Five Days in Summer

three thirty today before you talk to anyone.”
    They exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and walked together into the full sun.
    “Go home and see your kids. Take a shower, eat something. I’ll be in touch with you.”
    Will got into his rented SUV with its smell of sanitized smoke. He decided he would trust Geary. He had to do something; he just hoped it wouldn’t be the worst mistake of his life.

Chapter 5
    “Daisy, come off that dock!”
    Marian had thought that at five years old her daughter would have the sense to keep away from danger. She was wrong. From birth, Daisy had shown little fear and with age became only more intrepid.
    “Ted, go see what that girl picked up.”
    Ted jogged onto the short dock and crouched down next to Daisy.
    “Hey, Daddy.”
    Marion couldn’t help but smile. Daisy looked just like her father. Tall, skinny, their brown skin glistening with sunblock. Ted’s red baseball cap, with the feather logo of his publishing company dead center on the forehead, cast a shadow over his face and onto Daisy’s open hand.
    “What do you have there, sweetie?”
    “A bracelet. Look. Isn’t it pretty?”
    Ted turned to look at Marian. “It’s a charm bracelet.”
    “Let me see it. And please, Daisy, come away from the edge.”
    Daisy and Ted walked onto the grassy bank where Marian had laid down a blanket so they could sit while they waited for her cousin Henry to arrive with his boat. He owned a chain of drugstores but couldn’tbring himself to use a public dock; that cost money. He could have motored straight from Martha’s Vineyard to Waquoit Bay but instead took the long way around to Popponesset Beach. Every summer for nine years now they’d made this wait at the unpaved end of Simons Narrow Road, with its tiny dock at an obscure little inlet for people who liked to think of themselves as insiders.
    “Too rich to pay” is what Marian called Henry. If Daisy hadn’t liked to ride in Henry’s boat so much they would have just taken the ferry over.
    But Henry was fun, Marian had to admit. Once they got to the other side, he’d get them to their houses in Oak Bluffs in an old golf cart with tattered white fringe along the top. It was tacky but Daisy had the time of her life. Once they installed themselves in the orange gingerbread house Grandma Peet had left Marian’s mother, Henry would disappear into his pink gingerbread house, which he’d inherited from his mother. It was said that Grandma and Grandpa Peet had once owned half the houses around Wesleyan Grove and that it was they who had painted them each a different color. All Marian knew for sure was that the colors had become a tradition, even a tourist attraction, and no house had ever been repainted a different color since.
    She had spent every summer of her childhood in that orange house, surrounded by an African-American intelligentsia unacknowledged by the broader world. It was a house where you talked and read books. To this day, there was no TV, and the radio had broken two summers ago. It was just a three-day trip this time, and Marian was so tired from the end-of-summer festival she’d just finished running as executive director of a nonprofit arts exchange in Boston that she planned to seal herself up and donothing but rest. She had a copy of Helen Dewitt’s The Last Samurai in her suitcase and she meant to read the whole thing. Ted and Daisy liked to busy themselves fishing at the pond.
    Daisy’s knees were already scratched, in contrast to the frilly pink sundress she’d insisted on wearing. If a dress didn’t have a spin, she wouldn’t wear it. This one had a spin and a ruffle and was as dainty as could be.
    She held out her small palm to show Marian the bracelet. It was silver, a nice grade by the look of it. It must have belonged to a mother with its three babies; an interesting woman, Marian would guess, by the cello and the sword.
    “Mommy, put it on me.”
    Daisy held out her thin wrist and handed her mother the bracelet.
    “I don’t know, honey. Maybe we should leave it in case the lady who lost it comes back to look.”
    “No, it’s mine. I found it!”
    “Honey, it doesn’t work that way.”
    “Please, Mommy, can I just wear it a while?”
    The putt of a motor got louder, and Ted started waving.
    “It’s Henry! Come on, girls, get ready. He’s here!”
    “Oh,” Marian said, “why don’t you wear it for now? We’ll figure it out when we get off the Vineyard. Maybe there’s a