"But the police said he died in his sleep."
"If you have a heart attack, they say you can get jolted out of the bed. I don't know what happened. He was naked, not far from the bed. They're going to replace part of the floor. And fumigate. They should be here soon."
"Didn't you realize when you opened the front door, from the odor-"
"Emily and I hadn't seen him for weeks. We were starting to get worried. He always let us know when he was leaving on a trip and when he came back. Yeah, I guess I knew when I opened the door. I went upstairs anyway."
"Was the dog there? Is he with you?"
"I thought you had him. Will kept talking about taking him to you. When I didn't see Will for a few days-must've been the first week of June-I thought he'd either gone sailing, one of those yacht deliveries he did with Craig down at the shipyards, or that he'd taken Henry to New York."
When I got into Evan's car a few minutes later, I was too stunned by the details of the death to say anything, and too angry with Evan to want his sympathy. He started the ignition, backed out into the street, and headed down Longfellow Lane toward the village. "Sophy, I'm not looking to be an accomplice in an investigation of tampering with evidence on my summer vacation. He could have called the video store and asked when Will took them out. He didn't have to remove them from the house."
"It wasn't fair of you to pull rank."
"That was not pulling rank."
"You'd never talk down to that Patrick guy I met at your house last summer."
"He'd never do something so stupid."
"Because he's a Harvard professor, right? Ben happens to make an honest living. Which is more than I can say for either of us."
"Sophy, don't get started with island Marxism. People talked like that around here in the seventies, but there isn't much of an audience for it anymore, except for what's-her-name who grows biodynamic turnips out at Lavender Point and thinks she's Che Guevara. Do you need anything in Cummington, or should we-"
"That's three weeks. May thirty-first to June twenty-second. I kept calling and leaving messages about money he owed me. I thought it was odd that he didn't call back. I knew he was pissed off, but I never imagined-"
"Of course you didn't."
"Poor baby. Poor darling. I hope he didn't kill himself."
"I do too."
"Because I hate to think he was so unhappy that he'd given up every hope of being happier. It hurts me to think of him in that much pain."
"I know it does."
"He used to say, 'When the time comes, put me on a rickety old sailboat with a carton of Scotch and a case of cigarettes and push.' It always made me cry. About a year ago it stopped making me cry. He knew. That I wasn't devastated anymore by the idea of losing him. He hated that everyone thought he was such a nice guy. Hated it. It would have done him good to be more of an S.O.B. now and then. Like you."
"Thanks. Thanks a lot."
"I hope he didn't know he was going to die. I hope he didn't have time to be afraid." Tears had been rolling down my face and into my mouth, and Evan handed me his handkerchief. His hand had slid over into my lap, and he was squeezing my fingers and stroking my wrists, and I was trying to take deep breaths because no air was moving through my nose. "Evan?"
"Yes, dear?"
"We have to go to the post office, because there's three weeks of mail that hasn't been picked up. Then we have to go to the video store and read the descriptions of the movies Will took out, on the chance that he meant them as suicide notes."
"What are you talking about?"
"He was a spy. He was clever."
"Sophy, you'll drive yourself nuts with amateur sleuthing."
"I lived with this man for ten years. I know the way he thinks."
"Aren't you speaking to the coroner later? He may have the results of the autopsy."
"I still want to look at the videos. Then we have to find Henry."
"Henry who?"
"The dog. Nobody knows this yet, but Henry's the one with the answers, because if Will planned for some time to kill himself, he might have given the dog away, to protect him, and whoever he gave him to, they could tell us what he'd said and when it happened and-"
"Of course, Sophy, of course."
Evan told me, some time later, that he thought I'd gone off half-cocked, between my pursuit of the missing dog and the secret messages in the videos, but he indulged me that day without further commentary. I was the grieving widow after all, and entitled to a touch of madness.
When we returned to Evan's house, with three tall bundles of mail, there was a message for me from Ginny. She would be arriving on a four o'clock plane from Portland, Maine. Evan, Mavis, and their two young sons invited me sailing for the rest of the afternoon, but I declined, because I'd have to go to the airport in a few hours. They gave me the keys to the Saab Evan had driven earlier, invited Ginny and me to stay at their house until Sunday, and said we were welcome to join them that evening at a clambake down the beach with their friends the Winstons.
"You know Sue and Bob Winston, don't you?" Mavis said. "She's been writing a biography of Louisa May Alcott for a zillion years that's finally being published, and he's a colleague of mine at Harvard."
I did not remember meeting them before, but my appearance that night at their clambake would linger long in all of our memories.
6. Clare's Funeral
THE NEXT SCENE could have passed for an ordinary summer afternoon at the Swansea Island Airport. The sky bluer than robins' eggs. The praying mantis-like private planes and sleek corporate jets all parked in a row down the side of the tarmac. A cluster of us in khakis and T's and jeans-this was Swansea wealth, after all, not Palm Beach-behind a chain-link fence that defined one edge of the outdoor waiting pen, some of us waving even before the tiny Cessna came to a stop on the runway and made its sharp right turn and parked in a spot beside three or four other Island Air runabouts. I wasn't one of the ones waving. Otherwise, Ginny and I could have passed for ordinary summer people, which is to say monied and carefree, accustomed to coming and going in high style. Ordinary summer people, and even what looked like tears as she crossed the tarmac, shoulder slung with a colorful Guatemalan bag, could have been explained away. She is a high-strung, emotional type who weeps almost as an affectation on arrivals and departures. How touching; that must be it. Or: she is suffering from a broken heart and has come to Swansea, to Mom and Dad, to mend.
I had not seen Ginny in more than a year, this young woman I had known since she was thirteen, when I could not tell her apart from her twin sister, except for their noses: Ginny's more aquiline than Susanna's. Even their voices were identical. She was lean and sportive in that row of travelers, like the pictures I'd seen of her mother when she was Ginny's age, but wearing a pair of awful jeans with gashes in the knees, and a flimsy tank top, and, so it seemed from the distance, a row of small silver hoops that rimmed her ears. She was squinting against the bright sunlight and smiling a contorted, bittersweet smile, unsure of what was called for. I must have been, too.
She was the third or fourth one through the gate into the waiting area, and I could see that it was difficult for her to look at me the closer she got, a sort of adolescent nervousness-lowering her eyes, letting them dart everywhere but in my direction. But when we were finally face to face, she flung her arms around my neck with a force and neediness I had not expected and began, suddenly, violently, to sob against me. We were blocking the exit, but people squeezed around us. I held one hand against the back of her head and the other on her shoulder; I held her that way for a long, long time.
It is a peculiar thing to be, a stepmother, and, stranger still, an almost ex-stepmother, and I don't know if we were happy to see each other, but we were relieved. Or maybe the relief was all mine; I had so dreaded telling her the news that comforting her now was effortless. But how could it not be? She and her sister were the closest thing to children in my life, and comforting one's children, even those not born of your flesh, is easy, so bred in the bone that even Daniel was good at it.