by Gwen Florio
‘A kid. So you saw enough to recognize his age.’
Had she? Or had she just assumed youth, because of the music? No, she remembered his face, eyes gone wide and white when she slowed to pass the traffic stop.
‘Yes. Teenager, maybe. Of course, now everybody looks young to me.’ She dragged up a laugh, trying to lighten the mood.
He dropped her arm and picked up the oar, guiding the boat back on course.
‘What kind of car? Could you tell?’
‘Please.’ Didn’t he remember? He’d taken it upon himself, all those years ago, to teach her how to recognize makes and models of cars and trucks, and though she’d protested the sexism of his assumption, she’d reluctantly gone along, taking unaccountable pleasure in nailing, say, a low-slung ’68 Chevy Impala.
‘A green Kia. That bright, neon green. A few years old.’
‘You catch a license number?’
He’d gone full interrogatory cop, and although his face was a studied blank, a chill ran through her.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me. No. I wasn’t looking for that. Mostly, I just remember the music.’
‘Yeah, that was him. That music. I’ll hear it the rest of my life.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Thanks, Nora. Maybe this will help with the investigation. They’re going to put me through the wringer. Which they should. It’s the only way to keep any credibility.’ He squared his shoulders, as though adjusting to a weighty, if necessary, burden.
She let out a breath. If the shooting had been anything but self-defense, would he so readily welcome an investigation?
The dock at Quail House hove into view, Murph pacing its length. The boat glided alongside as the dog performed ungainly arabesques of relief at their return.
‘I’ve got to go. It’s going to be a tough week,’ Alden said. He rested the oars and grabbed a piling. He lingered, though, backlit by the gentle shimmer of the rising sun, gazing at her so long that she dropped her eyes and began running her fingers through Murph’s fur in old familiar patterns as though searching for ticks.
He reached over to stroke the dog, his fingers tangling with hers, tightening around them for a moment before releasing them.
‘I’m glad you’re back. Even under the circumstances, it’s good to see you. You out here every morning?’
‘Depends when I wake up. Maybe. I like it this time of day. It’s the only time it’s cool.’
‘Same. This rowing – it’s about more than staying in shape or distracting myself until they finish this investigation. I live in a houseful of women. It was open warfare when I left this morning, somebody already in hysterics. This is the only peace I get. Teenage girls. You can’t even imagine.’
She laughed, remembering epic battles with Penelope. Over what, exactly? Penelope’s horror at her choice of college, abruptly transferring from the nearby University of Delaware to Colorado after her break-up with Alden.
‘It’s so far,’ her mother pleaded. ‘You can’t leave. You’re all I’ve got.’ The sense of suffocation, propelling the westward escape that ended up with Nora gaining her freedom but acknowledging that Alden was forever gone. Her laughter faded, but she tried to keep her tone light.
‘Yes, I can. I used to be one.’
He let go of the piling and took up the oars. The boat drifted backward into the current. ‘I remember.’ He raised an oar in acknowledgment and then wielded it to set the boat back on its course. ‘I remember very well.’
Nora tiptoed back across the lawn, her caution unnecessary as the thick clipped grass would have silenced all but the loudest footsteps. She veered away from the house and toward Electra instead, beset by an adolescent certainty that Penelope would be able to read in her expression the moment Alden rowed hard back to the dock, beckoning Nora, clutching the piling with one hand while pulling her to him and brushing her cheek with his lips, a chaste bittersweet bestowal of sweetness and regret and apology and promise.
‘Old times’ sake,’ he’d whispered, and although she should have pulled away, she didn’t.
TEN
1963
As jobs went, cleaning Quail House was a lot more work than Grace had expected.
Her mother had warned her. ‘You think it’s going to be like what you do here.’ She laughed, short and bitter. The home’s rooms gleamed spotless, all four of them – the kitchen, parlor and two bedrooms, one for Davita and Gerald, and one that Grace had shared with Bobby until she turned twelve and Davita declared that growing children needed privacy, after which Bobby slept on the parlor davenport. The outhouse stood at the far end of the packed-earth back yard, regular applications of quicklime and ashes keeping odors to a minimum. Once a week Grace cleaned the house to Davita’s exacting standards, while Bobby tended the vegetable garden, those chores turned over to them by their exhausted parents as soon as Grace and Bobby were old enough to wield a broom or hoe.
‘Six bedrooms,’ Grace said at the end of her first week there. ‘A kitchen bigger than this whole house, almost, and a dining room, too. Bathrooms with flush toilets upstairs and down. Two parlors – two! And a library, with shelves so high I’ve got to climb a ladder to dust the books. Bobby’ll have it easy just doing windows and the lawn.’
‘Poor baby,’ Davita crooned, so solicitous that Grace stiffened. ‘You just forget about that stupid old job and come pick crabs with your mama.’
‘Yeah,’ Bobby chimed in. ‘You do that and I’ll take over the housecleaning. I’ll take that library ladder any day over one outside in the sun, washing all those windows with all those windowpanes. That house has got more windows than a fly’s got eyes. But that’s still better than pushing a mower back and forth about two acres of lawn and then getting down on hands and knees with the clippers around all those flowerbeds.’
Gerald looked at his wife. ‘We have raised a couple of spoiled children for sure. You try following a tractor on foot, picking up the corn the harvester missed. You’re crying about two acres, walking across green grass cool and soft as carpet. Try sixty acres, mosquitoes and greenhead flies dogging you every step of the way.’
The conversation echoed in Grace’s brain the next time she found herself atop a ladder in the library, a tall-ceilinged room darkened by brocade draperies, smelling of dust and neglect, the former rising in great clouds as Grace attacked the stacks with a feather duster.
Philippa gave away her presence just outside the door with a sneeze.
Grace nearly fell. She grabbed a shelf for support and tried to recover her dignity along with her equilibrium. ‘Wasn’t expecting company. Doesn’t anybody ever come in here?’
Philippa withdrew a lace-edged handkerchief from the cuff of her cardigan and held it to her face. ‘Apparently not. Not any of us, and – from the looks of it – certainly not the last girl. I appreciate your attentiveness to detail. I appreciate it very much.’
She’d been doing that, showing up on some pretext wherever Grace happened to be working. Checking her out. Seeing how she compared to the last ‘girl.’
She drifted away, and Grace, once she was sure Philippa was gone, chanced pulling a book from its place among the other leather-bound volumes, but found it yet another dry examination of the Roman Empire. Whoever had amassed the collection had a penchant for history, most of it about places and people that interested Grace not at all. She’d found a slender volume that purported to be a history of the Eastern Shore, but she set it aside after finding only brief mentions of Indians and none at all of black people, unless passing references to various tobacco plantations counted.
The lower shelves held art books of the kind appreciated in the region: glossy pages of Audubon’s birds, protected by translucent sheets of onionskin, or drawings and photographs of skipjacks and other Chesapeake Bay watercraft. She was grateful to stumble across a Wyeth collection she enjoyed, preferring N.C. Wyeth’s dramatic illustrations of Treasure Island’s glowering pirates, and especially a breathtaking one of Launcelot and Guenevere astri
de a galloping horse, Guenevere’s hair streaming behind her, to the muted barns and fields favored by Andrew Wyeth.
Grace spent extra time in the library each week, dragging its upholstered chairs outdoors and pounding them free of dust, rubbing oil into their mahogany legs, to justify the reward she gave herself of leafing through the books when she’d completed her task.
She sometimes felt as though she spent most of her days polishing wood – the tables and chairs, sideboards and dressers, the finials on the Queen Anne beds, whose grooves collected stubborn lines of dust. So much polishing that after the first few weeks she felt as though the scent of lemon had permeated her pores, surrounding her with a citrus haze even after she’d gone home, although she quickly learned better than to say as much to Davita.
‘Better than smelling like crab all the time,’ her mother reminded her, and she hung her head in silent acknowledgment that, compared to a day in the steaming Quonset huts where the crabs were processed, she had an easy time of it indeed. Philippa, for all her early attentiveness, gradually drifted back into doing whatever it was she did all day – luncheons, mostly, Grace learned.
As for her husband, the Police Chief, Grace rarely saw him unless Philippa asked her to work a weekend when one of the endless luncheons involved husbands. Grace listened hard on those days, doing her best to busy herself with some task wherever the Chief happened to be, but as far as she could tell, the men’s discussions centered on golf and duck-hunting, the conversational equivalents of the boring books in the library.
She was making beaten biscuits for one of those gatherings, spreading the dough across the kitchen’s thickest cutting board, then alternately folding it and whacking the hell out of it with a rolling pin when, as she drew her arm back for a renewed assault, she heard a tap at the window.
It was Bobby, clambering down a ladder with his bucket and squeegee. He hopped to the ground as she hauled the heavy window sash up. ‘You’re not hitting them hard enough,’ he said.
Grace’s arm already felt like macaroni boiled too long, the way the Smythes liked it.
‘I’ve been at it for half an hour. Still got fifteen minutes to go. You think it needs to be hit harder, get in here and hit it yourself.’
‘Gladly! I’m burning up out here.’
Grace filled a glass with ice and dipped her brother some lemonade from the two-gallon Mason jar that sat on the counter. Kathleen Mavourneen, Chief Smythe’s hunting dog, rose as Bobby came into the kitchen, hackles half-raised, tail stirring the air in a slow, uncertain wag. She knew Bobby by now, was used to seeing him shoving the lawn mower in diagonal lines across the endless expanse of grass, or on his ladder, rubbing newspapers dipped in a mixture of water and vinegar across the windows, and then flicking away the surface moisture with his squeegee. But she’d never seen him in the house before.
Bobby drained the glass in a single long draft and held it out for more.
‘Must be ninety out there,’ he said. ‘Usually, I try to finish up a set of windows before noon. I don’t know which is worse, being up on that ladder or behind that mower.’
‘This is worse.’ Grace brandished the rolling pin, gambling on the chance he’d fall for it.
She bet right.
‘Girl, please. No harder than swatting a mosquito. Give me that thing.’
He snatched it from her hand and went at the dough with a crashing vengeance. The counter shook. Dishes rattled in the cupboards. The dog took cover under the table.
And Penelope Smythe appeared in the doorway in her frilly little pajamas, rubbing sleep out of her eyes and demanding to know what in the world was going on.
Grace froze.
There’d been no explicit instructions against Bobby being allowed in the house, but on the other hand, all of the Smythes’ interactions with him had taken place out of doors – Chief Smythe instructing him how to use the lawn mower (as if he didn’t know); Philippa on the back step handing him an envelope with his pay. He’d come inside a few other times, hanging around in the kitchen while Grace cooked, or positioning himself behind the big desk in the Chief’s study, pretending to order Grace around, but always when Philippa had set off somewhere in her long black Lincoln and the Chief, of course, was at work. They’d forgotten about Penelope, who they hardly ever saw anyway. Sometimes Grace heard her, chatting away on the pink princess phone on her nightstand, the one that Grace regularly wiped clean of the residue of biscuit-colored pancake makeup it acquired after spending so much time tucked against Penelope’s cheek.
Penelope rarely rose before noon and then spent her afternoons stretched out on a chaise lounge in the sun, reddening skin gleaming with a noxious combination of baby oil and mosquito repellant in hopes of a tan to fill in the spaces between her freckles. On the most oppressively hot days, she frittered away afternoons in her room. When her door was ajar, Grace would see her sprawled on her unmade bed, paging through fashion magazines, or sitting in front of her vanity, experimenting with various shades of lipstick or piling her auburn hair atop her head in some new style, and Grace wondered what such a summer would be like, free of school, no need for a job, and no expectation of doing anything so strenuous as picking her clothes up off the floor and placing them in the hamper across the room.
They stood motionless, Bobby’s arm still raised, the rolling pin lofted high. Grace tried to read Penelope’s expression. Shock? Outrage? Could she fire them herself? Or would she leave it to her mother or, worse, the Chief?
Bobby broke into an easy grin. ‘Just showing my sister how to really beat these biscuits. Sorry if we woke you up. But the way she was playing pattycake with ’em, they’d never rise. Be like chewing on stones. To get it right, you’ve really got to wallop them. Here. Give it a try.’
He stepped forward and held the rolling pin out to Penelope.
‘Lord,’ Grace breathed almost audibly. How great an offense would Bobby’s presence be? Especially in proximity to a barely clad white girl.
She closed her eyes and envisioned a life spent picking crabs.
She heard a tap. Opened her eyes. Penelope stood above the dough, rolling pin in hand. ‘Like this?’ Tip-tap.
‘That’s even worse than my sister. Both of you, you’re an embarrassment. Give it some gas.’
The pin came down again, this time with a thud.
‘Better.’ Bobby gave a solemn nod, and a command. ‘Again. Try it with both hands.’
Bam.
‘Again.’
Bam. Bam. BAM!
Bobby took a step back. ‘You see, Grace? That’s how it’s done.’
He held out his hand and Penelope, flushed, handed the rolling pin back to him with a breathy laugh.
He accepted it with a bow, then straightened and raised his eyes to hers. ‘Remind me,’ he said, ‘never to make you mad.’
ELEVEN
‘Old times’ sake.’
Nora turned the phrase over and over in her mind as she showered and dressed, the memory of Alden’s brotherly kiss and the decidedly unbrotherly kisses of their teenage years bringing a smile to her face that vanished only when she descended to the kitchen and found Penelope insisting that the cop at the table join them for tea.
He stood when Nora came in. The room dwarfed most people, the length of it, the fireplace dominating the far wall, but the cop was a big man, his body settling comfortably into middle age, softening without being fat, the sort of heft that denotes respect rather than sloppiness.
Nora took a step back.
Penelope, regal in a high-necked dressing gown with a demure trim of eyelet lace, remained seated. ‘Here she is now. She can make the tea. I would, but …’ A nod to the walker, accompanied by a self-deprecating laugh. Yet she must have struggled her way to the door to answer the knock Nora hadn’t heard because she’d been daydreaming her way through a too-long shower.
Nora pushed her hair away from her face. It dripped slowly on to her T-shirt, the damp spreading across her shoulders. She’d forg
one the blow dryer, hoping to preserve the illusion of coolness as long as possible.
She studied his face, as she did with anyone close to her own age in Chateau, assessing the chance that he might be another former schoolmate. But Penelope’s next words disabused her of the possibility.
‘This is Sergeant Brittingham. He grew up in Easton.’
So they’d already played that game, sussing out each other’s people. Brittingham hailed from the tony town to the north, with a name that went back generations. Penelope, of course, had her own generational bragging rights, made manifest by Quail House, and the added fillip of a Police Chief father, leaving no doubt as to who held the social upper hand. Which explained Brittingham’s deferential manner when he turned to Nora.
‘We just need a few minutes of your time down at the station.’
Nora took another step back. The last time she’d gone voluntarily with a law enforcement officer – it had been a Wyoming sheriff – she’d ended up spending the night in a county jail on suspicion of kidnapping and possible murder.
‘We understood you might be a witness to the, ah, unfortunate event of Saturday night,’ he added.
That hadn’t taken long. Nora wondered if Alden had called him from the boat as soon as he’d rowed out of sight.
‘I didn’t really see anything. I told Alden that.’
Penelope stiffened, and Nora cursed inwardly as she realized she’d just brought a raft of eventual questions down upon herself.
‘You can help us with a timeline,’ he said easily. ‘It’ll only take a few minutes. I’ll drive you right downtown and get you back in time to make lunch for your mother.’
Penelope bestowed a smile upon the cop as she wielded a verbal stiletto on her daughter. ‘I’m so glad to hear you and Alden got a chance to catch up.’ As though it had been a few weeks, rather than decades. ‘I can’t wait to hear all about it.’
