Summer Rental Read online

  She stood up. “How long?” she asked. “I’ve got a big project I’ve been working on, and the report should be done by next week.”

  Ms. Stone blinked. Ellis could have sworn she hadn’t seen the woman blink before. Ever.

  “Oh,” Ms. Stone said. “I thought you understood. Your termination is immediate.”

  “Like, right now?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Ms. Stone said, holding out her hand, palm up, expectantly.

  Ellis Sullivan was not normally a woman given to sarcasm. But somehow, the occasion seemed to cry out for … something.

  “What?” Ellis said hotly. “It’s not enough you just fired me? You took my job, my career, eleven years of my life? And for that I get, what? Twenty-two weeks of pay? Are you freakin’ kidding me? What do you want now, lady? A kidney? My spleen maybe?”

  Ms. Stone’s mustachioed upper lip twitched. “That’s entirely uncalled for,” she said, her voice tight. “This is purely a professional business decision made by the executive committee. Please don’t try to make it personal.”

  “Not personal?” Ellis cried, fighting back tears.

  “Not in the least,” Ms. Stone said. She stood up now. She was a good six inches shorter than Ellis. She was holding out her hand again. “I’m going to have to ask for your employee security badge.”

  Ellis ripped the laminated badge from the beaded silk cord that hung around her neck, and flung it right in Ms. Stone’s face. The woman blinked again, and then ducked, but the badge glanced off her chin before falling onto the desktop.

  “The cord’s mine,” Ellis said. “It’s not company property.”

  “Fine,” Ms. Stone said. “Understood. And now I’ll need your BlackBerry. The company’s BlackBerry, that is.”

  Ellis winced. “I don’t have it with me,” she admitted. “It’s in my office. I’ll drop it off here after I clean out my desk.”

  Ms. Stone smirked. “Your desk has already been cleaned out.” She crossed to the door and opened it. A security guard in an unfamiliar charcoal gray uniform stood in the hallway, clutching a large cardboard carton. Sticking out of the top of the carton was a goofy red-plush stuffed bear wearing a T-shirt with the BancAtlantic logo stitched in green script. Ellis had won the bear two years ago at the department’s Christmas party. Her Louis Vuitton pocketbook, the one she’d splurged on after her last promotion, was draped across the security guard’s arm.

  Ms. Stone jerked her head in the direction of the pocketbook. Ellis took it from the guard, reached inside, and unclipped the BlackBerry.

  Ms. Stone ducked, but all the fight had suddenly drained from Ellis. She put the BlackBerry on the edge of the desk, turned and followed the waiting security guard down the hall and into the elevator.

  There she held out her arms for the carton. “I can take it from here. Don’t worry. I won’t come running back upstairs with an Uzi or anything.”

  The guard shrugged. “Sorry. I’ve gotta escort you all the way out of the building. It’s policy.”

  She punched the “B” button on the control panel, and they rode the elevator down to the basement parking garage in silence. The guard followed her to the Accord. She opened the trunk and he put the carton inside it, handing her a slip of paper that had been lying on top of the contents.

  “It’s an inventory of everything from your office,” he said apologetically. “If you could just initial it, you know?”

  She scrawled her initials at the bottom of the page without even looking at the list and handed it back to him.

  He nodded. “This really sucks, man. I hate this part.”

  “Not your first termination of the day?”

  “You’re my eleventh,” he said gloomily. “After lunch, we’ve got commercial loan. The whole stinkin’ department.”

  Ellis nodded. It was no consolation to know that the rest of her company was being disassembled and discarded, one department at a time. “See ya,” she said, knowing she wouldn’t.

  She hadn’t known what to do with herself for the first two days after what she’d come to think of as T-day. The first morning, she’d gotten up at her usual 6 A.M. and groped in the dark for her BlackBerry. After a brief moment of panic, she’d remembered that the bank had repossessed it, along with her former identity. Then, groaning, she settled back into the bed, realizing she really had no pressing need to get up.

  What followed was a week of bereavement. She went two days without bathing, lived in grungy yoga pants and sweatshirts, subsisted on a steady diet of cold cereal and daytime television because she couldn’t bear leaving the town house. Anyway, where would she go? After seven straight days of therapy courtesy of Dr. Phil reruns, she’d forced herself to go out and buy the iPhone. She even bought a perky pink rubber jacket for the thing.

  Since she’d never had any e-mail address other than her BancAtlantic one, she set herself up with a Hotmail account and e-mailed everybody she could think of that she had a new e-mail. There had been the inevitable flurry of replies from friends wanting to know what was up.

  She couldn’t stand the idea of anybody pitying her, especially since she already had enough self-pity to go around, so she made up a peppy reply: “Midlife career adjustment! Time to stop and smell the roses! Details to follow.”

  But there were no details. Not yet. This trip with the girls, which she’d been plotting since April, when they’d all been together down in Savannah for Julia’s mother’s funeral, was the only thing that had kept her going since she’d lost her job. A small, insistent voice in the back of her head kept telling her she should have canceled the trip, should have saved her money, should have put herself right back out there on the job market.

  And she’d replied to that small, insistent voice. Shut. The. Hell. Up.

  It was almost August. No way was she canceling this beach trip.

  So here she was, sitting in a restaurant in Nags Head, North Carolina, and two weeks’ worth of her severance package had already been eaten up. She didn’t care. In the past five years, she’d taken exactly one week of vacation per year, spending Christmas with her mother and aunt at the condo down in Sarasota, listening to her mother bicker with Aunt Claudia.

  In April, Ellis had sat next to Julia in the front row of Blessed Sacrament Church in Savannah. Dorie sat on the other side of Julia, and Willa sat beside Dorie. Booker, Julia’s boyfriend of many years, couldn’t make the trip from London. All four of the girls clutched each other’s hands as a young priest none of them recognized, Father Tranh, said the Mass of Christian Burial for Catherine Donohue Capelli. Later, back at the Capelli house, after all the funeral-goers had finally cleared out, the girls had taken off their funeral dresses, climbed into pajamas, and sprawled out on the double bed in Julia’s old bedroom, just like they’d done all those Friday nights in the old days. Only this time, instead of sipping Pabst Blue Ribbon stolen from Mr. Capelli’s beer fridge in the garage, they’d gotten shit-faced on a pitcher of cosmos.

  And that’s when they’d hatched the plan. No more catching up at funerals. Ellis’s father had died two years earlier, and Mr. Capelli had been gone, what? Six years? No more of that, Julia had declared, waving the empty pitcher in the air.

  “We’re gonna go away together,” she announced. “To the beach. All of us.” She’d looked over at Dorie, the newlywed of the group, and added, meaningfully, “Just us girls.”

  The group had elected Ellis, the planner, the organizer, ruthlessly efficient Ellis, to put the trip together. And that’s what she’d done. And now here she was, jobless, but with the whole month of August to spend in a summer rental with her best friends. Plus Willa, Dorie’s sister, who’d invited herself along.

  She felt positively giddy at the prospect. The amber-hued summers of her girlhood had been the sweetest of her life. She and Dorie and Julia had been inseparable, spending weeks at a time at Julia’s grandmother’s rambling cottage on Tybee Island, lazing around the beach during the day, spending hours getting ready to
go out in the evenings.

  Dorie always trailed a wake of would-be boyfriends, so they’d traveled in a pack, cruising the beach road in Julia’s mother’s big Fleetwood Caddy. It hadn’t mattered that Ellis didn’t have her own boyfriend. The Caddy was white with a moonroof and the fifth tire mounted on the trunk, a total pimp car, which they all thought screamingly hysterical—that Julia’s churchgoing mother drove a pimpmobile. They loved the Fleetwood because it could fit six or seven people on its big leather bench seats. They’d roll the windows down and blast their favorite song, screaming the tagline—“WHOOMP, There It Is!”—over and over again, and the Fleetwood would rock with the heavy bass beat.

  They’d dance at a club whose name Ellis had long since forgotten, but she could still remember the boy she’d met and danced with all night long the last summer weekend before her sophomore year of college. His name was Nick, and he went to Boston College, and she’d gladly let him grope her while they swayed to “I Swear,” and she’d allowed herself to fantasize that it was Nick who was promising—by the moon and the stars above—to love her forever. Then school had started, and he’d e-mailed a couple of times, and then nothing.

  Ellis looked down at the iPhone. She opened an e-mail window and typed in the address:

  [email protected].

  Dear Mr. Culpepper. I realize that my group’s check-in time for Ebbtide technically isn’t until 2 p.m. today, but I find myself in the area earlier than planned, and wonder if it would be possible to have access to the house any earlier. Say around noon? I’d be totally grateful. Sincerely, Ellis Sullivan.

  She pushed the send button and a moment later heard the soft whooshing noise that notified her the message had been sent. Not for the first time, she pictured Mr. Culpepper as a wizened but kindly old duffer. She imagined him in a faded but starched Hawaiian shirt, with knobby knees protruding below madras Bermuda shorts, and wearing high black socks and beat-up sandals. His face would be weathered, his head nearly bald. He would take an instant liking to her and the girls, calling them “sweetheart” and “dearie.”

  She couldn’t wait to meet Mr. Culpepper in person.

  3

  Maryn drove south, switching between the interstate and winding back roads, with no specific destination in mind. Away. That was the only place she knew she was going. Away from her home, what little family she had left. Away from Biggie; that one really hurt. But there was nothing she could do about that. She could still see Biggie’s melting brown eyes watching as she rushed around the house, throwing her things in a duffle bag. He’d followed her from room to room, and then, when she was about to leave, he’d met her at the back door, his red leather leash in his mouth, convinced they were going to the dog park.

  It broke her heart to leave Biggie behind. She told herself the aging golden retriever would be all right. He would never harm Biggie, not even to get back at her. He adored Biggie, had raised him from a puppy. Biggie had been there before her, and he would be there after her. Wouldn’t he? Anyway, the main thing was that she had to get away. From him. And that meant leaving Biggie behind.

  Thinking of him, she twisted the diamond solitaire on her ring finger. She’d wanted to fling it at him so many times, tell him yes, he’d bought her with it, but he’d gotten the deal of a lifetime. She’d almost left it behind, along with her other belongings. But at the last second, she decided she would keep wearing it, a reminder—as if she needed one—of how easily and cheaply she’d sold herself to the devil.

  Maryn glanced down at her arm. Her sleeve hid them, but she could still feel the bracelet of ugly purple bruises on her left forearm. Another reminder of the real Don Shackleford. The bruises would fade, she knew, but she doubted she would ever forget his icy rage, the way he’d so easily clamped a hand around her arm—squeezing until she’d cried out in agony, his expression never changing as he told her exactly what he’d do to her if he ever caught her snooping around in his private business again.

  “I’ll bury you,” he’d said, a strange light coming into his pale blue eyes. “Someplace where you’ll never be found. Nobody will even know you’re missing until it’s too late. Not Adam, not your mother, nobody will know what happened, where Maryn has gone.” He’d smiled at the thought of that. A moment later, he’d released her arm, but not before bending his head to her forearm and tenderly kissing the angry red welts he’d left there.

  By the time she heard his Escalade roar out of the driveway, she’d already started planning her escape.

  She locked the front door and ran to her bedroom. When she retrieved the money from the Ugg boots at the back of her closet, she was startled to discover that she’d amassed nearly six thousand dollars. Her seed money was twenty-seven hundred dollars in winnings from an April trip to Atlantic City, money she’d won at blackjack, and which she’d told Don she’d spent on clothes and shoes. Lying to him came easily to her and didn’t seem wrong. The rest of the money was added in spurts: a twenty picked up from the wad of bills Don tossed on his dresser at night, a hundred saved back from the money she told him she needed for a new jacket, five hundred dollars realized when she exchanged the ridiculously expensive (and ugly) watch he’d given her for her birthday for a more suitable model.

  Maryn couldn’t say why she’d been squirreling away those twenties and fifties. Was it really for that Hermès Kelly bag she’d been eyeing, or was it more the vague memory of her mother’s cynical advice, delivered with a cigarette dangling from colorless lips? “A woman always needs to have her own money. Always. Get-outta-town money.”

  Thank God for the one good piece of advice her mama had given her. The packing hadn’t taken long. Twenty minutes? She’d changed blouses, putting on a long-sleeved silk top to hide the bruises on her arm. So here she was, back on the road. Again.

  How long had she been driving? Her eyes burned with exhaustion, her arms and shoulders ached. She should stop soon. Stop for sleep. For food, although her stomach roiled at the thought of eating.

  She’d crossed the Virginia line, saw that she was in North Carolina now. The sun was coming up. She flipped the Dior sunglasses down over her eyes and squinted at a billboard advertising a place called The Buccaneer, a motel on Nags Head.

  Nags Head. Her parents had taken her to Nags Head the summer after her father was transferred to Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She’d been what, twelve? They’d stayed in a tiny motel, right on the beach, and her father took her fishing on the pier, just the two of them. The motel had a pool and a little coffee shop, and they’d eaten out every night, a real treat. One night they’d played putt-putt golf, another time they rode bumper cars in an amusement park.

  Had that been the last happy summer? The divorce came a year later. Just as she was settling into her new school. Not that she’d made many friends there. She’d been a goofy-looking kid, all knees and elbows, with hair the color of dirty dishwater and a head too big for her body. Maryn had been appalled when she became the first girl in her sixth-grade class to need a bra. Her mother, of course, had celebrated this fact by buying Maryn the tightest-fitting tank top she could find. “If you got it, flaunt it,” Mama told her. To avoid a fight, Maryn wore the tank, but topped it with a baggy shirt the minute she left the house for school.

  She’d just started cracking the social code of her new school when Mama loaded her into the faded blue Buick that May and announced they were going to visit Aunt Patsy in New Jersey. “If you think I’m stayin’ in this godforsaken excuse of a town while your daddy parades around with that whore girlfriend of his, you’ve got another think coming,” Mama said, throwing the car into reverse and slamming into the mailbox at the end of the driveway. She didn’t even stop to look at her crumpled rear fender.

  Visit? How about move in with her mother’s older sister, Aunt Patsy, a part-time hairdresser and full-time alcoholic? By fall, Maryn had emerged from puberty and entered junior high, two inches taller, wearing a B cup, tight-fitting new acid-washed Jordache j
eans, and a glamorous blond hairdo courtesy of Aunt Patsy. Also by fall, Maryn’s mother had joined Aunt Patsy at the hair salon—and the liquor store.

  Maryn’s first few weeks of junior high had been a triumph. A petite brunette named Brooke sat in front of her in homeroom and took pity on the new girl, inviting her to sit at the cool girls’ table at lunch. She’d gotten invited to sleepovers and skating parties and spent hours on the phone with Brooke every night, rehashing who-likes-who, with her mother and aunt relishing every second of Maryn’s newfound popularity.

  In October, she’d gotten invited to her first boy-girl function: a Halloween party. The invitation threw her mother and Aunt Patsy into a frenzy of sewing and thrift-store shopping. On the appointed night, Maryn slithered into Heather Palumbo’s basement rec room dressed in a towering black wig and a flowing, long-sleeved black sheath with a deeply plunging neckline. Her face had been whitened with pancake makeup, her eyes rimmed and outlined with stark black liner, her lips lacquered bloodred, matching her inch-long fake red fingernails.

  All these years later, Maryn could still remember the impact her entry had on the party. Brooke and Heather and Colleen, dressed in ’50s-era poodle skirts, bobby socks, and letter sweaters, gathered in a circle around her, staring at her as though she’d just been beamed down from another planet. “What are you supposed to be?” Colleen demanded, hands on hips.

  “You know,” Maryn said, taken aback. “Elvira. Mistress of the Dark. Like from TV?”

  “You look,” Heather sneered, “like a prostitute.”

  Maryn’s cheeks burned with shame. She’d slipped upstairs to try to call her mother and ask her to come pick her up early, but Mama and Patsy had dropped her off and headed straight to Harlow’s, their favorite bar.