What the Tide Left

About What the Tide Left

Bellhaven is two towns wearing one name: the tourist tide that floods the boardwalk every June, and the few hundred year-rounders who keep the lights on after the Esplanade goes dark in October. Goldie Penhallow has run the Saltbox Inn — the boardwalk's oldest guesthouse — for thirty years, fluffing pillows and flipping breakfast for visitors who never remember her name, and she came to Bellhaven a stranger herself once, a fact she has never forgotten. So when her dearest friend, the town clerk, turns up dead on the open sand the morning after the season-opening Sandcastle Classic, Goldie feels the loss like a tide going out. The town wants a tidy verdict — too much sun, too much punch, please don't spook the visitors — but Goldie knows the patch of sand beneath her friend was three feet underwater at four in the morning. As the town hurries to pin it on a drifting carnival worker — because in a place built on strangers, the stranger is always easiest to blame — Goldie has two reasons to dig in: her friend deserves the truth, and the young newcomer being railroaded is a boy Goldie herself hired, the kind of stranger she once was. From behind the front desk, with a shameless boardwalk gull and the saltwater-taffy lady's bottomless gossip on her side, she follows a trail that runs through a box of old hotel photos no one's looked at in decades. Because her friend wasn't curious about the wrong people for nothing — and the answer has been smiling at Bellhaven for thirty years