“What are you doing in here?” Demeter asked.

“Cleaning,” Lynne answered honestly. “It smelled awful. I took your sheets…” Lynne nodded at the naked bed.

“Yes, I see that.”

“I cleaned your bathroom, you’re welcome. I’ll return your linens to you by dinnertime, freshly laundered, you’re welcome.”

“Wasn’t this room locked?” Demeter asked.

“Yes, but…”

“How did you get in?”

“I popped the lock.”

“You popped the lock?”

“With a pin,” Lynne said. Apropos of nothing, she laughed. She had broken into her teenage daughter’s bedroom, and she had nothing to say in her own defense. She had put so much effort into cleaning that she had lost track of time. Now she was busted, as though she were the teenager and Demeter the parent.

“Get out,” Demeter said.

“Honey, really, I just needed to get in here to clean-”

“If you really need to get in here, you ask me,” Demeter said. “You don’t pop the lock with a pin while I’m at work. You’re like a common thief.”

“Thief?” Lynne said. “I didn’t take anything.”

“A spy, then,” Demeter said.

“Honey, I wasn’t spying. I told you, the smell-”

“I like the smell.”

“Your sheets needed to be changed.”

“What happened to my water glass?” Demeter asked.

“I emptied it. It’s in the dishwasher.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing in here!” Demeter’s voice took on the shrill edge of hysteria. She was still in her work boots-which were, naturally, tracking dirt and sand into the newly vacuumed room. She was clutching her backpack to her chest like a shield, just as she had done the other night when she got home from babysitting.

Clutching her backpack. Okay, Lynne wasn’t naive, she wasn’t in the wrong here, this was her house, she was the mother and Demeter was the child and something was going on with Demeter and Lynne wanted to know what it was.

“Do you have a Facebook page?” Lynne asked.

“What?” Demeter said. “No, I don’t.”

“I can check, you know.”

Demeter said, “Fine, check. I don’t have one.” Her tone of voice was both calm and bored. Facebook wasn’t the culprit.

“Let me see your phone.”

“What?”

“Your phone. Let me see it.”

“My phone?”

“Your phone.” Demeter had an iPhone 4S that Lynne had bought for her in the spring. Lynne had noticed that she kept a passcode lock on the phone. Now she wondered, Why would she keep a passcode lock unless there’s something she’s trying to hide?

Demeter pulled her phone out of the pocket of her cargo shorts and handed it to Lynne.

“Unlock it, please,” Lynne said.

Demeter unlocked it. “You’re acting like a psycho.”

“No,” Lynne said. “I’m acting like a parent. Finally.” She looked at the face of the phone. Apps-she knew that those colorful squares were apps, but she didn’t know what to do with them. She was acting like a clueless parent. She had a cell phone herself, but she kept it in her car and used it only when she was on the road or away from home. She didn’t know how to text. Zoe knew how to text, and Jordan knew how to text-the two of them had been texting buddies for years, that was how they communicated. But not Lynne. She was a clueless parent and a fuddy-duddy who didn’t text and couldn’t navigate her way around an iPhone. She handed the phone back to Demeter.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Demeter asked.

Lynne sighed. She wasn’t getting anywhere. “Demeter, what’s going on with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s going on? Something is funny. Something is wrong.”

“I’m working,” Demeter said. “I spend all day on my knees weeding. If I’m very, very lucky, I get to water. Or deadhead.” She held up one hand and clutched at her backpack with the other. Her hand was blotched with purple stains. “Daylilies.”

She clutched the bag, clutched the bag. Lynne said, “I’d like you to open your bag, please.”

“What?” Demeter said. She tightened her grip on her bag, which only made Lynne more determined to see what was inside it. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Set the bag down and unzip it for me, please,” Lynne said.

“I suppose the cavity search is next,” Demeter said. “Do I need to call my lawyer?”

“Just do it,” Lynne said.

Demeter did not release her hold on the bag. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. What is wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with you?” Lynne said. Her voice sounded positively lethal; she felt herself losing her grip. She rarely got like this. If Al had been home, she would have ducked out of there already. She would have made herself a cup of chamomile tea and gotten into a cool bath, played some Mozart, read some poetry. “Put the bag down, please, and unzip it.”

Demeter did as she was told. The backpack gaped open. Lynne took a step forward and peered inside, as though she expected to find someone’s severed head in there. But all she saw was a flannel shirt. She rummaged a little deeper. Two bottles of water, one of them with a lime floating in it-more Zoe water-and another rotting banana. That was all.

Lynne extracted the banana. “Waste of a perfectly good banana,” she said.

“Call the fruit police,” Demeter said.

Lynne held the black, weeping banana. She was so relieved, she thought she might cry.

Demeter collapsed against the closet door; it closed with a sound like a gunshot.

“Mom,” she said.

“What?” Lynne said.

“Get out, please?”

“Yes,” Lynne said. “Okay.”


Lynne was so embarrassed by the incident in Demeter’s bedroom that she said nothing about it to Al. She laundered Demeter’s sheets and towels and left them in a neat pile outside her daughter’s bedroom door. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t use the pin to force entry again. Demeter was a seventeen-year-old girl. She needed her privacy.


On August 14, Lynne was working in her home office. She was listening to a Bruce Springsteen CD, drinking freshly brewed iced tea with mint. She and Al had a date to meet at Ladies Beach at four o’clock. They did this every August, right when Al realized that summer was almost over and he hadn’t taken any late-afternoon swims. And this year, because of all that had happened, they hadn’t gone to the beach even once. Jordan was gone, and Lynne had been afraid to call and inflict herself on Zoe.

Lynne was looking forward to the swim. Afterward she would try to convince Al to go to Dune for dinner.

Downstairs, the phone rang. Lynne ignored it. God knew, if she picked up every phone call that came in to the house, she would never get any work done. Because of all that had happened this summer, she was running behind. The answering machine picked up. The Castles had to be the last family in America that even still had an answering machine. Everyone else used automated voicemail. Lynne tried not to listen to the voice on the machine-if she was so keen to know who was calling, she told herself, then she should have just picked up the phone in the first place. But she listened anyway, just long enough to discern that the voice belonged to Zoe.

Zoe. It was Zoe, finally calling her back. Lynne sprang from her desk and rushed down the stairs to get the phone, but by the time she picked it up, she was talking to a dial tone. She was just about to call Zoe back when the phone rang in her office, and Lynne thought, Of course, Zoe would call my office phone next since she couldn’t reach me on the home phone. Lynne hurried up the stairs, calling out pointlessly, “I’m coming, hold on, here I come!” When she picked up the phone, she was out of breath. She was too old for this. But it was Zoe. At last! She couldn’t wait to talk to her.

“Hello?” she said.

“Lynne,” Al said. “I need you to sit down.”


Twenty minutes later Lynne and Al were meeting in the hot, unvented offices of Frog and Toad Landscaping with Kerry Trevor and a hysterical Demeter. It was difficult for the adults to talk about what had happened with Demeter making so much noise.

“Honey,” Lynne said. “You have to calm down.”

But Demeter was a volcano intent on erupting. She hadn’t emoted nearly this much after the accident or after Penny’s funeral, which was probably why she was such a mess now. All of that difficult stuff was surfacing.

“Actually, maybe Demeter should wait outside,” Kerry said.

Was that a good idea? Lynne wondered. At this point, she knew, Demeter was a flight risk. If she was left unsupervised, she might just get into her car and drive away. She might do something stupid.

“Jeanne will keep an eye on her,” Kerry said.

“Okay,” Lynne said. Jeanne, Kerry’s right-hand woman, had grown up in Brockton, where, she liked to tell people, she had earned her doctorate in badass.

As soon as Jeanne took Demeter by the arm and led her from the room, it was much quieter.

Lynne said, “Maybe you should start again at the beginning.”

“Demeter was caught trying to steal two bottles of vodka from a client’s house,” Kerry said. “She had a bottle in each hand; she was hurrying for the side door. The clients weren’t home, but a member of their staff caught her.”

“A member of the staff?” Lynne said.

“I have to tell you this in extreme confidence,” Kerry said. “The clients were the Allencasts.”

Lynne thought she might vomit in her lap.

“And the person who caught Demeter was their personal chef, Zoe Alistair.”

“We know Zoe,” Al said. “We’re close friends.”

“I realize that,” Kerry said. “And Zoe handled the situation sensitively. She called me right away. She said she had taken the bottles from Demeter and decided that she wasn’t going to tell the Allencasts. She said she would let the three of us handle it.”