“Do you?” Rory had the feeling she knew exactly what was concerning him.
“Oh,” Mr. Wheeler said, “it’s just a little summer romance. Nothing to get upset about.”
“Well, I just wanted to make sure you don’t mind how much Zack is around,” Rory said.
“How much the two of them are together.”
“He’s about the nicest boy she’s gone out with,” Mrs. Wheeler said.
“So, no, we don’t mind a bit.”
For a moment, Rory worried about what the other boys Kara had dated had been like—and what diseases they might carry—but he put those thoughts aside.
“I’ll tell you the girl we need to worry about,” Mr. Wheeler said.
“That Bemadette. They say she’s heading straight for the Outer Banks now.”
“I didn’t know that,” Rory said. He hadn’t listened to the weather report yet that day.
“There’s still a chance she’ll veer off course,” Mr. Wheeler said.
“I
just hope we don’t have to evacuate. Remember doing that when you were a kid? “
“I think we only had to do it once or twice,” Rory said.
“I don’t remember where we went.” He supposed he and Zack would go to a hotel on the mainland somewhere, if they needed to evacuate.
“Oh, we usually end up in one of the shelters,” Mr. Wheeler said. ‘ “Cheaper than a motel, with our crew, and the kids wind up having a lot of fun.”
Rory took another swallow of tea.
“Well,” he began, “I guess you know why I’m here this summer.”
Mrs. Wheeler nodded.
“Shelly,” she said.
“That’s right. I’ve been talking to people on the cul-de- sac about what they remember. Do you two have any thoughts on who left Shelly on the beach that morning?”
“I always figured it was that Cindy girl who lived at the end of the street,” Mr. Wheeler said.
“Oh, it wasn’t Cindy,” Mrs. Wheeler said.
“She was too thin. Remember?
We talked about it back then. She was a skinny minnie. ”” Well, you were skinny back in your baby-having days,
yourself,” Mr. Wheeler said, and his wife made a sound of mock annoyance.
“Cindy preserved her figure a heck of a lot better than I ever did,” Mrs. Wheeler said.
“We see her every once in a while when we go up to Smokey’s restaurant in Corolla for the sweet-potato fries. She’s always so nice.”
Rory leaned forward.
“You’ve seen Cindy Trump recently?” he asked.
“Does she live around here?”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Wheeler said.
“She and her husband and kids own one of them huge houses in Corolla. Her last name is Delaney now.”
Rory made a mental note of the name, unable to believe his good fortune. He would be able to talk with Cindy after all.
“You know,” Mrs. Wheeler said, “I’d like to think of Shelly the way Sue—her mother—did—as a gift from the sea, with no parents other than the Catos. Shelly is such a sweet girl, and she gave Mrs. Cato such happiness in her last years. And Daria’s been a saint to take care of her.”
“Maybe it was that retarded girl,” Mr. Wheeler said suddenly.
“Maybe she was Shelly’s mother.”
“Hush,” his wife said sharply.
“That was Rory’s sister.”
Rory smiled.
“I’m quite certain Polly had nothing to do with Shelly,” he said, although he was beginning to wonder why he was so sure of that fact. The thought of Polly having been taken advantage of sexually, the thought of her being confused about being pregnant and delivering a baby by herself, was too horrifying to ponder.
“Rory…” Mrs. Wheeler sounded hesitant.
“Did you ever consider that your own mother might have been Shelly’s mother?” she asked.
Rory masked the shock in his face.
