Summer People by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online Page B

sister-in-law Angela Bennett and Angela’s nine-year-old daughter, Candy Cohut. Constance stabbed Angela to death, and in the process fatally wounded Candy. Even now, when Marcus thought about the murders, it seemed so incredible it was as if it had happened to somebody else.
    “I’m going to eat my sandwich,” Marcus said. He’d drained his cocktail and the ocean began to take on a wavy shimmer. He needed food.
    “Okay,” Winnie said. “Enjoy.”
    “Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked.
    “I’ll wait until later.”
    In just three days, Marcus had learned what this meant: Winnie would let her sandwich sit for another hour or two, then throw it away, claiming the mayonnaise had gone bad.
    “You know why you’re so skinny, don’t you?”
    Winnie didn’t respond.
    “Because you don’t eat. If my father had to sit here and watch you waste a sandwich with turkey on it that costs, like, ten dollars a pound, he’d throw a French fit on your ass.” Marcus took a lusty bite of his sandwich. Even the food here tasted better. These sandwiches he’d been eating, for example. The bread was homemade, the smoked turkey was real turkey, not some white meat paste that was processed to taste like turkey, the lettuce was crisp, the tomato ripe. Beth used gourmet mustard. It was so superior to any sandwich that could be purchased in Marcus’s neighborhood or in his school cafeteria, that it was as if he’d been eating cardboard and ashes all these years and only now had stumbled upon actual food. “I mean, really,” Marcus said. “Why don’t you eat? Do you have some kind of problem? There was a girl at my school who had anorexia. She walked around looking like she had AIDS or something.”
    “I don’t have anorexia,” Winnie said. “And I don’t have AIDS.”
    “But you look like a skeleton. I haven’t seen you eat the whole time you’ve been here.”
    “I eat when I’m hungry,” she said.
    Marcus finished the first half of his sandwich, then wished he’d saved some of his cocktail to wash it down with. He eyed Winnie’s cocktail. She’d give it to him if he asked her for it. Then he remembered that Beth had slipped two bottles of Evian into their beach bag. That woman was improving in his eyes. Marcus drank one of the bottles down to the bottom. He felt much, much better.
    “There are people in Queens, you know, and the rest of New York City, who don’t eat because they can’t afford to.”
    “I’m well aware of that, thanks,” Winnie said. “I do my part to feed the homeless.”
    “Do you?”
    She sat bolt upright. “For your information, I gave my lunch to homeless people every day this spring.”
    “Good for you,” Marcus said. He believed her. Although he’d only known Winnie for three days, he could tell that was exactly the kind of thing she would do. She loved charity cases. Him, for example. “But you should take care of yourself while you’re at it.”
    Winnie stood up and her sweatshirt dropped to her waist. She put on her sunglasses, snapped up her towel and headed up the stairs without a word. Marcus had pissed off his handmaiden by telling her the truth. She looked like a skeleton. If she didn’t start eating soon, she was going to make herself sick.
    Well, fine then. Marcus concentrated on his sandwich. Actually, it tasted better now that he was alone. He noticed that Winnie had left her sandwich behind, and since there was no hope that she’d ever eat it, and since the rum made him extra hungry, he finished that one, too, and drank the second bottle of Evian, and while he was at it, polished off the remains of Winnie’s cocktail. Then he lay back on his blanket and listened to the sound of the ocean. It was almost pleasant enough for him to forget about his worries. His mother. The photo of Candy, all covered up except for her shiny black shoes. The unwritten book. The tactile memory of five crisp hundred dollar bills that his editor, Zachary Celtic, handed him on the