“Keeping track of all those Harrison investments, no doubt.” Liddy opened her eyes and stared at the inside of her hat’s brim until all she could see were concentric circles of brown and white, the colors of her hat. For her morning on the beach, Liddy had tossed her long hair into a topknot and pulled on a tank top and a pair of cutoff jeans. She’d topped it all off with the hat before grabbing her everyday handbag, into which she’d stuffed a bottle of water and a granola bar, and running out the door.
“I think they have a business there, but I never want to ask.” Emma’s potential new beau was the scion of the town’s wealthiest family. Their mansion was for most of the year uninhabited, and the fabled carousel was brought out every few years on the Fourth of July for the local children to enjoy before it was returned to storage in one of the outbuildings on the mansion’s grounds.
“Why do you feel you can’t ask him?” Maggie’s attire, while several notches above Liddy’s last-minute, thrown-together choices, did not reach the level of Emma’s beach chic. She wore a blue-and-green paisley one-piece bathing suit and bright-orange flip-flops, and her bag was a gray leather tote. Her blonde hair was pulled up in a high ponytail and held with a pink scrunchie, over which she wore a green WBPD ball cap she’d stolen from Brett.
“I don’t want him to think I’m interested in his money or his status,” Emma explained.
“Doesn’t he know who your son is? Do you really think he’d be worried about you being interested in getting your hands on his investments, knowing Chris is worth a gazillion dollars?” Maggie sat up. “Em, can I borrow your sunscreen?”
“He knows, but we never talk about finances. Harry left me very well off, so I don’t need anything from Chris.” Emma dug in her bag and retrieved the sunscreen, which she tossed over Liddy’s prone body to Maggie. “Not that I would expect my son to support me.”
“Speaking of whom, where is the boy this holiday weekend?” Maggie squeezed lotion into her hand and proceeded to lather up her legs and arms.
“I’m not really sure. He was a little vague when I talked to him on Tuesday. Maybe off with that mysterious unnamed girlfriend I told you I think he has.” Emma took a long drink from her now-warm water bottle. “What’s Natalie up to? I figured she’d be here for sure.”
“The community college where she teaches started two weeks ago, and she said she’s up to her ears in paperwork already. She took on an extra remedial English class this semester, so she’s really busy.” Maggie finished with the sunscreen and tossed it back to Emma. “And Daisy has preschool on Tuesday, and Nat thought it might be too much for her to travel up here and back between Friday afternoon and today and then go to school tomorrow.”
An old Bruce Springsteen tune began to play loudly from Liddy’s phone.
“Oh.” She sat up and grabbed her phone from her nearby bag. “It’s Rosalita.” Liddy stared at her phone for a moment before announcing, “She’s still around the tip of the Cape.”
“Who’s Rosalita?” Maggie asked.
“She’s the great white shark I’m tracking on this app I found online.” Liddy held up the phone. “See the red icon there off Barnstable? That means there’s been a confirmed sighting of her near the beach.”
“Good call on the ringtone.” Maggie high-fived Liddy and sang a few lines of the song.
Emma reached for the phone, and Liddy handed it over. “Oh, there she is on the map. I had no idea you were into sharks.”
“I wasn’t, but I saw something online about how they can be tagged with a sort of sonar thing that’s used to track them. I thought it might be fun to see where they go, season to season. Last week she was a little further up the coast, but I guess she’s going to be heading south soon and following the Gulf Stream now the water’s getting cooler.”
“How does one tag a shark?” Emma asked.
“There are a couple of different ways. They can shoot the tag onto a dorsal fin with a sort of speargun, or they can get it close to a boat and put it in a kind of sling, and then attach the tracker to the fin. The tracker sends a signal to a satellite whenever the shark breaks the plane of the water. I’ve been tracking Rosalita for the past few weeks, but this is the closest she’s come to shore.”
“Very cool.” Emma passed the phone to Maggie.
“Yeah, there are different sharks you can track. I picked Rosalita because she wasn’t first tracked until last fall, so she didn’t have a lot of followers. At the time, she was in the Gulf of Mexico. She’s not the biggest shark—only fourteen feet—but she seemed to have the most personality.”
“Somehow when I think ‘shark,’ I don’t think ‘personality,’” Maggie said.
“The first picture I saw of her, she looked like she was smiling.”
“Had she just taken a bite out of the guy who tried to tag her?” Maggie returned the phone to Liddy.
Liddy laughed. “Possibly. Anyway, it’s a diversion for me. She’s gotten around quite a bit. Nantucket, the Cape. All the way up the coast to Maine.”
“Well, as long as you don’t decide to bring her home and keep her for a pet, I guess it could be interesting.” Maggie dug her toes into the sand.
“That would require one hell of an aquarium.” Liddy put her phone back into her bag.
“So you’re all set for your grand opening tomorrow, right?” Emma asked.
“I hope so. I can’t think of anything I’ve missed. You guys have been great, helping me to set up the shop, hang the posters, put prices on the books. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You thanked us last night with not one, not two, but three batches of your incomparable margaritas,” Emma reminded her. “I’m amazed none of us are hungover.”
“They were small pitchers. Besides, Grace was there to help. Four people, three small pitchers, no one gets hurt.” Liddy adjusted her sunglasses, which had slipped down the bridge of her nose almost to the tip.
“Grace sounded excited about her proposed new living arrangements,” Emma noted.
“She’s going to talk to Tuck this week and see how much it will cost to make the changes she has in mind for the house. She said she wanted to wait until he was finished up at the bookstore, which he now should be.” Liddy watched three old men cross the sand to set up their rods to surf-fish. “At least, I think he is. Maybe I should run down there and . . .”
“No,” Maggie and Emma said in unison.
“No stopping at the bookstore. Tomorrow’s soon enough. We agreed,” Emma reminded her.
“I know. It’s just so hard.” Liddy sighed.
“Just close your eyes and relax for another . . . oh, let’s give ourselves another thirty minutes out here on the beach. I can’t remember the last time the three of us were here, sunbathing together.”
“Remember that time right before high school graduation? The weekend before? Exams were over on Friday,” Emma said. “I was still smarting over the fact Todd Hartman hadn’t spoken to me since prom night. He’d taken me home when the evening was over, and I never heard from him again. I thought he liked me, and here he’d only wanted a date for the prom. It took me months to get over it.”