"You grate the carrots. You can't taste them. They sweeten the sauce, neutralize some of the acidity of the tomatoes."
"Sugar does the same thing, and it's not a carrot." He wrinkled up his face at the idea. "You put onions in the sauce, you put garlic, you put mushrooms and peppers, maybe-once in a while-some olives. You don't put in carrots."
"I've put in carrots before. You've never even noticed."
Tess grinned at them and dropped onto a chair at the table, feeling some of the tension roll out of her. She'd tell them about her visit with Richard Montague, but later. "It's nice to hear someone talking about something normal."
Harl eyed her. "I suppose you don't make spaghetti sauce. You make pasta sauce."
"I do live on Beacon Hill."
"Watch it, Harl," Andrew said. "She gives as good as she gets."
She shook her head. "Not tonight. I'm not holding my own with anything but a glass of wine." She smiled, adding, "Two. Two glasses of wine."
"Red or white?" Harl asked, getting to his feet.
"Red." She stretched out her legs and leaned back in her chair, feeling curiously at home. She winked up at Harl. "Red wine goes better with spaghetti sauce."
Lauren admired the perfect creamy yellow of the single daylily blossom in the flower garden just off the back porch. The gloom of dusk was settling in. The yardman had come today, the air still smelling of freshly cut grass. It was so normal and pleasant, reminding her of summer and running through the yard as a child, that she wanted to cry. She tried to be hardheaded and unsentimental. She knew she had to keep her wits about her with a dead body in her car trunk. But she missed her family. She missed her parents. She missed Ike.
Ike.
The daylily was so beautiful, she wanted to lose herself in its shape and color, think of nothing else.
Her poodles rubbed against her ankles as if they sensed her mood. She couldn't let depression settle in. A tug of nostalgia was all right, but nothing more. Too much was at stake.
"There you are." Richard trotted down the porch steps, a drink in each hand. "I brought you a scotch, just in case. Hell of a day, I know."
She accepted the drink. "The police are stopping by tomorrow to interview me on Ike's whereabouts.
It would be so much easier if I had a normal brother, but then-" She smiled, sipping the scotch. "But then I wouldn't know what to do with a normal brother."
"Ike's normal. Half the men in this country would take off just the way he does if they could get away with it. He's got the money, no attachments." Richard shrugged agreeably, in a remarkably good mood considering his devastating news. Lauren wondered if it was the scotch. "A normal guy."
"You're joking with me."
"Lauren, everyone's on edge because of this Tess Haviland, not because Ike hasn't been heard from in a year. If she hadn't come around and claimed to find a skeleton, then have it disappear, no one would be thinking about Ike Grantham today. It's damn inconvenient, that's all."
His tone hadn't changed, remaining almost affable. Lauren walked up to the porch with him. She had to call the dogs, who liked wandering in the yard. So much for feeling her pain. They didn't give a damn about her.
She picked up the old, yellowed bound volume she'd been reading. Richard frowned at her. "What's that?"
"Adelaide's diary."
"Who?"
"Adelaide Morse. Benjamin's wife. Jedidiah Thorne's victim."
Richard shrugged, indifferent, and sat on a wicker chair. "I'd love for this to turn out to be a hauntedhouse scare. They happen now and again at the carriage house, don't they?"
"Yes, but never a skeleton-usually it's just strange noises, shadows, voices." She sat on the chair next to him with her scotch, the glass in a cold sweat in her hand. "I should put Adelaide's diary in the archives. In fact, I should give it to the project historians. I don't know why I insist on protecting her."
"Lauren, I'm not following you-"
"Adelaide. I'm protecting her."
"But she's dead!"
"She killed Benjamin. I almost told Tess the truth today."
Richard gave an exaggerated frown. "Lauren, what are you talking about?"
"She sensed it. Tess. It was as if Jedidiah and Adelaide were trying to speak to her through their pictures in the files and set the record straight."
Her husband simply stared at her.
She smiled. "Don't worry, Richard, you needn't call a doctor. I'm fine. It's just been a long day, and I've had so much to think about. I know Beacon-by-the-Sea history bores you."
"The study of history is vital," he said. "It helps us to understand why people do what they do today, and it can help us predict their actions in the future. But, Lauren, are you saying this story of the Thorne-Morse duel isn't true?"
"What is truth?" she asked, her eyes suddenly filling with tears.
His mouth snapped shut. "Perhaps I shouldn't have brought you that scotch."
"It's not the drink. I've been like this all day. Richard, Adelaide Morse was my great-grandmother's sister. My great-great-aunt."
"That's going back too far to make a difference."
"It did to my great-grandmother and my grandmother. My mother didn't care as much. She gave me Adelaide's diary." Lauren set her scotch down and ran her fingertips over the cracked old binding. "Benjamin was an awful man."
"He physically abused her-"
"No. No, he didn't. He was an awful man, but he never hit her. She made that up to manipulate Jedidiah. She knew he wouldn't keep silent, as so many of her friends would. And Benjamin responded just as Adelaide knew he would, by challenging Jedidiah."
Richard didn't say a word. He was staring at her, his gray eyes neutral, but she knew he was wondering if she'd gone out of her mind.
"She knew Jed would accept the challenge, but wouldn't fire on Benjamin or anyone else. He'd renounced violence after the war."
"He would stand there and let another man shoot him? That's ridiculous. And obviously it didn't work out that way-"
"But it did. Jedidiah gave Adelaide one of his weapons and asked her to get away, take a train west, leave Benjamin. He expected to die. But Adelaide- " Lauren picked up her drink again, relished the burning liquid coursing down her throat. It was unlike Richard to bring her anything more than an occasional glass of wine. "Adelaide shot Benjamin herself, just before the duel began."
"There were no witnesses?"
"No. Dueling was illegal in Massachusetts."
She could see his incisive mind at work and remembered he'd earned a Ph.D. from Harvard long before she'd met him. In so many ways, she knew very little about her second husband, which was only one of the reasons Ike had warned her against marrying him. He was silent, digesting her words. "Then perhaps Adelaide did Jedidiah a favor under the circumstances. If he wouldn't fire his weapon, she saved his life by killing Benjamin."
"But she let him go to prison."
"A small price to pay. She won her freedom, and she saved his life."
"That's how my grandmother and her mother looked at it."
"Adelaide?"
"There's no regret for her actions," Lauren whispered. "None. She says over and over again… Benjamin deserved his fate."
Richard shot abruptly to his feet. "I'd burn that damn diary. If you don't want the whole story to come out, why keep it?" "It's a reminder." "Of what?" "Of life's cruelties. We're not always faced with a good and a bad choice, a right and a wrong choice.
Sometimes the choices are all bad, all wrong." "Lauren, for God's sake-" "What would you have done, if you'd been Adelaide?"
"I'd have found another way out. She could have left her husband without manipulating someone else into killing him." Richard spoke crisply, not harshly, and Lauren imagined him delivering his analysis on a terrorist cell in just such a tone. "But what's done is done. They're all dead now."