Page 110 of Swan Song

The money, totaling nearly half a million Australian dollars, is enough for Chiefs Kapenash and Washington to arrest the Richardsons for arson. But before their lawyer even arrives at the police station, Leslee Richardson confesses: She acted alone; Bull knew nothing about it. While everyone was waiting on Hedonism, Leslee placed her hot curling iron into one of the Amalfi lemon crates filled with packing straw and doused the whole thing with her perfume. After turning off the alarms, she created a trail of perfume-soaked rags down the hall to the library, where she hoped the books and the closet filled with bourbon would be enough to combust the rest of the house.

Her motive? Insurance money, of course. Bull’s business is going belly-up, the IRS have his feet to the fire, he owes them millions, and the real estate deal that he planned to do with Eddie Pancik and Addison Wheeler soured. The Australian cash is theirs; Leslee has been skimming off their accounts for years so that she had an emergency fund.

“I would have burned down all of Nantucket if I could have,” Leslee tells her attorney, Val Gluckstern, causing Val’s eyebrows to shoot up. “I hate this island and everyone on it.”

Curling iron, we think. Perfume. Amalfi lemons and hidden cash. Leslee Richardson is one hell of a glamorous arsonist.

But will she be charged with pushing her personal assistant, Colleen Coyle, off the back of her boat? Aggravated assault, perhaps even attempted murder?

Colleen “Coco” Coyle was discovered on the south shore of Tuckernuck, exhausted but alive. She has no recollection how she ended up in the water. She realizes that she could easily claim Leslee pushed her, adding a few more years to Leslee’s sentence. But Coco isn’t sure what happened. She must have slipped, in which case the faulty latch on the back gate could be a problem for the Richardsons should Coco decide to sue.

What we don’t know in the days following these events—and what we won’t, in fact, find out for many months—is that Coco won’t sue the Richardsons. Instead, she writes a screenplay titled The Personal Concierge, set at a gracious and iconic house on Nantucket that is purchased by a couple who set out to infiltrate and dominate Nantucket’s summer social scene. There are familiar details in the screenplay: The personal concierge has a handsome boat-captain boyfriend and a best friend who takes selfies of the two of them and sends them to her ex-girlfriend. The couple the concierge works for throw extravagant parties that involve wigs, nudity, and partner-swapping. The wife cheats at pickleball; the husband pits two local real estate agents against each other in a land-development deal.

Coco sends her screenplay to three producers in Hollywood whose contact information she acquired from creeping into Bull’s email account (Coco has been saving Bull Richardson’s password for the right moment). A bidding war ensues. Warner Bros. buys the screenplay for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.

Bull Richardson sells Hedonism back to Northrop and Johnson for a fraction of what he paid for it (the accident devalued the boat severely). There will be no insurance payout on the house, but Bull puts the empty land on the market for seventeen million—he wants to recoup his money somehow, though both Eddie and Addison agree he’ll be lucky to get a third of that, and it will likely take years for some abject climate denier to come along.

Bull stays with Leslee despite her two-and-a-half-year sentence at MCI-Plymouth (he, at least, meant every word of his vow renewal). Leslee makes friends in prison, of course, and shamelessly flirts with the corrections officers. Six months before her release date, she arranges for a viewing of The Personal Concierge, which earned great acclaim on the big screen before finally coming to Netflix.

“This movie,” Leslee tells her cellblock mates, “is about me.”

Leslee generally approves of how “Layla” in the film is depicted; they cast a beautiful, award-winning actress. Leslee loves the scene near the end where Layla takes the boxes of cash and escapes from Pocomo Harbor on her speedboat, Decadence (why didn’t Leslee think of doing this in real life?), before being caught by the Coast Guard.

The only moment in the movie that Leslee ponders later is Coco slipping and falling off the boat.

Leslee (who, as Coco once acknowledged, is a human being with a point of view) remembers the events happening this way: As news of the fire breaks among guests of the sail, Leslee decides to sneak a couple of drags off a cigarette to steady her nerves (her house is going up in flames; she will have to do the best acting of her life in a moment). She finds Coco at the back of the boat all alone, taking a picture of the sunset. The idea comes to Leslee swiftly: If she pushes Coco off the boat, it will look like Coco is trying to run because she set the fire.

However, before Leslee can decide if she’s actually going to go through with pushing Coco, she hears a splash and watches Coco’s pink-and-white-clad form hit the water. Leslee is stupefied; she very nearly calls for help, but there’s a disorienting moment when Leslee wonders if she did push Coco or if Coco somehow knew Leslee’s intentions and fell in as she tried to avoid being pushed. Yet another part of Leslee wonders if Coco might have… jumped. This is obviously absurd; why would Coco ever jump off the boat?

But then, look how things turned out: Leslee and Bull are ruined and Coco has a blockbuster movie—and Leslee just heard that Warner Bros. has green-lit Rosebush as well. Talk about a clever revenge.

If Leslee didn’t hate Coco so much, she might admire her.

Nantucketers are known for bouncing back from even the most troubling events and by Labor Day weekend, nearly all the uproar caused by the Richardsons has receded into the background. Life, after all, goes on. Eddie Pancik and Addison Wheeler apply for a substantial construction loan from Nantucket Bank to develop Jeanne Jackson’s property out in Tom Nevers. Kacy Kapenash decides to stay on Nantucket for the foreseeable future. She accepts a position at Nantucket Cottage Hospital in labor and delivery, a job that will become especially meaningful in the spring because her brother, Eric, and his girlfriend, Avalon, are expecting a baby in April. Kacy has started dating Stacy Ambrose; if things work out, Kacy might consider moving to Baltimore and taking a job at Johns Hopkins.

Busy Ambrose tells anyone who will listen that Leslee Richardson never made the seventy-five-thousand-dollar donation to her husband’s scholarship fund that she said she did. Busy sounds surprised by this. She sent me a picture of the check!

A space at the Homestead opens up for Glynnie Oakley. She’s placed on the same floor as all her best friends. It’s just like being back in the college dorm, she tells Lamont.

This frees up Lamont to leave the island, at least for the off-season. He and Coco are thinking of Los Angeles. Coco is starting work on a screenplay that might be based on certain real-life events, and Lamont has an interview for the director of sailing position at the Los Angeles Yacht Club.

As Blond Sharon drives home from pickleball, her phone rings with an unfamiliar number, area code 954. Telemarketer, she thinks, but she answers anyway. It’s none other than Lucky Zambrano.

“I submitted your short story to an online literary magazine called Modern Romance,” he says. “It’s grown wildly popular with the TikTok crowd and has nearly half a million subscribers.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Sharon says. “Mo-Ro!” She can’t believe Lucky took the initiative with her piece. Nancy and Willow will be so jealous when they find out. “When will we hear back?”

“I just did,” Lucky says. “They want to publish it, and they’re paying fifteen hundred dollars.”

Fifteen hundred dollars! Sharon nearly drives off the road.

When she gets home, she shares the news with her kids: “Mo-Ro—TikTok-approved—is going to publish my story and I’m getting paid.”

Robert is playing Minecraft and doesn’t look up.

The twins are briefly energized by the mention of TikTok and come over to give Sharon desultory hugs. She knows she shouldn’t expect much more than this. They’re kids; they see her only as their mother.

She calls her sister, Heather, who, although once again in the middle of a desk lunch, whoops with abandon and says, “I’m so proud of you! Am I in it?”

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