Page 1 of Dead of Summer
PROLOGUE
She hears a scream before she hits the water. Hers? Someone else’s? It doesn’t matter—it is quickly swallowed up in the roar of the waves. Even though it’s July, the bay this far offshore is shockingly cold. And dark. Instinctively, she tries to paddle. She slips under.
She kicks herself back up, relieved to break the surface, gulping air while the waves crest and glow in the starlight.
She looks toward shore at the lights on that magnificent lawn. The party is in full swing now. The sounds large enough to carry across the surface. The thrum of conversation and the band playing a final raucous tune. She screams again, but her single voice is no match for the open ocean.
She turns as her whole body rises on a swell, looking for something, anything. But she only finds churning darkness. She is growing heavier with each passing second. Her kicks can’t keep her head above the waves much longer. Panic crawls up her legs and she starts to thrash. Bad idea. Her lungs burn for more oxygen. She descends.
Up, gasping for breath.Down, heavy quiet.Up, now facing the other way she can see the outline of the Rock in the distance. The house is sinister in the dark, its stilts spindly like a spider’s legs. A dim light shines from one of the windows. Could she make it there? She kicksharder but a wave rushes over her, hitting the back of her head and pushing her under.
Down, this time the water fills her nose. Her heart roars in the murky black. Then a light, suddenly wavering above her. She pushes toward it, breaks the surface, but it vanishes, leaving her alone in the dark again. She kicks and kicks no longer knowing which way is which. Her chest aches. A roar fills her eardrums.
She had so many plans.
But what good are plans when you’re dead?
Part OneTHE ROCK
FAITH
The ring box was hidden deep in his suitcase, in the folds of a light blue James Perse shirt. Faith Ellis’s stomach twists as she picks up the little velvet dust bag stamped with curved gold font: Cartier.
The shower is going in the en suite and she tiptoes over to it, peeking around the bathroom door to be sure he can’t see her. Through the fogged glass she can make out the tanned blur of David’s back. She’s safe for now. He’ll stand like that for a while, his head bowed, letting the water pour over him. The shower is his “thinking time.” Faith dashes back to the suitcase and slides the ring box out of the dust bag. It is red and angular with a little gold button on the front. She pushes on it, her heart thrumming, and the top flips open, revealing a massive marquise-cut diamond. She sucks in her breath and picks it up delicately between her fingers. The band is composed of a row of smaller diamonds so perfectly clear they look like tiny mirrors. A ring like this could probably pay for someone’s college tuition. Faith resists the urge to try it on, imagining the horror of it getting stuck and having to fess up to David that she’d pawed through his things.
She peers down into the many glimmering facets of the stone, her face refracted in icy light. Even though she is pleasantly surprised, she isn’t shocked. She’d had a feeling this was coming. David had eyed the suitcase the whole journey to the island.
“I’llget that,” he’d said, snatching it away when the driver tried lifting it into the trunk of the Mercedes on the way to the airport, keeping it next to him in the back seat instead. It stayed with him on the Clarke private jet as well, as if someone could steal it there. Finally, Faith noted with growing anticipation that when they arrived at the house—thoughhouseis not really the proper way to describe David Clarke’s childhood summer home;Mansion? Villa? Estate?—he made sure to bring the suitcase up to the bedroom himself, not allowing it to be taken up by the staff with the other luggage.
A little out of character for David, but Faith has had a premonition that he was going to propose for a while now. There had been something about the way he treated her the past few months, a shift in how he has been looking at her. It has been different from those very early days, when she could tell he was appreciating her mostly for her appearance. She hadn’t been bothered by it. Attraction is important and she has never had any qualms about playing it up—a woman has to use every tool at her disposal, especially someone like Faith who came from so little. And she enjoys feeling pretty, relishes the attention and the rush of knowing someone is attracted to her. But these days David looks at her squarely in the eye, like they are partners. And she finds that she likes that even more.
The change is also evident in the way she’s overheard him talking about her, on the phone casually turning down plans with the guys at work, the ones she knows he used to go out drinking with. These are finance guys, real boy’s boys, and she enjoys hearing him reject them. “I can’t. Faith and I have something that night.” It is also the way he grabs her hand when they go out, walking through the West Village after dinner, like they are a pair.
But it was the invitation that sealed it for her.
They were in their usual seats at the Polo Bar and had already gone through half a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé when he turned to her, his facesuddenly earnest, and said, “I was thinking you might want to come with me to the cottage this summer?”
His voice made it sound like a question, but they both knew that David Clarke was not used to having to ask.
The invite to Hadley Island was something she’d hoped for but never allowed herself to expect would happen so soon.The cottagewas a cheeky reference to the ultraexclusive summer residence of David Clarke’s famously wealthy family. It was someplace only their extreme inner circle was allowed to set foot. For Faith it would be a coup.
“For how long?” She had tried to keep her voice even, not wanting to sound overly eager, though inside she was absolutely squealing.
“The whole summer,” he’d replied without missing a beat.
“But my job,” she’d feebly started to say, a smile already starting in her cheeks. She didn’t care much about her position as an underling to an elderly publicist and they both knew it. It was always meant to be just a stopgap, a layover between her old sad and desperate life and her new glamorous and exciting one. She’d been itchy about it lately, impatient for the next phase to begin. The job has lasted longer than she would have liked, stretching past the five-year mark soon. She hadn’t looked elsewhere because she was lucky to have found it, grateful that someone took a chance on her even if the office smelled like tuna fish. Grateful for someone who didn’t ask too many questions or do any sort of background check.
Faith didn’t tell David much about her earlier days in New York, hiding the under-the-table gigs as a household assistant or bartending private parties way out in Bushwick. He wouldn’t have known that her first taste of New York privilege didn’t come from experience, but from the back of the house looking in and watching.
She had since learned to pass herself off as someone who belongs at the tables of impossible-to-get-into restaurants and on the inside of exclusive residences. She wanted to keep it that way. So she kept her past vague. And lucky for her, David didn’t ask her much. The wine was warm in her veins as she gazed back at David. She twisted her leg around the barstool.
“You can come back if you need to. Dad has the jet.” Ah yes, the private plane. Spoken of so casually because wealth was the only thing David knew.
“Maybe,” Faith said, toying with him a little by drawing the acceptance out. Though she was sure that her dour-looking boss, with his sad tuna sandwiches for lunch every day, would absolutely not understand.
“Or how about you just quit,” he’d said, taking a sip of wine. Being employed by his father for the last decade after a legacy stint at Yale, David had never struggled to find employment.Look at him, so incredibly privileged, and somehow he doesn’t even see it,Faith had thought for one ungenerous moment before swallowing back her criticism with a gulp of expensive wine and reminding herself that this was an opportunity David was giving her. She had blinked at him trying to judge how serious he was being about the summer and about her no longer needing her job.
“We both know you don’t like it.” That was true. “And it’s not like you need the money anyway.” That part was less sure. She’d moved into David’s place only a few months prior. And she’d met him only a few months before that. Was that really enough time to trust him so completely? It was all very tempting. And she was beginning to have an inkling that this trip was about more than just spending a fun summer holiday together. That it was the start of something far more serious.
