The Summer I Dared: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Delinsky has written many bestselling novels over the past two decades, including Flirting with Pete, The Woman Next Door, and Coast Road. Delinsky is a lifelong New Englander who loves communicating with her readers. She can be reached at P.O. Box 812894, Wellesley, MA 02482-0026, or at her website at www.barbaradelinsky.com

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Chapter 1

Julia Bechtel was airborne only as long as it might have taken had a large someone picked her up and heaved her high into the ocean. She went underwater in a stunned state, but she never lost her orientation. Even before her downward plunge slowed, she was clawing against the sea to propel herself back up. When her head broke the surface, she gasped for air. The waves rose around her, but she fought them. Focusing on that singular need to breathe, she used her arms and legs to create a rhythm matching that of the sea in an effort to keep herself afloat.

Her breath came in shallow gasps, along with a creeping awareness of what had happened. She heard in echo the sound of screams, an impact, and an explosion, all drawn from immediate memory. Pushing wet hair from her eyes, she looked around, trying to get her bearings. The waves were littered with pieces of wood, ejected from the boat just as she had been, but where the rest of the Amelia Celeste should have been there were now flames furiously devouring wood and God knew what else, and the line between black smoke and white fog was lost.

Instinct told her to move away from the fire, so she fought the tug of the waves and pulled herself backward. Her sandals were gone, as was her pocketbook, and when she felt the weight of the wet quilted blazer dragging her down, she slid her arms from that, too. She was trembling, though she didn't know whether from cold or from shock. Fear hadn't yet set in.

"Hey!" came a shout from the smoky haze, then a head appeared. It was the man who had been with her in the bow. He was swimming toward her. "Are you hurt?" he called loudly enough to be heard above the roar of the flames.

She didn't think she was. Everything seemed to be working. "No," she called back.

"Hold on to this," he said as he pulled forward what he'd been towing. It was a long seat cushion, clearly buoyant. "I'm going back in."

Grasping the cushion, Julia was about to ask if that was possible, when another staggering explosion came. She barely had time to take a breath when the man pulled her under to escape the falling debris. By the time they resurfaced, gasping and sputtering, treading water in the churn of the waves, the hail was done.

Going back in was a moot point, then. The flames were louder, the smoke more dense.

In obvious anguish, the man stared at the devastation. Seemingly as an afterthought, he tore his eyes from the smoke, looked around for the cushion, swam for it, towed it back. "Hold on," he said, and when Julia complied, he dragged the cushion through the waves, farther away from the wreck. All the while he stared into the smoke and the flames.

Suddenly, he did an about-face in the water and turned those anguished eyes in the opposite direction. "Hey!" he screamed in desperation toward what Julia assumed was the shore. "Get out here! Hey! There are people who need help!"

Julia knew he wasn't referring to himself or to her. They appeared to be unscathed, but there were all those others on the far side of the flames, who might have been hit by debris, knocked unconscious by the explosion, or burned by the fire.

Incredibly, the man began to swim toward the smoke.

"Don't go!" Julia cried. She had visions of his disappearing and never being heard from again -- or perhaps she just didn't want to be left alone. The fog was thick, the fire close, and she had no idea how far they were from shore. For the first time then, with a marginal grasp of what had happened, she did feel fear. The ocean was a big place and she an infinitesimally tiny dot in its midst. Two dots were better than one.

He kept swimming. After a minute, though, he stopped. He bobbed in place, staring at the flames, before recalculating and swimming to the left of the fire, but the waves fought him there, pushing him back when he might have moved on. So he let himself be carried back to where she was and, once there, grabbed hold of the cushion.

"Did you see anyone else?" she asked. She was breathing hard, but nowhere near as hard as he was.

He shook his head, then twisted it back toward shore again. It was another minute before Julia heard what he had, and another minute after that before a boat emerged from the fog. A working lobster boat, it was smaller than the Amelia Celeste and nowhere near as polished, but Julia had never seen anything as welcome in her life.

In no time, she had been helped over the side and into the boat, wrapped in a blanket and settled in the small cabin under the bow. Once there, though, she began to shake in earnest, because not only were those sounds reverberating in her mind -- screams, impact, explosion -- but she could see it again: the sudden emergence of a huge purple point coming out of the fog, just high enough to start right over the side of the ferry, before crashing down in its midst.

Unable to sit still, Julia went back up to the deck, where she stood, dripping wet and trembling under the blanket, now with a hand at her mouth and her eyes on the fog. The smell of smoke was overwhelming; she raised the blanket over her nose to diffuse it.

The man who had been with her in the water was also aboard, but there was no blanket for him, no coddling. He and two others were leaning over the side, peering through the fog and smoke as the boat dodged its way along between pieces of wood, fiberglass, and miscellaneous other matter that Julia couldn't identify. Some were burning, some were not.

The ghost of another search boat flickered briefly in the fog before heading in the opposite direction. When a third search boat appeared, it drew alongside, and the man who had been with her in the water climbed into it.

Julia didn't ask questions, and he didn't look back. He was clearly a local, known by the men in both boats, no doubt known by the rest who had been in the Amelia Celeste. He was worried.

Feeling a deep sense of dread, she watched the third boat pull away. She followed the sound of it, struggling to see through the fog, until her own boat turned away.

"We're gonna get you in," the captain explained as the boat picked up speed.

"You don't have to," she said quickly. "I'm okay. Shouldn't we stay here and help with the search?" She felt a need to do that.

But the captain simply said, "I'll drop you ashore and come back," and sped on.

Chilled as the wind whipped through her wet hair, Julia took shelter in the wheelhouse, eyes on the front windshield, waiting for sign of land. Within minutes, a darkness materialized, a body of land rising from the water, with a serrated skyline rising high above it. Another minute, and the mist thinned to reveal a small fishing village built into a hillside.

The boat pulled up at the dock. Of the islanders already gathered there, one woman ran forward.

Zoe Ballard was Julia's mother's youngest sister, a late-in-life child, barely twelve years older than Julia. That closeness in age alone would have been enough to justify the bond Julia felt. More, though, Zoe was interesting and adventurous, irreverent, independent. She was everything Julia was not but admired nonetheless.

And now here she was, wearing a woven patchwork jacket and frayed jeans, her chestnut hair windblown, her features delicate like Julia's, eyes filled with tears. But her arms were strong, helping Julia as she stumbled off the boat, then hugging her tightly for what seemed like forever. Julia didn't complain. She couldn't stop shaking. Zoe's strength helped. She felt safe with her, safe on dry land, safe and alive -- and suddenly terrified that others were not. She looked back at the boat in time to see it head out again.

That quickly, the crowd closed in, and the questions began.

"What happened?"

"How many were on the Amelia Celeste?"

"Have they pulled others from...