“I’m in,” Riley called, her voice muffled by the door. “Let me know if somebody comes, okay?”
“Get out of there,” Parrish said. “If somebody comes I am not making your bail.”
* * *
Parrish crept along the side of the house, watching to see if anybody approached the house from the cul-de-sac. The rain fell softly, and her sandal-clad feet sank into the sandy soil. Hours passed. Mosquitoes swarmed, and she slapped frantically at her bare legs and arms. She had to pee, and she was terrified.
“Hey!”
Startled, Parrish whirled around to see Riley standing beside her.
“You literally just scared the living piss out of me!” Parrish said. “What took you so long?”
“It was only five minutes,” Riley started. “And it was totally worth it…”
“Let’s go.” Parrish started around the corner of the house but quickly darted backward. “Hide!” she whispered. “Somebody’s coming. A cart just pulled up around front.”
They backed quickly away from the rear of the house, squatting behind a huge clump of palmettos. They heard keys jingling, and the front door opening. Five minutes passed. “I’m getting eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Riley whispered.
“Serves you right,” Parrish whispered back.
They heard the sound of the back door sliding open, and then a familiar woman’s voice. “Come on Moosey. Come on boy, let’s go make poopeys.”
Parrish flattened herself to the damp ground, but Riley peered through the palmettos, then did likewise.
Parrish dared to look up. She could see what she knew were Andrea Payne’s feet, standing on the patio, holding one end of a leash, while a large golden retriever strained at the other end of the leash, its nose pointing directly at the shrub where they were hiding. She held her breath.
“No, Moosey. We’re not chasing squirrels. We’re pooping, remember? Come on boy, Auntie Andrea wants to get in out of this rain.”
The dog snuffled around, but finally, less than a foot away, Parrish saw it squat.
“Good boy! Good Moosey. Let’s go inside and get a treat,” Andrea cooed.
They heard the door sliding shut, and then the sound of a lock clicking. They waited five more minutes, and then heard the front door close, and finally, the soft whir of a golf cart rolling away from the house.
* * *
They waited another ten minutes before emerging from their hiding place and sprinting through the rain to their cart.
“I thought you said there was no dog,” Parrish said, wiping the rain from her arms and legs with a beach towel she kept under the seat. “That looked a lot like a dog taking a dump less than a foot from where we were hiding back there.”
“He was in a crate in the laundry room,” Riley said. “He must be, like, ninety in dog years. I was walking toward the bedroom and I heard this snuffing sound, and when I looked in the laundry room, there he was. His muzzle was totally white, and it looked to me like he had cataracts, poor baby. He just barely raised his head, looked at me like, ‘meh,’ and went back to his nap.”
She took the towel her friend handed her and started drying herself off. “Anyway, guess what? It looks like Melody is getting ready to move.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. The house only has two small bedrooms. She’s using the guest room as a closet, and boy, were you right about her being a fashionista. The whole room was full of clothes, shoes, and handbags. She had all these plastic bins, and it looked like she’d started packing the shoes and bags in them. She had a bunch of those cardboard wardrobe moving boxes, and about half of them were packed with clothes. Same thing in her bedroom. Three or four suitcases on the floor, and they were all packed.”
“Wonder where she’s going?” Parrish said. “And why?”
“I don’t know, but I have an idea how we could find out,” Riley said. “I bet Melody’s best friend, the one who comes over every day to let her dog out for a potty stop, knows. Because, let’s face it—Belle Isle Barbie knows everything that happens on this island.”
“Nooooo,” Parrish said. “Anything but that. You’ve put me through enough today. I bet I aged twenty years back there when that sliding-glass door opened.”
“I can’t ask her, because I recently told her to fuck off,” Riley said, hugging her friend. “Pleaaase? Pretty please?”
* * *
Two hours later, Parrish was back.
“You owe me,” she announced when she walked into the library at Shutters, where Riley was reading something on the Internet.
“You did it!” Riley beamed. “But how’d you manage it this fast?”
“I just got lucky,” Parrish admitted. “I was going to the Mercantile to find something quick for dinner tonight, and as I passed the nail salon I spotted Andrea in there, getting a pedicure. I walked in, but the girl said there was an hour wait. So I just found a magazine and sat there. And you know our Andrea. She just loooooves to chat. Of course, the main topic she wanted to discuss was you and Nate Milas.”
“Of course.”
“She doesn’t really think he’s your kind of people,” Parrish said. “She wanted to know where the two of you are going to be living. Surely not that horrible shack he bought.”
Riley smiled. “The question is, what did you get out of her?”
“She’s devastated that Melody is moving, but totally understands. New management at the bank doesn’t really appreciate Melody, and not only that, Melody’s elderly aunt, the one who lets her use the house here, has been moved to a nursing home in Wilmington. So Melody has bought a condo at Wrightsville Beach, and she’s moving, right after Labor Day, to be closer to her aunt.”
“She volunteered all that?”
“I’m a pretty skillful interrogator when I want to be,” Parrish said, preening a little. “I just primed the pump a little. Told her you’d gotten a new job in Raleigh, and how much I was going to miss you for the rest of the summer. Stuff like that.”
“So she’s quit her job at the bank, and bought a condo at Wrightsville,” Riley said thoughtfully. “Wonder if the sheriff would be interested in that?”
57
Riley stood in front of the minuscule closet in her bedroom, trying to decide what to wear. Nate was due on the 6:15 ferry, and they were going to have dinner at his place. He’d promised to pick up groceries in town. Now she just needed to come up with a devastatingly adorable outfit.
She really did need to clean out the closet. It was still packed with decades’ worth of her old clothes, along with her current clothes, all of them crammed in so closely together it was hard to discern the good from the bad from the ugly.
The problem was, she decided, everything in this closet reminded her of her old life. She dug around, selecting and rejecting, until she found a bathing suit cover-up she’d forgotten about. It was a vaguely ethnic black-and-white geometric cotton print, with long bell sleeves and a drawstring neck. The price tag still hung from the sleeve.
She pulled it off the wire hanger and slipped it over her head, then stepped in front of the mirror on the back of the closet door. Not bad, she thought. It was a little too skimpy as a dress, so she pulled on a pair of white calf-length leggings beneath it.