Beach Colors Read online

  Dedication

  To Maggie Cousins and Julia Cauthorn

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Connecticut

  July 199–

  The porch steps were hot. Margaux Sullivan hopped from one foot to the other while she searched the beach for her friends.

  It was the last day of summer. Sunlight floated on the water like a million diamonds. Lazy pinwheels of white filled the sky. Across the Sound, Long Island stretched like a green thread on the horizon. It felt like time would last forever. But tomorrow the houses would be closed up, and the Selkies would be separated for another winter.

  Margaux’s stomach clenched. This year would be different. Margaux and Grace were both returning to Hartford with their families, but Brianna was moving to New York. They might never all meet here again.

  Stupid. Of course we will. The Selkies will always have each other.

  She shielded her eyes against the sun and found the others standing at the water’s edge. Brianna posed for the lifeguard, pretending to ignore him, while he practically fell off his seat to get a better look. Grace stood in the water trying not to giggle.

  The lifeguard was tall, dark, and handsome, but Bri’s mother told her not to fraternize with him because he was a townie. Bri didn’t listen.

  Margaux had her own tall, dark, and handsome young townie. Well, he wasn’t really hers. He was much older and they’d never even spoken. But they had sat across the same table at the library every summer since she was ten—him frowning over his books—her copying dresses from the latest fashion magazines. It was almost like a date. Only he wasn’t there this summer, and now she was sorry that she’d never asked him what he was studying.

  The screen door slammed behind her and her brother, Danny, ran past her and jumped down to the sand.

  “Hey, Magsy. Want a ride to the library?”

  “No thanks. I’m busy. And it’s Margaux.”

  Danny grinned back at her. He pushed his motorcycle helmet over unruly red curls and made a bow. “Madame Ma-a-argaux.” Then he reached up and scrubbed her hair. “Magsy.” The pencil stub that was pushed through her equally unruly curls fell to the steps.

  She slapped at his hand but he dodged away. “See ya, Mags.” He ran around the side of the house. A minute later she heard his new Honda 500 roar to life. Margaux pulled at her hair. It had taken her ten minutes to get it to lie flat, and now it was every which way again. She picked up the pencil and shoved it behind her ear.

  Brothers could be so annoying. She put two fingers to her lips and whistled. Brianna and Grace looked up and started walking toward her. They met halfway and turned as one toward the jetty at the end of the crescent beach.

  Brianna led the way, walking ahead as if she were already leaving them. They climbed up the rocks of the jetty, barely paying attention, they had climbed them so often. Then down again to the cove. The tide was in and they had to splash through the water to reach the path that led through the woods.

  Margaux lagged behind. Things were changing and she wasn’t sure she was ready. She knew some people outgrew the beach, but not the Selkies. Even when they got too old to explore and write secret messages and go crabbing—Margaux would never be too old to go crabbing—the beach would still be a part of them. Would live in a special place inside each of them.

  She felt a flutter of nerves. Today they were leaving something of themselves behind—just in case.

  It was cooler beneath the pines and scrub oak. Silently they walked along the narrow path, nearly grown over with rhododendron and fern.

  When the path veered off, they ducked under the gnarled tree limb, climbed over the rotten log, and stopped at the entrance of the Grotto. They had discovered it that first summer, an outcropping of rocks and a ledge of granite that formed a shallow cavern. It became their secret hideout where first they made magic potions, or hid from pirates, and later, talked about boys. They had grown older; the sapling whose roots spread over the rock had become a tree.

  But the Grotto never changed. It was a magical place that could make dreams come true.

  Brianna flipped on her flashlight, crouched down, and ducked beneath the ledge. One by one, each took her place, sitting cross-legged in a circle, knees touching, while the flashlight cast their shadows eerily against the rough stone.

  Brianna reached into her string bag and pulled out a Tupperware container. She placed it in the center of the circle, lifted off the top, and glancing at the others, slowly reached back into the bag and pulled out the pink plastic diary where, that morning, each had made her last secret entry. Solemnly, she placed it in the Tupperware container. She closed the lid and sealed it tight.

  They gathered around the fissure in the rock wall. Brianna shoved the box inside, and they covered the opening with three large smooth stones.

  “The Selkies forever,” Brianna intoned in her throaty voice. They crossed their hearts, licked three fingers, and raised them in the air.

  “The Selkies forever.”

  Nick Prescott stood on the dark rocks of the jetty, careful not to get his new uniform wet or scuff the polish of his new boots. Tomorrow he would be in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Private Nick Prescott.

  For the past two years, he had watched his friends get on with their lives while he stayed behind. The money he’d saved for college dwindled away while he tried to take care of his mother and brother. But now it was his turn.

  He would miss the shore. Even though his family only owned a cape in town, he was proud to have grown up here. He wished he could say the same for his brother, Ben.

  He was down there now at his lifeguard post, flirting with the blonde. He just didn’t get that they would never accept him. No matter how many times Nick told him. They were summer people. But Ben wouldn’t listen.

  Nick watched the girls join another girl. His heart tightened—just a little—when he saw her halo of red curls. She had been his talisman ever since the summer after his father died. Then she was just a kid, sharing his table at the library. Drawing pictures with the tip of her tongue pressed to the corner of her mouth as she concentrated. Pushing curls out of her face with an impatient hand. He could hardly wait until school was out and she came back to sit across from him.

  Only this summer was different. She had grown up, become one of them, and that put an end to everything.

  He would become a history professor someday. The army would pay for his education. And she would become—he didn’t know. He just knew that she would always
be a summer person, and he, just a townie.

  One

  Margaux Sullivan stood unmoving and listened to the echoes of her failure. Only a week ago, her Manhattan loft had been thrumming with energy, excitement, and caffeine, as twenty-five pattern cutters, drapers, and seamstresses worked round the clock to prepare M Atelier’s latest collection for the event of the year. New York City’s Fashion Week.

  Now it was just an empty space. The finished pieces carted away in cardboard boxes. The long worktables cleared of everything but a few forgotten scraps of fabric. The mannequins repossessed, the brick walls bare except for the row of five-by-three-foot photographs of Margaux’s award-winning fashions that her creditors left behind.

  The asymmetrical black moiré satin sheath had been her first CFDA award winner. The black wool tuxedo had made the cover of Vogue. Marie Claire had called the black tulle ball gown—not a fluffy evening dress, but cutting-edge stark—“Tulle with a Bite.”

  The models stared back at her, caught in time, sleek and scowling. This dress will make you thin, this will make you beautiful, this will make men adore you. Black, unique, and powerful. They’d promised to make Margaux’s dream come true.

  And it had come true. Ever since that sticky summer day when she’d discovered a bridal magazine in the Crescent Cove library. She’d opened its shiny pages to brilliant white, palest pink, creamy ivory. Pearls and veils and promises—and she thought, This is what I want to do.

  For the rest of the summer, she rode her bike to the library almost every day to draw and dream. During the school year she took art classes and every summer she returned to the library to copy the latest magazines. She majored in design in college and interned in New York, and gradually worked her way up to owning her own workshop.

  It had been a long fierce climb, but she’d made it. She was successful, envied, happily married. But it was just an illusion. While she worked unceasingly to establish herself as one of New York’s top designers, her loving husband had siphoned off their assets and disappeared.

  The bank had taken everything else.

  All she had left was her car and her reputation. The car was paid for, but her reputation wouldn’t be worth a two-martini lunch once the news got out that M Atelier had gone belly up.

  Margaux felt her chin quiver. Not now. She had one more thing to do before she broke down and howled at the moon.

  She slipped the business card out of her pocket and picked up her portfolio. She stepped into her secretary’s office. “Guess we’re the last two.”

  Yolanda looked up from a soggy Kleenex. Margaux thrust the business card toward her. “Liz Chang at DKNY has been threatening to steal you for years. Here’s her number. Call her.”

  Yolanda took the card. “She’d take you, too.”

  Margaux shook her head. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” She’d thought about hiring herself out again. But the thought stuck in her gut. She couldn’t do it. It was too humiliating. And she wouldn’t give her competition the sastisfaction of seeing her grovel. Not yet, anyway.

  “Good luck.” Margaux turned to leave and came face-to-face with the most recent photo of herself. An awards dinner at the Plaza. Tall, sleek, her impossibly curly auburn hair gelled, sprayed, and pulled back into a classic French twist that an earthquake wouldn’t ruffle. Her black evening gown, one of her own designs, had stopped conversation when she’d entered the room. She was holding a glass of Taittinger’s champagne and smiling. At the top of her game.

  And now the game was over.

  She walked across the long expanse of wooden floor to the elevator, her heels tapping in the deserted room. She stepped inside and closed the grate; listened to the rhythmic creak as the ancient elevator descended to the ground floor one last time, stood as it clanked at the bottom, then pushed open the door to the street.

  The air was thick with car fumes and the noise of living. Handcarts filled with goods rattled up the sidewalk. Garbage bags lined the curb. Men late for appointments shouldered past slower pedestrians. An old woman stuck her mittened hand out at Margaux. “Help an old lady?”

  Margaux couldn’t even help herself. She no longer belonged here, had no place here, no business, no apartment, no income.

  There was only one place she could go.

  Nick Prescott glanced up as the blip appeared on his radar. Resignedly, he tossed his History of the Ostrogoths in Italy onto the passenger seat beside him. He should be sitting in his office correcting final exams, not hiding in the trees waiting to ticket some unsuspecting speeder.

  Nick flipped on the siren, pulled the cruiser onto the tarmac, and took off after a bright blue sports coupe going at least sixty. The tourist season hadn’t even begun, and already the summer people were breaking the law.

  The car slowed and pulled to the sandy shoulder of the road. Nick followed and stopped several yards behind it. He noted the make, model, and license plate—New York—of course. Connecticut was their weekend retreat of choice.

  As he got out of the cruiser, he slipped on his sunglasses and unsnapped his holster. He’d been out of the army for ten years, and until six months ago, he never thought he’d ever use a firearm again.

  A woman sat behind the wheel, the window was open, her hair was windblown. Auburn, deep, rich, like burnished mahogany. A color that as a boy stopped him in his tracks. It stopped him now, even while his rational mind told him it couldn’t be her.

  He took a breath and stepped up to the car. “Ma’am.”

  She looked up at him with wide, serious blue eyes. Eyes the color of a sunlit sea.

  He’d know her anywhere in spite of the years that had passed. Felt the same jolt of connection he’d felt twenty years before. It hadn’t changed, hadn’t softened or diminished. And was still just as one-sided as it had always been. She had no idea who he was. “Do you know how fast you were going?”

  “Fifty-five?”

  “Sixty.”

  “But . . . that’s only five over the speed limit.”

  “It was—a mile back. But you’ve entered Crescent Cove and it’s thirty here.”

  A worried expression flitted across her face. “I didn’t see the sign.”

  “Driver’s license.”

  She riffled through an expensive-looking handbag and came up with an even more expensive-looking wallet.

  “Take it out, please.”

  She jimmied the license out of the plastic sheath and handed it to him. Her fingers trembled a little.

  “Margaux Sullivan.”

  She jumped as if the sound of her own name was a surprise. He frowned at the license, mainly to keep from staring at her.

  She clutched the edge of the window. Her nail polish was chipped. She definitely had been biting her nails. The cuticles, too. Not something you’d expect from a hotshot New York fashion designer. And though she had turned into a beautiful woman, there were dark circles under her eyes and she looked drawn, not just model-thin. It made her eyes larger, vulnerable.

  If this is what the big city did to you, she could have it. He studied her license. “New York City.”

  “Yes.”

  “Around here, Ms. Sullivan, we stick to the speed limit.”

  “I do, too,” she assured him. “I just didn’t realize I had entered the town limits.”

  “Uh-huh. Registration.”

  She fished in the glove compartment and handed it to him.

  He took a look, then handed it back and pulled out a citation pad from his back pocket. It was his job after all.

  “Officer,” she pleaded.

  “Chief of police.”

  “What? What happened to Herb Green?”

  “Retired.”

  He didn’t want to give her a ticket. Not with the way she was biting on her bottom lip. His heart was pounding and the sun beating down on his neck felt like a
third-degree burn. He wanted to take her hand and tell her that whatever was making her look so unhappy would go away. He would make it go away. But he didn’t. She’d been speeding, not five miles over, but twenty-five over. Ignorance was no excuse.

  He handed her the ticket. “Drive carefully.”

  When she eased the Toyota onto the road, he pulled out behind her. He stayed behind her all the way into town, down Main Street to the other side of town where it joined Shore Road. He followed her until she turned through the chain-link gate of Little Crescent Beach. She was on her way home, and that open gate might as well have slammed shut behind her.

  He jammed on the accelerator and sped away. For a few minutes he’d been young again. Just a townie boy with an ordinary dream. Not an ordinary man with no dreams left.

  Margaux gripped the steering wheel in an effort to keep from shaking. She didn’t have the money to pay for a speeding ticket. She barely had enough to pay for gas. When she’d slid her card into the gas pump on the way up, she prayed that it wouldn’t be denied.

  She drove slowly down Salt Marsh Lane, staring straight ahead, not even glancing at the summer house her best friend Bri’s family owned, or at the cottage Grace’s family rented each summer. She blinked away tears so close to the surface they hurt, but she resisted the urge to speed toward sanctuary. Most of the cottages were still boarded over from the winter, but small towns had a way of noticing things. It would be hard enough facing everyone without having to explain why she’d come running back or why the police had followed her home.

  When the lane reached the beach, it curved to the right. Three houses later, Margaux turned left into the parking niche at the back of the Sullivan beach house.