Chapter Seven Nic
Chapter Seven
Nic
The sky blazes red and orange as I pull onto my parents’ street on the south end of the island, a quick five-minute drive from my apartment downtown.
Even though sometimes all I want is to move off this tiny island, I have to admit that right now, there’s comfort in its familiarity.
The vegetable garden out front of the Alfonzos’ house, where Mrs. Alfonzo has grown pumpkins in the fall, asparagus in the spring, and tomatoes and cucumbers all summer long since I was a kid.
The Parkers’ house across the street still decked out in red, whites, and blues from the Fourth of July, committed as always to their over-the-top holiday celebrations.
The north side is where the rich people live—where the party last night was. Developers like Harriet’s stepfather got their greedy hands on it years ago, razing all the small beachfront cottages and replacing them with gated mansions and spots like the Yacht Club.
Now they’ve set their sights on my side of the island, but instead of giant single-family homes, they want to build high-rise hotels and luxury apartment buildings.
People are up in arms about it, which I totally get.
A lot of the families here have lived on the island for generations.
No one wants to see small businesses vanish or neighborhoods bulldozed.
Not to mention no one wants to lose their home.
George George was notorious around here for his development schemes, including a proposal to build a giant hotel complex just a few blocks away from here, where the Windswept Motel used to stand.
Thankfully, the island’s zoning board has pushed back against him time and time again, and it seems like, for the moment at least, we’re safe.
I stop in front of my parents’ row home and turn off the ignition.
I yawn, big and deep, and drop my head to the steering wheel.
I got a grand total of three hours of sleep last night, and that only after a hefty shot of whiskey.
I was up late making a huge list of lawyers to call if—or maybe more accurately when—things go south with Sara.
The cops here are notorious for treating people on the island’s two sides very differently. Very differently.
A few years back, a jewelry store downtown was robbed, and they immediately arrested a couple kids who live two streets over from here on the grounds that they’d been seen in the area shortly before it occurred.
It wasn’t until their parents scraped together enough money to hire a decent lawyer that anyone bothered to look at footage from the red-light camera down the street.
It turned out it wasn’t them at all—it was a group of rich teens here on vacation.
A sudden, sharp rap on the car window startles me out of those depressing thoughts. My head jerks up, and I find Martin peering in at me with a grin on his face.
I roll down the window and swipe at him. “What the hell, man? You almost gave me a heart attack.”
He jumps back, laughing. He’s certainly in fine spirits for someone who had another person’s blood on their hands yesterday, though I suppose that’s par for the course with his job.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” he says, although his smirk says otherwise.
“Whatever.” I climb out of the car and join him on the sidewalk. “You here visiting your ma?”
Martin and I both grew up on this block and have known each other since we were in diapers. My mom has the embarrassing pictures to prove it.
“Yeah. Dropping some stuff off.” His mom was diagnosed with stomach cancer a few months ago, and he comes by to administer her meds when his dad is at work.
I peel my shirt off my moist back and give it a shake. It’s humid as hell out here, and dawn has barely broken. The Jersey Shore at its finest.
“How’s she?”
He shrugs. “Okay. Sort of. The chemo is helping, but she feels like shit pretty much all the time. Worst thing is my dad found this new clinical trial up in Detroit, but we can’t afford the cost of travel.
They’re already in a ton of debt because their insurance doesn’t cover a lot of the stuff it should… ”
His lips pinch white, and anger surges in me. It’s such bullshit that his mom—one of the sweetest people I know—is drowning in medical debt while the people on the other end of this island have more money than they’ll ever need.
“Anyway,” he says. “It is what it is. You here because of Sara?”
I nod.
Martin grimaces. “I thought, day after the party, we’d be talking about you seeing Harriet for the first time in years. Not your sister behind bars. I’m sorry about…”
He trails off like he doesn’t quite know how to finish the sentence. A gull shrieks overhead.
Finding the knife? Totally screwing Sara by telling Sharkey about it instead of surreptitiously digging a hole and burying it so far down that no one would ever find it?
“You know,” he finally says.
“Yeah. It’s not your fault.” I was pissed at him for a split second last night, but I’d be kidding myself to think no one else would have spotted it. “I get it. You were doing your job.”
“Yeah, well. Sometimes, my job is bullshit.” We lapse into momentarily silence and then: “How do you think it ended up there?”
A headache tugs behind my eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know, man. Maybe somebody stole it when we weren’t looking? It has to be that, right? It’s the only explanation.”
I may have had a moment last night when I thought—well, what anyone would think after finding someone standing over a dead body. That maybe my sister had killed him.
But I’ve thought about it pretty much nonstop since, and now I’m convinced she didn’t do it.
Sara’s a hothead, sure—the number of times she’s been fired by Mom speaks to that—but she also calms down, fast. If she was going to kill George for insulting her cooking, she would have done it right there in that kitchen, crowd or no crowd.
Martin, loyal friend that he is, immediately agrees. “Right. Of course. Have you heard if she’s coming home today?”
“Yeah. She should be back soon, and she hasn’t been formally charged or anything. Though my mom sent her cousin Barry down to the station to ‘help,’ so we’ll see how long that lasts.”
Martin grimaces. “Barry…like her cousin who failed the bar eight times Barry?”
“The very one.”
“Shit, man.” Martin kicks a pebble off the sidewalk with the tip of his boot. “Well. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but if your mom is planning to rely on Barry for help…”
He’s wearing an expression on his face I recognize. It’s the same one he was wearing our senior year of high school when he told me he’d overheard Michael Dalton in the locker room telling everyone that I had a tiny dick.
I hate that expression.
Also, for the record, I don’t have a tiny dick—Michael Dalton is a fucking liar and is currently serving ten years in minimum security prison for mail fraud.
“What?” I prompt impatiently.
“I was talking to some of the cops last night, and—” He hesitates. “I don’t know how to say this any other way, so. Sara’s their lead suspect right now. In fact, she’s their only suspect.”
I squint down the block at a gull, squawking as it splashes in a puddle. What I wouldn’t give to trade places with it right now.
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” Martin agrees. “Shit is right.”