39: The Drug Dealers Next Door
Chapter 40: Sea Change
Chapter 41: Sister Secrets
Chapter 42: Testing the Waters
CHAPTER 1
Night Swimming
Not halfway there and yet her shoulders tingled with fatigue. Going out was always a fight, the incoming Atlantic shoving her back, impeding her progress. Sloan swam slowly, methodically, one stroke following the next in perfect rhythm with a head turn and measured breath in between. Pier lights appeared from behind a jetty and she stopped, treading water, triangulating herself against the faint illumination of home.
An occasional figure moved on the beach, dark against the lights rising behind dunes. Tonight she hadn’t worried that her mother might see her drop her clothes to the sand. Her parents were at a charity benefit in support of a cure for some disease or another. They were always attending these events even though her father grumbled. But her mother was poised for the next illness or disaster, always extending her checkbook to those less fortunate. Sloan had come to question her mother’s commitment to these causes. Somehow, her actions appeared desperate at times rather than altruistic.
Her parents looked like old money when they left, Sloan’s father in his worn tuxedo and her mother in a rose-colored dress, understated as always. A string of inherited pearls encircled her delicate neck. But her parents seemed somehow out of kilter in their evening attire with the summer sun bright on their shoulders. It was the gentleness of his hand against her back as he helped her into the car when only moments before they had argued. This particular argument was the same as always—money, work, the pressure of social obligations.
They seemed at a truce when they left. Sloan stood on the screened-in porch watching them pull away, the oyster-shell drive popping under the car’s tires. Ocean breeze fingered her hair while a lump of dread formed in her stomach. Sloan had come to anticipate this emptiness, the sensation of a roller coaster hung at the bottom sweep of a drop, pressing down, never leveling out.
She was nearly ill with this sinking feeling at times, but she could never pinpoint why. Sometimes it didn’t have anything to do with her parents or her SAT scores or even her total lack of social life. When that vacant sensation crawled in her stomach she gravitated to the beach. It was an odd impulse that had made her wade into the dark water the first time.
She hadn’t meant to go so far. She knew better, but she walked forward into the waves until she was gently lifted, her tenuous connection with solid earth dissolved. She had floated there, her arms moving listlessly, barely enough to keep her head above soft swells, knowing an undertow could carry her to sea.
But she had sensed the tide was coming in and she had been correct on that all-important account. The current caught her up and swept her along parallel to the beach. At the northern tip of the island she was pushed inland where the water squeezed into the creek behind their home. There she was deposited on the steps of their dock as if the hand of a god had laid her there. She crawled into their barnacle-encrusted wooden boat. Like most everything else of value in their lives, the watercraft was inherited from her great-grandfather, a once regal thing grown shabby under her father’s watch.
Stars had been distinct that moonless night as she tiptoed down the dry planks of the slender walk from the dock. Palmetto fronds clacked and marsh grass shushed as she sneaked toward her back door. Inside, her parents dozed on the sofa, a movie playing soft blue against their faces.
She had remained careful since then, checking the weathered tide chart on the storage shed door to make sure of the water’s movement before she ventured into the surf—a calculated risk. She was a strong swimmer. Her mother had made sure of that, hauling Sloan and her little sister to lessons at the YMCA for years, until Sloan had flatly refused to go another chlorine-stinging lap.
Her mother would have a meltdown if she knew Sloan was out at night, swimming into the distance, leaving her younger sister alone in the house. She’d be grounded for a month if discovered, perhaps for the rest of the school year. Still, Sloan craved the heart-pounding adrenaline from this secret endeavor, a feeling far preferable to the palpitations of anxiety and dread that came upon her so naturally. She felt wild and independent knowing she could slowly drift to the black below or be attacked by a rogue shark. Everyone would wonder what had happened to her. Was she kidnapped? A runaway? There would be headlines in the Pawleys Island Gazette—“Local teen disappears, worst feared.”
Gauging her level of exhaustion as moderate, Sloan started toward shore. She’d make it. She always did. Today was not her day to die. She struggled on. The journey back was always easier, as if the world were behind her pushing her home.
Twenty minutes later her feet found sandy purchase and she stumbled onto the beach so limp it was impossible for her to feel any emotion, except perhaps relief that she had survived once again.
Soreness would grip her muscles the next few days, a constant reminder of her triumph over the abyss, over exhaustion, over herself. Her mother would comment that her moody nature had ebbed. Her grades would improve. She would be at peace for a time.
It was not the death-defying act that buoyed her but the clandestine nature of it that was her companion. I have a secret, she would think to herself over the next few weeks when she quarreled with her mother or struggled with calculus. I’m strong. I’m a survivor.
CHAPTER 2
Island Life
Emmett Sullivan pressed open the hatch to the widow’s walk atop his house. His golf shirt billowed in the rush of salty air as he climbed the last few ladder rungs and stepped into a 360-degree view. The Atlantic tumbled in on the east side of the island. To the west, the creek was placid, the marsh grass still and straight. Only a cat’s-paw ripple in the channel betrayed the current below where the incoming tide married the creek. Here at the northern tip, a wide sandbar tightly packed with cordgrass squeezed the channel more narrow each year. It was healthy compared to the southern end, where the clockwise motion of the Atlantic chewed away the island’s sandy fringe and depleted the creek.
Emmett scanned the beach for his daughters’ bright bathing suits. They were in their usual spot, away from the grip of undertow between islands but close enough to be seen from the widow’s walk.
He clicked the walkie-talkie. “Sloan, it’s Dad.”
One of the tiny people on the sand below moved. A moment later, he heard his older daughter’s bored tone crackle to life in his hand.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Your mother says it’s time to come in.”
Sloan motioned to Ainslie and began cramming things into a bag. Ainslie, true to form, ignored her sister, enthralled with something in a tidepool, probably crab holes or a starfish. Emmett knew how things would transpire. Ainslie would ignore her sister. Sloan would practically drag her to the house. Later, Sloan would let her mother know, in that universal sardonic teenager tone, how much she hated having to baby-sit, AGAIN.
The girls trudged back, lugging buckets and bags. Sloan wore her straw hat and Jackie-O glasses. She was no doubt slathered from head to toe in sunscreen in her battle to stave the freckles that sprinkled her mother’s skin. Then there was Ainslie, his sun-drop baby, all nut brown skin, dark eyes and hair just like Emmett’s before the gray invaded. Emmett could relate to his nine-year-old’s desire to stay out all day. His own childhood had been spent in similar pursuits on this island, he and his brothers wading tidal creeks and crawling sand dunes from first light to dark.
The girls left the hard-packed beach for the loose sand of a path that snaked between dunes. The sand pulled at their steps, their flip-flops kicking up sprays of granules behind them. They worked their way through gnarled cedars, a stand of only a dozen or so trees. When he was a boy, this island had been thick with cedars, low-slung and hardy from weathering storms. Emmett and his brothers hacked through them, cleared secret rooms in their dense branches.
Their mother banished