Mrs. Thwaite shook Mary’s hand and then Walker’s. “I’m delighted to meet you both,” she said. “We’ll have tea in the sun room.” She led them through a parlor. The ornate wallpaper was obscured by heavy antique furniture, and gilded frames with big paintings of dark mountains under brooding cumulonimbus clouds, then under an arch into a white sun porch with walls that were rows of windowpanes looking out on a rose garden. In the middle was a table set with teacups and silverware.
Walker waited through the elaborate, leisurely tea ritual. Mrs. Thwaite was not inclined to abbreviate it, or to forgo any of the antiquated formalities. Mary Casey seemed to have prepared herself for this. She sat with a perfectly straight spine that never touched the back of her chair and responded with fierce, immovable correctness. She saw everything Mrs. Thwaite did, and heard whatever was behind the voice, things not said but simply understood by women of a certain sort. Mary was helpful without actually doing much helping, because only certain motions could be performed without presuming upon the prerogatives of the hostess, who must do the steeping, pouring, and serving. She moved delicate china objects into her reach, but never too soon or too late, then made them glide to their proper places. Always, she kept up a fluttery patter about the garden outside the windows, the china, the tea, the tablecloth and napkins, and even the angle of the sun, as though Mrs. Thwaite had cunningly contrived to plant the giant oak two hundred years ago to shade the windows today.
When the tea and cookies and pastries had been distributed and all formulaic utterances exchanged, Mrs. Thwaite’s face assumed the contented softness that indicated her gods had been appeased. She said, “How do you know Myra Sanderidge?”
“I don’t, really,” said Mary. “I was just doing a little research and I talked to her on the telephone. She said that if I wanted to know anything about this part of the state, I should ask you.”
Walker surmised that this Myra person must be the one at the state archives. How could Mary know her? He couldn’t imagine that this had been anything but a purely formal trap—an opportunity for Mary to claim a false legitimacy, but Mary had effortlessly converted it into a compliment.
“Well, you should know Myra,” pronounced Mrs. Thwaite. “I like her, and you would too.” Walker could tell that this was her announcment that Mary was one of
Mary gathered in her winnings gracefully. “I’m hoping to meet her in a day or two. I’m driving to Concord to do a little research. Mrs. Thwaite, I was—”
“Ivy,” interrupted Mrs. Thwaite. “Call me Ivy. Now, what are you doing research for?”
Mary’s smile grew to a grin. “I suppose it’s because that’s what I do best, so I always fall back on it when I’m in a new situation. John was already here on a trip with a business friend. He liked it, and I had nothing to do, so he talked me into joining them for a few days. I couldn’t do much reading at the last minute, so I used my computer on the plane to see what I could find out, and now I’m hooked.”
Ivy’s eyes strayed to Walker. “What did you like about it?”
Walker began to sweat. “Well, I . . . the country, mostly. I came into Keene, and I liked the look of it. Then Mary told me she’d found interesting facts about the area—scenic routes, history—and so my friend and I drove around a bit to look at some of the small towns around here. We went up the Old Concord Road through East Sullivan, Munsonville, South Stoddard, a few other places.”
Mary prompted, “But the place you liked best was Coulter, wasn’t it?”
“Oh?” said Ivy. “You were in Coulter?”
Walker struggled to make as many of the lies coincide with the truth as he could. “It seemed like such a peaceful little place. I was curious about it because it seemed kind of remote, so far off the highway. Then, when we got there, it seemed active, friendly, and—”
“Wealthy?”
Walker smiled. “Well, yes. It seemed to me that all the houses were pretty nice. I wondered about the people who live there.”
Ivy looked at Mary, and some understanding passed between them. It was only a second before Mary revealed what it was. “It sounded like a nice place for children.”
Ivy’s face looked thoughtful. “It’s an interesting place. It always has been.”
“It has?”
“I gather that Myra told you local history is my weakness. I was a history teacher in Jaffrey for thirty-two years. But I didn’t start out to be that. I met my husband in Manhattan, only it was Manhattan, Kansas. I was fresh out of KSU, and he was a young second lieutenant stationed at Fort Riley. You know how those things go.”
Walker caught himself nodding in exactly the same rhythm as Mary. “Was this where he was from?”
“Yes,” she said. She looked wistful at the memory of it. “When he told me about this place, I secretly thought he must be some kind of aristocrat. His family came to this part of New Hampshire with William Pynchon in 1636. They ended up precisely here a little later. After they’d sold off the trees for lumber, they became farmers, probably by default. They stayed put a long time, but the Thwaites were never rich.”
“Did any of them settle in Coulter?” asked Mary.
“Never,” said Ivy quickly. “Never in Coulter.”
Walker was surprised by the certainty, the finality. He ventured, “It seemed like a pleasant place, but so is this.”
“Yes, Coulter probably always was pleasant. But it had an odd reputation. After Randolph and I had been married for a short time, I began to hear a peculiar tone when it was mentioned.” She put her hand on Mary’s forearm and said, “I’m just like you. I hear something, and I want to know all about it.” She withdrew her hand and looked at them knowingly over her teacup. “Well, people implied that it had sort of a racy reputation.”
“Racy?” Mary raised her eyebrows. “That would get my attention.”
“Me too. I was a Kansas girl, from the rough-and-ready West, and I’d been to college. When I heard that, I thought it must be houses of ill repute, at least. I wasn’t used to the New England sensibility yet. I was from a place where you talked with your mouth wide open, and used your finger to point at what you saw. When I couldn’t get anything much out of anybody, I went to look for myself.”
“You went there alone?” asked Mary.
“Sure,” said Ivy. “What I saw was . . . ” She smiled and paused for suspense. “Pretty much what you saw.” Her smile turned into a laugh. “I was so disappointed, all that morning. I walked up and down staring at people, looking into their eyes for signs that they had hidden depths. Nothing. Of course, in those days, it wasn’t as well populated as it is now, or as well-heeled.”
Walker said, “It wasn’t? The houses all looked as though they had been there for a hundred years or more. There were a few new ones, but they all seemed to be in the middle of old blocks, where there would have been something else before.”
Ivy’s eyes sharpened. “You’re a good observer. And you’re right. In those days, all the houses were big and fancy and old. Most of them were run-down, and quite a few looked as though they hadn’t been occupied for years.”
“Odd. I wonder why.”
“So did I. All the little towns around here have a few big houses like the ones in Coulter. At one time there was lots of industry—pottery works, glass factories, furniture factories, textile mills, shoe factories, granite quarries. A lot of people made fortunes, and built houses to let passersby know it, right up until 1900 or so. But those were business owners. There were a lot more laborers than owners. I didn’t see any tenements or workers’ cottages in Coulter. I was trying to get a sense of this area, and Coulter was just part of that. I remembered, when I was asking questions of people, to ask about Coulter too.”
Walker said casually, “Did you find out anything about the people that built the houses? Family names or anything?”
“I was an outsider asking prying questions, and people around here didn’t always take that well. Finally, one of my students took me to meet her great-grandfather. His name was Jonathan Tooker. She said he had lots of interesting stories about things, and that I was the one to hear them. The old gentleman was—I think—ninety-eight at the time, and that was fifty years ago.”
She stared out at the garden as she spoke. “Jonathan said the people there grew rich as what used to be called ‘Yankee traders’ when that was not necessarily taken as a compliment. They were itinerants, tinkers who fixed, sold, and traded things. But they were crooks. They sold cheap goods disguised and labeled as first-rate. They traded for old machinery, shined it up, and sold it as new. Jonathan said that while they were on the road,
