Page 38 of Everything You Hate
“This isn’t in Malcolm’s records.”
“Of course it isn’t.” Mimi pushes back from the table. “Come on. You’re not going to learn this island from a booth.”
Brine and Bean is two blocks down, painted with a mural of orcas and kelp forests, and it smells like cinnamon and ocean air. Half a dozen people under twenty-five are tapping at laptops with their names in bubble letters on their cups.
“Donna!” Mimi calls, pushing through the door. “This is Scarlett. Malcolm’s reporter. Be nice to her.”
The woman behind the counter has honey-blonde hair going silver at the temples and the warmest, most suspicious eyes I’ve ever seen. She’s wiping down the espresso machine and doesn’t stop when we walk in.
“Malcolm’s reporter.” She might as well be sayingroot canal. “Here for the Merrick version or the real one?”
“Both, ideally.”
That earns me a second look. She sets the cloth down. “Coffee?”
I’ve had more than enough caffeine today. “Please.”
She makes me an Americano without asking how I take it. “The Merricks are liars. All of them. Malcolm’s the worst because he believes his own, which makes him dangerous. Jasper’s cruel but predictable. Theodore’s the only decent one in the bunch, and that’s Birdie’s influence, not blood.”
I write it down. Donna watches me write and seems pleased about it.
“Malcolm’s philanthropy is performance art. He funds things that make him look good and defunds the things that don’t. The library renovation? That was Catherine’s project. He finished it after she died and put his own name on the plaque.” She leans on the counter. “Jasper put his first wife in the ground and called it a suicide, and half this island still believes him. The other half is too scared to say otherwise.”
“His first wife?”
“Georgina Caldwell. Sweet girl. Married him at twenty, dead by thirty. Jumped off a cliff, they said. Or was pushed. Depends who you ask and how much they’ve had.” She refills my cup without being asked. “The Merricks have been rewriting this island for a century. Malcolm’s just the current edition.”
At the corner table, a man with hands like knotted rope has been listening to all of it over a newspaper he isn’t reading.
“That’s Fish,” Mimi says. “His grandfather saw the Fairchild ship go down.”
Fish grunts.
“What year?” I ask.
He looks up. His eyes are the color of old pennies. “Don’t know.”
“Your grandfather didn’t say?”
“Told me he saw it. Didn’t say when.” He turns a page. Conversation over.
Donna refills his coffee on the way past. “He’s been telling that story for forty years and it’s never had a date in it.”
“Doesn’t need one,” Fish says, to the newspaper.
By noon there are four of them at that corner table—Fish, two women in their sixties, and a bearded man who arrives with a thermos of something that smells stronger than coffee. Mimi calls them the Bilge Rats and they answer to it.
“Evangeline ran off with Thomas the night before the wedding,” the first woman says. “Took her dowry. Gold, jewelry, the family heirlooms, the whole fortune.”
“Bullshit,” says the beard. “She took nothing but the clothes on her back. Charles Fairchild caught them at the dock and shot her. Bled out in Thomas’s arms.”
“Then where’s the body?”
“Weighted and dropped in the sound.”
“There was never a treasure,” the second woman says. “It was a deed. Evangeline’s grandfather willed her the north shore. Charles wanted it, she wouldn’t give it up, and he killed her for it.”
“Then how’d Thomas buy that land two years later?—”
