Golden Girl(57)

Willa’s office is air-conditioned. She does not have to guide the VIP group tours and interact with the public until she’s feeling up to it emotionally, so she sits at her desk and tends to her administrative duties—final approval of all publications, overseeing publicity and marketing, scheduling maintenance and repairs on the NHA’s fourteen properties.

After work, Willa usually takes a walk on the beach. If Rip gets home early, he’ll go with her and they’ll hold hands for a while, then stop, then rejoin hands. Rip likes to pick up shells and horseshoe crab carcasses and dried mermaid purses. He can identify shorebirds—oystercatchers, the endangered piping plover, and, his favorite, the sanderlings.

For dinner, they either get takeout from Millie’s or grill out back—burgers, steaks, chicken, thick slabs of swordfish. Protein; Willa craves it. Has she craved protein this way in the past?

Willa goes to bed early, often before it’s fully dark. The exhaustion hits her like something that falls out of the sky.

This doesn’t tell the whole story, of course. It skips over the seventeen times a day Willa uses the bathroom—sometimes to relieve her bladder, other times just to cry (quietly at work and then with abandon, loud and ugly, when she’s in Wee Bit by herself).

Her mother is gone.

Sometimes when Willa cries at night in bed, Rip will hold her and whisper into her hair. He says he would do anything to make the pain go away; he would take it from her and endure it himself if he could. But Rip can’t make things better. Nobody can make things better. Willa loved her mother so, so much, and now her mother is dead. Willa is aware that everyone loses a loved one eventually; it’s part of being human. And everyone must bear the pain alone.

Willa won’t say that Pamela showing up with the news that she suspects Zach of having an affair was welcome—but it has certainly served as a distraction. On that first day, when Pamela drove out to Wee Bit to confide in Willa, they ended up sitting at the picnic table out back. Willa said, “What, exactly, makes you think this?”

Pamela lifted her sunglasses to the top of her head and stared into the dunes. Willa noticed some strands of silver in the white-blond streak of Pamela’s hair; her face was tan from playing so much tennis, and there were lines around her blue eyes. Willa couldn’t recall ever being this close to her sister-in-law before because Pamela had always held herself literally at arm’s length. But now the barrier was coming down.

“He’s been disappearing at night,” Pamela said. “Midnight, one o’clock. He claims when he has insomnia, he drives out to the beach. He says watching the waves makes him sleepy.”

Willa agreed—this was suspicious behavior. “Have you checked his phone?” Willa asked.

“I can’t check his account to see what calls he made,” Pamela said. “His phone is issued by the FAA. They pay the bill. He can use it for personal calls too, of course, but there’s no way I can access the account.”

“But you could check his actual phone.”

“If I knew the passcode. But I don’t.”

“He has a passcode?”

“Everyone has a passcode, Willa.”

“I don’t,” Willa said. “Rip doesn’t. Rip and I are in and out of each other’s phones all the time.”

“Well, you guys aren’t normal,” Pamela said.

Willa relaxed. This, at least, was a Pamela she recognized. And Willa knew that she and Rip had an unusually close relationship. She was proud of it, thank you very much. “Have you noticed anything else?” Willa asked.

“He’s happy,” Pamela said, and again, her eyes brimmed with tears. “And that’s what makes me dead sure. He whistles. He sings.”

“Couldn’t his happiness be due to something else?” Willa asked.

“He has insomnia and sneaks out of the house after I’m asleep. But he’s happier than I’ve seen him in years.”

Willa had to admit, this equation had only one likely answer. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m going to find out who it is,” Pamela said.



Willa is intrigued, and it pains her to have no one to share this with. She can’t tell Rip. He works with Pamela every day, and though he’s normally a vault when it comes to secrets, Pamela is a weak spot for him. He would break, and Willa would be deemed untrustworthy.

She misses her mother. If her mother were alive, Willa would confide in her.

Can she tell Carson? They’ve become closer since Vivi died. Carson texts to check in at Willa’s request, and Willa has invited Carson over to Wee Bit for dinner the next time she has a night off. But Carson doesn’t care for any of the Bonhams—she thinks they’re cold and superior—and if Willa told her that Pamela thought Zach was having an affair, she would roll her eyes and say, Girl, who cares?

Willa can, maybe, tell Savannah—but Savannah is doing so much already, trying to settle Vivi’s estate. Willa offered to take over the admin of the Vivian Howe Memorial Facebook page and Savannah seemed relieved.

She said, “Look at the message from someone named Brett Caspian, would you? He claims he was your mother’s boyfriend in high school.”

“Mom didn’t have a boyfriend in high school,” Willa said.

“Just look, please, Willie,” Savannah said.