That was another story.
“After the Storm: A Golden Boy, A Small-town Girl, and the Murder That Maybe Never Was.”Vanity Fair, October 1991
CHAPTER THREE
July 3, 2025
31 Days Left
I don’t see much of August or Lo for two days after their arrival. It seems like they’re mostly keeping to their rooms and the beach, but I’m also busier than usual around the hotel. We’re nowhere near full occupancy—which was once a given during a holiday week—but we still have more guests than we’ve had so far this summer, and getting them checked in, making sure the rooms are clean, chasing down extra phone chargers, extra blankets, “better” towels… it all means I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off, as Mom would’ve said.
Still, I’ve found time in the evenings to look up everything I can about Landon Fitzroy’s death, including going through Mom’s box of clippings, and—just as I’d thought—I can’t find any reference to the Rosalie Inn being the place where Landon’s body was found. Over and over again, it’s justthe beach near a nature preserve,ora lonely stretch of coastline.There’s no mention of the Rosalie at all as far as I can tell, and neither Mom’sname nor my grandparents’ comes up in any of the things I see online or in the articles Mom kept.
Which makes me wonder—how does August know something I don’t?
IT’S ONLYJULY3, but as I step out into the early evening, heading for my trailer down the beach, I’m surprised at how heavy the air feels this early in the season. It rained earlier today, and heavy clouds still hang low over the horizon, deep purple against the pink and orange of the sunset.
August is when the heat starts to feel like a sweaty fist smacking into the sand. September can be that way, too—and every kid who grew up in St. Medard’s has a sad story about the Halloween It Was Too Hot to Wear My Costume. That’s the kind of heat that drives people crazy, makes them feel like they’re walking through hot Jell-O just getting to their cars in the grocery store parking lot.
Edie is obsessed with weather and has told me more than once that this year’s hurricane season is predicted to be bad. “They’re already on the ‘J’s, and we’ve got what? Four more months to go?” she’d said just this morning, pointing at a swirl of red and yellow somewhere out over the Atlantic.
I’d nodded and looked worried and we’d talked about climate change, about rising ocean temperatures, and I hadn’t told her that there’s a dark, secret place in my heart that longs for one of those storms to come howling out of the Gulf and finally smash the Rosalie Inn to pieces.
A small place, I should add. Most of my heart loves the Rosalie Inn with the kind of passion that can come only when a business has been in your family for generations, when every board, every window, every doorway holds a memory.
But each time I put another charge on my Visa and hold my breath that it will be approved, I’m reminded that sometimes even places we love can become weights around our necks.
Now, as the warm wind blows my sweaty hair back from my face, the sand underfoot squeaking slightly against the soles of my sandals, I wonder if the air really does feel charged somehow or if it is just the doom-and-gloom thinking I find myself engaged in more and more these days.
I’m almost to the Airstream when I hear someone calling my name. I turn, figuring it’s Mr. Peters from Room 202—that man never met an amenity or perk he didn’t want to wheedle out of me or Edie—or maybe the handyman who’s supposed to be figuring out why the shower in 114 keeps leaking. But it’s not either of them.
It’s August, standing on the boardwalk that leads to the inn, the setting sun limning him in gold. He’s wearing loose linen pants and a fitted gray T-shirt tonight, his Tevas held in one hand, Lo’s sparkly sandals in the other.
She’s just behind him, but her gaze is directed to the clouds on the horizon. Once again, I’m stunned to think that she’s sixty. In this light, she looks almost unchanged from those pictures taken when she was twenty years old. Only the delicate thin skin of her neck and upper chest give her away. She’s got on a white sundress, and it billows around her legs as the breeze picks up.
“Hi!” I say with forced cheer, retracing my steps to stand in front of them. “Have y’all been settling in okay? Do you need anything?”
“A beer,” August says, smiling at me, and I’m about to tell him we don’t have a restaurant on-site—Dad closed that up a few years before he died, saying it wasn’t worth the expense or headache to run it anymore. But before I can, August adds, “Apparently there’s a famous bar around here?”
“Oh, The Line,” I reply. Famous is one word for it, butinfamous is probably closer to the truth. It started out as a beach shack sometime in the sixties, built right on the state line between Florida and Alabama, hence the name. Now it’s a jumble of buildings that regularly attracts hundreds of people a night, thousands during spring break and summer holidays. The night before the Fourth of July? It’s going to be a madhouse.
“It’s just down the highway,” I tell August, pointing in that direction. “Take a right out of the parking lot, and—”
He laughs and shakes his head, curls flopping over his forehead. “No, I didn’t want directions. I wondered if you wanted to come with us.”
“Why?” I blurt out, almost without thinking. He laughs again, shrugging this time.
“Always nice to have a local on hand, and I was going to ask you some questions about the hotel at some point anyway. Thought I might as well do it somewhere with some ambience, you know?”
Now I’m the one who laughs. “Oh man, if you’re after ambience, I have… some not-great news about The Line.”
“I used to wait tables there,” Lo says, almost dreamy as she keeps looking out over the ocean. “And some nights, they let me sing with the band. ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.’ That was my signature song. Do you know it?”
When I shake my head, Lo just smiles, fluffing out her long blond hair. “Too young, I guess. How old are you, Ellen’s Little Girl?”
“Forty,” I reply, and she tips her head back with a sigh.
“A baby. Like August here.”
