Page 74 of The Identicals
The girl tilts her head and hitches up the strap of what Caylee thinks is a Chloe hobo bag in saddle-tone leather. “When I was here before, there was foodanddrink. What’s up with that?”
Then Caylee realizes: this girl with the twenty-five-hundred-dollar bag is Ainsley’s friend—or former friend—Emma. Unlike Harper, Ainsley has confided everything about her personal life to Caylee. She told Caylee that she stole gin from her grandmother’s house and that Emma planted it in Candace’s locker, but then somehow the situation flipped on its head and Emma and Candace ganged up on Ainsley and Ainsley ended up serving a three-day in-school suspension. Then the girls egged her house. It’s enough to take Caylee back to the heartache of her own high school days. Kids are cruel because they are jealous or confused or simply badly parented. Ainsley has told Caylee that Emma lives with her father, Dutch, who owns the restaurant at the Nantucket airport. The mother lives somewhere in Florida; apparently Emma never sees her. Caylee feels for any child who has lost a parent to either death or desertion—Caylee’s own mother died of breast cancer three years ago, and Caylee misses her every second of every day—but she also suspects that in Emma’s case, a lack of a mother has curdled her soul until it’s as sour as a glass of expired milk.
“That was a special occasion,” Caylee says. “We don’t allow food or drink during regular business hours. I’m sorry. You’re welcome to finish your coffee outside.”
Emma places the cup on the front step. Caylee will bet fifty bucks that she forgets all about it and leaves it for Caylee to throw away.
“Thanks,” Caylee says. “Now, can I help you find something?”
“Actually,” Emma says, “I’m looking for Ainsley. Is she here?”
“She’s not,” Caylee says, though certainly that’s apparent. The store is deserted. “It’s her day off.”
“Oh,” Emma says. “Lucky her.” She takes an ERF dress off the rack—long-sleeved with a floppy bow at the neck, reminiscent of what Dustin Hoffman wore inTootsie—and holds it up against her body. “This is hideous.”
Caylee happens to agree, but she isn’t about to bond with Emma over taste, nor is she going to let Emma insult the signature brand. “I’ll tell Ainsley you stopped in,” she says.
Emma sniffs and heads to the part of the boutique that features the other, younger lines. She fingers a black beaded Parker top.
“I have this in white,” Emma says.
Caylee smiles blandly. Emma moves to the table where the “littles” are kept—rope belts, scarves, sunglasses, and the jar of lacy thongs. She fingers the scarves, inspects the belts, tries on the sunglasses. Caylee stifles a yawn. Norah Jones sings “Come Away with Me.”
Then suddenly Caylee gets an idea.
“I have to use the ladies’ room,” she says. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Whatevs,” Emma says.
Caylee steps into the back office and closes the door firmly with a click. She brings up the store surveillance camera on her phone as she strides with heavy wedge-heeled footsteps down the hallway. Sure enough, Emma Marlowe’s head is on a swivel, checking the store for cameras, but the camera Eleanor had installed is designed to look like a sprinkler head. Emma reaches into the glass jar and grabs two lace thongs. She drops the thirty-six dollars’ worth of merchandise into her twenty-five-hundred-dollar bag. If it were anyone else, Caylee would have handled the shoplifting herself, but for Emma, Caylee calls the police.
Gotcha,she thinks.
Nobody is surprised to hear that Emma Marlowe has gotten caught stealing. Even the officer who responds, Sergeant Royal DiLeo, is unsurprised. He has busted up every teenage beer party this summer, and Emma, with her snarky, entitled attitude, has been present at them all. Peoplearesurprised to hear that Dutch Marlowe actually leaves the airport restaurant in order to come to the store and lobby on his daughter’s behalf. Little does he know that this unprecedented bit of parental support will backfire. For the second he walks in to the ERF boutique and sees that it’s Caylee Keohane who has caught his daughter, he is sorry indeed.
Caylee’s eyes shoot streams of green fire at Dutch. “What areyoudoing here?” she asks.
“That’s my dad,” Emma says.
“Your… your…” Caylee says.
Dutch runs a hand over his shaved head and silently begs the young woman not to disclose how she knows him. It was Dutch Marlowe who grabbed Caylee’s perfect peach of an ass, causing her to unload a Jack and Coke in his lap. She had then been fired by Shorty, the manager at the Straight Wharf. Shorty hadn’t wanted to fire Caylee. She was a tireless worker with a great personality—a winning combination in the service industry, where so often you get either one or the other—and he was 100 percent sure that Dutchhadgrabbed Caylee’s ass. But unfortunately, Shorty had no choice. He was a regular at the Wednesday night poker game at Dutch’s house, and he was into Dutch for forty-five hundred dollars.
Dutch, as we all know, is a person with absolutely no conscience, but he had felt guilty about getting Caylee fired. He hadn’t meant to pinch her ass, meaning it hadn’t been premeditated, but she had been out from behind the bar a lot that night, waving her tush around in those white jeans like a matador waving a red flag in front of a bull. What could Dutch say? He was a man, horny all the time and lonely besides.
But still, he doesn’t love the idea of Emma hearing that her father is a lecherous jerk.
Caylee snarls. “Your dad?” she says. She takes a deep breath and prepares to tell Emma the truth about her father, but in the end she just shakes her head. “Why am I not surprised?”
MARTHA’S VINEYARD
The island is so crowded in July that we fear it might tip over—down island will nose-dive, upending Chilmark and Aquinnah. The population hits ninety thousand, then ninety-one thousand. The steamship sits so low in the water—weighted down with Jeeps, Land Rovers, Hummers—that it reminds us of a pregnant woman after the baby drops. State Beach is parked out by nine in the morning; the Port Hunter has a two-hour wait for a table. The line at the Bite has 111 people in it at five thirty, which increases to 147 people at six thirty. There is an average of fifteen car accidents a day; six of these involve taxis.
And yet who among us hasn’t longed for these summer days? Indians and IODs tack and jibe in Edgartown harbor, tennis balls hit the baseline at the Field Club, eliciting our best John McEnroe imitations:That ball was in! Chalk flew up all over the place!Daughters of the scions of industry tan their breasts on the shores of Lucy Vincent. Authors come nightly to read at Bunch of Grapes—Charles Bock, Jane Green, Richard Russo. Skip Gates rides his tricycle out to Katama; Keith Richards takes his grandchildren to pick blueberries at the patch off of Middle Road; Noah Mayhew, the reservationist at the Covington, becomes so overwhelmed by calls from demanding and entitled people that he quits and moves to an ashram in Oregon.
Upon hearing this news about her great-nephew, Noah, Indira Mayhew, who has worked as the Chappy ferry master for nearly forty years aboard theOn Time II,thinks seriously about following suit, although she has never practiced yoga.
With all this happening, how does anyone have time to figure out what’s going on at Billy Frost’s house? Daggett Avenue is an average, year-round part of Tisbury that falls beneath most people’s notice—and from the curb, the house looks the same. If someone had been staking out the street—selling lemonade on the corner or casing the neighborhood with criminal intent—he might have noticed Franklin Phelps’s truck driving around the neighborhood, and further snooping would have revealed Franklin’s truck parked in Billy’s backyard. But no one is staking out the street.
