“Cool,” he said.
Joan wanted to dry off, but she didn’t want to do it in front of Duane, so she kept the towel wrapped around her and slid her own sandals back on her feet, trying to ignore the wet sand trapped between her toes.
“I’m going to head back now. I’m cold.”
“Oh, okay,” Duane said. “See you tonight.” He turned awkwardly, and made his way in the direction of the hotel. Joan, happy that he hadn’t waited for her, dried herself off, pulled on her denim shorts, all while watching Duane work his way up the beach pretty slowly. Maybe he was hoping she’d try to catch up with him. She wasn’t planning on it, though, and she wasn’t planning on meeting him and his townie friends at the beach later, either. What she really wanted to do now was to find Richard and report on this interaction. When Duane was far enough ahead of her, she hung her towel over her neck and made her way back to the Windward.
Dinner that night was meatloaf, and the only good news about that was there was also mashed potatoes.
Joan’s father was napping, so it was Joan and her mother and her sister, and halfway through the meal, Denise, Lizzie’s new friend, joined them. She was a senior at NYU and she had a really short haircut, but with one long strand that came down the left side of her head, and that she kept tucking behind her ear, almost like a nervous tic. She wore a tank top and had one of those tattoos all the way around her bicep muscle, a little interlocking pattern, and Joan wondered what it would look like when Denise was old and saggy.
“Have you started to think about college yet?” Denise asked Joan.
She hadn’t, but said, “Maybe somewhere in Boston,” just to have something to say.
“So you think you might want a city school instead of a country school?”
“I guess so.”
Denise then told a long story about the nine different colleges she’d applied to and the ones she’d gotten into and the ones she hadn’t, and Lizzie kept smiling at her and nodding along like it was the most fascinating thing she’d ever heard.
While they were talking, Joan saw Richard, who she’d spotted earlier with his aunt and uncle, go up to the buffet. It was relatively quiet up there, so Joan quickly finished all the potatoes on her plate and told her mom she was going back up for more.
“She’s got a hollow leg,” her mother said, as Joan got up, leaving her dirty plate at the table like you were supposed to.
The buffet had two sides, the trays of food identical on both so it didn’t matter which side you went down. Joan cut into the line on the opposite side from Richard, grabbed some more potatoes, then said, “Hey,” across the sneeze barriers.
He’d been getting more potatoes, as well, and he looked up.
“Meet me in the library after dinner,” Joan said. “I have news.”
Richard nodded, and Joan went back to her table, feeling a little stupid and a little excited at the same time. It felt as though they were playacting, being secretive, but it wasn’t entirely playacting, was it? When Richard talked about doing something to Duane, he seemed serious.
When Joan got to the library, Richard wasn’t there yet, which was fine since there was a woman in a muumuu looking through the fiction shelves. Joan pulled a random Judy Blume book from the kids’ section and plopped down on one of the leather chairs. It was Deenie, a book she thought her older sister had once read, and she flipped through the pages, not looking at them. The woman, whose hair was dyed and stiff and looked like a helmet, kept talking to herself as she browsed the books, saying things like, “Oh, I think I’ve read that one,” or reading the titles out loud. At last she pulled a book down, a chunky paperback, and was quiet while reading its back cover. “I guess this’ll have to do,” she said aloud, then glanced in Joan’s direction. Joan kept her eyes on her own book. The woman left.
About ten minutes passed, and Joan was pretty sure that Richard wasn’t going to show up. She felt angry again, wondering if he was trying to avoid her, but then he was suddenly standing at a nearby shelf. She hadn’t heard him come in.
“Oh, hi,” she said, as though they were meeting randomly.
“Hi, there,” he said.
Joan leaned over in her chair to see around the shelf that was in the middle of the room.
“We’re alone here,” he said.
“Oh, good. Guess who I talked with today?”
“Duane?”
“Yep. I was swimming right before dinnertime and when I got out of the water he was standing by my clothes and towels waiting for me. Like he hadn’t attacked me the other night.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted to know if I’d come down to the beach again tonight and hang out with him and his friends.”
“Jesus. What did you say?”
“I was going to tell him off, but then I figured maybe I’d say that I was going to come, at least lead him on a little.”
“Uh-huh,” Richard said. He seemed to be thinking.
“He said there would be more kids there this time, including two girls who are staying at some rental house. I guess he figured I might come if I knew other girls would be there.”
“So are you going to go, or what?” Richard said.
“Where? To Duane’s beach party?”
“Yeah.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Maybe you should go, but just for a little bit, like one beer, then leave.”
“Last time I went he was all over me. This time he’ll probably kill me, or something.”
Richard grinned, exposing his very white teeth. “I don’t think Duane is a serial killer. At least not yet.”
“Why do you think I should go?”
“It will be like baiting the hook. Remember we talked about how the best way to kill Duane was to get him out to the end of the jetty and then push him in the water?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’ve got to get him interested first, make him think he has an actual chance with you. And then it will be easy to lead him out to the jetty.”
“Tonight?” Joan said too loud, then whispered, “You want me to lead him out there tonight?”
“No, not tonight. There’ll be other people on the beach, and they’ll all know you went with him. No, I just think you should show up tonight to keep him interested, and then sometime next week you could ask him to secretly meet you at the end of the jetty.”
“You are using me as bait?”
“I guess so,” Richard said. “Do you feel like a worm?”
“A little bit.”
There was a sound in the hallway, like someone knocking on a door, and Richard went to the entryway to the library and looked out. “Nothing,” he said when he came back.
“Do you think it will be safe if I go meet Duane and his friends tonight? I mean, do you think there will really be other girls there?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “If you want, I could go down to the beach, too, and spy on the party. It will be dark, and I don’t think they’ll see me. That way I can make sure that you get there safe and that you’re able to leave. Just don’t stay long, but act like you don’t totally hate Duane. Then later he’ll do whatever you ask him to do.”