Demeter’s strange behavior continued. On the night she returned from babysitting for the Kingsleys, Lynne happened to be awake, standing next to the open freezer door, shoveling Chunky Monkey into her mouth. She had been indulging in this kind of late-night stress eating more and more lately, but when Demeter walked in, she hastened to fit the top back onto the carton and shove the ice cream back into the freezer, because what kind of example was she setting?

“Hey, honey,” Lynne said. She positioned her body to block’s Demeter’s view of the sticky spoon on the countertop.

Demeter didn’t respond to her greeting, didn’t acknowledge her mother’s presence at all. She clutched her backpack to her chest and proceeded up the stairs.

“Demeter!” Lynne snapped. Her voice was louder than it ought to have been in the middle of the night-Al was sleeping-but Jesus Christ, she was sick of being ignored.

“What?” Demeter said.

“How was babysitting? How were the Kingsleys?”

Demeter let out a shrill, high-pitched laugh that was unlike anything Lynne had ever heard come out of her daughter’s mouth. It made Lynne worry that maybe Demeter’s problem was that she was possessed by the spawn of Lucifer. “Babysitting?” Demeter said. “At the Kingsleys’? It was awful. It was goddamned fucking awful, if you must know, Mother.” Then Demeter laughed again, and it gave Lynne the shivers.


Two days later Lynne stood in front of Demeter’s bedroom door with the metal pin. Demeter was still at work, and Lynne had been trying to work in her home office as well, but Demeter’s words kept playing through her mind: “It was goddamned fucking awful, if you must know, Mother.” And that demonic laugh. Something was going on, and Lynne intended to find out what it was.

She popped the lock on Demeter’s door as she’d seen Al do the night of the accident. She entered her daughter’s bedroom. She was one of those mothers now, she thought. One of those mothers who nosed around her child’s personal space, one of those mothers who couldn’t be trusted. She had never had to do this with the boys. The boys had been easy to raise; the boys had been a breeze.

Demeter’s room smelled funny. It had been a hot couple of weeks, and Lynne had kept the central air on, so Demeter’s window was shut tight. Sunlight streamed in, and dust motes hung in the air. The bed was unmade. Demeter used only a fitted sheet and a duvet, anyway. Lynne sniffed the duvet. Abominable-body odor, along with whatever cheap teenage scent her daughter used to mask body odor. Lynne rarely cleaned in this room anymore; she had basically been denied access for the past three years, though she did make a point of asking for Demeter’s sheets and towels occasionally. But she hadn’t asked once this summer, and now the whole room smelled of dirty linen. Lynne started stripping the bed right then and there. Something was under the pillow and fell to the floor, and Lynne scrambled to pick it up. It was a paperback copy of The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lynne sat on the bare mattress and flipped through the book. Demeter was reading Fitzgerald. Was Lynne worrying herself sick over nothing?

Lynne set the book down on Demeter’s bedside table, next to her water glass, which had a wedge of lime floating in it. Lime in her water glass? That was Zoe’s influence right there. Zoe kept a pitcher of chilled water in her fridge, and it always had lemon or lime slices and sometimes fresh mint and sometimes cucumber slices floating in it, and it always tasted fresh and delicious.

God, Lynne missed Zoe. She wondered what would happen if she just turned up at Zoe’s house unannounced. That was what a real friend would do-go over there and check on her. Lynne would bring her something, maybe a hanging begonia from Bartlett’s Farm or a topiary from Flowers on Chestnut.

Lynne picked up the water glass and emptied it into Demeter’s bathroom sink. She threw the lime wedge in the trash and carried the liner down to the kitchen trash. The bathroom trash seemed to be mostly crumpled tissues and dental floss and a bunch of wrappers from sugarless gum and breath mints. So maybe Demeter was having a relationship with someone at work-or, more likely, she’d developed a crush. Which could either end well or end badly.

Lynne went back up to Demeter’s bathroom and collected all the towels and the bathmat. She gathered the sheets as well and carried everything down to the laundry. Demeter would be angry when she found out that her mother had been in her room, but she’d appreciate having clean sheets and towels.

Lynne had work to do-three clients needed titles cleared-but she hated to leave a job half done. She lugged the Dyson up to Demeter’s room and found a yellow dust rag and fetched her bucket of cleaning supplies and the mop. The cleaners came once a week, so this kind of time-consuming effort on Lynne’s part had been rendered unnecessary in the rest of the house. But the cleaners weren’t allowed to go in Demeter’s room, and it badly needed cleaning.

That smell, Lynne thought. How did Demeter stand it?

Lynne dusted and vacuumed. This gave her a legitimate excuse to peek under the bed-nothing there but a dusty suitcase, which made her wonder if what they really needed was a vacation, which made her think of the Randolphs in Australia. They’d gone because, Jordan said, he needed to get Jake and Ava off the island for a while. Ava had been asking to move back to Australia for years, Lynne knew, but the accident was what had prompted their departure. So it seemed-to Lynne, and probably to the rest of Nantucket-as if they had left in shame. Lynne had heard people castigating Jordan for not printing anything about the accident in the paper, and she had done her best to correct this misperception by telling anyone who brought it up within her earshot that Zoe had asked him not to print a single word. His actions had been noble, she believed.

Lynne wondered if Jake had somehow been to blame for the accident. The police report had been so vague.

Lynne was glad that she hadn’t found any strange or unidentifiable objects in Demeter’s room. No weird altars or vials of tiger blood or voodoo dolls. Of course, she hadn’t looked through the drawers. She would look through the drawers-maybe-once she was done with the bathroom.

No one in the world enjoyed cleaning a bathroom, and this one smelled especially bad. Lynne was generous with the Windex; she tried not to gaze into the toilet bowl as she scoured it with the brush. She checked in the cabinet under the sink and saw that Demeter was down to her last roll of toilet paper and her final two tampons. Lynne replenished the supplies from the stockpile in her own bathroom. The girl was suffering from neglect.

Lynne struggled with the bathtub. She pulled Demeter’s hair out of the drain, then she took down the shower curtain. That could use a run through the washing machine as well.

She checked the medicine cabinet. There was a large bottle of ibuprofen that Lynne knew she herself hadn’t bought. Strange, she thought. She checked the bottle’s contents to make sure it really was ibuprofen, and it was.

Okay, she was feeling paranoid now. Why would Demeter have spent her own money on ibuprofen? Why not just write it down on Lynne’s shopping list?

Lynne went back into Demeter’s bedroom and thought, I have to check her drawers. She didn’t want to check the drawers, but to be thorough, she had to. Then there was the dark screen of Demeter’s computer. Should she check the computer? Would she know what she was looking for? Demeter didn’t have a Facebook page, or she hadn’t the last time Lynne checked, which was some time before the accident. Even Lynne had a Facebook page, complete with 274 friends. Penny had been Lynne’s friend on Facebook, that was the kind of dear child she was, but Lynne hadn’t had the heart to go in and see if Penny’s page had been taken down yet. Lynne collapsed in Demeter’s desk chair and stared at the computer. There were so many places for kids to hide things. How were parents supposed to win at this game?

She would check the dresser drawers, she decided, but would leave the computer alone for now. She would ask Al about the computer, maybe. He had to pull his weight in this.

Lynne slid open Demeter’s drawers. She was holding her breath as though she expected to see a nest of snakes in there. But all she found was a mess of very large clothes-overalls, jeans, T-shirts, and the hooded sweatshirts that made Demeter look like a hoodlum from Jamaica Plain instead of a nice girl from Nantucket. This was Lynne’s chance to surreptitiously remove them, but she was so glad not to have found anything worrisome in the drawers that she let the sweatshirts remain, and even resisted her urge to fold and straighten them. She closed the drawers.

Her search had turned up nothing. Nothing except the Fitzgerald.

Lynne was about to leave the room when she caught sight of the closet door. It was slightly ajar, which seemed like an invitation for her to open it and check inside. Lynne noticed how blank the door was, how blank the whole room was, really. There were no pictures of friends, no pictures of her or Al, or Mark or Billy, no trophies or awards or ribbons or framed certificates of achievement, no maps of places they’d visited, no posters of actors or rock stars. (Even Lynne, yes, straight Lynne Comstock, had had a poster of Lynyrd Skynyrd taped to her wall.)

Suddenly Demeter’s room seemed like the saddest place on earth.

Lynne took a step toward the closet.

“Mom?”

Lynne gasped.

“Jesus Christ,” she said to Demeter. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Demeter stared at her mother. Lynne wondered when the last time was that she had taken the Lord’s name in vain and sworn in the same sentence. College? She hadn’t always been such a straight arrow; she hadn’t always been such an upstanding citizen. She had listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the front seat of Beck Paulsen’s Mazda RX4. She had smoked Newports with Beck and drunk Miller beer from cans.