Page 25 of The Beach Shack Legacy

The fog came in early, the way it did in June—a gray wall that sat offshore all afternoon and was halfway up the bluff by close. The Shack’s front windows had gone silver at the edges and the water was a sound instead of a view.

Joey ran the closing list in the order the list gave it. Grill scraped. Surfaces wiped. Walk-in checked against the sheet, which took four minutes if nobody had been in it and eleven if Tyler had. Towels bagged. Patio swept, by him, because the patio was on the list and the list did not care whose turn it was.

The study plan was in his apron pocket, folded in four.

School was in there, folded up with it—the sessions he was behind, the pages he had not opened, the finals coming whether he was ready or not. The stress started every time his hand found the pocket, and he could not make it stop.

He had built it the way you build anything. Units broken into sessions, sessions broken into blocks, blocks assigned to the hours that were actually available rather than the hours a person wished were available. Commute time both directions. A margin at the end of each week he had labeled EVENTS, because things happened. It was color-coded. It was sound.

Stella was at the corner table with her Nana’s recipe box in front of her and nothing else. No laptop. The lid was open and she was not going through it. That was not how a person went through a box.

He finished the list, checked the list against the room, and stopped at the end of her table with the clipboard.

“You’ve had that open for thirty-five minutes.”

“You counted?”

“I passed you four times.” He set the clipboard down and squared it with the table edge. “You haven’t touched a card. What’s going on?”

“I’ve touched one card.” She turned it around. ANZAC BISCUITS, block capitals gone soft with handling. “I went through the whole box with my mum on the phone. Every card. And this one’s been sitting wrong in my head ever since and I can’t work out why. I keep thinking if I stare at it long enough she’ll explain herself.”

Joey looked at the card. He knew the name off the specials board. He had written it in blue ink himself, in his own capitals, more mornings than he could put a number to.

“It’s on our board.”

“It’s on our board because I make it.” Stella turned the card back around. “This is Nana’s. My mum learned it off her and I learned it off my mum, and I have never once seen it written down. And now I’ve seen it written down and something’s off.”

“Off how?”

“I don’t know. That’s the part.”

Joey considered it. It was a document problem. Document problems were not mysterious. Then he said, “Don’t you have finals?”

She looked up at him. “Yes. Not today, though. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. He said it the way you’d report the weather in a city you don’t live in. “I have a study plan. It’s color-coded by unit and it accounts for commute time.”

“Are you following it?”

Joey looked at the clipboard. He squared it against the table edge again, though it had not moved.

“The plan is sound,” he said.

He did not go and check the walk-in. The walk-in was next. He stood there instead, and then he said, “When a system fails, I bake.”

Stella looked up from the box. “You what?”

“Stress baking. It’s a documented technique. There’s a card in my binder. Section nine. Coping strategies with measurable outputs.”

“Naturally.”

“The oven’s still warm. And you have a document with a problem in it.” He picked the clipboard back up. “You can’t diagnose a recipe by looking at it. Recipes are instructions. Instructions want executing.”

“That’s evidence, Joey.”

“You can execute evidence if you wash your hands first.”

Which is how, after closing on a regular day, Joey ended up at the prep counter with a dead woman’s handwriting propped against the sugar bin.