Winter Solstice Read online

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2017 by Elin Hilderbrand

  Cover design by Lauren Harms; photo-illustration by Debra Lill

  Author photograph by Nina Subin

  Cover copyright © 2017 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: October 2017

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  ISBN 978-0-316-43548-2

  E3-20170817-JV-PC

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PART ONE

  BART

  EDDIE

  AVA

  KELLEY

  EDDIE

  JENNIFER

  AVA

  BART

  EDDIE

  JENNIFER

  BART

  KELLEY

  AVA

  PART TWO

  JENNIFER

  EDDIE

  MARGARET

  BART

  AVA

  KELLEY

  EDDIE

  JENNIFER

  AVA

  EDDIE

  PART THREE

  BART

  JENNIFER

  EDDIE

  AVA

  BART

  MARGARET

  KELLEY

  AVA

  MARGARET

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ELIN HILDERBRAND

  NEWSLETTERS

  Reagan Arthur:

  In every way, this book is for you.

  PART ONE

  OCTOBER

  BART

  The party is his mother’s idea. Bart’s birthday is October 31, which is one of the three worst birthdays a person can have, along with Christmas and September 11. It was especially soul crushing when Bart was growing up. Nobody wanted to celebrate a birthday when there was free candy to be had on the street just by dressing up and knocking on doors.

  Bart agrees to the party, reluctantly, but he lays down some rules. Mitzi is sitting on the end of Bart’s bed in Bart’s room with her pen and her legal pad, ready to plan. Does she notice that the room smells strongly of marijuana smoke? She must, though she doesn’t comment. Bart figures one reason she wants to throw a party is so Bart will get up out of bed. So he will be social, interact, return to the fun-loving idiot he used to be. He has been back from Afghanistan for ten months, and what Mitzi doesn’t seem to understand is that the person Bart used to be… is gone.

  “No costumes,” Bart says. “Since you’re all keen to write things down, start with that.”

  The corners of Mitzi’s mouth droop. Bart doesn’t want to make his mother any sadder than she already is, but on this he must hold firm. No costumes.

  “Write it down,” he says again.

  “But… ,” Mitzi says.

  Bart closes his eyes against his frustration. This is Mitzi, he reminds himself. Once she gets an idea, it’s nearly impossible to reason with her. Bart tries imagining what a costume party thrown by the Quinn family might look like: His brother Patrick can come wearing an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs, since he spent eighteen months in prison for insider trading while Bart was gone. Bart’s brother Kevin can wear a beret and kerchief, and carry a baguette under one arm. Since marrying Isabelle—who was a chambermaid and breakfast cook when Bart left—Kevin has become a regular Charles de Gaulle. Once, when Bart visited Kevin and Isabelle’s new house—there had been talk of Bart moving in with them and serving as a manny to their daughter, Genevieve, and brand-new infant son, KJ, but no, sorry, Bart isn’t good with children—Bart heard Kevin singing in French to his newborn son.

  Singing in French!

  Ava can come dressed as a femme fatale in a black dress with a plunging neckline, smoking a cigarette in one of those old-fashioned holders since apparently she has become quite the temptress in the past three years. She tried to explain the trajectory of her love life to Bart—Nathaniel, then Scott, then Nathaniel and Scott, then she was, ever so briefly, engaged to Nathaniel, then Nathaniel took a job on Block Island, so she was back with Scott. Then Scott got one of the teachers at the high school pregnant, and Ava was left with no one for a matter of months. And somewhere in there—Bart can’t remember, his brain has more holes than Swiss cheese now—she met a third person, Potter Lyons, or maybe it’s Lyons Potter, who is a professor somewhere in New York City, but according to Ava, Potter Lyons or Lyons Potter is not the reason Ava now lives on the Upper East Side of New York and teaches music at a fancy private school where her students include the grandson of Quincy Jones and two of Harrison Ford’s nieces. Ava has grown up. It’s a good thing, a natural thing, Bart realizes—but still, he feels resentful. Who is supposed to hold the family together with Ava gone? Certainly not Bart.

  And what about a costume for Bart’s father, Kelley? Kelley has brain cancer, and after enduring fifteen more rounds of chemo and twenty-eight rounds of radiation, he made an executive decision: no more treatment. For a few months it looked like maybe he had beaten back the disease enough to eke out a few more good years. This past summer he was still able to flip the blueberry cornmeal pancakes and serve the guests breakfast with a smile. He and Mitzi were still walking every day from Fat Ladies Beach to Cisco and back again. But then, in mid-September, while Kelley and Bart were watching the University of Tennessee play Ole Miss—Bart’s closest friend in the platoon, Centaur, now dead, had been a huge Vols fan, and Bart had vowed to watch the team since Centaur no longer could—Kelley suffered a seizure and lost sight in his left eye. Now, a mere four weeks later, he is relegated to a wheelchair, and Mitzi has called hospice.

  Kelley is beyond the point of dressing up, and that’s the real reason Bart doesn’t want costumes. Kelley is going to die.

  When Bart was on the plane home from Iceland, he swore that he would never let anything bother him again. But returning home to news of his father’s cancer had cut Bart out at the knees. Along with profound sadness, he feels cheated. He managed to stay alive and make it home despite untold horrors; it’s not fair that Kelley is now dying. Kelley won’t be around to see Bart get married or have children. He won’t know if Bart makes a success of himself or not. It taps into Bart’s oldest resentment: Bart’s three older siblings have gotten a lot more of Kelley than Bart has. They’ve gotten the best of him, and Bart, the sole child from Kelley’s marriage to Mitzi, has had to make do with what was left over.

  Mitzi winds one of her curls around her finger.
“What if we compromise?” she asks. “What if I say ‘Costumes optional’? I have an outfit I really want to wear.”

  Bart closes his eyes. He envisions some guests wearing costumes and some wearing regular clothes. The party will look like a half-eaten sandwich. He debates giving in to Mitzi just to make her happy and to prove himself a nice, reasonable guy—but he can’t seem to buck his absolute hatred of Halloween.

  “No costumes,” he says. “Please, Mom. You can throw the party, I’ll go and try to have a good time. But no costumes.”

  Mitzi sighs, then stands to leave the room. “You could use an air freshener in here,” she says.

  Bart gives her half a smile, the most he can muster. It’s only after Mitzi walks out, closing the door behind her, that he realizes she didn’t actually concede.

  EDDIE

  It’s the first invitation he has received since he got out of jail, and Eddie won’t lie: he’s over the moon. Eddie Pancik, formerly known as Fast Eddie, dutifully served a three-to-five-year sentence (in two years and three months) at MCI–Plymouth for conspiracy and racketeering after confessing to pimping out his crew of Russian cleaning girls to his high-end real estate clients. Eddie’s conviction had coincided with his discovery that his wife, Grace, was having an affair with their handsome and handsomely paid landscape architect, Benton Coe—and so when Eddie had first gotten to jail, it had felt like his world was caving in.

  If Eddie learned anything while being incarcerated, it’s that human beings are resilient. He won’t say he thrived during his time at MCI–Plymouth, but it wasn’t nearly as awful as he’d expected. In some ways he appreciated the discipline and the hiatus from the rat race. Whereas before, Eddie’s focus had always been on drumming up business and the next big deal, jail taught him to be mindful and present. He went to the weight room every day at seven a.m., then to breakfast, then he spent the morning teaching an ersatz real estate class in the prison library. The clientele of the prison was primarily white-collar criminals—embezzlers, credit card scammers, some drug lords but none with violent convictions—and nearly all of them, Eddie found, had a good head for business. Most times Eddie’s “classes” turned into roundtable discussions of how good business ideas went awry. Sometimes the line was blurry, they all agreed.

  Eddie even managed to sell a house while in lockup—to a man named Forrest Landry, who had hundreds of millions in trust with his wife, Karen. Karen Landry was one of those long-suffering types—Forrest had been unfaithful to her as well as to the law—but prison had made Forrest penitent, and he decided that a house on the platinum stretch of Hulbert Avenue would be just the thing to make amends.

  He paid the listing price: $11.5 million.

  Eddie’s commission was $345,000. Eddie’s sister, Barbie, acted as Eddie’s proxy, and the windfall was directed to Eddie’s wife, Grace, who used the money to pay college tuition for their twin daughters, Hope and Allegra. Hope had gotten into every college she applied to and had opted to go to Bucknell University in the middle of Exactly Nowhere, Pennsylvania. The school is ridiculously expensive, although—as Hope pointed out—not as expensive as Duke, USC, or Brown, her other three choices. She is getting straight As and playing the flute in a jazz band. Now in the fall of her sophomore year, she’s even pledging a sorority, Alpha Delta Pi, which both Eddie and Grace agreed was a good thing, as Hope had been a bit of a loner in high school.

  Allegra didn’t get in anywhere except UMass Dartmouth and Plymouth State because of poor test scores and even worse grades. She decided on UMass Dartmouth, with an eye to transferring to the main campus in Amherst her sophomore year—but instead she flunked out. She returned to Nantucket and went to work for her aunt Barbie at Bayberry Properties, a company owned by Barbie’s husband, Glenn Daley.

  Eddie is secretly okay with the fact that Allegra isn’t in college, and not just for the obvious financial reasons. Eddie sees a lot of himself in Allegra. He, too, struggled with traditional book learning. Allegra has common sense, ambition, and enviable social skills. She has started out as the receptionist at Bayberry Properties, but Glenn has been talking about promoting her to office manager sometime in the next year. From there it will only be a matter of time before she pursues her broker’s license. The kid is going to be a success; Eddie is sure of it. He has seen her in action at the office—she is polite, professional, and confident way beyond her years. She’s even nice on the phone when the odious Rachel McMann calls. Rachel used to work at Bayberry Properties, but while Eddie was in jail, she struck out on her own, and she’s had an alarming amount of success, even though she’s the worst gossip on the island.

  Glenn Daley, once Eddie’s biggest rival, offered Eddie a desk at Bayberry Properties at Barbie’s insistence. Eddie now sits in the back row against the wall with two other first-year associates, and the three of them split phone duty, although somehow Eddie always ends up getting stuck with the weekend shifts. It’s like starting in the business all over again, but Eddie tries to feel grateful. He should be humbled that Glenn Daley has chosen to claim his convicted felon of a brother-in-law and give him a fresh start.

  Eddie shows Grace the invitation. “Look,” he says. “Bart Quinn’s birthday party at the VFW on Halloween!” He tries to tamp down his enthusiasm, but it’s difficult. He’s thrilled that the Quinns haven’t forsaken him. There are others on the island who have either shunned him or given him the stink eye. Philip Meier from Nantucket Bank, for one. Eddie bumped into him at the post office, and Philip walked by Eddie without so much as a hello. And don’t get Eddie started on his former office manager, Eloise Coffin. Eddie would love to key Eloise’s car, but she drives a twelve-year-old Hyundai, so it would hardly be worth it. When Eddie went to jail, it was Eloise who talked to the press.

  “Halloween?” Grace says. She takes the invitation from Eddie and puts on her reading glasses. The reading glasses are new since Eddie went to jail, as is all the gray in the part of her hair. One of the infinite number of things Eddie feels guilty about is causing Grace to look middle aged. “I can’t go.”

  “You can’t?” Eddie says. He feels a sense of panic. They’ve been invited to a party by the Quinns, which may lead to an invitation to the Quinns’ annual Christmas Eve party. That would really restore Eddie’s social credentials. They have to go. “Why not?”

  “I’m working up the alley,” Grace says. “I’m in charge of giving out the candy to the trick-or-treaters. I’ve been doing it for years.”

  Doing it for years? The phrase “up the alley” annoys Eddie. “Up the alley” means Academy Hill, the former school that is now fixed-income housing for elders. It’s a hundred yards from the teensy-tiny cottage Grace bought on Lily Street, up Snake Alley. Grace has been volunteering at Academy Hill since Eddie went away. She may have worked there last Halloween and possibly the Halloween before that, but this hardly qualifies as “doing it for years.” However, Eddie holds his tongue. He promised himself in jail that, as far as Grace was concerned, he would be a new man—a kind, patient, and attentive husband. He will not belittle Grace’s charity work. He will not ask her to skip it. But what will he do about the party?

  “What will I do about the party?” Eddie asks Grace.

  Grace sighs and heads into the minuscule kitchen, where she pulls a bottle of wine from the three-quarter-size fridge. The wine is Oyster Bay sauvignon blanc, which retails for twelve bucks at Hatch’s. The sight of Grace pouring herself an inexpensive bottle of wine in that pathetic kitchen depresses Eddie, though he knows it’s not supposed to. He’s supposed to feel grateful that he’s a free man, that they have a roof over their heads, that they have money to send to Hope at Bucknell. Gone are the days when Eddie and Grace would drink Screaming Eagle cabernet or, on a random Wednesday afternoon, open a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The worst part is that Grace doesn’t complain; she makes the best of their compromised circumstances. The cottage is barely seven hundred square feet, and a quarter of that is a loft bedroom, which is acces
sed by a twisty set of stairs. Grace repurposed the back sunroom into a bedroom with a futon, a TV, and a stackable washer and dryer, leaving the loft for the twins. But once Allegra returned home from her failed year at UMass Dartmouth, she said she preferred the only other sleeping space, a narrow, wood-paneled room with a single bed. The room has a door that closes and a bigger closet. It smells of pine sap and stays cool in the summer. It’s kind of like living on a boat, Allegra says.

  The house is in town and it does have a pocket garden out back, which Grace has transformed into a verdant oasis—a postage stamp of lush green lawn that she surrounded with flower beds bursting with hydrangeas, lilies, snapdragons, and rosebushes. People cutting through to town on Snake Alley always stop to admire the garden and to comment on the quaint charm of the cottage. It looks like something from a storybook, they say. It looks like the house where the Three Bears live!

  Eddie is bound and determined to earn enough money to buy a bigger house. He won’t be able to afford anything as grand as the estate they used to own on Wauwinet Road—they’ll never have a home or waterfront acreage like that again—but something with a bigger kitchen, something with more than one bathroom.

  Grace takes a sip of her wine. She has grown to like the New Zealand sauvignon blancs, she says. They’re bright, grassy.

  “Take Allegra to the party,” Grace says. “She broke up with Hunter yesterday, and she’s been in her room ever since.”

  “She broke up with Hunter?” Eddie says. Hunter Bloch is a broker at Melville Real Estate; Hunter’s father, Hunter Sr., owns the company, and when Allegra and Hunter started dating, Eddie and Barbie and Glenn all got the same gleam in their eye as they fantasized about the two agencies merging, creating the biggest real estate concern on Nantucket. “How come?”

  “He was seeing Ina, the Bulgarian receptionist at Two Doors Down, behind Allegra’s back,” Grace says. She raises an eyebrow and lowers her voice. “Frankly, I think it was good for her to get a taste of her own medicine. After what she did to Brick…”