Page 5 of The Hampton Beach Café
“It’s potato-flavored ice cream!” she exclaimed. “What on earth makes you think I’d want to eat that!”
This was a surefire way to annoy Lucinda, but despite the long day of travel they had endured, she laughed instead.
“It’s not a potato. It’s taro,” she said. “It’s a root vegetable, and it’s very sweet! It’s no weirder than candied yams at Thanksgiving.”
Frances couldn’t really explain why she was so against the weird-looking food, so instead of trying to justify it, she went the lighthearted route instead. “Well, it’s definitely…purple-er.”
Glad she could make Lucinda laugh, Frances leaned around her friend to spy on Mike the Cabbie. He looked like he was having a rough time, indeed. He mouthed the word ‘sorry,’ pointed at his watch, and mouthed the words ‘ten minutes’ with an anxious expression. Lucinda hadn’t seen it, and Frances knew the delay would only annoy her friend if she knew about it.
“Let’s wander down. Mike looks like he’s in a world of hurt,” she said. “Maybe he actually suggested to his wife she cook breakfast for us on our last day.”
Despite the chilly breeze, it couldn’t have been more than seventy degrees out. The ice cream went down exceptionally well. The rich chocolate Frances had chosen might not have been cool or interesting like Lucinda’s choice, but chocolate was almost always a pretty good bet––and as a risk management specialist, wasn’t that kind of what Frances was paid to prefer?
“These hotels look like something out of an old movie. I can just imagine murder mysteries solved by high society flappers in the twenties…” Lucinda said, “…and the stolen jewels absolutely get discovered in a bootlegger’s secret tunnel.”
She couldn’t exactly disagree, but the majority of the hotels were from the fifties and sixties at most. Frances didn’t want to point that out to Luci when she was having such a great time, but then she saw an old redbrick building that would fit Lucinda’s story.
“That one there…” she pointed to the hotel, “…it’s been renovated, and that extension is definitely eighties, but I think the central part was probably built around the turn of the century.”
The pair crossed the road, jogging the last few steps to avoid the sweeping school bus that barely slowed down for them.
“This is such a pretty street,” Luci commented, popping the last piece of waffle cone into her mouth. “Oh, look!”
Frances turned her gaze from the red brick marvel to where Frances was pointing. The place looked like a house, but the wooden sign over the door and large glass window display meant that it must be a store. Her heart fluttered slightly though she couldn't pinpoint why. Frances shook it off and pulled Lucinda down the road to get a closer look.
FOUR
The paint was peeling off the wooden door and window frames, the glass was dirty inside and out, and the sign she had seen was hanging by a single chain loop that Frances was sure could not be at all safe.
“Isn’t it just so stinkin’ adorable?” Frances said, pressing her face into the glass to try and see inside.
“Stinkin' adorable? More like rotting, but still,” Lucinda said. “It was probably very charming once. Now, though, it looked quite a bit nicer from further away––it’s actually condemned, Frances!”
She was pointing at a yellow piece of paper stuck to the window with an excess of clear packing tape. Frances looked closer at it and shook her head.
“It’s not condemned. It’s just in foreclosure,” she said. “Look…the bank is auctioning it off this weekend.”
Peering through the musty glass, Frances could see the built-in wooden counter at the rear of the room. A flicker in her chest erupted again. There was something there, but she just couldn’t put her finger on it. There was a pattern of stained glass that bordered both windows and arched over the doorway. It was beautiful despite the bad paint job. She looked over her shoulder, intending to glare at Lucinda for being so down and out about such a nice old place that had clearly been left to fester, but the wall across from her made her stop in her tracks.
“I remember now,” she said. “This was the candy store my friend’s parents owned when we were in high school. Good lord, that must be twenty-five years ago now. We used to hang out here all the time. Look at the bricks.”
She crossed the road to indicate the ones she meant. There was a slightly gray color to some of the bricks in the wall that alternated with the dull red to create a pattern of overlapping diamonds.
“Yeah?” Lucinda said, her eyebrow raised.
“We came back one night, way past curfew. All five of us were supposed to be staying here overnight, and boy was Mrs. Lockwood mad at us,” Frances trailed her fingertips down the wall. “We couldn’t convince her we hadn’t been out partying––which we had not, by the way––and she thought the best punishment was to get up and help Mr. Lockwood build this wall starting at six am. We weren’t hungover like she thought we were, but six am is torture when you’re sixteen––even more when you got home at one in the morning!”
“So you were a rebel in high school? Never would have picked that.”
“Hardly! We had been out on the beach with a campfire, reading poetry to each other and finding different constellations with Alex’s dad’s telescope…”
A sharp bark of laughter came from Lucinda. “That makes a lot more sense. You were a nerd in high school!”
Frances laughed at that, but it was a quiet one, unlike Lucinda’s.
“Yeah, that sounds more like me,” she said. “We should head back. I think Mike’s either done on the phone or in too much trouble to take us anywhere.”
“A candy shop, huh?” Lucinda asked as they crossed the main road so they could walk down the beach as they made their way back to Mike.
