“She always wanted to babysit for Shelly. Of course, she baby-sat for a lot of kids in the neighborhood—I think so she could have boys over, frankly. My brother was one of those boys.
Do you remember Brian? He was pretty wild. “
“Your twin, right?” Brian had slept with Cindy?
“Uh-huh. He slept with her the summer before Shelly was born, and he slept with her that summer, too. I never understood how he could do that, since everyone was so sure Cindy was Shelly’s mother. But his hormones were stronger than his common sense, I guess.”
“I had no idea Brian was seeing Cindy,” Rory said, IVory sat on his front porch, waiting for Grace. They were going to an early movie, then out to dinner. He’d suggested he come down to Rodanthe for this outing, but as he might have predicted, she said she would prefer to drive up to Kill Devil Hills. He finally asked her why she never wanted him to come to Rodanthe, and she sounded surprised by the question.
“I don’t have anything against you coming down here,” she said.
“It’s just that I love to get out. And I know you’d rather not be that far from Zack.”
He’d spent the last couple of hours on the Internet, trying to find information on those two young women who’d disappeared from North Carolina and Virginia twenty-two years ago. He tracked down some old newspaper articles, but they didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.
“Hi, Rory!”
He looked next door to see Jill walking toward her car. He waved, and Jill changed direction, heading toward him. She climbed the steps to his porch and sat down.
“I heard you and Zack had a great time on the dunes,” she said, slipping her sunglasses onto her head, where her thick, silver hair held them snugly in place.
“Yeah, we did.” The afternoon had been, for want of a better term, a bonding experience. No doubt about it. Of course, there had been no time for heavy conversation, which had made life easier for Zack.
Instead, there had been shared concentration on the task at hand and
the plea Summer Child 209
sure of reliving every moment of the class afterward. “We mi^ht even do it again,” he said to Jill. “My son was on the phone to his dad last night, begging him to take him hang gliding,” Jill said.
“See what you started?”
Rory smiled, pleased. He’d finally done something right.
“So when are you going to talk to me about what I think happened the morning Shelly was born?” Jill asked.
“How about now?” he said.
“I’m waiting for a friend, but we can talk until she shows up.”
“Well, I don’t know that I can add anything new to what you’ve already heard,” Jill said.
“I’ve always felt sure that Shelly was Cindy’s baby. I think the only reason we don’t know that for certain was that the police didn’t have enough evidence to examine her. But I remembered seeing her a couple of days before Shelly was born and she was wearing a loose shirt over her shorts. That wasn’t her style of dress, in case you don’t remember.”
“I remember,” Rory said.
“But” -this had been gnawing at him “—Cindy spent a lot of summers down here after Shelly was born. Don’t you think it would have come out somehow? Wouldn’t she have shown some special interest in her?”
“But she did,” Jill said.
“She always wanted to babysit for Shelly. Of course, she baby-sat for a lot of kids in the neighborhood—I think so she could have boys over, frankly. My brother was one of those boys.
Do you remember Brian? He was pretty wild. ”” Your twin, right? ” Brian had slept with Cindy?
“Uh-huh. He slept with her the summer before Shelly was born, and he slept with her that summer, too. I never understood how he could do that, since everyone was so sure Cindy was Shelly’s mother. But his hormones were stronger than his common sense, I guess.”
“I had no idea Brian was seeing Cindy,” Rory said,
trying to think back. He could barely remember what Brian looked like.
“Well, I don’t think what he was doing with her would be described as ‘seeing her.” He was. well, screwing her. ” Jill shrugged.
“That’s about it. You were a few years younger than us, so what was going on probably went right over your head.”
“True,” he said.
“I was only fourteen the summer Daria found Shelly.”
He saw Grace’s car turn into the cul-de-sac, and Jill followed his gaze.
“Your friend is here,” she said, standing up.
Rory was still thinking about Brian and Cindy. “Excuse the rudeness in this question,” he said, “but if Brian slept with Cindy, is there any chance he was the baby’s father?”
“I don’t think so,” Jill said.
“I thought about that myself. But it would have meant that he’d been with Cindy nine months before Shelly was
