Life Guards in the Hamptons (2 page)

The pod of dolphins that swam near East Hampton last week herding the late summer swimmers back to shore had nothing to do with him. Or with me. So what if my super-powered Spenser’s alter ego was the sea god M’ma, protector of oceans and nurturer of his symbiotic minions? M’ma’s buddies were magical lantern beetles, not ordinary bottlenose dolphins. Okay, not so ordinary when they swam east and wrecked the fall surfing
contest in Montauk yesterday by upending every board until the surfers gave up and got out of the water.

Odd, but not my problem. Neither were the first-ever tornado in Watermill, the purple pumpkins in Bridgehampton, or the new tick disease found only on the East End, to say nothing of the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions across the globe. Finding a companion for Spenser Matthews, in the tradition of Batman’s Robin or Superman’s Lois Lane, was my problem. I refused to think about who the real Matt Spenser—the veterinarian who’d won naming rights by being the highest bidder at a benefit auction after Labor Day—was spending his time with. I’d given up men again. Or still.

I had my own sidekick, a six-pound, three-legged, attitudinal Pomeranian named Little Red. He didn’t like being in the city, on a leash, smuggled in and out of my rent-controlled, no-pets apartment like a take-out meal in a tote bag.

Too bad. I lived in Manhattan, not Paumanok Harbor. I only went to the country when my mother needed someone to take care of her elderly rescue dogs. With the summer season over, my cousin Susan cooked fewer hours at her uncle’s restaurant, so she could watch them. Of course I missed the clean salt air, the bay beaches a couple of blocks away, the quiet nights with no sirens or horns blowing. And Matt.

“We’ll go back when I finish the first draft,” I told the dog, who was licking his toes. “The weather will still be nice enough for long walks—” Little Red got carried, mostly, “—and there’ll be less traffic, too.” And maybe by then Matt Spenser wouldn’t look at me as if I had two heads or spoke in tongues. I couldn’t blame him, not after the night he saw the real M’ma, a being from the hidden world called Unity, not my imagination. M’ma broke a million sacred rules to trespass here, and broke a million of our physical laws to metamorphose from a lump of decaying whale-like blubber into a fiery winged god that threw me a kiss good-bye before diving into the bay.

Neither Matt nor I, nor anyone else who happened to
be out in the salt marshes that night, could ever forget the scene. Only a handful of spectators could actually understand it. No one would let me tell Matt about forbidden contact with the otherworld, not when he was no kind of esper, and an outsider in Paumanok Harbor besides. The agents from DUE wanted to wipe his memory clean, or worse.

He was our veterinarian, I shouted at them. And he swore not to tell anyone what he’d seen. I trusted him. They should, too. Who’d believe his absurd account anyway? No one.

They weren’t convinced. Protecting Paumanok Harbor and its secrets had priority over one untalented, unpsychic, unimportant individual. Surprising them and myself with my emotional reaction, I started screaming.

“He is important! He saved my dog. He helped me protect M’ma when the rest of you were too busy putting out fires. He believed me!”

I threatened to tell the world about the Royce-Harmon Institute for Psionic Research myself if they stole Matt’s memory or harmed him in any way. They let him go, but it was too late. I knew Matt worried about his sanity. Or maybe he just believed I was the crazy one. I worried about that, too.

So I left.

Leaving Paumanok Harbor with its small-town gossip, its oddball inhabitants, and my guilt about Matt took a weight off my shoulders. Unfortunately, most of the weight settled around my butt and belly. Yeck. That was another reason I stayed away from the Harbor: my cousin’s four-star cooking and the leftovers she brought home from the restaurant, plus the jams and fresh bread from my grandmother’s farm stand. Not that Manhattan didn’t offer every kind of takeout and food truck, but I could be more disciplined here.

So I ate another Oreo and went back to work looking for a sidekick.

The real Matt Spenser was an animal doctor. My Spenser Matthews owned a pet shop, maybe in Massachusetts or New Jersey, somewhere on the ocean, of
course, so he’d be close to his alternative environment. He’d carry birds and fish and little furry creatures and a couple of slimy ones, too, but only adoptable dogs and cats from the local shelters. If he had puppy mill dogs for sale, my animal-rights crusading mother would kill me.

I sketched Matt—that is, Spenser—with a parrot on his shoulder. Too piratical. A ferret? Adorable but smelly, and where would it go when he transformed into the sea god? A fish? He couldn’t very well carry a bowl around with him, and no hunky guy talked to goldfish. A lizard? People would think he sold insurance.

Frustrated, I put on the ten o’clock news. The Hamptons made the headlines again. This time two restaurants in Noyac got hit, the tills emptied along with the patrons’ pockets. No one saw anything but ski masks. The dolphins were back in the news, too. This time with video. They’d left the surfing beach at Ditch Plains and headed east to the Montauk Lighthouse. They knocked surf casters there off the rocks and pushed them to shore, then they went after the spearfishing scuba divers, in teams. One grabbed the spears, another disconnected the air hoses, while two more grabbed the guys by the flippers and towed them in backward.

“I guess the dolphins are tired of sharing their suppers and their territory,” the newscaster said with a nervous laugh. “But people are being warned to stay out of the ocean. These animals are big, and getting more aggressive, although they have not harmed anyone yet. Furthermore, the oceanographers remind us that they are a protected species. Injuring or harassing one of the sea mammals is a federal crime and the laws will be enforced. Scientists from NOAA, the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod are all monitoring the pod and its unusual behavior.”

He flipped a page on his desk. “Speaking of unusual, there’s still a reason to go out to the Hamptons, despite the no-swimming ban and the crime wave. An extremely rare, endangered shore bird has been spotted in tiny Paumanok Harbor, on the north side of the South Fork of
Long Island. The pink-toed Patagonian oiaca is so rare and reclusive we don’t have a clear picture to show you, but several experts have identified the species.”

I turned off the TV. “We’re not going back there any time soon,” I told Little Red, “so you better get used to your wee-wee pads. Traffic will be at a standstill and the whole town will be filled with telescope-toting birdwatchers. At least the restaurants and delis will do good business.”

Red didn’t care about rare birds, traffic, or tourists. He wanted to go o-u-t. Like on a leash, downstairs, in the dark, with plastic poop bags, where people yelled at you if your dog pissed on the straggly petunias around the pollution-stunted trees in their tiny squares of dirt.

Maybe Paumanok Harbor had its good points, like Mom’s fenced-in yard and floodlights, with my relatives living across the street and down the block. Except one of my relatives was a witch, and I wasn’t altogether sure about the rest of them.

“All right, all right, I’ll take you out. Stop barking before we get reported to the tenants’ association.”

By the time I’d put on shoes and combed my hair, taken the Pomeranian in his tote down the three flights of stairs, around the corner where none of the neighbors could see him, then waited for him to find the perfect spot so I could clean up the filthy gutter, then do the whole trip in reverse, it was too late to get back to work.

“Come on, we’re going to bed. I’ll get more done tomorrow after a good night’s sleep.”

Except I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Something kept nagging at me. Not the pink-toed Patagonian oiaca that I couldn’t find on the Internet or in my bird books, not the search for a likable cartoon companion, not even Little Red’s snoring. I rolled over again.

The dolphins and the robberies were someone else’s responsibility, I reminded my weary self, not mine. Susan assured me the old dogs at my mother’s house were doing well. Why not, on Susan’s leftovers? I untwisted my nightshirt.

I had time on my deadline and money in the bank. I threw off the covers.

Dad in Florida had a new girlfriend, and Mom said she’d found homes for most of her retired greyhounds. Little Red snarled when I shoved my extra pillow away and threw myself facedown on the mattress.

What the hell was bugging me?

Frigging chiggers, that’s what.

1
Trolls in the Hamptons, November, 2010; Night Mares in the Hamptons, May, 2011; Fire Works in the Hamptons, November, 2011.

I
 NOW HARBORED THE MOST OBNOXIOUS, disgusting blood-sucking parasites—and I am not talking about my former boyfriend Arlen. City people might have bedbugs, but eastern Long Islanders had chiggers. The repulsive, maddening monsters hung out in tall grass and weeds, in places only an idiot would go, or someone trying to save a lost sea soul. I’d spent days sitting in bramble trying to comfort what I thought was a dying creature. Now I felt like I’d been on the wrong end of the autopsy.

You couldn’t see the little bastards, only feel them. They burrowed under your skin, causing the worst burning itch of your life. They usually started at your ankles, filled up on your blood and moved on, anywhere warm, like in your socks, beneath the elastic bands of your underwear, or your crotch, the perverted pestilences. Hot showers raised up more burning, tormenting welts, and if you scratched them, ichor dripped out. I wanted to rip my skin off and send it to the dry cleaner. Or the fumigator.

I needed help.

My cousin Susan worked late and partied later. She’d still be sleeping.

I called her mother instead. Aunt Jasmine had lived her whole life in Paumanok Harbor. Her husband helped Grandma Eve run the farm. Surely Aunt Jas would know what to do. Besides, she dealt with hysterical people in crisis all the time. She taught school.

“Your grandmother makes up a lotion that gets rid of them,” she told me.

“I’m never coming back to that godforsaken, infested place,” I told her. Nor was I about to use any of Grandma Eve’s grimoire formulas. Not after a gang of cabbage-smashing kids all ended up with genital warts last year. “What can I do, here in the civilized world?”

She laughed. “You call dodging messenger bikes and breathing bus exhaust civilized?”

“I need help here, Aunt Jas, not a country mouse/city mouse spiel. I’m scratching myself bloody.”

“Okay, first you have to wash your sheets and towels and pajamas in hot water. As hot as you can make it. Otherwise you’ll keep breeding the nasty little devils and getting reinfested. Then get some anti-itch ointment. Any drugstore will have it.”

So I took my laundry and everything I’d brought back on the bus from Paumanok Harbor downstairs to the basement laundry room. I filled every washing machine, which didn’t earn me any points with the first-floor pregnant tenant who had to wait. As soon as I shoveled the sodden stuff into the driers, I raced up the three flights, fetched Little Red and my credit card, and hustled to the nearest drugstore. The dog didn’t get much walking, sniffing, or marking done, but I bought three different kinds of ointments for bites, burns, and scrapes. By now I had them all.

The creams worked for about half an hour. Then the itching started again, worse, in new places where my sneakers had rubbed or the top of my jeans. Susan had to be up by now. My younger cousin had been born in the desolate east-of-everything and never missed a beach party, private picnic in the dunes, or a good-looking surfer dude. It was a miracle she didn’t have STDs, much less parasites. She had cancer last year, though, so I should stop complaining. But, hell, I itched.

“Yeah, chiggers are a bitch, but they don’t carry diseases like ticks.”

“So what can I do about them? I’m going crazy.”

“Grandma—”

“No.”

“A doctor? They have prescription meds that kill the bugs.”

I had a dentist and a gynecologist and a walk-in clinic that took my insurance for flu shots. I never saw the same doctor twice. No way was I showing my pox-covered ass to a stranger. “What else?”

“I heard you could try putting clear nail polish on the bites. Suffocate the bastards.”

I only had red polish, but so what? So now I looked like a leper.

And I still itched, except where I’d drawn blood. I guess the blood flushed the venom out. I scratched harder.

I blamed my mother, of course. I wouldn’t have gone to Paumanok Harbor in the first place if not for her and her dogs and her well-rehearsed guilt sermon. I wouldn’t have encountered M’ma, or the troll, or Grant whom I almost married. I wouldn’t have gotten involved with the paranormal or the parasites.

I called her cell. Heaven knew where she was.

“I’ll be home soon,” she said. “We’ve shut down another dog fighting operation, and have one more breeder to investigate.”

“I need help now, Mom! I’ll be a bloody mess by the time you get here, with permanent scars.”