Prologue
Danny Leavitt, a gangly eight-year-old with a severe peanut allergy, was the one who discovered the body. It was early, maybe 7:30 a.m., and he’d been riding his black Schwinn bike around town to search for snails after the big storm they’d had the night before. The boardwalks were wet and slippery and covered with leaves and small branches blown off by the strong winds. It hadn’t been a tropical storm, but it’d been close—an intense microburst that had hit the island unexpectedly, sending deck furniture flying and doing some light damage to several roofs around the village. Danny’s house, which was right on the beach, was fine, the power intact, but his mom yelled after him to be careful as he left, warning of potential downed wires.
He’d ridden for about ten minutes, going from the ocean down to the bay on the walk that he lived on, Surf. Then he decided to ride over to Neptune Walk, where the playground was, to see what shape it was in. He turned on Harbor from Surf, passed Atlantic, Marine, and Broadway, and then turned left on Neptune. Something shiny caught his eye in front of the Cahulls’, a friendly couple with one little kid, Archie. He stopped and got off his Schwinn to see a bike, nearly hidden in the woody, shrubby area that lined the boardwalks, about a three-foot-drop down. The town had lifted all the walks after flooding from Hurricane Sandy, and Danny’s dad, along with many other people in Salcombe, thought they’d gone overboard. “Someone could break their neck,” he remembered his dad muttering.
Danny figured the bike had been blown away by the wind, so he grabbed its wheel and dragged it up onto the boardwalk, no easy feat—it was a grown-up’s bike, and Danny was small for his age. It was then he saw that the bike had been covering something else: a person, facedown in the reeds. The body was angled strangely and not moving at all. Danny felt his throat close, almost as if he’d eaten a peanut. He hadn’t, had he? He ran to the Cahulls’ house and banged on the door loudly, shivering and scared. Marina came quickly, in her pajamas and glasses, holding Archie, a concerned look on her face. Marina was very pregnant.
“Danny Leavitt? Are you okay?”
Danny could barely get the words out.
“There’s someone out there on the ground, I think they fell off the boardwalk on their bike. They’re not moving.”
Marina put her son down and called for her husband, Mike.
“Come inside now. Mike and I will handle it. You just stay here.”
Mike, in sweatpants and a sleep-rumpled T-shirt, passed them by and went out to look at the find. Marina smiled at Danny. They were silent for a minute. Mike came back into the house. He seemed tense, like when Danny’s dad had a bad day at work.
“Take Danny back to his house, and take Archie with you. Don’t look at the body. I’m going to call the police. Or whoever it is out here that they call police.”
The body? Danny had only heard that phrase in TV shows his parents watched. Marina grabbed her son, who was fussing, and led Danny down the walkway toward his bike, redirecting him away fromthe body,as Danny now thought of it. She told Danny to ride home and then put her son in the baby seat of her bike and took off after him.
Danny wasn’t part of the excitement after that, but he did get to speak to two police officers that day (they were real police officers, weren’t they?) and tell them what he’d found and how he’d found it. His parents seemed upset; he’d overheard them speaking in a loud whisper in their bedroom after the cops had left.
“Great, now he’s going to be the ‘dead body’ kid—this is going to be the talk of Dalton,” said his mom, Jessica.
“I wonder if there’s a way we can sue the town,” said his dad, Max. “I’m not paying two million dollars for my beach house, plus fifty thousand in property taxes, for my son to find a corpse. Someone needs to pay for this.”
But overall, Danny felt pretty good about discovering the first murder victim in Salcombe, like, ever. He was looking forward to telling all his friends at camp about it. How cool was that?
PART IJune 26
1Lauren Parker
Lauren Parker was in desperate need of a great summer. This winter had been awful. First of all, it had been freezing since December. Lauren hated the cold. If she could move to Miami, she would—it seemed like everyone else she knew was doing just that. But Jason’s job was based in New York, and he needed to occasionally stop by the office. He was the boss, after all. (“If you’re the boss, why can’t you justdeclareyou’re moving to Florida?” Lauren kept asking. “You don’t go in during the summer!” She never got a good reply.)
Secondly, the Upper East Side school that Lauren’s kids went to, Braeburn Academy, had been embroiled in a public scandal, and for months, it was all anyone within a twenty-block radius could talk about.
It started in February, when the school’s board received an anonymous email about Mr. Whitney, Braeburn’s revered headmaster of twenty years. Mr. Whitney was a Braeburn legend—British, in his late sixties, fond of bow ties and fountain pens, he’d taken the academy from B-list to a true competitor on the scene. Braeburn was now the preferred choice for the most discerning New York City parents, including the Parkers, who bragged to all their friends about Mr. Whitney’s unwillingness to bend to the winds of social change.
So, when the board received the accusatory email, it was as if a bomb had gone off on Ninety-third Street and Madison: Mr. Whitney wasn’t who he said he was. He was a fraud, according to the widely forwarded screed, a community college dropout who’d forged his résumé twodecades ago and tricked Braeburn’s leadership into hiring him. They’d all been had by a swindler, a guy from New Jersey who’d pretended to be from England, who’d created a character that specifically, smartly, preyed on the status-obsessed dupes of the Upper East Side.
The story leaked, ending up as a cover inNew Yorkmagazine (“How Francis Whitney Tricked New York’s Upper Crust”). Lauren and her mom friends were completely mortified. They’d all gone to great lengths to secure spots for their children at Braeburn and shelled out $50,000 per kid for the privilege of attending. To have it all revealed as a scam, as the rest of the private school circuit sniggered, was a real blow.
“I still can’t believe this happened to us,” said Lauren’s friend Mimi Golden recently, sighing. They were having a glass of wine at Felice, on Eighty-third Street. Mimi had come from a Botox touch-up, and her forehead was speckled with red dots where the needle had entered. “I don’t want to talk about it for one more second. We’re decamping for the Hamptons next week. When are you heading out to Fire Island?”
“On Saturday,” said Lauren. “Jason’s been busy with work, so we haven’t had a chance to open the house yet.”
“How’s everything going with you two?” Mimi asked, staring at Lauren with what Lauren imagined Mimi thought was a “concerned look,” but the toxins wouldn’t allow for that. Lauren, after three wines and no food at a fundraiser, had mentioned that Jason had been completely ignoring her. Mimi had pressed her about it since.
Lauren looked down at her glass of chardonnay. She strived to project an image of perfection and stylish ease; messiness and vulnerability had always been weaknesses to avoid. But this year had been a doozy, and for the first time in her life, she was struggling to keep up the charade. “Fine, fine. All good.” She quickly changed the subject—Mimi was fun, but you couldn’t trust her as far as you could throw her. “I’m also done with this year,” Lauren continued. “I need to go sit on a beach, read a book, and never hear the wordscammeragain.”
She and Jason had discussed pulling Arlo, seven, and Amelie, five, out of Braeburn, but ultimately, the board was able to salvage the school’s reputation by stealing the headmaster of Collegiate, Mr. Wolf, a veteran whobrought clout and legitimacy. None of the parents cared that tuition was raised to fund Mr. Wolf’s wildly high salary. They’d pay anything for this nightmare to end. The Parkers put next year’s deposits down at Braeburn for Arlo and Amelie. All was right again on the Upper East Side.
The temperature in the city had started to warm, and the tulips had already bloomed and died on Park Avenue. Lauren couldn’t wait to get to their beach house in Salcombe, on Fire Island, which had been sitting empty since last Labor Day. (Salcombe, named after a British seaside town, was pronounced “Saul-com,” with a silentbande.The townspeople liked how refined it sounded and scoffed when outsiders called it “Sal-com-BE.”) The Parkers usually started going for weekends in late April, but because of a glut of birthday parties, plus Jason’s packed work schedule, they hadn’t yet had a chance. Lauren had a team of cleaners arrive at the house the week before to open it up—get rid of a winter’s worth of accumulated dust, make sure the bike tires were filled with air, unpack the multiple deliveries she’d had sent from FreshDirect and Amazon, plus the cheeses, olives, and meats from Agata & Valentina.
Once they went out to the house, they stayed through the summer; Jason used to travel back and forth just for weekends, but the new world order allowed everyone to work remotely, so all the dads were there, too (a development the wives pretended to be thrilled about). The kids attended camp, and Lauren spent her days hanging with girlfriends at the tennis courts and the beach—there was really nothing more to do than that. They also brought their nanny, Silvia, a Filipino woman who had raised three children of her own, to live with them for the summer. During the rest of the year, Silvia worked from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., commuting to Manhattan from Queens. Occasionally, Lauren wondered if Silvia, who was just the right combination of self-sufficient and unobtrusive, hated it in Salcombe. But having her there meant Lauren and Jason were free to go out with friends, be on their own schedules, and not have to deal with the hassle of making breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the kids, even on weekends.
