Page 16 of These Summer Storms

Alice shook her head. “No.” There was no need to share how close they’d gotten to photos.

A long moment passed while her siblings watched her, searching for the truth, which was thin on the ground when the Storms were together, told in halves and quarters, too valuable to give away for free and so tucked away and converted to secrets—a much better investment.

But Alice had told the truth (about the photos, at least), and they believed her (about the photos, at least).

“There’s nothing going on with me and Tony,” Greta interjected in that casual way people interjected when it was not at all casual. Which it wasn’t. Greta and Tony hadn’t been casual for seventeen years. When neither Sam nor Alice replied, she changed the subject, asking Alice, “You spent the night in town?”

“Mm-hmm. At the Quahog Quay.”

A beat.Dammit.Alice was out of practice, having forgotten that conversations with her family were best treated like depositions. Answer the question asked and nothing more. Greta pounced. “With Griffin?”

So much for solidarity.

“No.” Alice ignored the way her siblings stilled, immediately full of silent anticipation. Played it cool. “He had to work.”

Greta sipped her coffee.

“Oh yeah? Does he have a real job yet?” Sam asked.

“Do you?” Alice hated how defensive she was of someone who’d packed up his stuff and left without any explanation, as though they hadn’t been together for years. As though they hadn’t been planning to be together for the rest of them.

Well.Alicehad been planning that; Griffin, evidently, had been planning an exit…and she’d never seen it coming.

Sam smirked, knowing he’d touched a nerve.

Annoyed, Alice didn’t hold back her pointed reply. “Where’s Sila?”

She might have narrowly escaped her marital mistake, but Sam had run directly into his. His wife, Sila, had no doubt crowed to her mother, frenemies, and anyone else in earshot the moment she’d caught Sam Storm like a prize trout.

Sam shut up, and Alice resisted gloating once she found her own nerve. “You could have just said you were happy to see me, Sam.”

“Why would I be happy to see you?” he retorted, and in the mouth of another brother, in another family, it might have been a joke.

But these were the Storms.

She looked to Greta, who stared into her coffee mug and saidnothing. Of course. Alice set her coffee on the counter. “I’m going to unpack.”

Neither of her siblings replied. What was there to say? Not even thirty minutes, and they were all sliding into their old roles.

Family.

Chapter

4

There were some lovelythings about Gilded Age manor houses.

An endless supply of rooms of all different sizes. High ceilings. Crown molding. Original hardwood floors laid out in meticulous patterns. Enormous sinks. Claw-foot tubs. Closets (one of America’s greatest inventions) with enough space to have once carried bustles, corsets, and yards of silk and velvet.

Unflinchingly over-the-top in their design, full of nooks and crannies and any number of locations designed for secrets and gossip and yes, trysts, as older sisters throughout history could attest.

Storm Manor was designed to compete with the best of the nineteenth-century mansions in Newport—boasting all their extravagance, and with a private island, to boot. Sixty-three acres of rolling grounds and magnificent vistas of the Atlantic to the south, Narragansett Bay to the north, and some of the most beautiful landscape in Rhode Island to east and west.

Purchased from the Narragansett Indians in the 1660s by John Peckham, an Englishman looking to build himself a fiefdom on a new continent, the island came with a name in one of the Algonquian languages,Uhquohquot. It was not clear from the records at the Wickford historical society whether Mr. Peckham had asked for a translation of the island’s name at the time of sale, but it was generally accepted that he hadn’t, or he might have thought twice about buying a place called Tempest.

John died in a brutal storm during his first winter on the island, and his family immediately left, guided by the good sense of his wife, Mary, who was surely unsurprised by her husband’s fate, considering his folly in purchasing the island to begin with. Mary didn’t marry again (see aforementioned good sense), and lived to be ninety-three, if the gravestone in the Little Compton town cemetery was to be believed. Maybe it was Mary who finally asked someone to translate the name of the place: Uhquohquot became Storm Island, and was uninhabited for another two centuries, when it was claimed by the state and sold for five thousand dollars to a steel magnate who wasn’t considered decent enough to be welcome in Newport—and who, considering the caliber of men whowerewelcome in Newport, must have been a real prince.

Storm Manor was built, big and brooding, on the hill—an enormous middle finger to the magnates to the south—and inhabited by that indecorous man and his odd, indecorous descendants until the 1980s, when it fell into disrepair, along with its owners’ trust funds.