Osprey Island

She slumped back then, deflated.

“Well,” Bud began, “I think we say as little as possible. I think if anyone asks, you send them to me so I can tell them what’s going on and we don’t have to get into a game of telephone, with wrong stories, exaggerating . . .”

“What do you mean?” someone asked.

“I mean,” Bud said sternly, “anything other than the plain truth: there was a fire in the laundry room late last night, a fire started by a cigarette when Lorna Squire, our head housekeeper, was smoking and fell asleep. The laundry burned down. Lorna died in the fire. That’s the real story. That’s the story I will tell our guests if they ask.” He was almost pleased by it, pleased at how a story like that could work like a campaign: Don’t Smoke in Bed. “And please,” he added, “please just don’t be discussing all this—these events—around the Lodge, around the guests. Of course, they’ll find out. I’m sure we couldn’t keep that from happening. But we can keep it simple. Keep things clean. Keep it from bothering them the way it’ll be bothering us.”

From the archway, Suzy piped up, acting as though Bud himself had finally succeeded in doing Lorna in after all these years. “Don’t you think it might be a little more honest, Dad, a little more up-front, if we just came out and told them? Made up a letter, one for each room, just letting people know what happened. Explaining how sad we are, explaining there won’t be fireworks here at the Lodge, just to let them know . . .”

“No,” Bud said, “no, I don’t think that’s best. The more we play this thing down, the—”

“Someone is dead! You think we should play that down?”

“I do not think we need to point our fingers at it,” he said briskly.

Suzy was gearing up for a fight. Bud looked as if he might try to send her to her room.

“I think that’s a serious mistake on your part, Dad. I think you’re making a grave error in judgment.”

Bud was in no mood. “Well, when you own a hotel”—and he did not say “this hotel,” did not concede even that much—“when you own your own hotel, you can do things however the hell you want . . . But seeing as I’ve got just a few years’ more experience, this is my decision to make.”

In the dining room the staff squirmed. Bud and Suzy glared, each daring the other to speak. Suzy broke off first—turned in the doorway and strode from the room as though in undisputed possession of the upper hand. She never failed to leave her father boiling.

When the meeting adjourned, the staff retreated to the porch, and Morey’s, and the barracks. Bud was talking to Roddy Jacobs when Suzy reentered the dining room. She came at Bud like she meant to strangle him. Roddy stepped clear for her to do just that, if she so intended. He had his own hands behind his back to keep himself from reaching out and strangling Bud of his own accord. Bud stepped back, cornered.

“I think you’re wrong, Dad. I think you’re making a really bad call here,” Suzy said.

“Oh, really?” Bud countered. “You sure didn’t make that clear.”

“I shouldn’t have . . .” Suzy conceded: if there was anything she had learned in childhood it was that conflicts took place out of the public eye—or, preferably, not at all. Bud did not like to be questioned; when Suzy learned to ask why, she had ceased to be someone he could relate to, or even tolerate.

Suzy plowed on. “I really think you absolutely need to let the guests know ahead of time what’s gone on here. I can’t even believe Mom isn’t insisting on that already—”

He cut her off: “Your mother and I made this decision together.”

“Oh, now that’s just bullshit! Don’t even try to . . . Mom’s been knocked out all day. Don’t treat me . . . Jesus!” She stuck one hand on her hip, pushed the other through her hair and held it back from her eyes as she peered at him, lifting that final curtain of illusion about just what sort of man her father might be. She let the hair fall. The hand went to her other hip. “You have to tell them. You’d be an idiot not to tell them. If you tell them—a simple, discreet note in each of the rooms—then you present it to them exactly the way you want, exactly the way you want them to hear it. You have control over the information then.” It was like explaining combat theory to a wary recruit. “If you leave it ambiguous”—she said this as though her father might not know the word: am- big-u-ous—“then you’re chancing what they find out, how they find out—you’re risking all the rumor that might find its way in along the way. I can’t even fathom why you’d take a chance like that.”

It was entirely the wrong tactic. “I think, Suzy, there are a lot of things about this situation that you don’t fathom at all.”

“Oh, don’t give me that shit when—”

“That’s it, right now. I don’t want to hear any more. This conversation is over.”

Bud stood for a moment, staring down his daughter, then turned to Roddy, a few feet off, as though it were Roddy he’d just been chatting with all the while, and said, “I’ll be up at the house with my wife if anyone needs me,” and then he turned and walked away.

Roddy and Suzy just stood there in Bud’s wake, waiting for him to clear the threshold, for the slam of the kitchen door marking his exit. They stood a moment longer as the room settled, and looked around as though remembering the shape of the place, the smell of sea air and furniture polish.

Suzy let out a breath. “I need a drink.”

Roddy laughed before he could catch himself, before he thought to wonder if it was OK to laugh. Suzy stared, disbelieving, her mouth open slightly. “Should I make you one too, or are you just going to stand there mocking me?”

“Oh,” said Roddy. “I got it.” He went toward the bar as if to beat her to it. “What do you want? What can I make you?”

She flung up her hands.

“OK,” he said slowly. “Anything you’re particularly in the mood for?”

“Jesus!” She laughed. “Just hand me a bottle.”