The Gun Runner's Daughter by Neil Gordon Page A

house, and it is hardest to avoid by dawn.
    It lay across Ocean View Farm, when Allison awoke in her childhood bed, like a spell.
    In the sodden light leaking into the little room where Pauly had played with his ancient set of wooden trains, still packed in their wicker basket in the closet.
    In the still air of her father’s study, where a fine layer of dust lay on the surface of the Stickley desk.
    Every window, holding a vista of horse pasture and wind-stunted field, filled with the drizzling dawn of receding storm.
    A framed composition, saturated with meaning, illustrating loss.
    Allison woke to the neurotic clucking of guinea fowl greeting the dawn. For a moment her body tried to find its way back into sleep. Then Dee shifted beside her, and sleep
fled. Like this she rested for a while, eyes wide. Then, gingerly, she climbed over him, naked, briefly straddling his big sleeping form, and picked up her nightdress as she left the room.
    Downstairs, through the big picture windows, the rain had all but stopped and the high sky was filled with fleeing clouds beyond which showed, every now and again, a glimpse of high, anonymous
blue. A big, wet wind filled the air, rocking the trees, blowing the hammock on the porch, and for an eerie second, a flash, she saw Pauly lying there, swinging away a long dappled afternoon of
shade, beside their swimsuited mother.
    For a long time she sat, arms around knees, in the living room, watching over the lawn, to the sky still swimming with the spectacular business of the storm’s lull.
    Then, with a quickening heart, she heard Dee’s foot on the floor above.
    He came down barefoot, in his jeans, his white shirttails hanging out. His blond hair was messy with sleep, and when he approached she smelled on him, faintly, the rain from the day before.
Wordless, she let him fold her against his chest, against the rough of his shirt. And for a moment, in the still morning, the pathos of the scene receded. Then she felt him tense, and reluctantly
she stepped back.
    “Alley. I got to be home before my aunt wakes.”
    “Okay.”
    He stood, at a loss. And she said:
    “I understand. Go now.”
    “May I come back later?”
    “I’ll be home after lunch.”
    “I’ll be here after lunch.”
    Then he was gone.
    2.
    Dee drove the wet, sandy road up to the highway carefully, afraid suddenly of getting stuck: this was not a place he wanted to have to call for a tow. In Vineyard Haven, only
the breakfast joints on Main Street were open, fishermen coming out in boots, smoking, heading for their cars: after the storm, the seas would be far too high to go out today. Billy Poole saw him
passing and waved, grinning in reference to the Sunday morning dawn run home. At home, he idled the car into the garage, then slipped in the screen door, careful not to let it bang.
    But he needn’t have bothered. As he entered, the telephone began to ring, and when he answered it the familiar voice of Shauna’s secretary came to him, uncannily, as if from another
life. The prosecution team had been leaked, she told him, to Stephen Labaton at the
Times.
McCarthy had talked him into holding his scoop until the following afternoon, but that meant the
press conference had been moved up: ten o’clock, Monday morning. He had to be in for makeup—he would be announcing on-camera—at seven.
    “She says you got to be here if you have to swim, Mr. Dennis.”
    “I might have to.” No sooner had Dee hung up than his father called. Senator Kennedy’s office had secured him an emergency reservation on the first ferry after the seas calmed,
which would probably be that evening.
    Dee hung up again, calculating.
    An early-evening ferry would allow him to get to New York by midnight.
    He’d call Shauna from the road and ask her if he could come to her house that night.
    By the morning, he thought as his heart quickened, it would all be over.
     

    At Ocean View, Allison Rosenthal, dressed now in her bicycle clothes and