Nantucket Nights by Elin Hilderbrand Page A

house, because if she wasn’t in the water we figured she just went home without our knowing it. But the house had been ransacked. Like someone broke in or whatever. To be perfectly frank, we have no idea what’s going on.”
    Lindsey’s lip curled in an unattractive way. “Ransacked,” she said. Her voice could not have been more deadly.
    Kayla sighed. “You don’t believe me. Okay, I don’t blame you. You don’t know me, and here I am telling you these preposterous things. Why don’t we get some lunch and we can talk a little and then I’ll drive you out to Antoinette’s house and you can see for yourself? Who knows, maybe by then she will have turned up. Maybe we’ll have news.”
    Lindsey wiped the tissue under her eyes, mopping away the smeared mascara. “Fine, whatever,” she sniffed. “I could do with some food.”
    They went to lunch at The Brotherhood because it was dark and quiet and full of tourists, so Kayla would be unlikely to see anyone she knew. Although she’d polished off half the turkey sandwich, by the time they sat down at a table for two in the corner, she was hungry again. The restaurant smelled of French fries. Their waitress was a young blonde wearing a long patchwork skirt; she bore a disturbing resemblance to Missy Tsoulakis. Missy, Kayla knew, had moved to Greece right after graduating from college. This was her younger sister, maybe, Heather. Kayla ordered without looking up from her menu: clam chowder, green salad, iced tea. Lindsey got a burger. Kayla played with the spoon sticking out of the tiny pot of ketchup. This felt a little too civilized: sitting down to lunch, when twelve hours earlier all hell had broken loose. What if there was news? Raoul was expecting her home at any minute. Just as Kayla was about to excuse herself to call Raoul, Lindsey spread her fingers out on the scarred wooden table. She had a French manicure, and her nails were as smooth and pearly as shells.
    “What’s she like, my mother?”
    “Oh.” Kayla deflated in her chair. “Antoinette is ... well, she’s one of a kind. You look remarkably like her.”
    “Do I?” A flicker of pleasure crossed Lindsey’s face.
    “It’s astonishing. Antoinette is tall like you, and slender. Bronze skin. Curly hair. She’s into her dancing and her meditation, and she reads.”
    “What does she read?”
    “Novels, I think. Charles Dickens, J. D. Salinger. Toni Morrison.” Kayla closed her eyes, remembering the year when Antoinette’s Night Swimmers secret had been that she spent three months memorizing The Bluest Eye. And then to prove it, she started reciting.
    “Does she have a job?”
    “No,” Kayla said. “She hasn’t worked the whole time I’ve known her.” Kayla stirred the ketchup. She wasn’t about to bring up the divorce settlement or Antoinette’s money. “She seems to have her own life work to do. The dance, the reading. She takes a lot of walks, rides her bike.”
    Their food arrived, and they were quiet as they ate. Kayla sipped her buttery chowder, trying to ignore the fact that it held thousands of unnecessary calories, wondering what else to say about Antoinette. She danced, she read—and she had a lover who made her pregnant. Pregnant! Kayla could really alarm the girl with that piece of news, although to Lindsey, who was Antoinette but a woman who’d once been pregnant?
    “Your mother is a private person,” Kayla said. She stabbed a perfect coin of cucumber lying on top of her salad. “She had her heart broken a long time ago, when your father betrayed her, when she decided to give you up. Those losses hardened her. She built herself a life of inanimate objects, you know. Her life is her books, her wine, her bicycle. Things that can be replaced.”
    “She loved my father,” Lindsey said.
    “Obviously.” Kayla lifted two purple rings of onion off her salad and dumped them in her empty soup bowl. “But she’s never even told me his name.”
    “Darren Riley,” Lindsey