Chapter 1

Present Day—Saturday, October 29, 2022, 7:10 a.m.
Morning after the Fall Meet and Greet
Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina
Boone Home, I’On Avenue
Sarabeth Mercer Jackson Boone

The morning after we hosted the Titanic of all neighborhood parties, Tucker and I were dead to the world, blissfully oblivious—at least for a few sweet hours—as to how spectacularly my plans to sow the seeds of unity in our small, fractured town had failed. I had tried my best to build bridges, I did… and every one of them had blown up in my face. Could there possibly be any bigger party fail than having to call the police, who hauled off several of your neighbors in handcuffs? My fall meet and greet was an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions is what I’m telling you.

Tucker and I slammed into wide-awake the next morning when the doorbell went off, ringing urgently in rapid-fire succession like maybe the house was on fire and somebody was trying to save us all. A woman was hollering and the dogs were barking and we bolted straight up out of the bed. It’s a miracle we didn’t both have massive heart attacks at that very moment. We are, after all, in the grandparent demographic and at an elevated risk.

We grabbed our robes and threw them on and went flying down the stairs. And of course the girls and Deacon and the dogs all came too. Tucker threw open the door and we huddled in behind him, the girls kneeling down to grab ahold of the dogs. Clutching the top of my robe together to be sure I was decent, I peered over his shoulder at Josephine Huger, who’s our neighbor behind us, and her English bulldog, Petunia—who was flat losing her mind—there on the porch.

“Call 9-1-1,” Josephine gasped, a hand to her chest. “There’s a body out here in your front yard.”

Well, at first I confess I thought, Poor Josephine is just confused. Those are our Halloween decorations. We had one of those spooky graveyards under the big live oak in our front yard?

Tucker stepped out to the edge of the porch and leaned over the rail for a better look.

Then he dashed down the steps for a closer perspective on things. The rest of us stepped onto the porch and clustered in the spot he’d vacated.

Tucker looked up at me.

The expression on my husband’s face was just… He was thunderstruck. “Call 9-1-1.”

“Girls, get inside and get dressed,” I said as I dashed for my phone, which was on the table beside our bed. I called 911 and told them we had a body in our front yard and to please send someone right away but I had no further information and needed to get my clothes on, thank you very much.

I must’ve been in shock, because it wasn’t until I was on my way back outside that it hit me Tucker hadn’t said who was dead in our front yard. At that point, I just assumed it was a random stranger. Probably some poor soul who overserved themselves at a party and through some series of misadventures passed out in our front yard and died of alcohol poisoning or some such thing. Tragic and horrifying but connected to us only by the accident of location. It never entered my mind it was one of our friends.

I’ve given a lot of thought as to how, exactly, we came to that moment. Looking back on everything that’s happened, if someone asked me when the whole thing started, initially I would’ve said it was with the May supper club. For me, of course, everything began the morning Tallulah Wentworth rang my doorbell—three days after we’d moved in, in March of last year—and asked for a drink of water. She said she wasn’t feeling well. Then she invited me to supper club. Actually, I guess if I really thought about it, the entire series of events was set in motion years ago, back when the supper club first started. I’m not saying any of this was Tallulah’s fault. Perish the thought.

But none of this would have happened if it weren’t for supper club. There was just no getting around it.

© 2024 by Susan M. Boyer and Stella Maris Books, LLC