to. Besides, I’m done fishing for the day.”

“But you didn’t catch anything yet,” she pointed out.

“I didn’t really expect to.” He secured the hook to the rod and picked up the bucket. “I just like to come and sit by the river sometimes. Fishing’s just an excuse to be here.”

She walked off to get her bike then returned to the path that followed the flow of the river, and joined her new friend. They were almost to Berry’s house when he said softly, “My little sister died in April. She was only four, and she was sick for a really long time.”

Dallas was so stunned that at first she couldn’t speak. When she finally found her voice, she said, “I am so sorry.”

“Yeah.” He nodded solemnly. “So am I.…”

*   *   *

From downstream on the riverbank, Grant had watched the small army of girls descend on the unsuspecting new kid who’d been sitting by herself for the past twenty minutes or so. Grant had been on his way to a point about a hundred yards beyond where the girl sat when he’d heard her sobbing as if her heart was about to break. Not wanting to walk past her, because that would likely embarrass her to have someone see her crying like that, he’d set up to fish where he’d been when he first heard her. The sound of her weeping had made him sad: it would make anyone feel sad for her. Except those bored and stupid girls who decided that they’d have a little fun at her expense.

One thing Grant Wyler had no tolerance for was mean.

Not that he’d ever borne the brunt of it. He was the biggest kid in the class and the most popular, partly because he didn’t have an ounce of mean in him. He’d always taken up for the underdog, and anyone in grade school who had a lick of sense knew that on any given day, anyone could be the dog on the bottom. So it made good sense to be nice to Grant—he was everyone’s ace in the hole.

He’d seen Brooke Madison cut down other kids for no reason other than she could, and he didn’t think it was fair that the new girl couldn’t even sit and have a good cry without being bullied.

Grant had known why Dallas was crying—he knew that her father had died not long ago and that she’d been sent to St. Dennis because he’d heard the grown-ups talking. He’d heard his parents talking about how the sudden death of Ned—Dallas’s father—had
nearly broken Berry Eberle’s heart: He had been the favorite of her late sister’s children. For a while, back when Ned was a boy, he’d spent so much time in St. Dennis with Berry, there was speculation that he was not her sister Sylvie’s son, but Berry’s. Grant’s parents had pooh-poohed the story whenever they heard it repeated, but there was still the slightest wisp of doubt in some circles.

Not that any of that mattered to Grant, though he suspected it might matter to Dallas if she ever heard the gossip. What did matter was that after he’d sat down next to her, she’d looked up into his face, and the minute he’d looked into those strange-colored eyes, he’d felt a little zip inside, and he knew that she was going to be something really special in his life. He didn’t know how he knew, but since his sister, Natalie, died, he’d had a number of these moments where things just happened and he knew to pay attention to them.