Page 37 of An Island Summer
“Or what if he has the delusional disorder and Alzheimer’s they’ve diagnosed him with, he was having an off day, and you’re just a sucker for happy endings?” Tess countered. She lowered herself down beside Meghan, pulling a pillow across her lap. “They’re doctors, Meghan. They know.”
“You’re probably right,” Meghan said, her shoulders slumping as she climbed down next to Charlie, who’d found a sun spot in the bottom corner of the bed. She stroked his thick fur. “But it doesn’t explain that page I read in the journal,” she said, hanging on to the tiny shred of evidence. “It might prove that Rupert can have the drugs he needs to slow down the Alzheimer’s. They’ve pegged him as completely out there, but I wonder if it’s not so far-fetched.” What she didn’t want to say was that Tabitha’s story about Toby was weighing on Meghan, and the medicine could make Rupert lucid enough to give her an answer as to whether Toby was entitled to Rupert’s money.
“I wonder where the rest of the journal is,” Tess said.
“I was wondering the same thing. From what Chloe said, very recently, the second-hand store found a few more pages and gave them to the coffee shop. I mean, they couldn’t sell them—who would want a few ripped pages? But how didtheyget them?”
Tess tossed the pillow aside, a tiny smile twitching at the edges of her lips. “I know you. Something tells me that I’m going to spend my beach day rooting through old relics at a second-hand shop…”
Charlie shifted under her hand with a groan, as if he understood.
Meghan gave her a please-let’s-do-this smile. “You know I won’t be able to sit still in a beach chair until I have the answer to whether the second-hand store has more, one way or another.” She leaned over her dog. “Charlie, you can come too.”
Charlie sat up with expectant eyes, his tail giving a swish on the sheets.
“Come on, Charlie,” Tess said. “Your mom wants to go on a wild goose chase, but not your kind of goose.”
The dog jumped off the bed and waited at the door.
“You never know what we might find,” Meghan said, feeling optimistic.
“That’s definitely true with you: you never know…”
With Charlie secured next to a bowl of water on the porch by the open double doors, Meghan and Tess went inside The Memory Box, the second-hand shop in town. Meghan ignored Tess’s loaded glances as they followed the owner through the maze of junk piles. Large wooden paddle fans on the high ceilings of the old barn-like space did little to cool the summer heat, but the open doors at the front and back allowed the sea breeze to filter in, keeping them all from overheating.
The old man everyone called Simp, short for his last name Simpson, looked to be about seventy-five, hunched at the shoulders in his button-up cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. “I remember I’d found the pages when I went through a pile of old memorabilia that had sat at the back of the shop for a while,” he said, leading them through the showroom as it was called on the welcome sign (if one could call it that) and into a warehouse-style back room. “It must have been sitting here for twenty years…”
Twenty years?“The pages?” Meghan asked.
“The pile,” he clarified with a smile.
He gestured to an enormous grouping of random objects, heaped on top of one another—old record players and televisions, wooden furniture, books, lamps, some tin boxes that Meghan had no idea of their purpose… There was so much there, she could hardly imagine where to look for a single journal.
“As the showroom empties out, I add new pieces,” he explained, putting his hands on his wide hips.
“So, when people buy things in the shop, you put more out, but until then, it sits here,” Tess clarified.
“That’s right,” he said with a nod, as he began to sift through the pile of junk.
Tess widened her eyes at Meghan.
A loud clatter brought their attention back to the owner, who was head-first in the pile, a large brass urn rolling away from him. Meghan stopped it with her foot and righted it.
“I saw these the other day,” he said, his voice muffled from behind the items. With a wipe of his brow, he handed a few more pages to Meghan. “They’re yours if you want them.”
Meghan peered down at the papers, the same curly script filling them, excitement bubbling up inside. “Yes!” she said, holding them to her chest. “I’d love to have them. Are there any more?” she asked, glancing around where he’d been digging.
The old man shook his head. “That’s all I’ve found so far. They didn’t talk about love, so I didn’t bother calling the coffee shop to see if they’d like them.” He led them back to the front. “No idea how they got here…” he said over his shoulder. “They must have been shoved in the boxes with other items.”
Meghan grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper from her handbag and wrote down her name and phone number. “If you find any more pages, could you give me a call?”
“Of course,” he said, filing it away with the rest of the mess on the counter.
With the papers held tightly against her, she thanked the owner and untied Charlie. “I’m glad you came with me,” she told Tess.
“What are friends for besides forgoing margarita shopping for a dusty junk shop?” she teased. “Should we at least grab an ice cream cone while we read them?”
“That sounds great.” Meghan leaned down and rubbed Charlie’s head. “Want some more water and a puppy cone?” she asked. Charlie walked along beside them, an extra bounce in his step as if he’d understood.
