“Well, it’s not necessarily sinister. Maybe your mother just doesn’t want to take any dramatic action until she knows what it means,” he suggested. The lake had turned a misty gray that blurred into the deepening sky. “After all, the will may not be valid. And if it is, then it would probably be pretty complicated to figure out who got what all these years later.”
“You think I’m overreacting?”
“A little bit,” he said, nodding.
“Maybe I am,” I said, remembering my conversation with my mother about Oliver’s intentions. She’d been completely right. “It’s always like this after a few days here. I start to lose my bearings. The surface is one way, but then there are all these other things going on, sometimes going back decades, swirling undercurrents that I just don’t understand.”
“This time is different, though,” he said. “You have Rose’s story now, which must put a new light on everything.”
It was true, I did. Her story, and the radiant windows of the chapel and the Westrum House, had stretched and changed the way I saw the world. Everything was connected in a way I had not understood before. Her dreams, as well as my great-grandfather’s, had brought us to this dusky evening, to this moment in time when everything might shift and change again.
Blake walked down the dock, his boat shoes echoing faintly against the wooden slats. He’d strung tiny white lights on the railings.
“Hey there, you two,” he said. “I’m going to run Mom up to the house. Want to come and check out the fires along the way?”
“Sounds nice,” I said, splashing my foot in the water, “but I’ve got the Impala. So I can’t.”
“Yoshi? Want to come?”
“You should,” I said, knowing how Yoshi loved to sail, realizing this might be his only chance, given how busy Blake always was, how our time here was already beginning to dwindle.
“You wouldn’t mind?” Yoshi wanted to know.
“I wouldn’t, really. I’ll meet you at the house. I might take a walk first.”
I waited until everyone had boarded and the boat had glided out onto the dark water, becoming nothing more visible than a net of moving lights. Then I finished my glass of wine and walked through the park, through the streets crowded with summer tourists.
I’d left the car behind Dream Master, where I knew I wouldn’t get towed. As I walked along the outlet, the building turned a dark, blank-eyed, and impassive face to the world, but when I cut around to the parking lot, a light was visible in Art’s window. He had left the party before I had a chance to say hello. I wondered if he was inside at his desk, or if he’d just left the light on. I wondered what, if anything, he knew about Iris, or the will, or Rose. So I went in.
I walked through those corridors where I had played as a child, running over the dusty linoleum, thrilled with the scents of metal and sawdust. This place had defined so many generations, and it looked caught in time. A row of safes for sale stood against the wall, made by some other company now, their little doors ajar. I walked up and down the aisles, studying the displays of locks and the bins of nails, the racks of paint chips and brushes.
When I finally made it to the door of Art’s office, I found him staring at a computer screen. An old-fashioned adding machine sat on the desk, cascading paper onto the dusty tile floor.
He didn’t hear me right away, and so there was a moment when I stood and watched him, concentrating hard, traces of my father in the shape of his hands and forearms, in the way his sideburns tapered into his graying hair. When he glanced up and saw me he was startled, and his face opened and went slightly slack with surprise; then he laughed, relaxing back into the chair.
“Lucy,” he said. “What a surprise.”
“Big leap?” I asked. “From hardware to software, I mean?”
He chuckled. “Sure is. You any good with spreadsheets?”
“I am, actually.”
“Ah. Want to have a look?”
“No, not really.”
He looked at me then, taking me in for the first time, and the uneasy expression that moved across his face echoed his look when he’d first seen me.
“No?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Then, what can I do for you?”
I felt sorry for him then, because he suddenly looked old and vulnerable behind that desk.
“I was just passing by and saw the light was on,” I said, gesturing to the window. “I parked here and went to the party. I saw you, but didn’t get to say hello.”
“I stopped in. It was fun. I always like the ring of fire, and the concert—I like that, too. Your father and I used to light flares as kids. It doesn’t seem that long ago.”
“I’ve been driving his car,” I said. “You know, the one he fixed up?”
“I know. I went out to look at it earlier. He sure loved that car.”
“Yes, he did. My mother hasn’t had the heart to touch it all these years, so it’s mostly just been sitting in the barn.”
He nodded and looked out the window at the gravel parking lot, where the Impala sat at the edge of light from the streetlamp, the silver arrows glinting.
“He’d be glad, I think.” Art said. “Glad to know you were enjoying it, Lucy.”
I leaned against the chair. “I am enjoying it. Though it drives like a boat. And the other day I had a flat tire, coming back from Elmira. I had to call the car service, you know, and the guy who came pulled everything out of the trunk. You’ll never guess what I found.”
“I can’t imagine—a tire iron?”
“Yes, actually. And my father’s tackle box.”
Art sat up straighter then, leaning a little forward. He folded his hands carefully on the desk.
“Yes? Are you sure? We looked and looked for that the night he died.”
“I know. He used to take me fishing. All the lures I remember were there.”
“I see.”
“Did you fish with him a lot when you were younger?” I asked, sliding into the chair, its leather smooth against the backs of my legs.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. We did. Summers, we were out on the water every morning. Me and Marty. We’d catch a whole string of fish sometimes. Other times we’d come back empty-handed.”
I nodded, thinking with nostalgia of all the mornings I’d spent with my father in just this same way.
“It’s funny, though,” I said. “The lures were in the tackle box, just like you’d expect, but none of his tools were in the bottom. No tools, no wire, nothing. It made me sad, somehow, all that empty space. Then I found the papers.”
“Really?” Art said. “What papers were those?”
“A will. Your grandfather’s will, in fact.”
Briefly then, without pausing to weigh the possible consequences, I told the story—Rose and her daughter, and the will written by my great-grandfather, which included Iris.
His expression didn’t change. After a minute, he sighed and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head.
“So, do you have this will?” he asked. “Could I see it?”
I’d left it in the Impala, locked back in the tackle box.
“It’s at the house,” I said. “My mother put it away somewhere, I’m not sure where.”
He nodded.
“Not that it matters,” he said. “Such a will would hardly be valid, all these years later. Rose is long gone, and probably her daughter, too. What difference could any of it make?”
He had no idea, I realized. Not about the chapel or the windows, the fascinating life Rose had led, the other branch of the family, living not very far away.
“Well, actually, she’s still alive. Iris, I mean. I met her recently. She has two grown sons, and grandchildren about my age.”
“Are you serious? You say you met her?”
“Yes. It was really kind of amazing. She’s ninety-five years old. Very together. She has the family eyes.”
“Does she know about the will?”
I thought this was a strange first question to ask. “Not yet,” I said. “I found it after I met her. But I think she should know, don’t you? I mean, it might not be valid, but emotionally it might matter to her. To know she wasn’t excluded.”
Art’s voice got lower then, not warm exactly, but inviting me to hear a confidence. I thought of Iris, and of Rose, of all the things I knew about the family that he did not know, and leaned a little forward, so I could listen. Listen, gather more, collect another piece of the puzzle that might let all the others fall into place.
“Lucy,” he said softly. “Surely you understand that the marshland is worth a great deal of money at this moment. It hasn’t always been valuable, and it may not be again. This is a golden moment, is what I’m saying. Probably this will you’re talking about is null and void. I’m not all that concerned about it. But even so, if you contact this person, this long-lost relative, you open up the door to competing claims, even litigation. And I warn you, the moment will pass, and anything you might have had—anything your family might have had—will be gone.”
“It isn’t about money,” I said, but even I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. I was thinking of Blake, and the falling-apart house, even as I was remembering floating in the marshes with my father.
“It’s always about money,” Art said. “Make no mistake, Lucy.”
Art waited a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was wistful. “I loved your father,” he said. “He was always such a sunny kid, the one everyone was drawn to, growing up. That was hard, and I did some things I regret, and so did he, but I loved him. I like to think that if he’d lived, we’d eventually have made things right between us.”
I took a deep breath, the air full of the scent of cut wood and iron. “It seems to me you had plenty of chances to make that happen.”
He shook his head, gazing beyond me to the doorway, to some distant point in the past. “Your father was a very stubborn man. He had his ways. He wouldn’t listen.”
There was something in his tone, so nostalgic, yet so laced with sorrow and regret. And I didn’t think that sounded true about my father, who had the gift of listening, who had taught it to me. I held still, feeling the quality of the air change in the room. I even blinked slowly, as if Art were a wild animal I didn’t want to frighten away.
“When?” I asked softly. “When didn’t he listen to what you had to say?”
Art didn’t look at me or even seem to hear me.
“I tried everything,” he said. “Everything I could to get him to listen to reason.”
“And he wouldn’t?”
He shook his head, passed his hand over his eyes as if wiping away sleep.
“No. He would not. I tried three, four, five times. He wouldn’t even speak to me by the end. When I found him that night he just kept casting his line into the water as if I wasn’t even there. That’s how it always was with Marty. Like I wasn’t even there.”
Now I could hardly breathe. “He was casting out his line,” I murmured.
“Yes. Into the reeds.”
“The night he died.”
“Yes.”
He looked across the desk then and we stared at each other, not speaking, as if his words had torn open the very air and all the oxygen was fading from the room.
“I was trying to do the right thing,” he said, as if I would surely see the reasoning and understand this. “I was trying to help him. Help you all.”
I closed my eyes for a second. “And he wouldn’t listen.”
“No.” He looked away again, out the window this time, into the back parking lot, where the gravel was a dim gray beneath the streetlamp. “Marty would never listen to me. He’d showed me those same papers. The ones you found, I bet. Showed them to me and told me what he was going to do, didn’t want to hear anything I had to say about it. And it was his land, sure, like he said.” Art made a gesture of frustration, a swift cut of his hand, as if reliving the argument with my father. “His to throw away if he wanted. Foolish. Not my business, though. But this was. Dream Master was
my
business. And I told him, again and again, if he found this person, if she laid claim to one piece, then what was to keep her from getting it all? Your father, he didn’t know what he was opening up, what he was getting into.”
Or maybe he did,
I thought. Maybe he’d been enjoying a quiet kind of revenge. I didn’t say this, though. I only nodded. I’d gone very still as Arthur talked, anchored by a strange calm, as if I’d stepped outside myself and was watching the conversation unfold from far away. In the silence, Art spoke again.
“I couldn’t sleep for thinking about what he might do with those papers. Days, this went on. Then I woke up one night in the middle of the night. Was rudely awakened, I should say. Joey was always on the wild side, but usually he had the good sense to sneak in when he broke curfew. That night, though, he came home spitting mad. He was throwing things around, a car was waiting for him in the driveway. Before I could get up and ask what was going on, he’d found what he needed and left again, slamming the door hard on his way out. Damned if I could get back to sleep. Beautiful clear night it was, the kind we used to wait for as boys. I had a feeling Marty would be out there. In the marsh, where he always went—I had a hunch he’d be there. It’s where we always used to go. So I drove to the lake and took the boat out. I just wanted to talk to him if he was there. And he was. He wasn’t hard to find. It was a very still night.”
I nodded, remembering how I’d stood talking with my father in my mother’s moon garden on that same night, surrounded by such quiet it seemed I could hear the flowers in their delicate unfurling.
“He must have heard me coming, but he didn’t even look up. I pulled the boat up near him, cut the motor. Then we just drifted. He kept casting his line, reeling it in. Wouldn’t speak. We drifted, two boats, dark fish swimming beneath us.”
Dark fish swimming everywhere,
I thought.
“Finally, I grabbed hold of his boat. The metal was cold, and I was so frustrated; I told him he was being a fool. He turned around, maybe he only meant to knock my hand away, but his hand hit me in the face. I stood up, and he did, too. I don’t think I hit him first, but maybe I did. Who knows, I might have. I just kept saying Marty, stop it, damn it, stop, but he wouldn’t, and so I pushed him away. Hard. Hard as I could. He lost his balance, fell. I did, too, on the recoil. I fell into the bottom of my boat, almost capsized it. Went skidding away, careening. It was dark. I didn’t see anything as much I felt it, heard it. It was a terrible sound, his head cracking against the side of the boat. It must have been his head. He didn’t cry out, shout, anything.”