Chapter 1 #2
I take the clip down sitting right there in the sand, and I tell myself the weird feeling in my stomach is just low blood sugar, and I mostly even believe it.
Besides. I did the right thing. I reported it through official channels like a responsible citizen.
If the boat belongs to somebody interesting, that’s the Coast Guard’s problem now, not mine.
I study turtles. Nobody sends a strongly worded anything to the turtle lady.
That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, all the way through packing up my kit and shaking the sand out of my sneakers and walking back to where my sad old kayak-hauling Subaru waits in the beach lot.
That’s when I see it the first time. A black SUV, parked across the lot, engine running. Tinted windows, the works. It looks like it got lost on its way to a movie about the Secret Service.
I notice it the way you notice anything shiny and out of place in a town where the median vehicle is a pickup with a cooler in the bed. Which is to say, I notice it, invent a story where it belongs to a rich tourist looking for the resort two towns over, and forget it by dinner.
Mrs. Pruitt is watering her tomatoes when I get home, which means it’s after seven, because Mrs. Pruitt waters her tomatoes at seven the way the tide comes in.
She’s eighty-one, she lives in the yellow cottage next to my blue one, and she has opinions about everything from hurricane shutters to the mayor’s haircut.
“You’re late tonight,” she calls over the fence, which is less a fence and more a suggestion of a fence, sun-bleached and leaning.
“Turtle business ran long.” I drop my field bag on my porch step and wander over, because you don’t walk past Mrs. Pruitt any more than you walk past the ocean without looking at it. “How are the tomatoes?”
“Sulking. Too much rain, then not enough. They’re worse than Harold was about the thermostat.” She says her late husband’s name the way she always does, easy and fond, like he just stepped out and might be back. “You eat dinner yet?”
“I have a plan involving cereal.”
“That’s not a plan, that’s a cry for help.” She points the hose nozzle at me like a gavel. “There’s leftover chicken and rice on my counter. Take some when you head in.”
This is how it works with Mrs. Pruitt. She feeds me, I fix the latch on her screen door and listen to stories about Harold, who was a shrimper and a card cheat and apparently the great love of the twentieth century.
Last week she showed me his picture, the two of them at somebody’s wedding in 1974, Harold mid-laugh, and she said, he loved my blueberry muffins more than he loved me, and I made my peace with it, and I have thought about blueberry muffins every day since.
“Hey, Mrs. Pruitt. Weird question. You didn’t see a black SUV come down the lane today, did you?”
“An SUV?” She snorts. “Honey, the most exciting thing that came down this lane today was the propane man, and he waved. Why?”
“No reason. Saw one in town. It looked lost.”
“Everything with tinted windows looks lost out here.” She goes back to her tomatoes. “Take the chicken.”
I take the chicken. I eat it on my porch with my feet up on the rail, watching the sky go violet over the dunes, and the weird feeling from Renata’s phone call dissolves into the evening like it never happened.
This is the thing about Sunbreak Harbor.
It’s very hard to feel hunted in a place that keeps handing you dinner.
Friday is grocery day, and grocery day is sacred.
Hobb’s Harbor Market is the kind of grocery store where the produce guy, Miguel, sets aside the good mangoes for his regulars, and I became a regular in record time by complimenting his mango-stacking architecture, which, for the record, deserved it.
I load my cart with field snacks and the ingredients for my grandmother’s blueberry muffins, because ever since Mrs. Pruitt said that thing about Harold and the muffins, I’ve been constitutionally incapable of not baking her some.
“Big weekend?” Miguel asks, bagging my mangoes separately, like always, so they don’t bruise.
“Enormous. Two nest checks, one soccer game, and a date with about nine hours of coral footage.”
“Living large, Turtle Girl.”
“Somebody has to, Miguel.”
I’m still smiling about it when I push my cart into the parking lot, into that thick golden six-o’clock light, and the smile stays right up until I see the black SUV.
Same one. Or—okay, I can’t swear it’s the same one.
I’m a scientist; I know better than to treat two observations of a common phenotype as the same individual without distinguishing marks.
But it’s parked two rows back from my Subaru, engine off, windows tinted, and there’s a shape in the driver’s seat that doesn’t move, and my data set is now: beach lot Thursday, grocery store Friday.
Two sightings. Two locations. Both mine.
“It’s a coincidence,” I say out loud, to the mangoes, because Carl isn’t here and a person has to talk to someone. “Rich tourists get groceries. Rich tourists love groceries.”
The mangoes don’t answer. The mangoes have seen some things.
I load my bags into the hatch with the deliberate calm of a woman being watched by absolutely no one, nothing to see here, and I do not run the cart back to the corral so much as escort it firmly. When I pull out of the lot, I check the mirror.
The SUV pulls out, too.
It follows me down Harbor Road. Past the Salty Bean. Past the turnoff for the pier. It stays back, smooth and patient, all the way to the little sandy lane that leads to my rental cottage and exactly nowhere else, and only when I turn does it glide on past, slow, like it’s memorizing my mailbox.
I sit in my driveway with my hands on the wheel and my heart doing an interesting new rhythm, and I have two thoughts, in this order.
One: I should probably call that Coast Guard tip line back.
Two: Mrs. Pruitt is never getting these muffins if I die, and that would be a genuine tragedy, because it’s my grandmother’s recipe and I nailed the crumb last time.
“Okay,” I tell the steering wheel, in my calmest scientist voice. “Okay. New hypothesis. Maybe somebody did notice the turtle lady.”