Edgewater (16 page)

I shook my head. “Actually, I need to stay focused. You know Gigi's never going to grow up, and Susannah may never wake up. Figuring out my family's finances is up to me.”

I stepped out into the corridor, and Lennox followed. “It's all going to work out,” she said. “I know it will.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it always has.”

“I hope so,” I managed.

“You know, I'm pretty sore from that lesson earlier. Altana had me riding without stirrups.” I knew from experience that was one of Altana's favorite exercises—she swore it was the best way to strengthen your legs and improve your balance. “Wanna come with me to the club for massages—my treat?”

“Can't,” I said. “I have to do Charger's stall.”

“All right,” Lennox said. She rolled her shoulders and wiped her brow. “Let's do it.”

“You don't have to,” I said. “Naomi's paying me to do this, but you're paying her so you don't have to.”

“Today Naomi gets two for the price of one,” Lennox said.

“What about your massage?”

“I'll get it later,” she said. “Right now I'd rather be with you.”

We headed down the corridor and started over, in Charger's stall, picking out the droppings and wet shavings. Horses may be majestic works of art, but they're also a bit gross. “So,” Lennox said, “you want to know something weird?”

“Always.”

“I Googled Victor Underhill, and I didn't find anything. Not one single thing about him.”

“He's not a politician,” I said as I swept shavings to the side of the stall. “He just worked for one.”

“But everyone has a footprint on the Internet these days,” Lennox said. She picked up Charger's water bucket and dumped the old water out through the drain in the floor. “Even Pepper has one. I think it's strange that there's not a trace of him—strange and suspicious.”

I leaned against the stall door. “You're always looking for things to mean something,” I told her.

“That's because they usually do.”

MY SECOND DAY ON THE JOB WAS MORE OF THE
same, sans Lennox. In the morning, I fed and groomed and tacked. In the afternoon, I helped Altana corral the bunch of ten-year-olds in her young-riders class. Basically I was just a safety blanket for one particularly anxious rider who was sitting atop Donut, the most docile horse boarded at Oceanfront. You practically had to cattle-prod Donut to remind him to breathe. I held the lead line as Donut plodded around the ring, and my
mind wandered to the letter I could write to Kathleen Strafford in the Hillyer Admissions Office:

Dear Ms. Strafford
,

As we discussed last week, my aunt has not sent in my tuition check for my senior year. Please know it does not reflect a lack of my commitment to Hillyer, just that my family is in a bad financial state right now.

I recently heard Julia Copeland give a speech about quality education, and as I listened, I couldn't help but think about how choosing to attend Hillyer in ninth grade was one of the best and most important decisions I have ever made for myself. I know you said there's no money left for scholarships, but would a loan be possible? I just want to spend my senior year at the school I think of as my home. I promise to pay you back as soon as I can.

Sincerely
,

Lorrie Hollander

A little hand tapped mine. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” a shrill voice said.

“You're doing great,” I told Lyle. “Keep it up.”

“Okay,” he said shakily, clearly not convinced. “But I think someone wants you.”

I'd been so busy composing the letter in my head that I hadn't heard Jeremy calling me from outside the ring. He waved me over to him.

“I'll be right back,” I told Lyle.

“You're leaving me?” he asked, eyes widening.

“You're fine,” I assured him. “Totally fine. Just do what you're doing. Follow the line. Let Donut know who's in charge. He's looking for a leader. That's you.”

Lyle clutched the reins so tightly his knuckles turned white, and I jogged over to the fence.

“Naomi was looking for you,” Jeremy said.

“Can you tell her I'm in a lesson?”

“She needs you now. You have a phone call in her office.”

I'd never gotten a call in Naomi's office before. I'd always had my cell phone for private calls. Not that my cell phone was working, but who would need me so badly that they'd track me down at the barn? My stomach muscles tightened in fear.

“Help!” Lyle called.

“I'll deal with him,” Jeremy said. “You go on.”

13

GOOD-BYE AND HELLO

MY TERROR ONLY INCREASED DURING THE WALK
across the pasture to Naomi's office, and with it came a horrible sense of déjà vu: I'd starred in this movie before—the girl heading from the stable to the administrative office, where the rug was about to be pulled out from under her. My mind raced as to who might have called Naomi with news so important that she had to summon me. The distance to her office seemed endless, and yet all too soon I was standing at her door. I said my mantra in my head:
yim, yim.
All these dumb Aunt Gigi lessons, and I was hanging on to them for dear life, like a drowning man to a life raft.

Naomi's door was slightly ajar, but it opened all the way with the lightest knock. Naomi was sitting back in her beat-up red leather wing chair, her feet propped up on the reconditioned barn door that served as her desk, ankles crossed. She looked
perfectly at ease. She wouldn't be sitting like that if she was about to deliver really bad news, right?

When she spotted me in the doorway, she winked. “Lorrie just walked in, so I'll put her on,” she said into the phone, and she paused, listening to the response on the other end. “It was great talking to you, too. And anytime you or your family need anything, seriously, you just give me a holler.”

She covered the mouthpiece and lowered her voice to a stage whisper as she handed me the receiver. “It's Charlie Copeland!”

Now, of all the people I thought might possibly track me down and call me at Oceanfront, Charlie had to be the absolute last person on the list.

“You can have my office to chat,” Naomi told me. “I've got to tend to a few things.” She winked again, and then she was out the door, closing it behind her.

“Charlie?” I said into the phone.

“Lorrie?”

My cheeks went hot at the sound of my name in his voice.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to track someone down without a last name?” he asked.

“I knew you were up to the challenge.”

“What is your last name?”

I hesitated. “Holl . . .
Hall
.” I said. I didn't know I would lie about it until the moment it was out of my mouth. “Lorrie Hall.” It came out more easily the second time. It had a nice, no-baggage ring to it.

“Lorrie Hall,” he repeated. I liked the sound of it. Especially in his voice. I could tell by his tone that he was smiling, and something inside me relaxed like an exhale. I wondered where
he was right then. Whenever I was on the phone with Lennox, I'd picture her where she was calling from—her car, her room, the sunroom that looked out on the moms' prized rose garden. And I knew exactly what image to call up in my head, because I knew what all those places looked like in real life. But in Charlie's case, save for his Porsche and his tree house and the ballroom-size foyer at the Compound, I didn't have any notion of his possible surroundings. I think because of the state of my home, I wondered a lot about everyone else's.

“Where are you right now?” I asked him.

“Home.”

“Where in your home?”

“In my room,” he said.

Charlie in his bedroom!

“Where are you?” he countered.

“I'm at Naomi's desk, in her big chair, which I've always wanted an excuse to sit in, so thanks for that.”

“Happy to be of service.”

“It used to be such a rare thing to be called to Naomi's office. It only happened if you did something really special, like the time I was youngest rider to win gymkhana.”

“I don't know what that is,” Charlie said.

“It's a series of timed games you play while riding. Naomi invited me in here and said I could put a picture of my horse on the wall. It's still up there now.” I spotted it from the vantage point of Naomi's chair—a gray mare named Spice. “You know, over the past couple days, I've been in this office more than I've been in it in the last decade.”

Naomi's office was an extension of her home, with a private
entrance so she didn't have people traipsing through her living room to get to it, and it was so unlike the home offices of my friends' parents. Those had been designed and decorated by professionals: chairs set at carefully measured distances from the desks and covered in fabrics that coordinated just so with the rugs and the curtains. Everything was expensive, and nothing was personal. But Naomi herself had chosen whatever was in her office, likely possessions she'd accumulated over time. Everything in the room had a reason for being there, and she managed to make it all look cozy without being cluttered. I imagined that the rest of her house was the same way. Since Naomi lived alone, the place wouldn't bear the stamp of anyone else's personality. She had been married and divorced years before, and now she said that tending the horses was like having a few dozen equine husbands, so she didn't need another human one.

“I remember seeing her in this chair and thinking she was the most amazing woman I'd ever known,” I told Charlie.

“And to think I got to speak to her—what's her last name?”

“Ward,” I said. No reason to lie about that one. “Naomi Ward. She owns and runs this place.”

“Naturally,” he said. “When I called, I asked to speak to the woman in charge.”

“The
woman
in charge?”

“I'm a feminist. Are you surprised?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Well, I am. But that's not really what I said when I called—the woman-in-charge thing. I called and asked for you, and when I said my name . . .”

“Right. Of course, in that case they would transfer you to whoever was in charge.”

“It's a curse sometimes.”

“You could've just said ‘It's Charlie calling.'”

“Ah, but I did,” he said. “Oceanfront has some pesky privacy policy whereby they won't confirm or deny if someone is boarding a horse there, so I couldn't even get them to agree to give you a message. That is, until I said
Copeland
.”

“The magic word,” I said. “Like
open sesame
.”

“Yeah, I suppose it is.” He paused. “So, Ms. Hall. There you are at Oceanfront.”

“Here I am,” I said. “How'd you know where to find me, anyway?”

“You mentioned your horse the other night, and I knew you had to board him somewhere around here, so I started calling barns. I figured, if I at least hit the right place, I could leave you a message.”

I couldn't believe he'd made the effort. “I'm glad you found me,” I told him.

“You could've just given me your number the other night,” he said.

“I didn't want to make it too easy for you.”

“I've earned it now, though, haven't I?”

He had. But I didn't have a phone number to give. I was always bumping up against the fact that I was actually Lorrie Hollander.

“Not quite yet,” I said coyly.

“Well, when you decide I've earned it, I'll be happy to take
it,” he said. “And I wanted to call because we didn't get to say good-bye the other night.”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “Lennox got caught taking pictures with her cell phone. Just a selfie, but zero tolerance and all that. We were escorted out.”

I left out the part in the middle. The part about seeing his father playing with the model trains. I didn't really have the vocabulary to describe the experience.

“No worries,” he said. “We can say a proper good-bye now.”

“Oh, okay. That's why you were calling—to say good-bye?”

“And other things, like ‘Hello.'”

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he said again. “Hello. How's Orion?”

I loved that he remembered the name of my horse. “He's on his way back from North Carolina as we speak, but I've gotten to ride a couple of the green horses in the meantime.”

“A horse of a different color! Are they Irish or something?”

“Figurative green,” I said, thinking of Nathan. “They call them that because they're too green to put new riders on.”

“But you're advanced enough.”

“Yes,” I said. When it came to riding, I didn't believe in modesty. “I've been doing it for years. Statistically, I
should
be pretty good at it by now.”