39. There Is No Story Here

She hits the water with a smack that disorients her. Her shorts balloon, and her phone falls out of her hand; she grabs for it but then realizes it’s too late. The water is a green glass globe with a stream of translucent bubbles, her own breath escaping. Which way is up? For one panicked second, Coco isn’t sure. She kicks her feet, feels instinctively that she’s going down, not up, flips around, and pulls apart the water like she’s opening a heavy curtain until she breaks the surface. In the twilight, Coco can see the sailboat, but it’s cruising away from her, both motors churning.

She tries to swim toward the shore; the beach at Eel Point is probably only a few hundred yards ahead. But the water has other plans for her. The current carries her out; it’s one stroke forward, two strokes back. She tells herself not to panic—she knows that in a riptide, you swim parallel to shore. She does this for a while. Is she getting closer? Yes, she thinks so. Her sodden polo shirt is weighing her down, and she’s having trouble using her arms. She treads water for a second, though even this is a challenge. The water is muscular, insistent: She will do what it tells her. She wrangles off her polo, unbuttons her shorts, lets them both go. She’s lighter now, but she’s lost ground. She watches as the westernmost tip of the island, Smith’s Point, recedes.

So what now? She turns and sees land behind her. Tuckernuck, Whale Island. It looks close but she knows this is deceptive; it’s half a mile away. Her shoulders start to ache as she swims, and she can no longer feel her legs. She remembers swimming off Great Point, Kacy’s warning about sharks. She moves in the direction she knows land to be, though now the dark land is nearly indistinguishable from the dark sky. She doesn’t think about Leslee or Bull or Lamont or Kacy or her mother, Georgi, back in Rosebush, who is no doubt vaping at the picnic table out back of the house with Kemp. Or, rather, she does think about them but only to remind herself that she can’t waste her precious energy thinking about anything other than getting to shore.

Is she going to die out here?

Coco kicks, scoops her arms forward. She can swim. She has swum not only in her murky, turtle-infested pond but also in the cobalt water of the Lake of the Ozarks, the turquoise water of St. John, clear to the white sandy bottom.

She hears a helicopter, but it’s far away. Even so, she treads water, waves her arms, cries out. Someone is looking for her. She has to make it to Tuckernuck. There’s nothing but ocean between here and Portugal.

Coco’s arms grow heavy; she kicks with all her might just to stay above the surface. Waves smack her face, water goes up her nose, down her throat. She thinks she can still see the coastline but she’s not sure, and then she sees—or thinks she sees—a pinprick of yellow light. A moment later, it disappears. What did Lamont say about Tuckernuck? No electricity, only generators. She gazes up in the sky and sees stars, but navigating by them is a pipe dream. She tries to remember where she saw the light and swims in that direction. She has to stop and tread water in order to catch her breath; she flips onto her back and floats but she feels the current carrying her in what she’s certain is the wrong direction. She’s out of gas, plain and simple. She can’t move her arms; her legs are two lead weights pulling her down.

As Coco slips below the surface, she replays her favorite movie scenes in her head.

The hotel-bed scene in Lost in Translation.

Armageddon: The crew singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane” as they board the spaceship.

“O Captain! My Captain!” in Dead Poets Society.

Finding Nemo, the scene with Crush the turtle. Also the fish tank in the dentist’s office. Just keep swimming, Coco thinks. Her lungs burn; she lets her breath go.

Rocky running up the art museum’s steps.

All of Barbie.

And, of course, the final scene of The Player, which has long served as the touchstone for Coco’s artistic vision. She has a purpose. She is a screenwriter.

Coco fights her way up, breaks the surface, gasps for air.

There is no story here, Bull said. But he was wrong.

40. Friday, August 23, 6:15 A.M.

“Kacy!” The Chief’s voice booms and Kacy startles from a dream. She was in her apartment in San Francisco waiting for DoorDash. Alerts came onto her phone: Your driver is seven minutes away… Four minutes away… Your driver has arrived! Kacy opened the door, and a teenager handed over her food, and Kacy somehow intuited that it was Little G. He had lived, he had grown up. And when Kacy turned to Isla to say, Look, Little G survived after all, he’s here with our beignets from Brenda’s! she realized the person sitting at her kitchen table wasn’t Isla. It was Stacy Ambrose.

“Kacy!” Her father is in the doorway of her bedroom, using his police-chief voice. She’s in trouble, but why?

She opens her eyes. “Daddy?” Her father is in his pajama bottoms and a Cisco Brewers T-shirt; his hair is a mess. What time is it? Then Kacy remembers about Coco and sits up.

“They found her,” the Chief says. “On the south shore of Tuckernuck. Tate Cousins was out running and she saw something washed up on the beach. She thought it was a seal, but then she realized—”

“Dad,” Kacy says. “Is she alive?”

“She’s alive,” the Chief says.

Coco is admitted to Nantucket Cottage Hospital and treated for dehydration and exhaustion. As soon as the Chief gets the okay from the nursing staff, he and Zara go in to question Coco about what happened.

“I’m not sure,” Coco says. “I don’t remember.”

“Can you walk us through what you do remember?” Zara says. “Starting with when you all left to get on the boat. Who was the last one out of the house?”

“Leslee,” Coco says. “I went out to the boat early with the trays from the caterer, like usual. The guests came in stages on the dinghy. Leslee was the last one out of the house. She was in her white dress, because the vow renewal was a surprise and she wanted to make a walking-down-the-aisle entrance. It worked. Everyone on the boat applauded.”

“When you set sail, everything seemed okay at Triple Eight?” the Chief says. “There were no alarms going off?”

“Alarms?” Coco says.

“Triple Eight burned to the ground,” the Chief says.

Coco’s jaw drops; her eyes widen, then fill with tears. The Chief has been at this job so long that he considers himself a human polygraph: He knows when someone is lying, when someone is acting, and his gut tells him Coco isn’t. But maybe Zara is right, maybe he’s too close to the situation to be a good judge.

“You didn’t know this?” Zara sounds skeptical.

Coco shakes her head, wipes under her eyes with her free hand; her other arm is attached to an IV. “What happened?”

“The fire inspector is still investigating,” the Chief says. He received a call from Stu Vick: It looks like the fire started in the primary suite. That house was a tinderbox, all that old wood, no insulation to speak of, just pockets of air that fed the beast. I’ll let you know if we find an accelerant.

“Once you were on the boat, what do you remember?” Zara says.

Coco was serving drinks, passing the hors d’oeuvres. She didn’t know many people on the boat; they were mostly new friends that Leslee had made. Bull and Leslee renewed their vows on the bow, Coco served the champagne toast, the sun set, Lamont turned the boat around.

“He told us he kissed you,” the Chief says. “He kissed you in public and Leslee saw.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Coco’s eyes brighten. “He kissed me.”

“Then what happened?” Zara asks.

“After I cleared the champagne flutes, I took a moment in the back of the boat.”

“Took a moment?”

“I went to the spot in the stern where the swimming ladder is. There’s a safety gate… I was standing inside the gate. I took a picture of the sunset on my phone. I wanted to remember the night because, after Lamont kissed me, he told me he loved me for the first time. Then the music on the boat stopped and I heard everyone yapping all at once. I remember thinking, I’ve got to get back, fix the music, wash the glasses… and the next thing I knew, I was in the water.”

“Did someone push you?” the Chief asks. “Or did you slip and fall?”

“I have no idea,” Coco says. “The gate was there, so I didn’t slip. I guess it’s possible someone pushed me… though actually, that gate wasn’t latching properly, so maybe I did slip and fall in. Lamont told Bull and Leslee the latch was faulty; he’d ordered a new one but it hadn’t arrived yet. They told him it didn’t matter, they wanted to sail anyway.” Coco offers the Chief a weak smile. “They don’t like anything getting in the way of their fun.”

“Believe me, I know,” the Chief says.

“Do you know anything about how the fire in the Richardsons’ house might have started?” Zara asks. “We learned that Leslee was a smoker—did she ever smoke in the house?”

Coco shakes her head. “I never saw her smoke, ever. She didn’t smoke around me.”

“Leslee and Bull both told us you all had a… thorny relationship at times,” Zara says. “They seemed to think it was you who started the fire.”