Edgewater
Authors: Courtney Sheinmel
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sheinmel, Courtney.
Edgewater / Courtney Sheinmel.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4197-1641-6 (hardback) â
ISBN 978-1-61312-828-2 (ebook)
[1. FamiliesâFiction. 2. SecretsâFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S54124Ed 2015
[Fic]âdc23
2015006547
Text copyright © 2015 Courtney Sheinmel
Jacket and title page photograph copyright © 2015 Shaunl/Getty Images
Book design by Maria T. Middleton
Published in 2015 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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FOR DORIS V. SHEINMEL
IT'S VERY DIFFICULT TO KEEP THE LINE BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
âLittle Edie Beale,
Grey Gardens
CONTENTS
11 A PEACEFUL SLEEP FOR OUR FRIENDS
17 SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME
1
THE BET
WHENEVER I LOOKED BACK ON THAT SUMMER, I'D
think of the bet as what set all the changes in motion. Even though the actual trigger was something that had happened long before. Before Mom left, and before I walked out the door myselfâgoing anywhere I could to escape home.
Maybe there was some unknown event in my mother's childhood that had shaped her into the kind of person who'd make certain choices that resulted in her absence. And maybe it went even further back than thatâto who her parents were, and who her parents' parents were, and all that they had passed down through the generations. Sometimes I think you can draw a line from today back to the beginning of time and see how everything that happened was made inevitable by what preceded it.
But it was that bet, on a hot summer night, that I would come back to as the starting point. Like that moment in
The
Wizard of Oz
when things go from black-and-white to Technicolor. A switch was flipped, and things began to unravel in earnest.
When it happened, I was in North Carolina, attending Camp Woodscape, an equestrian program for advanced riders, for the second summer in a row. Thirty-two of us lived in a dorm adjacent to the barn and stables of Raleigh College's south campus. Late June had seen a week of earth-scorching, record-breaking temperatures up the Eastern Seaboard, and Barrett Hall didn't have air-conditioning. The smells of shampoo and perfume barely masked the stubborn odors of hay and sweat and girls radiating warmth and sucking up all the oxygen.
But I didn't mind. I loved anything even remotely related to horses, even the smells. The mustiness of the barn, the freshly oiled saddles, the fields after a summer rain showerâthose scents covered me like a blanket and made me feel utterly at home, more at home than I ever felt in New York, in my own house. In fact, the only thing at Woodscape that really got under my skin was my roommate, Beth-Ann Bracelee. Yes, of
the
Bracelees, as my aunt Gigi would, no doubt, have noted. A Bracelee Candies Bracelee. While Beth-Ann might have been heiress to a half-billion-dollar confectionery fortune, as far as I was concerned, there was nothing sweet about her.
Beth-Ann had had it out for me ever since the prior summer, when her palomino, Pacifica, got a stress fracture that made him all but unridable. Foolishly, I let her ride my horse, Orion, in a dressage competition that I hadn't qualified for myself, and then she got it into her head that Orion would be better off with her. She went as far as to have her dad fly
in from their Palm Beach home and take us to dinner at the Oakwood Café, the most expensive restaurant in town, where the cloth napkins were folded like origami swans, the butter was infused with different flavors, and the grilled-lobster salad was served with a citrus dressing that you dreamed about long after dinner was over. “Orion's the perfect age, Daddy,” Beth-Ann practically cooed. “He's no longer green, and he has all his best years ahead of him.” Clayton Bracelee waved his checkbook in front of me. “Name your price,” he said. But I told him there'd been a misunderstanding: Orion wasn't nor would he ever be for sale.
Beth-Ann had pouted for the rest of the summer. Frankly, I didn't expect to see her back at Woodscape again, but on the first day, there she was. Already in our dorm room, having taken the brighter side by the window and moved things around so she ended up with more space. You don't get to pick your roommate at Woodscape, but I wished I'd had the forethought to write on my housing form:
anyone but Beth-Ann Bracelee.
Beth-Ann had brought her brand-new prized Thoroughbred, Easter Sunday, that she'd purchased afterâget thisâthe horse psychic she'd hired to tour different barns with her said that she and Easter had a special mind-body connection.
But that kind of thing wasn't out of the ordinary among equestrian circles. I was used to riders like Beth-Ann. Back home my tactic was to steer clear of them. It was just that Beth-Ann made it virtually impossible: She lived in my dorm room, and despite her apparent disdain for me, when we were outside our room, she still always seemed to be at my heels.
I had dinner plans that last night with Isabella Reyes, a raven-
haired, olive-skinned rider from Spain who'd had two of her Arabian horses, Razia and Sultan, flown across the ocean to Woodscape. But Isabella was down-to-earth, or as much as a descendant of the Spanish royal family could be.
Unsurprisingly, Beth-Ann had invited herself along to dinner with Isabella and me, and then she insisted we stop at the CVS on the way, so she could junk up our shared sink with more random drugstore purchases. While Beth-Ann was in line to pay for an armload of nail polish and eye shadow, I wandered over to the ATM to get some cash, forty dollars, and I was denied “due to insufficient funds.”
I'd purposely waited for the first day of July to make a withdrawal. Years earlier, my mother had set up a trust fund for my sister, Susannah, and me, right before ditching us to move abroad with her British boyfriend, Nigel. My aunt was named our guardian and the trust's flaky executor. By the end of each month, we were usually living off fumes, waiting for the next stipend to be transferred into our checking account. But today was payday, andâI looked down at my watchâcertainly by ten after seven the transfer should have been made.
So money, and the lack thereof, was on my mind as the host at the Oakwood Café, where we'd fast become regulars, led us through the throng of other patrons, men in summer sport jackets and women in pearls, to our table. I'd long ago perfected the art of keeping my face straight and impassive so no one would catch on to the meltdown I was having inside, and besides, Beth-Ann was too involved with her own battles to notice even if I hadn't. She flagged down our waiter to demand olive oil for the bread, then flagged him down again when it
didn't come fast enough. “This is why waiters are waiters and not brain surgeons,” she stated in her slow Southern drawl before he was safely out of earshot. “Because they can't even remember a simple request.”
“Quiet,” I said under my breath. When I turned, our waiter was looking right at us, and I was certain he'd heard every word. I ducked my head, mortified.
Beth-Ann barely lowered her voice and went on: “Daddy says it takes all kinds of people for the world to function. Some people need to be the ambitious ones and become doctors and lawyers.”
“And candy-shop owners,” Isabella said with a smile. Her accent made the word
candy
sound foreign and fancy.