Life Guards in the Hamptons Read Free

companion, not even Little Red’s snoring. I rolled over again.
    The dolphins and the robberies were someone else’s responsibility, I reminded my weary self, not mine. Susan assured me the old dogs at my mother’s house were doing well. Why not, on Susan’s leftovers? I untwisted my nightshirt.
    I had time on my deadline and money in the bank. I threw off the covers.
    Dad in Florida had a new girlfriend, and Mom said she’d found homes for most of her retired greyhounds. Little Red snarled when I shoved my extra pillow away and threw myself facedown on the mattress.
    What the hell was bugging me?
    Frigging chiggers, that’s what.

    1 Trolls in the Hamptons, November, 2010; Night Mares in the Hamptons, May, 2011; Fire Works in the Hamptons, November, 2011.

C HAPTER 2

    I  NOW HARBORED THE MOST OBNOXIOUS, disgusting blood-sucking parasites—and I am not talking about my former boyfriend Arlen. City people might have bedbugs, but eastern Long Islanders had chiggers. The repulsive, maddening monsters hung out in tall grass and weeds, in places only an idiot would go, or someone trying to save a lost sea soul. I’d spent days sitting in bramble trying to comfort what I thought was a dying creature. Now I felt like I’d been on the wrong end of the autopsy.
    You couldn’t see the little bastards, only feel them. They burrowed under your skin, causing the worst burning itch of your life. They usually started at your ankles, filled up on your blood and moved on, anywhere warm, like in your socks, beneath the elastic bands of your underwear, or your crotch, the perverted pestilences. Hot showers raised up more burning, tormenting welts, and if you scratched them, ichor dripped out. I wanted to rip my skin off and send it to the dry cleaner. Or the fumigator.
    I needed help.
    My cousin Susan worked late and partied later. She’d still be sleeping.
    I called her mother instead. Aunt Jasmine had lived her whole life in Paumanok Harbor. Her husband helped Grandma Eve run the farm. Surely Aunt Jas would know what to do. Besides, she dealt with hysterical people in crisis all the time. She taught school.
    “Your grandmother makes up a lotion that gets rid of them,” she told me.
    “I’m never coming back to that godforsaken, infested place,” I told her. Nor was I about to use any of Grandma Eve’s grimoire formulas. Not after a gang of cabbage-smashing kids all ended up with genital warts last year. “What can I do, here in the civilized world?”
    She laughed. “You call dodging messenger bikes and breathing bus exhaust civilized?”
    “I need help here, Aunt Jas, not a country mouse/city mouse spiel. I’m scratching myself bloody.”
    “Okay, first you have to wash your sheets and towels and pajamas in hot water. As hot as you can make it. Otherwise you’ll keep breeding the nasty little devils and getting reinfested. Then get some anti-itch ointment. Any drugstore will have it.”
    So I took my laundry and everything I’d brought back on the bus from Paumanok Harbor downstairs to the basement laundry room. I filled every washing machine, which didn’t earn me any points with the first-floor pregnant tenant who had to wait. As soon as I shoveled the sodden stuff into the driers, I raced up the three flights, fetched Little Red and my credit card, and hustled to the nearest drugstore. The dog didn’t get much walking, sniffing, or marking done, but I bought three different kinds of ointments for bites, burns, and scrapes. By now I had them all.
    The creams worked for about half an hour. Then the itching started again, worse, in new places where my sneakers had rubbed or the top of my jeans. Susan had to be up by now. My younger cousin had been born in the desolate east-of-everything and never missed a beach party, private picnic in the dunes, or a good-looking surfer dude. It was a miracle she didn’t have STDs, much less parasites. She had cancer last year, though, so I should stop complaining. But, hell, I