Page 60 of Bad Summer People
“I can’t. The ferry is coming. We’re going back to the city.”
“Go!” Sam pushed him, but Jason didn’t budge. What the fuck was happening? Sam’s sunglasses were off, and it looked like he had tears in his eyes. “Don’t say anything,” said Sam. “Just deny it all. Nothing’s going to happen to you. That’s not the point.”
Jason heard a commotion. Everyone on the dock was talking at once, all of Salcombe shouting. There were three Suffolk County police officers approaching the group, parting people like the Red Sea. Jason stood still, his feet like weights. He was so hot he thought he might faint. “It’s about Susan!” he heard someone shout. A few people gasped. Bonnie Trimble fell into Richie’s arms, and Marie Pond started fanning her with a tissue.
He saw Lauren stand up and look for him. Arlo and Amelie were by her side.
One of the police officers, a young, freckled guy with a thick mustache, approached him. The other two stood next to him, hands behind their backs.
“Jason Parker?”
Jason nodded. This couldn’t be happening. The entire village was watching. His children were watching.
“We need you to come with us. Now.”
Jason didn’t want to ask, but he knew he had to. “About what?”
Then Sam was there, standing next to him.
“Sam! No!” Jason heard Jen scream.
“I’m his lawyer,” said Sam. “I’m coming with him.”
The policeman shrugged. “Suit yourself. Let’s go. We can drive you across the bridge to our station.”
The group turned and walked through the townspeople, lined up as if to play a game of red rover, everyone gaping, everyone silent. Shocked. Amazed. Titillated. Jason Parker being questioned about Susan Steinhagen’s death? It was all too much. Lauren stood there, ashen, with the kids. Her life was over. The queen bee felled. Beth Ledbetter smirked. “Oh my God!” said Jeanette Oberman. Theo Burch was rattled. Rachel Woolf put her hand over her mouth, nearly toppling over before Brian Metzner steadied her. Mayor O’Connell looked relieved; at least people could stop blaming him.
Jason and Sam walked side by side down the dock, behind the police, as if heading toward the altar. Or the plank.
30Micah Holt
Micah Holt felt sick. He was sitting in the back seat of his parents’ Lexus SUV—they were driving him from the ferry terminal in Bay Shore to school in New Haven, about a two-hour journey. More than enough time for Micah to confess everything and set off a chain that would, in all likelihood, end in the ruin of Salcombe.
“I still can’t believe that Jason Parker got arrested for murdering Susan Steinhagen,” said Micah’s mom, Judy, shaking her head emphatically in the front passenger seat. Judy was fifty-three, and this summer, for the first time, Micah had noticed her age. The lines in her chest had deepened, and there was a new softness to the area below her chin. It made him depressed.
“Mom, he wasn’t ‘arrested,’ he was taken for questioning about Susan’s death, which no one has said was a murder,” said Micah. Was she also getting stupider?
Micah turned the facts over in his mind, trying to find the best way to present them to his parents.
He thought back to the night that Susan died. First, seeing Lauren Parker and Jen Weinstein with their flashlights, looking for something on the tennis courts. Later, he and Willa had walked Larry Higgins back to Lighthouse Road, acting as guardrails so that Larry didn’t go toppling off the boardwalk. Larry was chatting to himself, saying things about his sons, Peter and Lee, who were about fifteen years older than Micah.
“My Peter, my Lee, my disappointments,” slurred Larry, likely unawarethat Micah and Willa were still with him in the dark. Larry went on, “Funny that Robert had the same idea as Dave.”
Willa pinched Micah’s side.
“And that Susan was onto both of them.” Larry then fell into silence, and the pair was able to get him inside his house with a light shove (very few people locked their doors in Salcombe, even at night).
The next morning, Micah woke to the town siren, queasy and exhausted. And then Susan was dead. “An accident.” Such an unfortunate tragedy, people said, a mix of an elderly woman’s poor judgment and shoddy town planning. Micah knew better. Maybe Susan had somehow gotten mixed up in all those marital affairs. Maybe Robert had offed her when she found out he was stealing.
Micah went back to Yale the week after Susan died, moving into his off-campus house in the late-summer heat, registering for his classes, starting to plan for next semester in Madrid. He floated through it in a daze. Had a woman been killed? By people he’d known his whole life? He felt like an entirely different person than when he’d left school last June. Older, embittered. He missed being a kid, missed thinking that adults were there to protect him.
On the surface, he’d come back to Salcombe to help his parents close the house, but it was more than that. He couldn’t stop thinking about Susan. He couldn’t stop obsessing about what someone had done to her. He’d spent this weekend observing them all—Robert and Lauren flirting at the bar during the Labor Day Extravaganza, Jen and Sam seemingly happy again, Jen and Robert hatching some sort of plan, just out of Micah’s earshot. Everyone was complicit, it seemed. Perhaps even Micah.
On the dock today, during all the commotion, Micah had locked eyes with Silvia, the Parkers’ nanny. She was standing behind Arlo and Amelie, her hands on their shoulders protectively as they watched their father being led away by the police. (Micah felt for the kids, privileged as they were; Salcombe was ruined for them, too, thanks to their parents’ misbehavior.) Micah had never spoken to Silvia, but he’d seen her around town for the past few summers, looking miserable on an adult tricycle. He wondered what it must be like for her here. She’d raised an eyebrowat Micah as Jason passed them by; Micah clearly wasn’t the only one who knew more than he should.
They were cruising up I-95, and his dad had Paul Simon on the speaker. It reminded Micah of summers when he was a kid, “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” playing as his parents danced together on the back deck of their Salcombe home. Micah’s eyes stung with tears. He studied the back of his parents’ heads, so familiar, his mom’s curls, his dad’s bald patch. He loved them so much. He looked at his phone and saw there was one unread message from Ronan. He hadn’t heard from him in ages. He opened it.
Hi, sorry about the way everything ended this summer—I’m at school already. I have some figuring out to do, but I’d love to hang next summer on Fire Island. We’ll all be back next year, right? x
