A Beach Wish

  Dedication

  To my children, Nick and Emma

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  About the Author

  Also by Shelley Noble

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Zoe Bascombe graduated in marketing because, according to her family, she’d never make a real career out of music. What they’d meant was that she wouldn’t climb a corporate ladder with hard work and smart investments—the only success they understood—but what she heard was, You don’t have the talent to be a rock star.

  She didn’t want to be a rock star, she didn’t want to be any kind of star, she wanted to write music. She’d studied piano—all well-heeled girls did—and tried her hand at composing; she even received a guitar one Christmas from her brother Chris. But when it came time to audition for Juilliard, she’d choked. She aced the entrance exam to Wharton. So . . .

  After graduation, she landed a job at MAX4, a cutting-edge New York music event organizer, that put her close to music as she tackled exposure—marketing and physical; arranged transport for temperamental VIPs; synched schedules and herded staff members with less interest and ambition than her, hoping, praying, that somehow the climb up this corporate ladder would lead her to what she actually loved. Music.

  And then she was downsized.

  One day she was everybody’s darling, the most requested project manager, the most indefatigable worker, the best packer—she never arrived anywhere with a wrinkle. Then . . .

  “Due to a restructuring of the company . . .”

  “It isn’t your fault,” she was assured by her superiors, all long-haired, jean-wearing corporate types. “We hate to see you go. But . . . seniority. You’ll land on your feet. Hang in. Good luck.”

  There were tears. Not hers. She just gathered up her personal items and left, no closer to music than when she’d been doodling in the margins of her Marketing Strategy textbook as she sat in class on the Wharton campus.

  She spent three months looking for jobs by day and writing music and going to clubs by night.

  It didn’t take that long to know she couldn’t afford to keep her apartment. So, leaving a month’s rent with her two roommates, she returned home to live in her old room with her mother as her only companion.

  Home. That day, home seemed like a failure, and family—like her revolving door of VIPs—was just a bunch of people to make happy and all too ready to complain about how you were doing your job.

  Or they would have been if she hadn’t walked into the kitchen three days later to find her mother dead on the floor.

  A blood clot, they said. Jenny Bascombe had been living on borrowed time. Had known she was. And like the consummate organizer she was, she had planned her own funeral. Or in Jenny’s case, the lack thereof.

  She wanted her ashes spread on Wind Chime Beach, a place none of her family had ever heard of. She’d left it to Zoe to arrange transport.

  Chapter 1

  Zoe Bascombe shot both hands through her hair, leaving it in short, dark spikes. “I don’t know why they’re all angry at me.”

  She looked back at the porch steps where her family stood framed by her mother’s perennial border. Her two eldest brothers, Errol and Robert, tall and blondish like their father, though Errol’s hairline was beginning to recede. Their wives, suitably thin and coiffured. Their several children, fidgety with that glazed-eye look that said they’d been away from their iPhones too long.

  There was also an aunt and two uncles on her father’s side. No father—he had left them years ago for his new secretary. And her mother’s attorney, the one person who looked back sympathetically at Zoe where she stood by the door of her SUV.

  They were still in a state of angry denial. Zoe was, too.

  Her youngest brother, Chris, also blond, the most handsome of the three and her only ally, opened the driver’s door. “You better get going if you want to miss rush hour.”

  Zoe tried to smile. “It’s always rush hour on Long Island.”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  Easy for him to say. He didn’t have to drive to the back of beyond with their mother’s ashes strapped into the passenger seat. “Why—”

  “Hush. Just go and find out. She must have had a reason. She always had a reason.”

  For everything, Zoe finished.

  “I could go with you.”

  Zoe shook her head. “Just me. Like you said, she must have a reason.”

  “She trusted you to do it.” He choked back a laugh. “Check out Errol. He looks like he’d happily toss her into the perennial border and be done with it.”

  “She’d be happy there,” Zoe said. Her mother’s garden was famous, appeared every spring in all the local magazines. “So why does she want to go to this Wind Chime place? She’s never even been there. And why—”

  “Just go. Call me when you get to the hotel.”

  “It will be late.”

  “Call me.” He gave her a quick hug.

  Zoe slid into the car.

  Chris shut the door, smiled, and stepped back.

  Zoe took a quick last look in her rearview mirror, where her family appeared as a perfectly framed photo for a bare second before dispersing out of frame. Like an Etch A Sketch drawing turned upside down.

  Zoe could practically hear them wiping their hands of the situation.

  She didn’t look back again. She drove straight down the driveway and onto the street, cutting off life as she knew it in the blink of a turn signal.

  It was a hot day and she turned on the air-conditioning. She’d rather lower the windows and let the air blast in to ruffle her hair—brunette like her mother’s—but she was afraid of disturbing the simple celadon urn that her mother had bought for the purpose.

  Putting the urn in the passenger seat had been Chris’s idea. His idea of humor . . . Humor was Chris’s way of coping. But Zoe knew it was because neither of them could stand the idea of their mom smothered in the darkness of a tote bag on the floor of the back seat.

  Zoe glanced at the urn. “It’s not like you’re going to want to chat.”

  Was sarcasm a stage of grief? Because she’d been feeling really sarcastic lately.

  “Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you let me help? Why?”

  She didn’t expect an answer and she didn’t get one. Her mother wouldn’t be answering ever again. She’d already said her last word on the subject—any subject.

  Zoe sped up and passed under a light just as it turned red. She waited for a siren, that humiliating pull to the side of the road. A ticket. Or for lightning to strike. For a voice from the grave. Only there was no grave. Just the jar of the corporeal remains of Mrs. Jennifer Campbell Bascombe sitting on the seat beside her.

  She reached for the radio, pulled her hand back. Her mother didn’
t really like music. Never let her or Chris play the car radio as kids. He was her closest brother, seven years older. Zoe had been the “surprise baby,” not that anybody but her mother had seemed to welcome the surprise.

  Zoe hummed under her breath. She needed air; she needed music. She needed to know why she was driving her mother out of state to be laid to rest with strangers.

  In her own way, Jenny Bascombe had been a stranger. Not that she ever let it show. But now that Zoe looked back on it—and she’d had plenty of time to do that in the past few days—there had been moments when her mother had seemed . . . remote.

  Chris called it passive aggressive. Zoe wasn’t so sure.

  She merged onto the highway. Made her way into the left lane. The sooner she got there, wherever there was, the sooner she could . . . fill in the blank. Get back home? The boys were probably already putting up the “For Sale” sign on the midcentury ranch where they’d all grown up.

  Look for a job? The will had been read. As always her mother had left no loopholes. She’d been wealthier than Zoe realized, and she’d divided her estate equally among her children except donations to a handful of her favorite charities. Now Zoe would have time to find the job she really wanted.

  Not as a songwriter. That would seem like a betrayal. Still . . . a melodic line wove through her head, just a few notes; she’d been working on it before . . . but it had been silent since her mother’s death. She’d thought it was lost forever.

  “You might as well know. I brought my guitar. I found it in the attic when we were cleaning it out. It’s in the back seat. Remember the Christmas Chris bought it for me? He wrapped it himself. He must have used two rolls of paper to get it all covered. I remember your face when he brought it out of hiding. I never knew if it was because it was a guitar or because he’d used the expensive wrapping paper.” Zoe sighed. “I guess I’ll never know now.”

  Why hadn’t she talked to her mother more? After Chris left for college, and her father moved out, it had been just the two of them. She could tell her mother almost anything, but now it occurred to her that her mother had never talked about herself. She’d expressed concern over her rose bushes, wondered aloud if she should make petit fours or meringues for the Friends of the Library fund raiser. Deliberated over what to give the grandchildren for their birthdays. But nothing about her.

  “Why was that, Mom?”

  It didn’t even feel odd, Zoe still doing the talking and her mother, if not listening, at least not interrupting. The way, Zoe realized, it had always been.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me . . . babe.” She smiled. “‘Babe. I’ve got you, babe,’” she sang, knowing if her mother were hanging about in the afterlife, it would piss her off.

  A song in a stack of old LPs on a turntable she and Chris had found in the attic one rainy Sunday afternoon. They’d taken them downstairs and were singing along to Sonny and Cher—before, according to Chris, Cher had found Bob Mackie, all three of whom Zoe’d had to Google.

  Their mother had burst into the bedroom, her face a livid red, her body shaking with wrath from her cultured pearl necklace to the razor cuffs of her linen slacks. She snatched the arm off the record, sending the needle scratching across the surface.

  Without a word she gathered up the albums and the player, yanking the cord out of the socket without a thought, and left the room.

  They never saw them again.

  Actually, they never even mentioned them again. Only in their most outrageous moments did they dare recall even to each other the “S-and-C incident.”

  Now they would never know what had set her off. And at this moment nothing seemed more important than to know why their suburban garden-club mother had revealed that one brief glimpse into whatever was lurking deep inside her manicured façade.

  Why hadn’t Zoe realized it before now? There had always been a part of Jenny Bascombe that she didn’t share. Maybe Zoe was about to find out what it was.

  “‘I’ve got you, babe,’” Zoe sang at the top of her lungs, and burst into tears.

  It took Zoe an hour just to get to the Whitestone Bridge, which would connect her to I-95 North, where the real trip would begin. She inched her way up the parkway, caught between Long Island rush hour commuters desperate to get home and island weekenders desperate to get to the beach. But she was wrapped in such a fog of looming disaster and nagging doubt that she’d hardly noticed.

  Traffic didn’t let up when she eased onto the highway and was met with another sea of cars. Where were all these people going? I-95 was a nightmare at the best of times. Today wasn’t one of those. Maybe she should have flown somewhere and rented a car. But could you fly with . . . ? She didn’t even want to think about it.

  So she hunkered down for the long haul and did what she always did when she could snatch time to herself. Wrote lyrics in her head. Hummed a tune to go with them . . . the same elusive melody that kept pushing at her mind since she’d turned onto the highway . . . the one she thought she’d lost along with her mother. Would she forget her mother as easily as she’d forgotten that kernel of song?

  She always forgot them if she didn’t write them down. Which she couldn’t do in traffic and she was too embarrassed to sing them into her phone’s note recorder. Especially in front of her mother.

  Get a grip. She can’t hear you. She’s gone. Maybe. Of course she was gone.

  She tested the tune out loud, glanced at the urn. “You can blame Sonny and Cher.” Though except for that one time, her mother had never discouraged her interest in music. Had driven her to her piano lesson once a week even though it was twenty minutes away. Of course, everything on Long Island was at least a twenty-minute drive.

  Zoe had even caught her occasionally wearing earbuds while she gardened, though Zoe had assumed she was listening to a recorded book. Now she wondered. Had her mother been a closet heavy metal fan? Country-western? Bach?

  Zoe’s stomach growled. When she reached New Haven, she pulled into a drive-through. No way was she going to leave her mother unattended or take her inside a restaurant. She got a hamburger and a drink, texted Chris with an update, and ate as she drove.

  Why had she agreed to do this? Nobody was happy with it. They tried to talk her out of it. She wanted to be talked out of it. But she knew she would do it. It was her mother’s final request.

  “I wish I could be happy about this,” she told the urn. “I wish I understood.”

  Only a few times had Zoe glimpsed moments of the other woman she’d begun to suspect lived inside her mother. Perhaps only the vestiges of a younger self. She’d tried to imagine her mother as a sorority party girl, or a Cher groupie following the band, wearing strings of beads and waving incense. But she just couldn’t.

  Her mother had been . . . contained. Going about life as if it had been preordained, doing it with a smile, usually. She was never late for car pool, baked cookies for school birthdays, belonged to committees, spearheaded food drives, had the best perennial border in town.

  She loved her children and her husband—until twelve years ago, when he left them for his secretary, Ashley, and he became, for all intents and purposes, “that lousy rat bastard.” It was the only swear word Zoe had ever heard her mother say.

  She doted on Zoe, something the boys said would keep her daughter from realizing her full potential. Maybe it had. But it had also kept her from missing her father, or feeling guilty that maybe somehow his leaving was her fault.

  The silence stretched to an hour, then two. Connecticut passed into Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and at last New Hampshire. Zoe actually welcomed the usually irritating voice of “the girl”—she refused to give her GPS a name—when she said to turn off at the next exit.

  She turned onto an access road. Gas stations, fast-food restaurants, drugstores, traffic lights. And more traffic lights.

  One town melted into another as trees and houses gave way to more gas stations, fast food, then more towns, and more . . . This went on for anothe
r hour and Zoe wondered why “the girl” hadn’t just kept her on the highway longer.

  The sun began to set behind her. The fast food and gas stations fell away, leaving only trees and fields. The road became narrower, the trees denser, the houses sporadic. And it was rapidly becoming dark.

  “Turn right in three-quarters of a mile.”

  “We must be getting closer,” she told the urn. She made the turn onto an even smaller road, covered by low-hanging trees that managed to cut out what little light was left by the encroaching night. The few buildings that appeared in clearings in the trees were closed for the night—or forever. It was hard to tell. She began to doubt the reliability of her GPS.

  It should be only another half hour to the inn where she’d reserved a room. She stretched her back, turned on her high beams only to have the light bounce back.

  Fog. Great. A half hour? With the fog it could easily stretch into an hour.

  “Turn right at the next—”

  “What? Where—” She almost missed it. The small sign was practically covered over with underbrush.

  Zoe turned right, straight into oblivion.

  Well, actually, it was just a rutted road that might have been paved at one time, but had long ago lost most of its surface. Surely this wasn’t the way to the spa. “Exclusive” was one thing, but “take your life in your hands to get there” was another.

  She slowed, swerved to miss a huge rut only to hit another. The SUV lurched and Zoe automatically stuck out a hand to protect her passenger.

  And came face-to-face with a tree. She slammed on the brakes. The road forked to either side; two signs appeared in the beam of her headlights. A weathered wooden one with an arrow pointing to the right fork and letters she could hardly make out. Except private.

  Okay, they wouldn’t be going there. The other sign was in moderately better shape and announced town to the left. She turned left.

  This had to be the back way into town, the old road, one of those GPS decisions to take her on the route with no tolls or no traffic jams or something.

  The Solana Inn and Spa had a great website. Had looked very upscale. Modern, fêng shui’ed into the next century. Zoe had stayed in a lot of great hotels because of her work, but she would never personally consider staying in a place that expensive, that healthy, or that trendy, but she was glad she had this time.