Osprey Island Read Online Free

with Suzy’s blue bandanna.
    “Hi, Suzy!” Squee was perched on a wicker loveseat, gnawing his way through a Snickers bar.
    “
There’s
a nutritious breakfast.” Suzy tightened her terrycloth belt.
    Squee grinned. Covered in caramel-peanut goo, his two new front teeth were about the size of his ears.
    “So”—Suzy leaned on the door frame—“just . . . hangin’ out in the hallway?”
    Brigid spoke up. The lavender top she had on made her skin glow orange as a jack-o’-lantern. “Mr. . . .” she began, “Mr. Ciz . . . Mr. . . .”
    “Bud,” Suzy told her.
    The girl sighed her relief. “Bud,” she said. “He . . . We’d been told to gather for an orientation at half-seven, though we’ve seen no one but the children.” She looked entreatingly to Suzy, taking little pains to conceal her annoyance with the situation.
    It was nearly eight-fifteen. Suzy looked to Squee. “Where’re your folks?”
    Squee shrugged, pouted out his lower lip—
search me
—and continued his breakfast.
    Suzy wandered out to the lobby and onto the deck. She found Roddy up on a ladder, cleaning rotted leaves and muck out of the dining porch rain gutter. “Excuse me,” she called from the sliding door, “do you know anything about the housekeeping orientation this morning? We’ve a slew of maids and no matron to be found.” One exchange and she was sounding like the Irish already. Suzy was convinced that she went back to New York with a brogue every August.
    Roddy did not look at her. “You don’t remember me, do you?” he said, eyes trained on the gutter.
    “Excuse me?”
    “You’re Suzy, right?”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you work here at the Lodge last summer? I’ve got a terrible memory for faces, for people at all, really, actually, about everything . . .”
    “I’m Roddy Jacobs.” He tossed down a clot of slimy twigs. “I was friends with your brother. I High. Class of ’sixty-eight.”
    “Oh,” Suzy said. Chas. Chas as he was at I High: cocky, young, crossing the football field with his friends, heading out to the woods beyond school grounds to get high. Chas’s friends: Lance Squire, Jimmy Waters—decent guys, not the brightest, but neither was Chas. “Roddy
Jacobs
?” Suzy repeated.
    He nodded.
    “Sure,” Suzy said, “sure. You were friends with Chas.”
    Roddy nodded solemnly. Chas had died in Vietnam not long after graduation.
    Suzy said, “So, you know anything about this housekeeping thing the girls are waiting on?”
    Roddy climbed down from his ladder.
    “Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I just wondered if . . .”
    Roddy nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, and passed her, pulling the glass door shut behind him. Suzy remembered Roddy somewhat. A quiet friend of Chas’s. With Chas and Lance, it would have been hard to exist as anything else. Roddy had hovered in the background of high school, and of Chas and his gang. It was a long time ago. Almost twenty years since Chas’s death, and Suzy tried to think about that time as little as she could. She’d managed to hardly remember Roddy at all.
    “HE WAS ALWAYS a nice child,” Nancy said, her tone circumspect. She and Suzy were drinking coffee on the porch of Bud and Nancy’s house, up the hill from the Lodge, overlooking Sand Bay. The house Suzy’d grown up in. Nancy nibbled disinterestedly on a muffin Suzy’d brought from the city, pinching up cranberries with her fingertips, divesting them of crumbs, and then dropping the fruit back to the plate like nits picked from a stray cat. “He was the one who always went around cleaning up after Chas and Lance,” she said. “Not that he wasn’t into their mischief too, but he was the one with the conscience about it. They’d break someone’s lawn ornament or a driveway lantern playing ball, and it was Roddy who’d wind up apologizing . . .”
    “He get drafted right out of high school too?” Suzy asked.
    Nancy swallowed a sip of coffee, shook her head.