Read Online Edgewater by Courtney Sheinmel - Free Book Online Page B

in there. We didn’t have a designated utensil drawer with one of those organizers to separate everything into neat little sections. Nope—the utensils were subject to the same chaos as everything else in our house.
    â€œDon’t think I didn’t know what you wanted to do with those,” I said.
    â€œYou think you know everything about everybody, don’t you?” he asked me.
    But he didn’t stick around to hear my answer. The screen door slammed shut behind them.
    That was my life these days: a series of doors slammed shut.
    With Susannah and Brian gone, I went around the kitchen opening various drawers, on the hunt for whatever other pieces I could find of Grandma’s silver. I think there’d originally been twelve each of the forks, knives, and spoons, plus serving pieces. I found maybe half, buried under a hundred other things—a screwdriver, a paperback book with the cover torn off, a broken pair of scissors, a stretched-out Slinky, an old photograph of my parents looking young and happy. I paused for a second, staring at them. Susannah had inherited the recessive blond gene, but my hair was chestnut brown, like both of my parents’. My face was mostly my mother’s—same eyes and arched brows, same small space between our upper lips and our noses.
    I dropped the photo back in and slammed the drawer shut. Somewhere in the house was the velvet-lined wooden box that the silver was meant to be stored in, to prevent the blackenedtarnish Brian had so diligently been cleaning off. God, he never did anything without an ulterior motive. But Susannah was an ostrich with her head in the sand about all things Brian Beecher. About a lot of things, actually.
    Where the box was hiding was anyone’s guess, and I didn’t have the time or the inclination for that game of hide-and-seek. I collected all the silver I could find, put my loot in a paper bag, and ran it up to my bedroom closet. Only then did I finally leave the house for my morning run.
    I RAN ALONG THE BEACH WITHOUT A SPECIFIC destination in mind. But somehow, instinctively, as my heart pounded and my legs ached, missing a thousand pounds of horse between them, I ended up at Oceanfront, the only place in Idlewild I ever really felt comfortable. I went into the barn, greeting the horses in their stalls as I made my way back to the one that had last been Orion’s. The stall was empty, but there was a fresh bedding of cedar chips on the floor, which meant someone was boarded here in Orion’s absence, probably a horse out on its own morning ride. Around the corner came a voice: “Not to worry, Ma. I’ll get you a check tonight.”
    When I peeked around, I spotted Jeremy Gummer, a cell phone pressed against his ear, at the far end of the corridor. Gumby Gummer. That had been his childhood nickname, he’d once told me, and it fit. He was tall and lanky but with a softness to him. Not sharp like Brian, and not solid and square like Charlie.
    Everyone knew Jeremy’s story: He used to be a weekender in Idlewild, who boarded a horse at Oceanfront. But a coupleyears back his father was convicted of insider trading. The family managed to hold on to their Idlewild home, which had been on his mother’s side for years. But otherwise they were wiped out. Everything had to be sold, including Jeremy’s horse, to pay legal fees and penalties. Now Mrs. Gummer ran a bed-and-breakfast out of their main house, and she and Jeremy lived in the caretaker’s cottage. Jeremy himself had to put college on hold and get a job, and Oceanfront’s owner, Naomi Ward, had hired him as a part-groom, part-trainer. Multiple times I’d seen him ease his way into the stall of a snorting, stomping animal, get up close, and speak in low tones to calm all the wildness right out of it.
    Jeremy had left a bucket of grain just outside the stall of a horse named Kismet, who whinnied from within, hungry for lunch.