Summer Days, Starry Nights Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part One: Kindling

  Scarlett’s Discovery

  Missing Mimi

  The Mimi Hunt

  Five Marbles for Five Starrs

  Part Two: Sparks

  A Family Meeting

  Trouble in Paradise

  A Scarf Full of Memories

  The Mess Hall

  Arrival

  Gwen

  The Race, 1956

  Dance Lessons

  King of the Campfire

  How To Be a Teenager

  Friday Night Wars

  Letters and Silverware

  A New Student

  Dolly

  The Plan

  The Right Kind of People

  Part Three: Fire

  A Secret Weapon

  Wide Mouth Bass

  Secrets and Lies

  Johnny Skins

  Showtime

  The Getaway

  Mimi’s Secret

  Fishing

  Sisters

  A New Day

  Acknowledgements

  About Vikki

  Other books by Vikki VanSickle

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  I’ve spent enough time around campfires to know that sometimes the fire doesn’t take right away. Maybe the logs are too thick or the wood too damp. Maybe a sharp wind keeps killing your flame. Whatever the reason, it can take a long time for the embers to get hot enough for the kindling to catch fire. The next thing you know, the fire is roaring away — the bark burning off the logs in black, curling strips, and the logs crumbling to a pile of white and black ash.

  As a family, we Starrs had been smouldering away long before Gwendolyn Cates showed up the summer of 1962. She dropped in on us like a rag soaked in gasoline, and the sparks that had always been there, biding their time among the coals, flared up and set everything ablaze.

  PART ONE

  KINDLING

  Summer 1961

  Scarlett’s Discovery

  I felt the footsteps before I heard them: little wet feet slapping against the weathered planks of the dock, shaking me out of my reverie. I groaned to myself, knowing that now that my secret place had been found out, it would be secret no more.

  In the past few weeks the old dock had become my home base — a place away from Scarlett’s whining, from Bo and his mean comments, but mostly away from the lodge, where Mimi’s disappointment hung over everything like fog. It was where I spent my free time: reading, fishing and sunning myself. I let the sunshine burn away my worries, and when I got too hot, I slipped into the lake to cool off. I was getting to be quite the angler, bringing my catch of sunfish and small bass back to Elsa to clean and prepare. Fish you catch yourself always taste better.

  But fishing was about luck, and so far I hadn’t had a single bite all morning. Instead, I lay flat on my back, dozing with my feet hanging off the dock. The sun was as moody as a teenager, sulking behind heavy clouds, then making brief, glaring appearances. Even the water was agitated, stirred up by a needling wind.

  The feet came to a stop by my head.

  “Reenie, I’m hungry,” Scarlett said.

  “Go tell Mimi,” I muttered, not even opening my eyes.

  “I can’t find her.”

  “Did you look in the office?”

  “She’s not there.”

  “In the kitchen?”

  “She’s not there, either.”

  “Maybe she went to help Daddy.”

  “Daddy went into town. He was by himself; I saw him leave.”

  I opened my eyes and pulled myself up to rest on my elbows. “Did you check the bedroom?”

  Scarlett nodded. “Yes, but she’s not there.”

  “She must be checking on a cottage,” I said, even though that was unlikely. It was Monday morning; all the cottages were full of new guests that had driven up over the weekend. Saturday was the day we cleaned the cottages. “Did you check all of them?”

  Scarlett hesitated. “Not all of them,” she admitted.

  “Well, then. She’s probably in the one you didn’t check.”

  Scarlett wandered off again.

  I tried to settle back down and find that drowsy, lazy place I had been dozing in before she’d interrupted, but the sun had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, clouds darkening the afternoon, and thoughts of Mimi darkening my mood.

  When my brother Bo was little, he’d started calling our mother Mimi instead of Mama. She’d loved it, adopting the name instead of Mom, because “Mom makes me feel old.” I’ve never called her anything else, and neither has Bo or our little sister, Scarlett.

  I can’t imagine calling her Mom or Mommy, but when she laughs or greets visitors at the check-in desk, I can picture her on stage. “Your mother always wanted to be a star,” Daddy liked to say. “That’s why she married me.”

  He meant a star like in the movies, not Mrs. Dorothy Starr, his wife. It’s a Starr family joke, although sometimes it feels too true to be funny.

  Lately Mimi had lost a bit of her starry sheen, lapsing instead into long, dark silences. Last night at dinner she’d sat mutely at the table, staring at her food, as if she were trying to remember what to do with it. Bo and Daddy had tried to prod a response out of her by telling the kind of off-colour jokes she normally frowned upon. But after a while they gave up and continued on as if nothing were wrong. Scarlett couldn’t bear it. Even though she’s five years old, she’d started sucking her thumb and peppered Mimi with question after question, like a toddler. Mimi didn’t seem to notice until Scarlett slid from her seat and went to sit on her lap. Mimi pet Scarlett’s hair absently for a while, then stood up and muttered something about a headache. She went upstairs and shut herself in her room for the rest of the evening.

  Like so many other times, Daddy had picked Scarlett up, given her a squeeze and run through every excuse he could think of: Mimi’s tired, she has a headache, she isn’t herself right now. But there were only so many times you could hear an excuse before it started to feel flimsy.

  As the sky grew even darker, I sighed and figured that I should go see where Mimi was. As I made my way down the dock, up the dunes, across the street and toward the lodge, raindrops as big and hard as marbles fell from the sky.

  Sandy Shores isn’t the fanciest summer resort around, but I can’t imagine another place as beautiful. My grandfather bought the land and built the lodge in 1898. By the time he died in 1944, Sandy Shores had grown to include five rental cottages. By 1960, we were up to nine cottages, a playground, four rental boats and the nicest beach on the lake.

  On rainy days, most guests would hole up in their cottages, reading or napping the afternoon away. Sometimes they’d come to the dining hall to order drinks, sit around the radio and play cards until the sky cleared. And that’s where I found Scarlett, sitting at the bar, stabbing maraschino cherries with a little plastic sword meant for the fancy drinks served at cocktail hour.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded, as Scarlett slid a row of four sticky cherries into her mouth at once.

  “I told you, I’m hungry,” Scarlett said, cheeks puffing out like a chipmunk.

  “Those are for the drinks,” I said, whisking the jar away from her. “Not for lunch.”

  “I didn’t know what else to eat,” she whimpered.

  “Come on,” I sighed. “I’ll make you a sandwich.”

  The kitchen was steamy and smelled delicious and, sure enough, when I peeked into the oven, I saw a large cut of beef roasting in its own juices. My stomach started to rumble. I was rooting through the cupboards, looking for bread, when a pair of wa
rm, sweaty hands grabbed me lightly at the scruff of the neck.

  “Aha! Mystery solved!” Elsa said. “Here I was thinking we had mice, but no, we have little girls stealing from my pantry!”

  I laughed. Elsa had been at Sandy Shores ever since Daddy was a boy. Grandpa Starr had kept her on during the war, even though she was a German.

  “Elsa is a Canadian who just happened to be born in Germany,” Daddy explained.

  She was a big woman with an even bigger voice, but I knew she was as soft as the pastries she made, before she slid them in the oven to bake. Her hair, white as the flour she baked with, was swept back in an elegant bun, and her cheeks were rosy from working over a hot stove.

  “What’s this,” she asked, dropping her grasp on our necks to take Scarlett’s messy chin in her hand. “Is kleine wearing lipstick already?”

  Scarlett giggled and licked the sticky red syrup from her lips.

  “No, it’s from the cherries!”

  “Cherries? For lunch?” Elsa said. “It’s a wonder your teeth don’t fall out!”

  “We’re just looking for bread,” I explained. “Then we’ll be out of your hair.”

  “How can such sweet children be in my hair?” Elsa said, pinching my cheek between her thumb and forefinger. “Besides, I wear the hairnet!” Elsa snapped the elastic of her hairnet against her forehead and laughed her big, jolly, Santa-sized laugh. I rolled my eyes.

  “Elsa, have you seen Mimi?” Scarlett asked, digging a knife into a jar of peanut butter.

  “No, kleine, I have not. Perhaps she is with your father.”

  I gave Scarlett a hard look. “Are you sure she wasn’t in the car?”

  “I don’t know, maybe,” Scarlett said, but she didn’t look convinced.

  “Now, get!” Elsa said, shooing us toward the kitchen door. “I have dinner to prepare and those men playing cards are going to want sandwiches soon, you wait and see if I’m wrong.”

  “You’re never wrong, Elsa,” I said with a grin, grabbing a loaf of bread and a handful of oatmeal cookies on the way out.

  Scarlett and I ate peanut butter sandwiches and oatmeal cookies for lunch, washed down with tall glasses of milk that Elsa brought out for us. The rain was coming down in sheets so thick we could barely see the lake. It was cozy and smelled like roast beef in the dining hall, so we found a table in the corner, far away from the card players and their cigarettes, and I taught Scarlett to play Old Maid and Rummy until she got tired, curled up in her chair and fell asleep.

  Around three, the servers started to arrive. I waved to Matthew and James in their crisp white shirts and black slacks, noting that it had been ages since I’d seen Fred or any of the other servers. I wondered if they’d been let go, and if that was why Mimi was so sad. It had been her idea to turn our modest dining hall into a proper restaurant this summer. She’d hoped to not only impress our guests, but draw in locals and passersby for the kind of fancy dinners she remembered from the city. She was always thinking of ways to give Sandy Shores a touch of sophistication, to scrub us up for our big-city guests. Before she’d met my father, Mimi had lived in the city, hoping to make it as an actress. She’d done a little modelling and was a chorus girl once, but it was wartime and there wasn’t very much work. So she’d ended up pulling on a pair of overalls and working at a factory, like so many other girls, just to pay the rent. Then she met my father, fell in love and the rest is Sandy Shores history.

  Sadly, the restaurant wasn’t taking off like Mimi had hoped. At first she’d buzzed about, planning menus with Elsa, picking out new dishware and laughing while she folded napkins into complicated shapes every afternoon. She flirted with the serving staff, complimenting their uniforms, and she even stood behind the bar and helped mix drinks on occasion. But the crowds never really grew, and in a few weeks she went from greeting the dinner guests every evening in her best dresses, to hiding out in her bedroom during the supper hour.

  “You have to give it time, Dorrie,” Daddy had said, but she’d just stared at him like he was a stranger, her eyes as flat as coins. Looking around the room now, empty save for Scarlett and me and the card players, I had to admit that the whole thing had been a bust. A dining hall was one thing: it was a place for people to get a quick bite when they were too hot or tired to cook. But a fancy restaurant, with servers in cummerbunds and menu items Scarlett couldn’t pronounce, was too much.

  I thought Sandy Shores was as close to perfect as it could be. Why couldn’t Mimi see that?

  Missing Mimi

  Scarlett and I waited for hours for Daddy to get back from town. Supper had been served and the staff was cleaning up when a pair of headlights shone through the dark like watery moons.

  “They’re home!” Scarlett cried, and she bolted up and ran to meet them.

  But only Daddy entered the dining hall, his shirt plastered to his skin, Scarlett clinging to his arm, wailing. “She’s not here, I told you, she’s not here!”

  Daddy pried Scarlett off his arm and hugged her to his chest. “Where’s Mimi?” he asked me.

  For the first time since Scarlett had asked me that hours before, I was truly worried.

  “We thought she was with you,” I said.

  “I told you he was alone. I told you, but you didn’t believe me!” Scarlett’s face was a mess, red and splotchy with tears wobbling on the end of her nose and eyelashes.

  “Shh, sweet pea, calm down,” Daddy stroked her hair and pressed her cheek to his shoulder. Her whole body shuddered in his arms. “I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.”

  The sound of Scarlett’s wailing brought Elsa bustling into the dining hall. She clucked her tongue and gathered Scarlett into her big, soft arms, whispering sweet things to her in German.

  “You’re cold, kleine. Let Elsa warm you up some milk.”

  Elsa hurried back to the kitchen, cuddling Scarlett.

  Daddy looked at me. “When did you see her last?”

  I had to think about it. Mimi had been such a ghost lately, floating through life with as few words as possible, that I couldn’t remember. It seemed ages since I had had any real contact with her.

  Daddy slammed his fist against the bar. The sound brought tears to my eyes. When he spoke, it wasn’t anger in his voice, it was fear. Anger would have been less scary.

  “Think, Reenie, when did you see her last?”

  “Last night, after dinner,” I whispered. I didn’t mention that she had been lying on her bed, unable or unwilling to even lift her head when I’d brought in a plate of food.

  Daddy looked grim. I saw lines in his face that I hadn’t noticed before. His cheeks sagged like an old man’s. It was as if I had caught a glimpse of him twenty years in the future, and I didn’t like what I saw. He sighed and ran his hands through his wet hair, slicking it back against his scalp.

  “I’m going to make some phone calls. Where’s Bo?”

  Tears made their way down my cheeks. I couldn’t hold them in anymore.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, hot with shame. What kind of person was I? I didn’t know where my mother or brother was.

  “You look after Scarlett,” Daddy said, then he turned on his heel and stalked off.

  I found Scarlett on Elsa’s lap. There was flour in her hair where Elsa’s kind hands had been stroking it. Even though it was hot and sticky in the kitchen, Scarlett was shivering violently. Elsa had draped an old lumpy sweater over Scarlett’s thin shoulders. Her little white hands were wrapped around a mug, and she kept staring into the curls of steam that rose to her face.

  Elsa looked up and smiled sadly at me. She nodded toward the stove, where a shallow pan of milk was simmering. I ladled us two mugs of hot milk, stirring in heaping spoons of Ovaltine. We stared at our hot chocolate in silence, Elsa humming and Scarlett whimpering. Eventually Scarlett cried herself out and began to droop against Elsa’s bosom.

  “I think you should take her up to bed,” Elsa said softly.

  “But Mimi—” Scarl
ett was overcome with a yawn before she could finish her sentence.

  “Come on,” I said, shifting her weight from Elsa to my own arms.

  Like a toddler, Scarlett wrapped her arms around my neck and let herself be lifted. I staggered under the weight of her. She was getting too big to be carried around like a baby, especially by a twelve-year-old like me, even though I was strong from years of tree-climbing and arm wrestling with Bo.

  We lived on the second floor of the lodge, except for Bo. This summer he had moved into the attic room so he could play his guitar at any hour of the day without disturbing anyone. We rarely rented rooms on the second floor, but when we did, we tended to rent the ones on the west end of the lodge so we could maintain our privacy.

  I loved the lodge, but it felt eerie being upstairs, just the two of us, alone in the dark, knowing Mimi and maybe even Bo were out there somewhere in the rain.

  The window had been left open in Scarlett’s room, and the dampness had crept in and settled over everything. I let Scarlett down on the bed as gently as I could, the muscles in my arms shaking with the effort.

  “I’m not sleepy,” Scarlett insisted, but she nuzzled her head against the pillow anyway.

  “Just close your eyes,” I suggested, tucking her ragged teddy Boo-Bear in beside her. “You don’t have to sleep yet.”

  “Will you stay with me?”

  Scarlett’s voice sounded small in the darkness. I reached out and felt her cheek, cool and clammy from all the tears she had cried. I perched carefully on the edge of her bed, letting my shoes drop to the floor.

  “All the way in,” Scarlett insisted. The storm was still pouring rain outside the window. I leaned back against her pillow, and I watched the shadowy patterns of the branches just outside the window dance across the ceiling in the lights from the patio. Scarlett’s cold little feet pressed into my shins but I didn’t want to move her. She seemed so comfortable. We lay like that, listening to the rain clatter against the window, until Scarlett’s hiccupping stopped and she began to breathe evenly. I was relieved and a little jealous at the ease Scarlett had falling to sleep, given the circumstances. My heart was racing, and despite being bone-tired, I knew I wouldn’t sleep much this evening.