The Dead of Summer Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2015

  A Kindle Scout selection

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  This book is dedicated to my children, Ryan and Tara. May you always know how much I love you.

  Thank you to my husband for his patience and talking me off the ledge, yet again. A huge thanks to Tyna for reading yet ANOTHER novel and not flinging across the room.

  Thank you to all the Chickies at CLC for your support and willingness to put up with my endless questions.

  Cover Design by: Jarmila Takač

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  ***

  Adults insist that you never completely remember your childhood. They say that as the years pass by, those little details that once captured your undivided attention become fuzzy around the edges. As time marches on, the sharp memories start crinkling up like a piece of newspaper burning in a campfire; first you can just make out the sentences, and then, the white hot fire laps at the pages, blurring them and obscuring the actual words. Until all that you are left with is a fine white ash and the vague memories of what used to be.

  As long as I’m breathing, I know I will never forget my sixteenth summer. It’s been years, but that summer is etched finely in my memory. That was the summer I finally kissed a boy, found the body in the basement, and discovered that keeping secrets just might kill you. And believe me, that isn’t something you forget too easily, no matter how hard you try. And I sure as hell have tried.

  My sixteenth summer was a strange time in Novella, South Carolina. When that first honeysuckle bloomed in early June, we were sure as hell done with summer already that year. For some reason, it had been unseasonably warm for nearly three months, the moon had been unnaturally full, and the events of that time inexplicably crazy, making me remember it even more. It was the summer that Shayla Wilson’s daddy discovered that she had been the one who was been stealing the cold cuts from his grocery store and giving them to the homeless couple that lived in the back alley. The day after that, Mrs. Busby’s (or aka Mrs. Busybody’s) barn burned down and her cows were discovered completely unscathed three miles down the road. And that all happened after the thirty-something-year-old principal of my high school ran off with Mrs. Nelson, the married sixty-five-year-old chemistry teacher. But none of that was what changed my life.

  It was a blistering hot day in June when I was pretty sure my life trajectory had been altered forever. That was the day I met him. Him was Carson Tyler, and I truly believe that if I had not met him, had he not breezed into our quaint little town, my life would have taken a totally different path from that point on. Better or worse, I’ll never know, but one thing is for certain; Carson Tyler’s arrival set into motion the events that would change me forever. He was like that first domino that falls, causing all the other dominoes that are perfectly lined up to come crashing down in rapid succession.

  ONE

  That day in June that I met Carson, my best friend Lindy and I sat, bored as ants in a drywall factory, lounging on the deck in her yard. Lindy’s parents were super wealthy (well, as wealthy as one could be in Novella, South Carolina without being called old money), and I found her house to be much more comfortable and inviting for us than my own. Lindy’s mama was one of those “ladies who lunch” and was rarely ever home to be in our hair. She was usually too busy chairing a garden club (or saving a tree, or an orphan, or some other crap like that) to be concerned with the child she actually was supposed to be raising in her own house. It was almost as if when Lindy had gotten old enough to find her way to school on her own, Mrs. Lincoln had simply let out a sigh of relief and turned around to attend to the affairs she had put on the back burner the previous ten years.

  Lindy’s house was spacious and grand. There was an honest-to-goodness ballroom that Lindy and I would practice our gymnastic tricks in, until Lindy fractured her wrist and Mr. Lincoln absolutely forbade it. He actually installed a security camera to ensure that we weren’t breaking his rule. But that was okay because there were at least twenty other rooms to break rules in. On more than one occasion, we found ourselves sliding down the freshly polished banisters or skating across the kitchen floor in our socks.

  The Lincolns had a housekeeper come in several days a week. Her name was, predictably, Maria, and she was practically like a mother to both me and Lindy. Quite possibly because, at the time, the pair of us were two of the most motherless creatures that one could imagine. Not that my mama was absent or anything like that. But while Lindy’s mama was busy being important and posh, mine was busy being. . .not.

  No, my mama wasn’t some alcohol, drug addicted crack whore who prostituted herself on the streets at night, leaving me to fend for myself. She wasn’t a pill-popping depressive who slept all day with the blinds drawn tight so that no sunshine crept in. She didn’t go out with flashy men who drove loud cars, nor did she slave away on the night shift at a local factory. It might have been easier for me if she had been any of those things. After all, they have therapy groups for kids growing up with mamas like that.

  My mama was just a regular run of the mill recluse, who was severally agoraphobic. She would just sit in the house all day, her once beautiful blue eyes practically sunken into her head, frightened and watery, staring out the window at the world passing her by, the world that she was deathly afraid of being a part of. She certainly wasn’t a bad mama in any way other than the fact that she didn’t step foot outside our door. I could never say I was neglected or even dismissed. Hell, inside the confines of our cozy, immaculately clean, two-bedroom home, Mama was doting to the point of overbearing at times. She’d always fix me and Lindy a snack or ask if we wanted to play a card game when we clearly just wanted to listen to music, shut up in my room with the lights off, lamenting about how no boy truly loved or understood us. So, needless to say, Lindy and I found that her spacious, parent-less house was much better suited for a pair of melancholy teens like us.

  Neither Lindy, nor I, had siblings; Lindy didn’t because her mama could barely stand being a mama long enough to raise Lindy to age ten, and I didn’t because my mama wasn’t married anymore. Oh, I wasn’t stupid. I knew you didn’t need a husband or nothing to get a baby. We had sex-ed in the form of Judy Blume books and racy romance novels. But when your mama doesn’t leave the house to even get groceries, you don’t assume that she’s planning to leave the house to go catch herself a man to make babies with.

  Anyway, on that blistering hot day in June, at the beginning of the first week of our school recess, Lindy and I were stretched out on a pair of m
atching lounge chairs parked on the deck behind her house; her in her skimpy bikini that lifted her perky B-cups and accentuated her flat tummy, and me detaching my jean shorts from my thunder thighs and mopping up boob sweat that got caught underneath my oversized T-shirt. There was no way I was wearing a bathing suit, let alone a bikini, when my perfectly proportioned friend was nearby.

  As we lounged, we were pondering what to do on this hot-as-Hades afternoon. It wasn’t that we weren’t used to the heat. Why, in late August sometimes the thermometer registered a hundred in the shade. We weren’t wusses. We just were just not accustomed to it being this damn hot this soon. We had spent the last few weeks in school practically mopping ourselves off the floor of the classroom, no energy for the usual end of the school year games and pranks that we liked to partake in, like Saran wrapping Miss Martin’s car or cutting class. Yeah, we didn’t even have energy to cut class.

  Not that what Lindy and I did would actually qualify as “cutting” in the delinquent sense of the word. We didn’t go out to the football field and smoke underneath the bleachers, or hop on mopeds and drive to the beach. We didn’t even hang out at the Burger King and make fun of the old geezers in polyester pants. Our cutting was quite lame; Lindy would write a note for me and forge my mama’s name, and I would write a note for her and forge her mama’s name so that neither of us could be accused of writing a fake note from our own parents. Then Lindy and I would go hide at her house, out of the watchful eye of Maria (we only cut on her day off) and spend the entire day flipping through teen magazines and eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with reckless abandon—well, I ate them, Lindy just watched and rolled her eyes. Then, at two o’clock when school ended for the day, I would stagger home, my stomach ready to explode from chocolate and peanut butter goodness overload and face Mama’s daily twenty questions about how school was that day. I would rush to the bathroom and puke like a prom queen on a bender, praying my mama wouldn’t hear me and make me stay home the following day. I didn’t want to get too far behind in my classes, and the attendance officer might notice that my two notes were written by two obviously different people.

  Lying out in the sun, our skin actually started to pop and sizzle. It was too hot, even for Miss Teen Queen of Tan. Lindy moaned and threw a towel over her head. “It’s too hot here to do anything.”

  I bobbed my head up and down, agreeing with her. “Okay. Let’s go inside.” Maria was baking, and the mouthwatering aroma of cinnamon rolls was wafting down toward where we were lounging. I was dying to get inside and sink my teeth into a gooey, sugary bun and relax in the lovely air-conditioned kitchen in the process.

  At our house, we only had an air conditioner unit in Mama’s bedroom and she only turned it on at night. I had a fan in my room, but that also didn’t get turned on till bedtime. So, during the day, we melted into puddles of candle wax. That was one of the other reasons I enjoyed coming to Lindy’s during the summer. But could she ever appreciate the glorious climate controlled air that she got to breathe in every day? No. She wanted to lie out in the backyard, oil herself up, and bake up all golden brown in the sun. I had Irish blood on my mama’s side, so needless to say, I was more like a giant prawn to her golden French fry.

  Lindy shook her head. “No, not inside. Let’s go lay out there.”

  Too hot to correct her improper use of grammar, I stared at the spacious backyard that seemed to stretch for miles, the hot Carolina sun beating down on the entire open yard like a Savannah, not a single tree to be had.

  Where their property ended, however, was a grove of trees that could probably be classified as a full-fledged forest. Part of me was hoping that Lindy was suggesting relaxing out there, but the other part of me was slightly uneasy about the idea. It was kind of creepy and weird noises came from the treetops, sounding like rustling and moans. As I stood and stretched, tucking my towel under my arm, I thought I saw a shadow dart behind the trees out of the corner of my eye.

  “Did you see that?” I pointed toward the wooded area.

  “See what?” Lindy asked as she flipped her own towel over her shoulders.

  “There. In the trees?” I pointed again.

  Lindy rolled her eyes at me. “Don’t be a baby, Kennedy. Stop being scared of the woods.” She was forever calling me a baby because I was shorter than her. Never mind the fact I was older.

  “I’m not scared of the woods, Lindy,” I grumbled defensively. “I just thought I saw something, that’s all. Must be the heat making me woozy.”

  “Which is exactly why we’re going in the backyard,” Lindy reported.

  “It’s going to be just as hot. There’s no shade, Lindy. There’s no trees.”

  She shot me an exasperated look for sounding smug. “I know there’s no trees.” She shielded her eyes and pointed to the far edge of the property. “We could lay under that.”

  I squinted my eyes to see where she was pointing. There was only one possible option.

  “The hydrangea bush?” I asked. “You want me to lie underneath the hydrangea bush?” The bush was enormous—probably six feet high and just as wide—but still, I had no desire to go crawling under bushes. I gazed longingly at the kitchen window. I could even see Maria in the kitchen with the oven mitts on her hands, ready to extract the gooey goodness from the oven. “Why can’t we just go inside and get a cinnamon bun?”

  Lindy tossed her long, silky blonde hair over her left shoulder and appraised my squishy mid-section. “You need a cinnamon bun like you need another thigh.” I blushed and tugged nervously at my shirt. “We’re going under the hydrangea bush. I go under there all the time. It’s like a tree house, except on the ground.” She stomped off in the direction of the bush, fully expecting me to follow her.

  I dutifully trailed after her. The whole tree house thing had been a bone of contention with her. Because there were no trees in their backyard, Lindy could not have the tree house she wanted when she was younger and Lindy was used to getting her way. From what I gathered from her daddy’s recollection of the event, Lindy stomped and stormed around and threw a hissy fit. Finally, Mr. Lincoln had a specially made life-sized doll house installed in the backyard for his very spoiled little girl. There were handmade curtains and an actual trundle bed on the “second floor” which was, according to Lindy, just a crawl space and not big enough to actually sleep in anyway. I wouldn’t know because I never saw the dollhouse, as it tragically burned to the ground the summer before I moved to Novella. Allegedly, Lindy had been pretending her dolls were having a romantic candlelight dinner, yet suspiciously, no candles were found in the ruins. My theory is that the doll’s house had lost its appeal and my best friend had decided to take matters into her own hands. Even at age eight, Lindy would have been challenging, to say the least. When she decided something, nothing changed her mind.

  Reaching the bright blue flowered bush, Lindy proudly lifted the branch and swept her hand underneath as if she were inviting me into her living room for tea. Sighing, because I knew this was never going to go my way, I dropped to the ground and crawled under the bush, pushing the towel beneath my body an attempt to not get dirt all over my knees. Lindy followed, burrowing underneath the bush and then flopping down on her own towel to lie next to me. She flipped onto her back, staring upwards while I was on my stomach, face pressed against the towel, breathing in the moist earth and grass around me.

  “What are we gonna do all summer?” she asked me in a bored sort of way.

  “I don’t know, Lindy. It’s too hot to think right now,” I murmured as I attempted to close my eyes. A nap would work right about now. If Lindy would just shut up. Instead, I started to tune her out as she babbled on about one thing or another. I really hoped there wouldn’t be a quiz later on as I don’t think I heard a word she said, my eyes growing heavier by the minute.

  In a few minutes, I began to suspect that I might in fact be allergic to hydrangea bushes. My eyes were tearing up and I had sneezed about fifty-two times, each time result
ing in Lindy kicking me squarely in the shin in attempts to shush me.

  Lindy had been my best friend for six years, but I still think she was by far the meanest girl in our grade. When we met the first day of fourth grade, I was a shy new kid to the school and Lindy an obnoxious loud mouth; we were the most unlikely of duos. Lindy had spurned our meeting by yanking on the braids that my mother (aka “Smother”) had plaited in my hair earlier that day.

  “What the hell is this?” Lindy had said as she chomped on about five pieces of watermelon bubble gum. I could smell her three feet away.

  “Braids,” I said, hugging my long chestnut locks close and blinking away tears as I stared at Lindy through my brand new glasses.

  Lindy had rolled her eyes and gestured with her hand toward the gaggle of girls leaning against the fence in the school yard, their shiny hair bobbed and cropped closely around their heads, some with wisps of hair gently brushing their shoulders, but not one single girl with a braid or even a ponytail.

  “Those are my friends,” Lindy informed me, swishing her own shoulder length, blonde hair across her delicate bare shoulders. “They all listen to everything I say. We’re in fourth grade.”

  I nodded, not understanding exactly how this girl wanted me to respond. In my old school, such a girl would be considered popular and wouldn’t even talk to me. In fact, as a nerdy bookworm, I hardly ever spoke to anyone anyway.

  “Are you in fourth grade or kindergarten?” she had asked me in a tone I had originally assumed was rude, but over the years have learned, is just Lindy’s way of speaking. I don’t think she could speak soothingly if she lubricated her mouth full of Vaseline—she always talked as if she was swallowing barbed wire.

  “Fourth,” I had muttered while staring down at my recently buffed Mary Jane Patent leather shoes.

  “Well, as you can see, fourth graders shouldn’t dress like kindergartners. Or wear their hair in braids. That’s what babies do.”