Roxie nodded.

“How’d you end up on the island?” Poppy said, momentarily forgetting that Roxie hadn’t seemed too keen on discussing the subject yesterday morning.

“My family vacationed here when I was a kid,” Roxie said. “My parents, sorry to say . . .” She gestured toward the condominiums they passed. “Yech, like you said. We’d rent a gorgeous beachside place for a week, my mom would still find things to gripe about. Curtains didn’t match the wallpaper. Sheets smelled mildewy. And if it wasn’t something about the house, it was my dad—they’d be at each other’s throats all week long. And I was an only child, so I didn’t have anyone to run off and play with just to escape.” Roxie shook her head at these memories. “Anyhow,” she said, “how I actually ended up living here, that’s a long story and it’d bore you to tears.”

“Probably not,” Poppy said.

Roxie shrugged mildly and didn’t offer anything further on the matter.

Poppy pointed out their rental house as they passed it, on the far side of the street. “That’s my home base for the week,” she said. “Pretty nice digs. The green one with the white shutters.”

“That one there?”

Poppy nodded. “I’m pretty sure it’s haunted. I swear to you, the last two nights, I swear I heard footsteps a couple different times. And everybody’s got their own bathroom attached to the room, so I don’t know what causes . . . Well, anyway.”

Roxie said, “Some people think this whole island’s crawling with ghosts.”

“Really?”

“Sure, there’s tons of spooky folklore,” Roxie said. “Pirate ship set fire to a boat full of orphans coming from England, just off the coast. All the orphans on the boat died in the water but now inhabit the island as ghosts. Some people say they can hear the children singing at night.”

Poppy said, “I do not like that.”

“The Gray Man is another one.”

“Who’s that?”

“Legend started up in Charleston. A guy set out to visit his fiancée, but he and his horse got trapped in quicksand in the marshes near Pawley Island. They say the ghost always wears gray and wanders up and down the coast when a storm is on the way, looking for ladies with broken hearts. See, he’s still trying to find his fiancée. He wants to protect her from storms.”

“I’d punch him in his gray ghost face,” Poppy said, “if he tried to talk to me.”

Roxie laughed. “Half the people who live on this island claim they’ve seen him. They’ve always got some new story. That’s what happens when you wait tables—you see the same-old-same-olds every single morning, and they’re forever coming up with new material.”

“Sounds that way,” Poppy said. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth to prevent a stomach cramp.

Roxie said, “You said you used to work at a restaurant too, right?”

“From junior high till I was almost thirty,” Poppy said.

Roxie ran a palm along the back of her tanned, graceful neck and wiped the perspiration on her mesh shorts.