maybe not such a nice guy."
Of course there would be talk about him, plenty of
it right on the money, too.
"But no matter what he is, the last thing she wants
is to mess up her shiny new image with an ugly old
story, dredge it all up again," Ellie finished.
"What old story?" I tried to go on sounding interested,
but when I heard this last part, my heart sank
discouragedly. All I'd been doing was listening to tales
of the old days, and none of them had helped.
"The story," Ellie said, "about the night Reuben
Tate burned down Uncle Deckie Cobb's shack."
She turned to me, her green eyes luminous in the
last fading glow of an autumn evening thickening
steadily to night.
"With," she added, "Uncle Deckie still in it."
I felt my jaw drop.
"Willow was there," Ellie said. "But she doesn't
want the memory refreshed around town. Bad for her
new identity as a woman of means and importance.
She cares about that a lot."
I was still busy absorbing Ellie's earlier statement.
"So Reuben was a firebug, too."
Her forehead furrowed. "Yes. You couldn't tell
what he might do." She got up and began clearing the
table.
"Anyway, the word is Willow's going to be around
a few more days. Make sure she sees everybody, and
more to the point, that everyone sees her. So tomorrow
at the salmon supper maybe you can corner her and
explain a couple of things."
"Such as, she talks to me or I talk to everyone else?
Spruce up their memories of her old, unimproved situation?
Sounds like a plan."
Just then Tommy Daigle's jalopy appeared around
the corner, horn blaring and headlights flashing, the
big raccoon tails Tommy thought so much of flying like
banners. The jalopy pulled over, Sam got in, and the
cherry-red glow of the taillights moved away up Water
Street.
Ellie and I gathered our paper trash and put it in
one of the barrels Tim Poole had stationed around the
area, wrapped up our lobster tools and butter and so
on to take home. In the near darkness, the fire in the
brick stove under the lobster pots leaped orange and
yellow.
"So tomorrow you confront her and question her,"
Ellie said, meaning Willow.
"Right," I said doubtfully. "But I still can't say I'm
confident it's going to do any real good. I've been chasing
her because I don't have much else. But what can
she tell me that I don't already know?"
Ellie turned, her hair like flowing copper under the
yard lights Tim Poole was turning on. The dock he'd
built shone yellow with new, raw wood, looming over
the glinting wave tops and scenting the damp breeze
with the pine-sap smell of fresh logs.
"Jacobia. When I say Willow cares what people
think, I mean she really cares. And who do you suppose
she despised finding out had gotten here ahead of
her when she got back to Eastport? Who could wreck
her reputation just by existing?"
"Reuben Tate," I replied slowly. "Her partner in
teenaged crime." Suddenly I got what Ellie was implying.
"But, Ellie, that doesn't mean she could or
would ..."
Kill him, I was about to say. Because how would
she get the weapon, or know about Victor, or ...
"Just meet her," Ellie interrupted. "Then come and
tell me what you think Willow might or might not do.
Because the image is impressive, and it probably cost a
mint," she finished with a glance at the glamorous
woman seated a few tables from us. "But it's fake, and
what it's covering ... well, Willow would do almost
anything to keep people from remembering it."
Later that evening, sitting up in bed with
Wade:
"I'm not going to lose the house. I might
have to go back to work. But if I do, big
deal. People in Eastport work harder than I've ever
worked in my life, and think nothing of it."
I put my chin on my clasped hands. "It's not," I
finished, "the end of the world. Tell you what, though,
I sure wish I had been paying more attention to my
own investing instead of giving all those stock tips to
Ellie. If I had, I'd be sitting on a big fortune by now."
Aside, I meant, from the one I was losing.
He chuckled. "Don't know she hasn't, do you?
Done something about them herself, I mean. Ellie's
pure Maine, you know, keeps money matters pretty
close to the vest."
"Be that as it may." I turned to him. "I'm not kidding,
Wade, I've got to do something about this."
"Will you," he asked soberly, "be able to stay on
here? To work, or would you have to go away?"
Trust him to find the crux of the matter. I'd been
avoiding thinking about it too hard, but push was coming
to shove. Very soon I would have to decide about
that land-option payment. And from that, everything
else would fall like a row of dominoes.
The operative word being fall. "I don't know," I
admitted. "The kind of thing I'm good at, individual
client work, takes face time. I probably could come
home on weekends."
I'd gotten past the stage where I'd had to be at
clients' beck and call, back in the city. But they all still
needed to be sweet-talked, scolded, or simply educated.
They had to be protected from a variety of scams, flimflams,
and rackets. And they'd all needed heavy-duty
advice before doing deeds more complicated than
brushing their teeth. In the rarefied world of rich people,
structure is everything; they plan their activities
with an eye to the tax implications, down to the penny.
In other words, they hire somebody like me: cool
head and keen eye. Or so I'd thought.
"I'm sorry, Wade. I've told people a million times
not to let their emotions affect sensible financial decisions.
And now look how awful my own decision has
turned out."
"Oh, hey, wait a minute. First of all, it hasn't
turned out any way, yet. And second, it wasn't your
emotions that got you to this point."
He looked at me, shrugged in concession. "Okay,
so it wasn't all your emotions, anyway. But the area
needs the trauma center, Victor's a good fit for it, and
having this thing happen was like getting hit by lightning.
You couldn't have seen it coming."
"Thanks. That makes me feel better." I settled
against him. "Once, it was all I wanted to do, you
know. "Wheeling and dealing was exciting. But I'm not
sure I have the energy for the money business anymore.
Part of why I'd just talk about it to Ellie, I guess. Instead
of acting on stocks I heard about, or read about."
"I haven't noticed any lack of energy. And I still
think you are exciting, even if you're flat broke."
I smiled against his shoulder. "That's because
you're not one of those boring nitwits who think
money's an aphrodisiac."
Which clearly he didn't. At the moment, for instance,
I didn't have a dime on me. Or anything else,
which was turning out to be awfully convenient.
"Aw. You mean it's not? Another myth bites the
dust."
"Don't worry," I told him, shifting slightly. "There
are plenty of soft, pliable young girls out there, ready
and willing to keep that particular myth propped up.
As it were."
"Oh." He paused. Monday woke up, looked
around, and jumped off the bed.
"You know," he said in a different voice, "you'd
better stop doing that or I might start mistaking you
for one of those girls. The soft, pliable ones."
He turned toward me, smelling of soap and fresh
air. Sam wasn't home; he had left a message to say he
was staying the night with Tommy Daigle.
"That," I managed from the tiny part of my brain
that could still form a coherent thought, "was pretty
much the whole idea."
The next day was Salmon Sunday, so long
awaited and now so absolutely upon us.
Clouds loomed on the western horizon,
heaped up dark and ominous like clenched
fists, but moved no closer as the sun rose red over the
Canadian islands.
"It can rain all it wants, but later," Ellie said worriedly
around noon, peering out my kitchen window.
The town was packed with people and more were
arriving by the minute: parked along the curbs, pulled
onto lawns, crowding along the sidewalks pushing
strollers and lugging backpacks, and gazing enviously
at the lovely old white clapboard houses they passed.
Personally, I felt there was a big patch of clapboard
that somebody was more than welcome to; the carpenters
had come and dropped off the estimate for replacing
all that siding and some framing beneath it. They
would go over the unhappy news with me later, they
said, after the festival was over. Now, the backyard
was littered with the siding they'd torn off, to peer
underneath it, and the envelope they'd left lay on the
kitchen table like an unexploded bomb. I didn't even
want to open it.
By contrast, Ellie was a sight for sore eyes in a pale
yellow T-shirt, a turquoise jumper, white sandals, and
a necklace of tiny turquoise lumps. Her red hair was
tied back with a white grosgrain ribbon, and she was
wearing the small emerald earrings George had given
her when they got married.
"You look," I told her sincerely, "absolutely stunning."
She turned hopefully to me. "Do you think so? I
wanted to make a good impression on the visitors."
"The only way you could make a better impression
would be by handing out hundred-dollar bills," I said.
Outside, Tommy's jalopy rumbled into the driveway.
The boys thundered in, grabbed oatmeal cookies
and glasses of milk, and galumphed upstairs. Wade and
George had already gone down to the park to set up
the barbecues and start marinating the salmon.
Ellie checked her clipboard. "Plates, cups, napkins,
ice," she recited. "Lemons. Oh, gosh, I forgot about
tartar sauce."
"Who's going to glop up that salmon with tartar
sauce?" I asked, but only rhetorically; as the mother of
a teenaged boy, I know there's no accounting for