breakfast, golf, sit in Leo’s room and play Fortnite—and more than once, Marissa has invented family drama (a fight with her mother) or a health crisis (a supposed meningitis scare) to reclaim Leo’s attention. It has been agonizing for Vivi to watch.
Vivi can only hope that Leo will break up with Marissa before he leaves for college in Boulder. He’ll find another girlfriend; anyone would be an improvement.
Leo will be fine!
Another text comes in to her phone. Oh, please, she thinks, not Dennis.
No; the text is from Carson. Sorry about the pan, Mama, and the tequila wasn’t me. I love you.
The tension in Vivi’s neck and jaw releases. Her kids are fine.
The song changes to opening guitar chords that seize Vivi’s attention. It’s “Stone in Love,” by Journey. Vivi almost trips over her own shoes. She stops and stares at her phone’s screen. What is this song doing on the Nine-Pound Hammer playlist? Did Carson add it? But Carson hates classic rock; she calls it “music from beyond the grave.”
Vivi is spooked. This song brings back such intense memories of high school that she feels if she turns her head, she’ll see Brett Caspian standing in the middle of Kingsley Road. She nearly pushes the skip button, but she does love the song, despite her complicated history with it, and it’s been so long since she’s heard it. When she starts running again, she sings along, Burning love comes once in a lifetime!
Her eyes are closed and by the time she realizes something is wrong, it’s too late—Vivi’s neck snaps; her heart feels like a stick of dynamite exploding. Vivi is airborne, she’s flying—until her head slams against the ground. Her leg. Something is wrong with her leg.
A tinny, faraway voice sings, Golden girl, I’ll keep you forever.
Then the music stops. The dark turns to a velvety black. The quiet becomes silence.
The Chief
Nantucket chief of police Ed Kapenash is on his way to work when he hears the call for an ambulance over the scanner. A woman’s been found unresponsive near the Madaket bike path.
By the time he gets to the station, he has the low-down: A driver turning onto Kingsley Road from the Madaket Road noticed a woman lying on the ground. The driver pulled over and called 911. The woman’s body was twisted and she was bleeding from the mouth and had a gash on her leg. The driver said he felt a faint pulse, but when the ambulance got her to Nantucket Cottage Hospital, she was pronounced dead.
Ed, sitting at his desk, bows his head. It’s not even the summer solstice and they already have what sounds like a hit-and-run on their hands.
“Are you ready for the details you don’t want to hear?” Sergeant Dixon asks. Dixon always seems to be the one who delivers the bad news.
“Yes,” the Chief says, meaning no.
“The deceased is Vivian Howe, the writer. You know her, right?”
Right, Ed thinks. Andrea reads each new book of hers the day it comes out. He’s learned that on the second Tuesday in July, he shouldn’t say so much as a word to his wife. She reads those novels—all of which are set on Nantucket and have plots about one scandal or another (as if the poor island didn’t have enough troubles without making more up!)—straight through the day and into the night. She hates to be interrupted.
The Chief and Andrea don’t know the Howe woman personally, but they’re all locals, so the Chief knows of her. Vivian Howe used to be married to JP Quinboro, who owns an ice cream parlor called the Cone on Old South Wharf. The Chief knows that Vivian Howe and JP Quinboro have three children. Their son just graduated from the high school; he played attack on the lacrosse team, and Ed used to see him written up in the newspaper. There are daughters too; one of them has been brought into the station a couple of times for minor infractions.
It’s life on an island. The Chief doesn’t—didn’t—know Vivian Howe, but he knows a lot about her. And she probably knew just as much, if not more, about him. Andrea said that one year, the plot of Ms. Howe’s novel came perilously close to the events of the summer when Andrea’s cousin Tess and her husband, Greg, were killed in a sailing accident. Andrea had read Ed a passage while he was falling asleep.
“Do you think she heard about Tess and Greg and used it in this book?” Andrea