Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies. Rosie Thomas

It was a hardback notebook with dusty black covers and a scarlet cloth spine. She opened it at the first page and saw girl’s handwriting not much different from her own. The first word on the top line was May.

      May licked her dry lips. The faint murmur of the sea swelled in her ears until the room seemed like a giant shell that amplified the greedy waves.

      The book was Doone’s, it had to be. This was her bedroom, and May had kicked against her secret hiding-place. Now Doone was writing from somewhere directly to May, and the roar of the sea rose up in her ears and almost deafened her.

      She read on with reluctant fascination, her fingers shaking as she turned a page.

      It wasn’t her name, she realised. It was a date: 15 May, last year. This was a diary. The dead girl’s diary, tucked into its hiding-place and forgotten.

      John and Ivy were calling her.

      May closed the book and blew the dust off the covers. She slid it back into the hole in the wall and pressed the loose section of skirting back into place. It fitted closely, with only two vertical cracks to betray its existence. No one would bother to investigate unless they accidentally dislodged the section as she had done. She scrambled to her feet.

      John was standing downstairs next to the smoke-blackened chimney stones. He had put on a clean blue shirt.

      May rocked on the bottom step, glaring her latest accusation at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about what happened to the Bennisons’ daughter?’ It was typical of May not to offer an introduction, just to launch straight into her offensive.

      John temporised. ‘All right, May, I should have done. Okay? But I didn’t want it to be a reason right off for you not to like the place.’

      She recognised the expression on his face. It was a taut mixture of conciliation, impatience and anxiety, and she often saw it when her father looked at her. Thinking about the hidden diary she felt defiance harden within her. Somebody’s drowning shouldn’t be wrapped up and hidden, just in case it might spoil someone else’s holiday. A person took shape in her mind, a girl, with her skin mottled by sea water and her clothes streaming with it. The momentary vision was real enough for May to see her pale features.

      Holding her discovery to herself, May felt the secret settle in place like an invisible shield.

      The diary was lying in the darkness, waiting for her to read it. Finding it in its secret hiding-place drew her into a conspiracy with Doone: Doone must have something to tell her that shouldn’t be shared with anyone else. ‘The place is okay,’ she said tonelessly. ‘Why wouldn’t I like it?’

      John’s face relaxed. This was better them he had hoped. ‘Good. We’re going to have a good time. These people seem friendly.’

      ‘Are we going, then?’ Ivy sighed.

      The Duhanes walked down their own driveway, passed Elizabeth Newton’s mailbox and doubled back between the overgrown trees and bushes that lined the way to the Beams’ house. They skirted the tennis court and various cars drawn up on a gravel sweep, and climbed the porch steps to knock on the back door. There was plenty of time before anyone answered it for them to survey the sagging chairs, heaps of shells and discarded shoes that lined the unswept boards. John and Ivy exchanged questioning glances.

      At length the screen door was tugged open by a man none of them had seen before. But it did seem that they were expected.

      ‘Hi, I’m Tom. Come on in, we’re all out the front.’

      The glimpse of the house confirmed their first impressions.

      It was huge and chaotic. Open doors revealed chairs piled with children’s toys and floors patterned with sandy footprints. At the beach, Marian favoured freedom and space for self-expression over domestic order.

      The houses had been built so that they turned their backs on the land and the lane leading away to Pittsharbor. The wide porches and front windows faced the curve of beach, the island and the open sea beyond, and they were separated from the edge of the bluff by their gardens. Elizabeth Newton’s and the Bennisons’ gardens were cultivated, but the other three were not much more than sandy spaces stitched with seagrass. Tonight, the porch and the decks at Marian Beam’s house appeared to be crowded with people. Lucas and his two younger brothers and two of their friends from Pittsharbor were playing frisbee between the deck and the bluff, with Gail looking on.

      Ivy stepped forward, smiling, knowing that she would be welcomed. May hung back, disabled by shyness.

      Marian surged forward to greet the Duhanes. Once they had been processed by her, John and Ivy were drawn straight into the party. May edged around the group and positioned herself where she could watch Lucas covertly and survey everyone else. After a minute’s quiet observation she saw that, apart from the four Beam siblings and their friends, the crowd was only made up of five Beam adults, Elizabeth Newton and an elderly couple May had not seen before.

      Marian was introducing the old people to John. ‘This is Aaron and Hannah Fennymore. Your neighbours from the opposite end of the beach, John.’

      The woman was about the same age as Elizabeth Newton, but she looked completely different. She had none of Elizabeth’s stately bearing or gracious manner. Hannah Fennymore was small and bent-backed, dressed in layers of nondescript brown and grey clothes as if the evening were cold instead of soft and mild. She was sharp-eyed and inquisitive-looking, rather like a small busy bird.

      The man, her husband, must once have been tall and imposing. He was bent now, too, and a stick lay on the floor beside his chair. He had white hair, long and a little unkempt, which stood out around his hollow, beaky face like a lion’s mane. Everyone, even the boys, stepped carefully when they came near Aaron.

      The Fennymores were Mainers, not weekenders or summer visitors. They lived all the year round up on the bluff.

      At last, feeling more confident, May slipped into a seat near Elizabeth.

      ‘I remember parties at this house in the nineteen-thirties and forties,’ Elizabeth murmured to her, as if they were resuming a conversation they had broken off only minutes before, not a full day and a half ago. May liked the implied intimacy of this. ‘Long before Dickson Beam bought the place. Marian makes believe the Beams have been here for ever, but they’re just newcomers, really.’

      ‘What were they like, the parties?’

      ‘They were grand affairs, for a summer cottage. Everyone in evening clothes, a uniformed maid. Of course, the house looked quite different then. Marguerite Swayne wouldn’t recognise it if she saw it now. Mr Swayne was a friend of my grandfather’s. They were an old family. Their money was in fruit shipping: bananas, up from Jamaica.’

      May scratched at an inflamed bite on her ankle, half-closing her eyes and trying to conjure up the scene. Movie images of marcel-waved ladies foxtrotting with gentlemen in white gloves danced in front of Joel and Kevin Beam. The pictures clashed with May’s own much darker impression of the beach and its houses. Another face swam by, drowned features framed by tendrils of wet hair. Water blotted out the dancing couples.

      Elizabeth was saying, ‘This house was built ninety years ago by the Swaynes, at about the same time as my paternal grandfather bought our parcel of land. He was Senator Maynard Freshett. His family business was timber, lumber mills. There’s a rather forbidding portrait of him in my dining-room, but he was the kindest man. My mother brought me up here every summer to visit her parents-in-law, from the time I was two years old. Her family were from Portland, originally, but her mother died when she was just a girl.’

      May nodded politely. ‘Who else lived here in those days?’

      ‘When I was a child?’ Elizabeth laughed briefly, showing the soft crow’s-foot skin beneath her jaw. ‘Aaron, Mr Fennymore did, for one. Not in the house along there, that came later. His people lived back in Pittsharbor.’

      ‘What was their family business?’

      Elizabeth gave her a quick glance. Then she