Celeste
Saturday, July 7, 2018, 5:15 p.m.
Nantucket
Karen
Greer
Tuesday, July 3–Friday, July 6, 2018
Celeste
Saturday, July 7, 2018, 5:45 p.m.
The Chief
Saturday, July 7, 2018, 6:55 p.m.
Nantucket
Saturday, July 7, 2018, 8:00 p.m.
Greer
Sunday, July 8, 2018, 2:47 a.m.
Nantucket
Acknowledgments
Discover More Elin Hilderbrand
About the Author
Also by Elin Hilderbrand
For Chuck and Margie Marino
There’s no such thing as a perfect couple, but you come pretty close.
Forever love xo
Saturday, July 7, 2018, 5:53 a.m.
THE CHIEF
A phone call before six on a Saturday morning is never a good thing, although it’s not unheard of on a holiday weekend. Too many times to count, Chief Ed Kapenash of the Nantucket Police Department has seen the Fourth of July go sideways. The most common accident is a person blowing off a finger while lighting fireworks. Sometimes things are more serious. One year, they lost a swimmer to the riptide; another year, a man drank ten shots of Patrón Añejo and then did a backflip off the roof of the Allserve building and hit the water in such a way that his neck snapped. There are generally enough drunk-and-disorderlies to fill a sightseeing bus, as well as dozens of fistfights, a handful of which are so serious that the police have to get involved.
When the call comes in, Andrea and the kids are fast asleep. Chloe and Finn are sixteen, an age the Chief escaped easily with his own children, he now realizes. Chloe and Finn—who are properly the children of Andrea’s cousin Tess and Tess’s husband, Greg, who died in a boating accident nine years ago—are proving to be more of a challenge. Finn has a girlfriend named Lola Budd, and their young love is turning the household upside down. Finn’s twin sister, Chloe, has a summer job working for Siobhan Crispin at Island Fare, Nantucket’s busiest catering company.
The Chief and Andrea have divided their concerns about the twins neatly down the middle. Andrea worries about Finn getting Lola Budd pregnant (though the Chief, awkwardly, presented Finn with a giant box of condoms and a rather stern directive: Use these. Every single time). The Chief worries about Chloe getting into drugs and alcohol. The Chief has seen again and again the way the food-and-beverage industry leads its unsuspecting employees into temptation. The island of Nantucket has over a hundred liquor licenses; other, similar-size towns in Massachusetts have an average of twelve. As a summertime resort, the island has a culture of celebration, frivolity, excess. It’s the Chief’s job to give the annual substance-abuse talk the week before the high-school prom; this year, both Finn and Chloe had been in attendance, and afterward, neither of them would so much as look at him.
He often feels he’s too old for the enormous responsibility of raising teenagers. And impressing them is most certainly beyond him.
The Chief takes his phone out onto the back deck, which looks west over protected wetlands; his conversations here are private, overheard only by the redwing blackbirds and the field mice. The house has a great view of sunsets but not, unfortunately, of the water.
The call is from Sergeant Dickson, one of the best in the department.
“Ed,” he says. “We have a floater.”
The Chief closes his eyes. Dickson had been the one to tell the Chief that Tess and Greg were dead. Sergeant Dickson has no problem delivering disturbing news; in fact, he seems to relish it.
“Go ahead,” the Chief says.
“Caucasian female by the name of Merritt Monaco. Twenty-nine years old, from New York City, here on Nantucket for a wedding. She was found floating facedown just off the shore in front of three-three-three Monomoy Road, where the wedding is being held. The cause of death appears to be drowning. Roger Pelton called it in. You know Roger, the guy who does the expensive weddings?”
“I do,” the Chief says. The Chief is in Rotary Club with Roger Pelton.
“Roger told me it’s his MO to check on each wedding site first thing in the morning,” Dickson says. “When he got here, he said he heard screaming. Turns out, the bride had just pulled the body out of the water. Roger tried CPR but the girl was dead, he said. He seemed to think she’d been dead for a few hours.”
“That’s for the ME to determine,” the Chief says. “Three-three-three Monomoy Road, you said?”
“It’s a compound,” Dickson says. “Main house, two guest cottages, and a pool house. The name of the property is Summerland.”
Summerland. The Chief has seen the sign, though he has never been to the house. That stretch of Monomoy Road is the stratospherically high-rent district. The people who live on that road generally don’t have problems that require the police. The houses have sophisticated security systems, and the residents use discretion to keep any issues under wraps.
