Golden Girl(22)

Cruz is not a suspect, Leo thinks. Cruz was the one who found Vivi.

There’s a string of texts from Cruz:

The police impounded my car. Forensics has to check it. My dad came and got me. I’m home.

I’m not sure when you’ll get this, but you need to clean your phone.

There’s gonna be a text from Peter Bridgeman, a photo. Delete it.

I’m home. Call me.

She was my mom too.

Delete that photo, man. Please. We can talk about it later. Or not.



Leo scrolls back to a time he now thinks of not as “morning” or “last night” but “when Mom was alive.”

Sure enough, a text from Maybe: Peter. Attachment: 1 image.

Leo clicks on it and immediately leans over to dry-heave.

No! he thinks. He breaks out in a sweat. Peter Bridgeman took this? Leo races for the bathroom and dry-heaves into the toilet, then realizes he has left the photo open on his bed where anyone could see it.

He runs back out, snaps up his phone, deletes the photo, then deletes it from his deleted file.

Should he call Peter? He has never liked the kid and they had that fight last fall when Peter got in Leo’s face. Leo had wanted to whip him so badly but there were people around to break it up and Leo supposed he was grateful for that. Peter is sort of family; Willa’s husband, Rip, is Peter’s uncle.

Who else did Peter send this picture to other than Cruz? Leo could call and threaten Peter—but by now, Peter would have heard about Vivi, and even lowlife Peter Bridgeman would feel bad for Leo, so hopefully he’ll delete the picture and that will be the end of that.

But Leo fears it’s just the beginning.





Nantucket




When the news breaks that the writer Vivian Howe has been killed in a hit-and-run off the Madaket Road, everyone has something to say.

She was a local—she had lived on Nantucket for over twenty-five years—but she wasn’t a native. She was from…Pennsylvania? Ohio? That made her a wash-ashore.

A few years earlier, the editor of the Nantucket Standard, Jordan Randolph, had pointed out an error in one of Vivian Howe’s novels. She had referred to a ferry unloading at Steamship Wharf rather than Steamboat Wharf, and he’d verbally flogged her in his weekly editorial, saying that if she couldn’t get the basics of Nantucket correct then she had no place writing about this island. This was met with backlash. The ferries were run by the Steamship Authority so nearly all of us—wash-ashore and native—called it Steamship Wharf. Honor Prentice, who was a fifth-generation Nantucketer, wrote a letter to the editor saying that even he called it Steamship Wharf.

Advantage, Vivi.

Most of the small-business owners in town loved Vivi because her books drove tourism—in particular, they brought in day-trippers with money to spend. When Vivi set a scene in her books at a specific restaurant, people wanted to eat there. When a character bought a dress at a certain boutique, her readers wanted to shop there.

Vivi was also blamed for the downside of tourism. As Lucinda Quinboro sat in a line of cars at the intersection by the high school, she said to her best friend and bridge partner, Penny Rosen, “This is all Vivi’s fault, you know.”

And Penny said, “You’ll blame anything on Vivi.”

It had been a big deal ten years earlier when Vivi and her husband, JP Quinboro, divorced. Some of us knew it was because JP fell for Amy Van Pelt, his young employee at the wineshop (which we never set foot in because the prices were so inflated). JP caused conversations to awkwardly stop wherever he went—the Nickel for sandwiches, Marine Home Center for paint, the Chamber of Commerce for Business After Hours—because no one knew what to say to him except Wake up, man. Vivi moved out, and when her new novel Along the South Shore proved to be a “breakout book,” she went on tour for so long that some of us thought she had left the island for good.

But eventually Vivi returned, and after a while, she seemed to recover. She bought a house on Kingsley that looked great on paper, though once Vivi moved in, leaks sprung and she discovered the fancy wine fridge was on the fritz and there was a pervasive smell of rot at the base of the stairs and she could hear mice (or rats) in the ceiling and she realized she had bought a money pit and decided that would become the official name of the house. She kept the tradespeople among us busy for years—her contractor Marky Mark, her plumber, her cute electrician Surfer Boy, and the person she revered above everyone else: her landscaper, Anastasia.

Vivi seemed to be flourishing and we cheered her on.

The news of her death was a shock.

The Springers had seen Cruz DeSantis kneeling by the body at the scene. They pulled over to ask what happened, but Cruz was too upset to say anything other than that the ambulance was on its way. Had Cruz DeSantis been the one to hit her?

We hoped not.

Cruz DeSantis was a shining star of the just-graduated senior class. He was going to Dartmouth on a full ride, which is a testament to his father, Joe, who owns the Nickel sandwich shop on Oak Street. The Nickel is tiny, but its influence in our community is outsize. Anyone who has ever had Joe’s deviled-egg salad with crispy bacon and lamb’s lettuce on toasted olive sourdough or his grilled salmon with fresh spinach and raspberry-dill aioli on a soft brioche roll will tell you—they may be “just sandwiches,” but there’s a reason why the Nickel is number one on Nantucket’s Tripadvisor in the category “Restaurants, Downtown.”