located Arthur, browsing the long, linen-covered table laden with silver platters of food: mounds of shrimp, salmon mousse, fussy triangular sandwiches.
“I’m afraid I just disgraced myself,” I laughed. “I outed Ian to Suki Weatherbee, the St. Harold’s mattress. She spent every weekend in one of our dormitories. With either Ian or Kittredge Rawlings. She went to Braemere, you know, our sister school.”
“Our incestuous sister,” Arthur said.
Miriam joined us. She seemed a bit light-hearted for the day of a funeral, eating a jungle of a salad. “An adequate salad bar,” she whispered. “Will wonders never cease?”
We found a quiet corner of the garden where we could relax, speculate about the murder, and hear Arthur’s plan to dedicate his Swim for Scholars to Ian’s memory. While we were talking, Ian’s sister Sallie strolled by, arm-in-arm with a tall, dazzling stranger.
“Her fiancé,” Arthur whispered. “Or so I heard over the cucumber sandwiches. He’s a marine biologist. The ultimate small fish in a big pond.”
Chapter Ten
Arthur and Miriam returned to Cape Cod while I called on my mother in Gloucester. She lived a short distance from the Drummonds in a strange stone gatehouse, a mossy tower Rapunzel might have inhabited, so darkened by overhanging spruce trees that it seemed as though sun never penetrated its dampness. My mother had bought the house years ago from the Snows, distant relatives of Ian’s father.
At the time, the Snows were moving to England, something to do with North Sea oil, and the grounds of their estate, Bellevue, were going to be subdivided into a development called Bayberry Heights. Then Mr. Snow dropped dead of an embolism in the first-class cabin of their jet to London. His widow and children began a litigious dispute about Bellevue, and, eventually, the house was pulled down—some museum in New York bought the Grinling Gibbons carving from the library—and the family donated the land to the Nature Conservancy, for tax purposes. But before Mr. Snow booked his fatal flight, when it looked like Bayberry Heights would make the transition from the drawing board to the cement mixer and saw, my mother bought the gatehouse “for a song,” as she would say. And now that it abutted conservation land instead of an outbreak of plywood townhouses, its value had skyrocketed.
My mother was in back of the house when I arrived, painting at her easel, a canvas of Halibut Point, Rockport. She had hair like mine, the tarnished copper of hoarded pennies, my sharp features and the mouth someone once called “licentious.” She’d liked a drink since her nightclub days, while I was wary of liquor. She was wearing something she’d salvaged from a yard sale, a housecoat appliquéd with fat red strawberries. On her feet were ballet slippers, and, as always, she rattled when she moved; she wore a dozen silver bracelets and a necklace of pottery beads. Why she bothered with jewelry when she was content with such clothes, her “painting rags,” was a mystery.
“Hello, darling,” she said, although her back was toward me and my feet were muffled by the browning spruce boughs littering the lawn like rushes on the floor of a medieval palace. She had the hearing of a guard dog; I guess that came with her musical training.
“How can you paint such a sunny landscape in this gloom?” I asked. “A bomb shelter couldn’t be any darker.”
“I have the sun in my head.” She dipped a brush in turpentine and wiped it clean. “It’s in my memory. Besides, I was just touching up.”
“You weren’t at the funeral.”
“That’s right, I was painting.”
We hadn’t spoken since Ian was killed. My mother stepped back to appraise the canvas. She’d taken up painting late in life but was quite good. You could see the waves swelling; almost experience the odor of salt and kelp.
“What do you think? It’s already been sold to a homesick Bostonian in Minneapolis.” My mother’s
“I’m afraid I just disgraced myself,” I laughed. “I outed Ian to Suki Weatherbee, the St. Harold’s mattress. She spent every weekend in one of our dormitories. With either Ian or Kittredge Rawlings. She went to Braemere, you know, our sister school.”
“Our incestuous sister,” Arthur said.
Miriam joined us. She seemed a bit light-hearted for the day of a funeral, eating a jungle of a salad. “An adequate salad bar,” she whispered. “Will wonders never cease?”
We found a quiet corner of the garden where we could relax, speculate about the murder, and hear Arthur’s plan to dedicate his Swim for Scholars to Ian’s memory. While we were talking, Ian’s sister Sallie strolled by, arm-in-arm with a tall, dazzling stranger.
“Her fiancé,” Arthur whispered. “Or so I heard over the cucumber sandwiches. He’s a marine biologist. The ultimate small fish in a big pond.”
Chapter Ten
Arthur and Miriam returned to Cape Cod while I called on my mother in Gloucester. She lived a short distance from the Drummonds in a strange stone gatehouse, a mossy tower Rapunzel might have inhabited, so darkened by overhanging spruce trees that it seemed as though sun never penetrated its dampness. My mother had bought the house years ago from the Snows, distant relatives of Ian’s father.
At the time, the Snows were moving to England, something to do with North Sea oil, and the grounds of their estate, Bellevue, were going to be subdivided into a development called Bayberry Heights. Then Mr. Snow dropped dead of an embolism in the first-class cabin of their jet to London. His widow and children began a litigious dispute about Bellevue, and, eventually, the house was pulled down—some museum in New York bought the Grinling Gibbons carving from the library—and the family donated the land to the Nature Conservancy, for tax purposes. But before Mr. Snow booked his fatal flight, when it looked like Bayberry Heights would make the transition from the drawing board to the cement mixer and saw, my mother bought the gatehouse “for a song,” as she would say. And now that it abutted conservation land instead of an outbreak of plywood townhouses, its value had skyrocketed.
My mother was in back of the house when I arrived, painting at her easel, a canvas of Halibut Point, Rockport. She had hair like mine, the tarnished copper of hoarded pennies, my sharp features and the mouth someone once called “licentious.” She’d liked a drink since her nightclub days, while I was wary of liquor. She was wearing something she’d salvaged from a yard sale, a housecoat appliquéd with fat red strawberries. On her feet were ballet slippers, and, as always, she rattled when she moved; she wore a dozen silver bracelets and a necklace of pottery beads. Why she bothered with jewelry when she was content with such clothes, her “painting rags,” was a mystery.
“Hello, darling,” she said, although her back was toward me and my feet were muffled by the browning spruce boughs littering the lawn like rushes on the floor of a medieval palace. She had the hearing of a guard dog; I guess that came with her musical training.
“How can you paint such a sunny landscape in this gloom?” I asked. “A bomb shelter couldn’t be any darker.”
“I have the sun in my head.” She dipped a brush in turpentine and wiped it clean. “It’s in my memory. Besides, I was just touching up.”
“You weren’t at the funeral.”
“That’s right, I was painting.”
We hadn’t spoken since Ian was killed. My mother stepped back to appraise the canvas. She’d taken up painting late in life but was quite good. You could see the waves swelling; almost experience the odor of salt and kelp.
“What do you think? It’s already been sold to a homesick Bostonian in Minneapolis.” My mother’s
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