41. The Cobblestone Telegraph III
The news about Triple Eight burning to the ground and the Richardsons’ personal assistant, Coco, going missing off their yacht nearly breaks the cobblestone telegraph. So many of us have a personal connection to the story that it’s hard to remain impartial. What actually happened?
Fire chief Stu Vick calls Chief Kapenash with the inspector’s report midday on Friday.
“It looks like the culprit was a curling iron left on in the primary suite,” Stu says.
“A curling iron?” the Chief says. Then he thinks: Leslee’s hair. Wait until Andrea hears about this. “So it’s being ruled an accident?”
“Someone wanted it to look like an accident,” Stu says. “But we found an accelerant. At first we weren’t sure what it was. Not gasoline, not kerosene, not lighter fluid. A little research revealed that its profile matched certain kinds of perfumes. Practically the first thing the inspector said to me was that the site smelled like burned birthday cake. I joked that it would have been wedding cake.” Stu pauses. “You know, because of the vow renewal.”
“But you’re sure there was an accelerant?” the Chief says. Which meant arson.
“Oh, yes,” Stu says. “Also, I don’t know if this matters or not, but one of the homeowners crossed the police tape and went up to the garage apartment and took a couple of boxes out of it. I told her she needed to leave everything up there untouched since that’s where the girl was living.” Stu clears his throat. “I won’t repeat what she said back to me.”
“What did she do with the boxes?” the Chief asks.
“She took them on the dinghy back out to the boat.”
Presence of an accelerant is enough for the Chief to get a search warrant for not only the garage but Hedonism as well. The Chief checks Coco’s notebook and sees that a few days before the fire, a package arrived for Leslee from Neiman Marcus containing three bottles of Guerlain Double Vanille perfume. Was that the accelerant? If so, was Leslee to blame, or—Ed’s heart sinks—do they need to take another look at Coco?
By Friday afternoon, the Nantucket police are all over the garage apartment as well as the trash and recycling in the actual garage. They find little of interest; the boxes in the spare bedroom contain Leslee’s clothes, the ones she supposedly intended to donate.
The Chief and Zara catch a ride with Lucy Shields, the harbormaster, out to Hedonism. They call Bull and Leslee up to the deck—Leslee is still in her white dress—and leave both the Richardsons under Lucy’s watchful eye while they search the boat.
The Chief is the one who finds the boxes, shoved in the crawl space under the bunk in the crew’s quarters, a blanket thrown over them. Someone did not want these boxes found. Ed gets down on his hands and knees, grunts as he pulls the boxes free. Blood pounds in his ears; he’s short of breath. The universe is testing his endurance with all this heavy lifting in his final days.
“Chief Washington!” he calls.
Zara helps him bring the two boxes out to the living area. The boxes both say DONATE on the sides and they’re bound up with packing tape; Zara searches for a knife in the galley so they can slice them open. Meanwhile, they hear Leslee up on deck giving Lucy a hard time: “I’m not sure what they think they’re going to find, this is insane, our house burned down and you’re treating us like we’re the criminals!”
Inside the boxes is… Monopoly money? There are bricks of what appears to be cash, only it’s in candy colors—orange, yellow, lime green. The Chief picks up a green brick and sees Queen Elizabeth II’s face.
It’s Australian money. A lot of it.
The money, totaling nearly half a million Australian dollars, is enough for Chiefs Kapenash and Washington to arrest the Richardsons for arson. But before their lawyer even arrives at the police station, Leslee Richardson confesses: She acted alone; Bull knew nothing about it. While everyone was waiting on Hedonism, Leslee placed her hot curling iron into one of the Amalfi lemon crates filled with packing straw and doused the whole thing with her perfume. After turning off the alarms, she created a trail of perfume-soaked rags down the hall to the library, where she hoped the books and the closet filled with bourbon would be enough to combust the rest of the house.
Her motive? Insurance money, of course. Bull’s business is going belly-up, the IRS have his feet to the fire, he owes them millions, and the real estate deal that he planned to do with Eddie Pancik and Addison Wheeler soured. The Australian cash is theirs; Leslee has been skimming off their accounts for years so that she had an emergency fund.
“I would have burned down all of Nantucket if I could have,” Leslee tells her attorney, Val Gluckstern, causing Val’s eyebrows to shoot up. “I hate this island and everyone on it.”
Curling iron,we think. Perfume. Amalfi lemons and hidden cash. Leslee Richardson is one hell of a glamorous arsonist.
But will she be charged with pushing her personal assistant, Colleen Coyle, off the back of her boat? Aggravated assault, perhaps even attempted murder?
Colleen “Coco” Coyle was discovered on the south shore of Tuckernuck, exhausted but alive. She has no recollection how she ended up in the water. She realizes that she could easily claim Leslee pushed her, adding a few more years to Leslee’s sentence. But Coco isn’t sure what happened. She must have slipped, in which case the faulty latch on the back gate could be a problem for the Richardsons should Coco decide to sue.
What we don’t know in the days following these events—and what we won’t, in fact, find out for many months—is that Coco won’t sue the Richardsons. Instead, she writes a screenplay titled The Personal Concierge, set at a gracious and iconic house on Nantucket that is purchased by a couple who set out to infiltrate and dominate Nantucket’s summer social scene. There are familiar details in the screenplay: The personal concierge has a handsome boat-captain boyfriend and a best friend who takes selfies of the two of them and sends them to her ex-girlfriend. The couple the concierge works for throw extravagant parties that involve wigs, nudity, and partner-swapping. The wife cheats at pickleball; the husband pits two local real estate agents against each other in a land-development deal.
Coco sends her screenplay to three producers in Hollywood whose contact information she acquired from creeping into Bull’s email account (Coco has been saving Bull Richardson’s password for the right moment). A bidding war ensues. Warner Bros. buys the screenplay for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.
Bull Richardson sells Hedonism back to Northrop and Johnson for a fraction of what he paid for it (the accident devalued the boat severely). There will be no insurance payout on the house, but Bull puts the empty land on the market for seventeen million—he wants to recoup his money somehow, though both Eddie and Addison agree he’ll be lucky to get a third of that, and it will likely take years for some abject climate denier to come along.
Bull stays with Leslee despite her two-and-a-half-year sentence at MCI-Plymouth (he, at least, meant every word of his vow renewal). Leslee makes friends in prison, of course, and shamelessly flirts with the corrections officers. Six months before her release date, she arranges for a viewing of The Personal Concierge, which earned great acclaim on the big screen before finally coming to Netflix.
“This movie,” Leslee tells her cellblock mates, “is about me.”
Leslee generally approves of how “Layla” in the film is depicted; they cast a beautiful, award-winning actress. Leslee loves the scene near the end where Layla takes the boxes of cash and escapes from Pocomo Harbor on her speedboat, Decadence (why didn’t Leslee think of doing this in real life?), before being caught by the Coast Guard.
The only moment in the movie that Leslee ponders later is Coco slipping and falling off the boat.
Leslee (who, as Coco once acknowledged, is a human being with a point of view) remembers the events happening this way: As news of the fire breaks among guests of the sail, Leslee decides to sneak a couple of drags off a cigarette to steady her nerves (her house is going up in flames; she will have to do the best acting of her life in a moment). She finds Coco at the back of the boat all alone, taking a picture of the sunset. The idea comes to Leslee swiftly: If she pushes Coco off the boat, it will look like Coco is trying to run because she set the fire.
However, before Leslee can decide if she’s actually going to go through with pushing Coco, she hears a splash and watches Coco’s pink-and-white-clad form hit the water. Leslee is stupefied; she very nearly calls for help, but there’s a disorienting moment when Leslee wonders if she did push Coco or if Coco somehow knew Leslee’s intentions and fell in as she tried to avoid being pushed. Yet another part of Leslee wonders if Coco might have… jumped. This is obviously absurd; why would Coco ever jump off the boat?
But then, look how things turned out: Leslee and Bull are ruined and Coco has a blockbuster movie—and Leslee just heard that Warner Bros. has green-lit Rosebush as well. Talk about a clever revenge.
If Leslee didn’t hate Coco so much, she might admire her.
Nantucketers are known for bouncing back from even the most troubling events and by Labor Day weekend, nearly all the uproar caused by the Richardsons has receded into the background. Life, after all, goes on. Eddie Pancik and Addison Wheeler apply for a substantial construction loan from Nantucket Bank to develop Jeanne Jackson’s property out in Tom Nevers. Kacy Kapenash decides to stay on Nantucket for the foreseeable future. She accepts a position at Nantucket Cottage Hospital in labor and delivery, a job that will become especially meaningful in the spring because her brother, Eric, and his girlfriend, Avalon, are expecting a baby in April. Kacy has started dating Stacy Ambrose; if things work out, Kacy might consider moving to Baltimore and taking a job at Johns Hopkins.
Busy Ambrose tells anyone who will listen that Leslee Richardson never made the seventy-five-thousand-dollar donation to her husband’s scholarship fund that she said she did. Busy sounds surprised by this. She sent me a picture of the check!
A space at the Homestead opens up for Glynnie Oakley. She’s placed on the same floor as all her best friends. It’s just like being back in the college dorm, she tells Lamont.
This frees up Lamont to leave the island, at least for the off-season. He and Coco are thinking of Los Angeles. Coco is starting work on a screenplay that might be based on certain real-life events, and Lamont has an interview for the director of sailing position at the Los Angeles Yacht Club.
As Blond Sharon drives home from pickleball, her phone rings with an unfamiliar number, area code 954. Telemarketer, she thinks, but she answers anyway. It’s none other than Lucky Zambrano.
“I submitted your short story to an online literary magazine called Modern Romance,” he says. “It’s grown wildly popular with the TikTok crowd and has nearly half a million subscribers.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Sharon says. “Mo-Ro!” She can’t believe Lucky took the initiative with her piece. Nancy and Willow will be so jealous when they find out. “When will we hear back?”
“I just did,” Lucky says. “They want to publish it, and they’re paying fifteen hundred dollars.”
Fifteen hundred dollars! Sharon nearly drives off the road.
When she gets home, she shares the news with her kids: “Mo-Ro—TikTok-approved—is going to publish my story and I’m getting paid.”
Robert is playing Minecraft and doesn’t look up.
The twins are briefly energized by the mention of TikTok and come over to give Sharon desultory hugs. She knows she shouldn’t expect much more than this. They’re kids; they see her only as their mother.
She calls her sister, Heather, who, although once again in the middle of a desk lunch, whoops with abandon and says, “I’m so proud of you! Am I in it?”
No,Sharon thinks, but I need to talk to a certain someone who is.
She drives down to the Steamship just as the noon boat starts loading. She hears her name and sees Busy Ambrose sticking her head out the window of her Subaru. She beckons Sharon over. “Your boyfriend is so influential. I was number one hundred and seventy-seven on the standby list, but Romeo pulled some strings and got me on!”
Sharon waves goodbye to Busy—“Have a nice fall, see you at Christmas Stroll!”—and waits until Romeo has loaded all the vehicles (packed to the tippy-tops with tennis rackets, boogie boards, buckets of candy from Force Five, golden retrievers, and sunburned children in need of haircuts) onto the ferry.
When he’s finished, Sharon lowers her sunglasses and says, “You let Busy on the boat after all?”
“I wanted to get rid of her,” he says with a wink. He gathers Sharon in a bear hug. “To what do I owe this honor?”
Sharon beams. “My short story is getting published in Modern Romance,” she says. “They’re paying me fifteen hundred dollars.”
Romeo picks Sharon up and swings her around. “I’m taking you out to dinner tonight.”
“And then maybe karaoke?” she says.
Romeo kisses her nose. “Of course. I’ll come get you at seven.”
As Sharon pulls out of the Steamship parking lot, she notices the bench where she first spied Coco and Kacy getting off the ferry. She’s so glad she abandoned Coco and Kacy as her characters, because who can keep track of all that drama?
Sharon is going to stick to love stories.