“What are you up to?” asked Cam.

“Headed up to Portsmouth a little while later,” Alexa said.

Cam nodded. “Good day for Portsmouth.” Sammy let out a little whine and started to pull at the leash and Cam said, “Sorry, boy, we’re going now. We really are.” To Alexa he said, “Duty calls! But I’ll be in touch soon.”

Who was he, Alexa wondered, to be so confident that she wanted him to be in touch? She remembered the kiss in his driveway. He had definitely kissed her back.

Alexa Thornhill, will you rate your experience with Cam Hartwell?

She’d give him a four and three-quarters out of five. Could be a little less earnest, she’d put in the comments. Then she pictured Cam reading that and becoming sad. He’d say something like, I’m not that earnest, am I? He would say that very earnestly, of course.

Alexa Thornhill, how likely would you be to see Cam Hartwell again? On a scale of one to ten, one being not at all likely and ten being very likely.

She brought her cup back inside and placed it carefully in the dish bin, noticing as she saw her reflection in the glass that she was grinning. Yeah, okay, sure, she’d go see Caitlin up in Portsmouth. She could feel herself getting nicer by the minute. Must be the Cam Effect.

20.

The Squad

We were not obsessed with Alexa Thornhill, if that’s what you’re thinking. We were grown women, with husbands and children and jobs, some full-time, some part-time, and many, many appointments. It would have been unseemly to take an interest in a seventeen-year-old.

But when we found out that Alexa posted videos on YouTube of course we took a quick look. We’re not sure what we were expecting. Something salacious, maybe. Alexa Thornhill is a very pretty girl. We’ve always wondered about her biological father because Alexa and Rebecca do not look that much alike. The hair, maybe. Not that Rebecca isn’t pretty enough. But Alexa is drop-dead: another league.

We were hoping for information that would give us a little something to talk about on the beach, or on our early morning walks, which some of us took three days a week, rain or shine.

We were not expecting to watch a video on cryptocurrency.

Serious walking is one of the best ways to lose weight, you know. We try to walk five miles at a stretch. The New England summer humidity sweats everything right off you. Some of us were eating Keto that summer too. Keto is very effective.

It was on one of these early morning walks a couple of weeks after Esther’s birthday dinner at Plum Island Grille that Michelle posited that there was something “off” about Sherri Griffin.

“What do you mean, ‘off’?” we said. Most of us knew that Michelle was at work writing some sort of psychological domestic thriller set in our town. She called it “Girl on the Train-esque” but honestly we didn’t think it would amount to much. She wasn’t even a writer. But that was Michelle for you, always taking up something new, throwing pasta at the wall to see if it would stick. There was the scented candle business, a few years ago. The shares she bought in an ice hotel up in Montreal, then sold again after the warm winter. The alternative preschool that she thought up to compete with the Montessori school on Inn Street. Nothing came from any of those endeavors.

“She seems like someone who’s got some grit in her oyster,” said Michelle. She told us this was a phrase she’d picked up from one of the writing blogs she was always reading. She explained that it meant that somebody had something dark in their past. Something they were trying to escape, or something they were trying to figure out. Obviously we already knew what the phrase meant, but we let Michelle have her moment. “Definite grit,” she repeated.

Our route took us from Cashman Park down the boardwalk along the river, past the new harbormaster’s hut, and onto the new section of the rail trail, which is really something. We had to break into smaller groups when we hit the rail trail, so that we weren’t taking up the whole thing. In the past we have been accused by some of the town’s old-timers of “traveling in a horde.”

Michelle was still on the oyster and the grit. Those of us who were walking with her suspected that she preferred talking about the elements of a psychological thriller to actually writing a psychological thriller. “Mark my words,” she said ominously.

Some of us went back to talking about Alexa Thornhill’s YouTube videos, and whether or not Rebecca knew that Alexa had decided not to go to college to focus on her “career.” We can’t tell you where we heard that—it was told to us in confidence. But we can say that the information came from more than one source, and that the sources were reliable.

Rebecca didn’t join us on the walks anymore. We didn’t blame her! She was still adjusting to the new normal. But without the walking and without the barre class, we weren’t sure how she was staying so thin.

Of course we were there for her, when it happened. It was a shock to the community too. Peter had been so healthy, so vibrant. He ran in the Yankee Homecoming ten-mile race every summer. He was on the school committee and the board of Our Neighbors’ Table. He was not yet fifty! There one day, and then gone. We set up a Meal Train for an entire month after the funeral. We took Morgan whenever we could, to give Rebecca a break. Believe us, we were there.

“I don’t think we mention it to Rebecca,” Dawn said finally. “It’s not our business.”