but her cute facade had hidden a mean-spiritedness that had scared him at times. He suddenly remembered an incident he hadn’t thought about in years. He’d been about thirteen, sitting with Ellen and a group of kids on the beach. He was watching an attractive girl walking along the water’s edge, when Ellen saw fit to point out to the rest of the group that he had an erection.
He’d rolled rapidly onto his stomach, hating Ellen and her big mouth.
Even now, he cringed remembering that moment.
Then there had been Daria, his little buddy, the girl who could run faster, swim better and catch bigger fish than he could. She’d been three years younger than him, but she’d been his competitor, nevertheless. He’d always pretended that he was letting her win at whatever they attempted. Inside, though, he’d been filled with admiration for her. He wondered what had become of the three Cato girls.
He opened the back of the Jeep and pulled out two of the suitcases. He carried them up to the porch, then took a moment to look toward the ocean himself, breathing in the still-familiar scent of the beach he loved. It would be a good summer. He was in one of the finest places on earth, about to delve into an intriguing story, and he had Zack with him. Zack would come away from this summer with a healthy tan, sun-kissed hair and his good values restored. And with, Rory hoped, renewed love for his father. He could hope for the moon, couldn’t he?
1 he laundry basket was full of Daria’s clean work clothes—several pairs of shorts and a dozen Tshirts—and she dumped them onto her bed and began folding. She had the windows wide-open, and a warm ocean breeze lifted the blue and white curtains and sent them floating into the room like the wings of a tired gull. It was the sort of early summer day that used to make her feel light and carefree, but she no longer seemed capable of experiencing those feelings.
She carried the stack of folded shirts across the room and set them on top of the dresser. Pulling open the dresser drawer, she took out the photograph she kept tucked beneath her Tshirts. She stepped closer to the window to study it, as she did nearly every time she opened that drawer. The picture was of Pete. He was leaning against a split-rail fence at a friend’s house in Manteo, a beer in his hand, a five-o’clock shadow on his face, and he was grinning at her, the photographer. His dark hair, as smooth and straight as hers was full and wavy, fell over his forehead. It was torture to look at the picture, and yet she did it anyway, over and over again. He’d been a part of her life and her future for six years. Now he was only a part of her past, and it was taking her longer than she liked to get used to that fact.
She replaced the picture, then lowered the stack of Tshirts on top of it and returned to the bed and the laundry basket, but her mind was still back with the photograph. Pete and his callous feelings about Shelly were linked together in her mind with the night of the plane crash, the night the young female pilot died.
For two months now, Daria had been visited by that pilot’s last moments in her nightmares. She could not seem to free herself from the young woman’s pleading gaze.
That morning, she’d received a call from her old Emergency Medical Services supervisor, a call she’d half expected but had hoped would never come. They were pulling her off CISD duty, he said, and she’d winced as though he’d slapped her in the face. She’d worked as a critical incident stress de briefer for five years. After traumatic incidents anywhere in the county, she’d be called in to help distraught emergency technicians cope with what they’d endured. Now she was the distraught technician. Her supervisor summed it up for her when she begged him to reconsider.
“If you can’t manage your own stress,” he said, ‘how do you expect to be able to help someone else with theirs? “
She was finishing folding the shorts when her gaze was drawn through the window to the cottage across the cul-de-sac, where this week’s vacationers were moving into Poll-Rory. Something made her move closer to the window, brushing aside the billowing curtain, to stare hard at the newcomers. A man and a teenage boy were unpacking a red Jeep in the driveway. Even from that distance, and even though she hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years, she knew the man was Rory Taylor. She’d watched every game the Rams had played on television when he’d been with them, and she’d watched him on True Life Stories for years. She had given up on his ever returning to Poll-Rory, though, especially now that both his parents were dead. He probably had more glamorous vacation spots in which to spend his free time. Yet here he was. Most likely, that was his son with him. She had read he’d gotten a divorce.
For some reason, the first memory that came to mind was of a hay ride they’d gone on with some of the neighborhood kids. Her father was the group chaperon, and Rory, who must have been about twelve and full of early-adolescent bathroom humor, told joke after joke that Daria had felt unable to laugh at because her devoutly religious father was along. Rory, of course, understood her predicament and tortured her with ever more raucous stories. The memory made her smile. Rory had been her best friend during the summers of her childhood. When she was ten or eleven, that friendship began turning into a genuine crush, on her part at least. But that’s when he began to snub her in favor of the older kids. She knew that she had never truly lost that attraction to him. When she watched True Life Stories, she was not simply excited by the fact that someone she had known had become a celebrity; she was excited by Rory himself.
Rory carried a suitcase across Poll-Rory’s sandy yard and up the front steps to the porch, and Daria noticed the slight limp in his gait. She remembered that he’d been injured playing football. That’s what had ended his career.
She watched until Rory and the boy disappeared inside the cottage for the last time, then she walked downstairs to the screened porch. Chloe was sitting in one of the three blue rockers, reading a book titled Summer Fun for Kids 5-15, and Shelly sat at the blue-painted picnic table, stringing shells for a necklace, her long, blond hair falling over her shoulders. “Did you see who just moved into Poll-Rory?” Daria asked, more to Chloe than to Shelly. Shelly knew that the host and producer of True Life Stories was someone who used to live on the cul-de-sac, but she had been very small the last time she’d seen Rory, and it was unlikely she remembered him.
Chloe glanced across the street.
“I wasn’t really paying attention,” she said.
“Was it a man and a boy?”
For a moment, Daria wondered if she’d only seen what she wanted to see. But she remembered the man’s limp, the breadth of his shoulders, the sandy color of his hair.
“It was Rory Taylor,” she said.
“Really?”
Shelly asked.
“True Life Stories Rory Taylor?”
