He does glance over at me now, clearly still weighing something in his mind, and then he steps forward, his shoulders tense.
“I was up all night looking through your mom’s… collection, clippings, whatever you want to call it. And you were right. There wasn’t much in there that I didn’t already know, orthat wasn’t just your usual tabloid crap. But that wasn’t why I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking, ‘Why?,’ you know? ‘Why did your mom keep all of this?’ You said it yourself, she never really talked about any of this to you when you were growing up.”
“She didn’t talk about itat all,” I correct. “I didn’t even realize that she and Lo were close.”
“Right. And then I thought, ‘Maybe she was just into true crime, or maybe she thought it would be interesting for the hotel and its history one day, if she kept a record.’ And that made sense to me for a while.”
I consider that theory, nodding. “That could make sense to me, too. Though, I know she wasn’t into true crime—like, not evenDatelineor20/20,things like that. I’ve always loved those shows, and she used to tease me about watching them. But she definitely saw herself as… the keeper of the flame, I guess. The Rosalie Historian.”
August nods, a lank of hair falling over his brow before he impatiently pushes it back.
“Exactly. Solid theory, nothing weird about it, just a record of an extraordinary thing that happened in her town, involving one of her best friends. Especially if it’s true that Landon’s body was found here. But it still bothered me for some reason, and I kept feeling like I was missing something. So I got out all my research on the case, on Lo, on Landon. And when I didn’t find anything there, I went online and I searched for…”
He stops himself, reaching into the pocket of his shorts to pull out his cell phone. His fingers move across the screen, and when he sets the phone on the edge of the desk, I see his hand is shaking.
A young woman smiles back at me, her dark hair shiny over her bare shoulders, her skin pale against the black velvet drape. It’s a senior portrait, probably from the ’70s, if her hair andmakeup are anything to go by, but what I’m most struck by is just how much this woman looks like… me.
Her eyes are dark, not hazel, and her chin is just a little bit weaker, but for the first time in my life, I look into another face and recognize my thin nose, my upside-down mouth, upper lip fuller than the bottom, my strong brows, the one dimple in my left cheek.
I raise my eyes to August, my mouth dry, my pulse thudding heavily in my chest, my throat, my ears.
“Who is this?”
“Camile Fitzroy,” he says, and I know the next words he’ll say before they’re even out of his mouth.
“Landon Fitzroy’s sister.”
“Landon,” I hear myself nearly whisper, and August nods, his mouth now set in a hard line.
“Geneva, did you really not know Landon Fitzroy was your father?”
VELMA
November 20, 1980
Landon always knew he had a destiny.
From a lot of people, that would probably sound pretentious, but when he said it, it just sounded like a fact.
I think it’s the way he was raised. His whole family was like that, all the Fitzroys. Big believers in signs and blessings and fate.
We Chamberses were a little more down to earth than all that. The only “destiny” I ever had was knowing that one day, the Shipwreck Inn would be mine.
Lo used to tell me how lucky that made me. “You’re gonna be sofancy,” she’d say, which was Lo’s highest praise. There was nothing better in this world than beingfancyas far as Lo was concerned, but I’d been working beside my parents at the Rosalie since I was old enough to hand Daddy a wrench, and I knew there was nothingfancyabout running an inn, not even one that was on the beach.
But then it was the inn that brought me Landon.
I was fifteen the first time he came to St. Medard’s Bay. It was November, the offseason, my favorite time of year. For one, it wasn’t hotter than Satan’s armpit like it was from April all the way to Halloween, and for another, that was the only time the inn ever really felt like ahome, like our home. When it was just me and my parents, with only the occasional guest to mar the illusion.
And I loved the beach in November. St. Medard’s Bay is famous for its clear water and white-sugar sand, but I liked it best when the sky was gray and looming, the water darker, whitecaps frothing. I could walk for hours along the shore in November, the sleeves of my sweatshirt tugged over my hands, my feet bare and numb from the water, the wind blowing my hair back from my face.
Lo was the one with the flair for drama—she was always making up stories for us to act out, and God help you if you’d decided your Barbies should be going to prom whenshethought they should be attending a royal wedding. I mostly just went along with whatever shesaid because it was easier, and because, to be honest, her stories and ideas usuallywerebetter than anything I could come up with.
But out on that beach, my brain ran wild with my own stories. I was a sailor’s wife anxiously scanning the horizon for her beloved, or a mermaid who’d been turned into a human against her will and now longed to go back to the sea. I once spent so long imagining that I was a castaway shipwrecked on a deserted island that I ended up walking nearly two miles away without even realizing it. Mom had to send Cap, the guy who did odd jobs around the inn, down the beach to find me.
I never acted these things out. Even when I was little, that kind of thing had been hard for me, shy as I was. But in a way, I liked that, that no one looking at me had any idea of all of the things going on in my head. To them, I just looked like Boring Ellen Chambers, the one who got great grades but never had much to say, the one who let “that little Bailey girl run right over her!”
But inside, there were worlds. Universes. And they were all mine.
