28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online Page B

wetsuits—down to Frazier’s clothes. The team members have lights; they have boards and rings and buoys.
    One officer stays at the house. He’s beefy, with reddish hair and freckles. He’s…familiar-looking?
    “I’m JD,” he says. “You were my server last week at the Summer House.”
    “I was?” Mallory says. She’s too panicked to go back and search her memory.
    “How long ago did he leave?” JD asks. He has a clipboard. He’s the information man.
    “I’m not sure,” Mallory says. How long were she and Jake kissing? “Half an hour?”
    “Had he been drinking?”
    “Yes,” Mallory says. “Beer and…Jim Beam.”
    “Why didn’t you try to stop him?”
    “I didn’t know he was going swimming,” Mallory says. “He told us he was taking a walk. I thought he wanted to be alone.” She drops her face into her hands. Why did Fray go swimming in the middle of the night? Why did he drink so much? Why did Leland go to town with her friends from New York? She could have seen them Sunday when she got home for her friend Harrison’s rooftop thing or whatever. Why did Cooper leave? His best friends were here! The weekend was for him!
    JD is looking at Mallory sympathetically, but she knows what he’s thinking: She shouldn’t have let Frazier wander off by himself. Whatever the consequences are, she deserves them. “I watched him leave. I should have gone after him.”
    JD sighs. “I’ve seen situations like this go both ways.”
    This doesn’t make her feel any better.
    “Let’s start with his name and date of birth. Just tell me what you can.”

    The divers search the water for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. When Mallory is finished with JD, she goes down to the scene. JD has lent Mallory his jacket, but still, she’s freezing. Jake is in his wet boxers and T-shirt; they won’t let him go back in the water because the risk of losing him is too great.
    “He’s not out there,” Jake says to Mallory. “They would have found him by now.”
    “They have to keep looking,” Mallory says. To stop looking is to…what? Give up? Switch from a rescue mission to a recovery mission? It’s too heinous to even contemplate. If something bad has happened to Fray, Mallory will never forgive herself. She wants to blame Cooper or Leland, but she was the last person to see Fray. She watched him head into the dark mouth of the night holding the bottle of Jim Beam by the neck. She knew his volatile history, the shadow of tragedy that followed him everywhere because of the gaping hole where his parents should have been.
    Fray! she thinks.

    There’s shouting. The ATV is barreling down the beach toward them. They found Fray. Mallory hears the officer on the beach calling in the divers.
    Alive? she thinks. Or dead?

    Alive. The officer on the ATV found Fray all the way down at Fat Ladies Beach, passed out in the sand. He was unresponsive at first, the officer said, but just as they were moving him onto the backboard, he came to and puked in the sand.
    The rescue mission takes some time to reel in and pack up. Once the paramedic checks Fray’s vitals, asks him a few questions, and determines he doesn’t need a trip to the hospital, Jake helps Fray into the cottage. Mallory thanks JD and the beach officer and the ATV officer and the two divers a hundred times apiece. She pulls twenty dollars out of her shorts pocket and tries to press it into JD’s hands.
    He laughs. “Keep it. This was your tax dollars at work.”
    “Well, then, I’ll bake you some cookies and drop them at the station.”
    “Cookies work,” JD says. He smiles at Mallory and she shuffles back through her mind to last week at the Summer House. Yes! This guy had come in with a white-haired gentleman, his father, who had engaged in some harmless flirting with Mallory and then left her a huge tip.
    “I remember you,” Mallory says. “Your dad was terrific.”
    “He told me I should ask you out,” JD says. “Are you here year-round or just