Chapter Three
I don’t see much of August or Lo for two days after their arrival.
It seems like they’re mostly keeping to their rooms and the beach, but I’m also busier than usual around the hotel.
We’re nowhere near full occupancy—which was once a given during a holiday week—but we still have more guests than we’ve had so far this summer, and getting them checked in, making sure the rooms are clean, chasing down extra phone chargers, extra blankets, “better” towels …
it all means I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off, as Mom would’ve said.
Still, I’ve found time in the evenings to look up everything I can about Landon Fitzroy’s death, including going through Mom’s box of clippings, and—just as I’d thought—I can’t find any reference to the Rosalie Inn being the place where Landon’s body was found.
Over and over again, it’s just the beach near a nature preserve, or a lonely stretch of coastline.
There’s no mention of the Rosalie at all as far as I can tell, and neither Mom’s name nor my grandparents’ comes up in any of the things I see online or in the articles Mom kept.
Which makes me wonder—how does August know something I don’t?
August is when the heat starts to feel like a sweaty fist smacking into the sand.
September can be that way, too—and every kid who grew up in St. Medard’s has a sad story about the Halloween It Was Too Hot to Wear My Costume.
That’s the kind of heat that drives people crazy, makes them feel like they’re walking through hot Jell-O just getting to their cars in the grocery store parking lot.
Edie is obsessed with weather and has told me more than once that this year’s hurricane season is predicted to be bad. “They’re already on the ‘J’s, and we’ve got what? Four more months to go?” she’d said just this morning, pointing at a swirl of red and yellow somewhere out over the Atlantic.
I’d nodded and looked worried and we’d talked about climate change, about rising ocean temperatures, and I hadn’t told her that there’s a dark, secret place in my heart that longs for one of those storms to come howling out of the Gulf and finally smash the Rosalie Inn to pieces.
A small place, I should add. Most of my heart loves the Rosalie Inn with the kind of passion that can come only when a business has been in your family for generations, when every board, every window, every doorway holds a memory.
But each time I put another charge on my Visa and hold my breath that it will be approved, I’m reminded that sometimes even places we love can become weights around our necks.
Now, as the warm wind blows my sweaty hair back from my face, the sand underfoot squeaking slightly against the soles of my sandals, I wonder if the air really does feel charged somehow or if it is just the doom-and-gloom thinking I find myself engaged in more and more these days.
I’m almost to the Airstream when I hear someone calling my name.
I turn, figuring it’s Mr. Peters from Room 202—that man never met an amenity or perk he didn’t want to wheedle out of me or Edie—or maybe the handyman who’s supposed to be figuring out why the shower in 114 keeps leaking. But it’s not either of them.
It’s August, standing on the boardwalk that leads to the inn, the setting sun limning him in gold. He’s wearing loose linen pants and a fitted gray T-shirt tonight, his Tevas held in one hand, Lo’s sparkly sandals in the other.
She’s just behind him, but her gaze is directed to the clouds on the horizon.
Once again, I’m stunned to think that she’s sixty.
In this light, she looks almost unchanged from those pictures taken when she was twenty years old.
Only the delicate thin skin of her neck and upper chest give her away.
She’s got on a white sundress, and it billows around her legs as the breeze picks up.
“Hi!” I say with forced cheer, retracing my steps to stand in front of them. “Have y’all been settling in okay? Do you need anything?”
“A beer,” August says, smiling at me, and I’m about to tell him we don’t have a restaurant on-site—Dad closed that up a few years before he died, saying it wasn’t worth the expense or headache to run it anymore. But before I can, August adds, “Apparently there’s a famous bar around here?”
“Oh, The Line,” I reply. Famous is one word for it, but infamous is probably closer to the truth.
It started out as a beach shack sometime in the sixties, built right on the state line between Florida and Alabama, hence the name.
Now it’s a jumble of buildings that regularly attracts hundreds of people a night, thousands during spring break and summer holidays.
The night before the Fourth of July? It’s going to be a madhouse.
“It’s just down the highway,” I tell August, pointing in that direction. “Take a right out of the parking lot, and—”
He laughs and shakes his head, curls flopping over his forehead. “No, I didn’t want directions. I wondered if you wanted to come with us.”
“Why?” I blurt out, almost without thinking. He laughs again, shrugging this time.
“Always nice to have a local on hand, and I was going to ask you some questions about the hotel at some point anyway. Thought I might as well do it somewhere with some ambience, you know?”
Now I’m the one who laughs. “Oh man, if you’re after ambience, I have … some not-great news about The Line.”
“I used to wait tables there,” Lo says, almost dreamy as she keeps looking out over the ocean. “And some nights, they let me sing with the band. ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.’ That was my signature song. Do you know it?”
When I shake my head, Lo just smiles, fluffing out her long blond hair. “Too young, I guess. How old are you, Ellen’s Little Girl?”
“Forty,” I reply, and she tips her head back with a sigh.
“A baby. Like August here.”
“I don’t know about that. Just the other day, I realized I not only have a favorite heating pad, I have a second favorite heating pad.”
Lo’s laugh is a high, bright thing, and when she steps closer, a wave of her perfume engulfs me.
It’s too sweet, and there’s a chemical tang to it, like the kind of drugstore body spray a teenage girl would wear.
“You’re funny,” she says, and then surprises me by reaching out and tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear.
It’s the kind of easy touch you’d give to a close friend or a family member, not someone you’ve spent only fifteen minutes with.
It makes me miss my mom with a sudden fierceness that has my throat going tight.
Not that Mom was ever particularly free with those easy, affectionate gestures, so maybe it just makes me miss the idea of a mom. Or maybe I just wish that things with mine hadn’t been so complicated.
“Your mama was funny, too,” Lo says, almost like she’d read my mind. I wait for her to ask about Mom, bracing myself to explain the whole sad thing to her, but instead, she just makes a shooing motion at me and says, “Now, go get changed. I need some quality time on memory lane tonight.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m in a hot, crowded room with what seems to be the entire population of Baldwin County, Alabama, plus a few hundred vacationers, some of whom are going to regret anything and everything that happens tonight.
That’s the kind of place The Line is. Paradise for some—a freewheeling honky-tonk where the band is loud, the beer is cold, and everybody will be your best friend for at least an hour or two.
For others—namely me—it’s hell. Too many people, too much noise, too much …
everything. The floor underfoot is sticky with spilled drinks and who knows what else, and there’s a constant haze of smoke that stings my eyes.
Smoking is still allowed indoors here, and I know from experience it will take at least three showers to fully get the smell out of my hair.
As I sit at a scarred picnic table on the edge of the dance floor, August throws a long leg over the bench next to me, his eyes narrowed in the dim light.
“People actually like this?” he yells over the band’s third performance of “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Nodding, I tip my beer to my mouth, grateful that it’s cold sliding down my throat.
Big fans circulate overhead, and there’s a breeze coming in through all the open doors that lead out to the beach, but that can do only so much against a July night and a bunch of people crowded in one space.
I’d changed out of the clothes I’d worn all day before climbing in the backseat of Lo and August’s rental car, and I’m glad I chose a simple, lightweight shift dress, but there’s already sweat dripping down my back and dotting August’s temples.
Lo, seated on the other side of the table from us, looks only a little wilted in the heat, her eyes wide as she looks around her. “God, it’s exactly the same,” she says. I can barely hear her over the band, and I lean in closer.
“Hurricane Peggy did a lot of damage back in ninety-eight, but they rebuilt it exactly like it was. Had to go to junkyards to find signs the appropriate amount of rusted.”
Using my beer bottle, I point to one such metal sign, advertising Crown Royal, and she shakes her head, smiling as she rests her chin in her hand. “I didn’t think I missed St. Medard’s Bay, I really didn’t. But Christ, I did.”
I believe her. She’s practically glowing in the red light from the beer signs, her white dress a beacon in the gloom, and for as dingy as The Line is, it’s like none of it is touching her.
Like she alone is going to leave this place without a sweat stain under her arms, without the smell of Marlboros clinging to her hair.
“How long did you live here?” I ask, and she slants me a look, tipping her head to the side.
“Ellen Chambers’s Little Girl, are you really going to pretend you don’t already know my whole damn story?”