Beautiful Day(82)

Maybe now, with his fish taco stand and Lily the Pilates instructor. Who knew.

But these were Margot’s ruminations, which she had to set aside. She needed to start thinking like Jenna.

Margot checked Rhonda’s phone for the time. It was nearly ten o’clock. She wondered what Roger looked like when he lost his cool. She had to move quickly.

As she turned away from the beach, she noticed someone waving at her. It was one of the surfcasters. Waving at her? Was there someone drowning offshore, or a shark? Margot squinted. The man was wearing a white visor.

It was Griff.

Not possible. But yes, of course. Of course Griff was fishing here. Had he mentioned fishing the night before? She couldn’t remember. Maybe he had, and now it would look like Margot was stalking him. Maybe this would become the story where Margot and the man who had kissed her like no other man before but whom she could never kiss again because of the awful way she had wronged him would hunt down the runaway bride.

Margot waved back, but the wave was halfhearted, despite the way her whole heart felt like it was dangling from the end of Griff’s line.

She hurried to her car.

Beth Carmichael had requested that her ashes be scattered in three places on Nantucket. And so, seven years earlier, Margot and her father and her siblings had taken the box of Beth’s remains to the locations she’d specified. The first place Margot and her family had scattered Beth’s ashes was the Brant Point Lighthouse. Brant Point was just a knuckle of land that jutted out into the harbor. The lighthouse was a white brick column with a black cap and a red beacon. It was prettiest at night or in the fog when the crimson light seemed to glow with warm promise. The lighthouse also charmed at Christmastime when the Coast Guard hung a giant evergreen wreath on it.

An old Nantucket legend said that when a visitor left the island on the ferry, she should toss two pennies overboard as the boat passed Brant Point Lighthouse. This would ensure the visitor would return one day. Beth Carmichael had been fanatical about the penny throwing. On the day that the Carmichaels departed each summer, Beth would herd all four kids to the top deck, where they would throw their pennies. Margot even remembered throwing pennies in rainstorms with punishing winds. When Margot, Kevin, and Nick were teenagers and refused to participate in the penny throwing, deeming it “lame,” Beth had taken Jenna up with her to throw the pennies. Jenna had believed in the penny throwing, just as she believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It was Nick who said, “You know it’s a bunch of baloney, right? Throw the penny, don’t throw the penny, you can still come back to Nantucket. It’s a free country.”

But their mother would not back down from this particular superstition. She could risk certain things, but she could not risk a life without Nantucket.

Now a part of her was here forever. As Margot walked to the lighthouse, she spied bike tracks in the sand, ones that her Nancy Drew instincts told her belonged to Jenna’s Schwinn. But when Margot reached the small beach in front of the lighthouse, the exact place they’d all stood when they’d scattered Beth’s ashes, it was deserted. There was gravelly sand, pebbles, the overturned shell of a horseshoe crab, and one of the most arresting views on the island: the sweeping harbor, sailboats, the shore of the first point of Coatue visible a few hundred yards away across sparkling blue water.

Breathtaking.

But no Jenna.

Margot got back in the car. She checked Rhonda’s phone in case Jenna had called. Nothing. It was 10:18.

Madaket was the settlement on the west coast of the island, the somewhat poor relation to Siasconset in the east. Sconset was fashionable and popular; it was home to the Sconset Market and the Sconset Café, it had the Summer House and Sankaty Head Golf Club, it had rose-covered cottages that had once been owned by the silent film stars of the 1920s.

Madaket was low-key by Nantucket standards. There was one restaurant that had changed hands a few times—in Margot’s memory it had been called 27 Curves, and then the Westender, which had served a popular drink called the Madaket Mystery. Now it was a popular Tex-Mex place called Millie’s, named after an iconic but scary-looking woman who had worked for the Coast Guard named Madaket Millie.

Beth had loved Madaket; she found its simplicity pleasing. There was no flash, no cachet, very little to see except for the natural beauty of the sun setting each night and the quiet splendor of Madaket Harbor, which was small and picturesque and surrounded by eelgrass.

Margot traveled the road to Madaket slowly, searching the bike path for Jenna. There were, in fact, twenty-seven curves in the road that took one past the dump, then the trails of Ram’s Pasture, then the pond where Beth used to take Margot and her siblings turtling—four sturdy sticks, a ball of string, and a pound of raw chicken equaled an afternoon of hilarity. Both Kevin and Nick had always ended up in the pond with the turtles.