This was an olive branch, better take it. “Did you crash?”
“In a car,” said Rob Clemence, dangerously sunny. “There was one of those famous little old ladies, the ones that drive only on Sunday, in the other one, and she’s as fit as a fiddle. I’ll be on the watch for her next time.”
He winced a little as he moved away, but to Sarah’s unforgiving eye it looked like a contrived wince. People in pain or under medical care had liberties denied to the rest of society; they could be as rude as they pleased and not be held accountable. It must, she thought, be a difficult privilege to relinquish.
Her empty glass was taken suddenly out of her hand. Hunter stood above her, looking down, his face at once brusque and bothered. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” said Sarah up at him, “perfectly happy,” and only realized when he had left with her glass that she sat alone.
Milo had carried his drink to a window and stood with his back to the room, gazing out. Rob Clemence was like a ticking time bomb as he listened to something that Evelyn was confiding lengthily into his ear. Bess turned the pages of an expensive and beautiful book on archeology; Kate and Harry Brendan sat a little apart, contemplating their drinks, talking quietly now and then. When Evelyn interrupted herself to say alarmedly, “You don’t mean to tell me it’s seven o’clock? Oh, I must go over and look at the chowder,” Sarah rose quickly.
“I’m nearest—can’t I? What do I do?”
“But you don’t want to . . . Well,” said Evelyn, giving in happily, “you could add the diced potatoes and a dash of thyme and then turn it down to low. But I really don’t know why you should have to—”
It had begun to snow, the ground was already a faint crisp white. Sarah walked through the cold as though it were a decontamination room, across the Clemences’ lawn, through the lilac hedge, into the long slope of darkness that the farmhouse lights didn’t reach. It was a pretty, twinkling snow, as much silver as white in the glow from the kitchen window.
The chowder bubbled loudly on the stove, the only sound in the quiet house. Sarah added the potatoes as instructed and began a search through the spice cupboard for the thyme. Bottles seemed to topple as soon as her hand approached them, knocking over other containers. Why—a pause here to clean up some spilled parsley flakes—did she suddenly feel so nervous and disorganized? Surely not because of a scrap of conversation overheard only minutes ago: Rob Clemence saying to Bess in an undertone, “ . . . think you’re wrong. People like Peck have no rules, and they think we’re suckers because we have.”
And Bess answering fragmentarily, “—all very well, but what would you have done?”
Peck, believed for a time to have been a murderer; Peck, staring in through the kitchen window. Sarah turned her head helplessly, looked out at whitening branches of lilac beyond the steamy panes, and tipped the can of thyme.
The kitchen door opened very quietly. As it swung in Sarah thought wildly that she mustn’t scream; she had read a hundred times that screams triggered fear and set off violence. But some sort of sound emerged from her throat as the door came open, and after a look of total astonishment Harry Brendan walked up and took her simply into his arms, thyme and all.
It began as reassurance—‘Who did you think it was?” “That man, that horrible Peck”—and turned gradually into a shaken kiss that quieted and held and grew stormy again. Harry said muffledly, “That’s what I didn’t do when I left you in New York,” and Sarah, with the kitchen growing up around her, said in an equally obscured voice, “The chowder’s boiling over.”
She moved away and took off the lid unsteadily and turned the heat down; mingled with the extraordinary lightness of body and mind was the warning memory of Bess’s voice: Harry and Kate . . . Harry and Kate.
Behind her Harry said with an odd violence, “I think we deserve a drink,” and went to get ice cubes.
“We ought to be going back.”
“But we aren’t,” said Harry. “Who will take care of this motherless chowder if we don’t?” He switched on the light in the little pantry between kitchen and dining room, and the caged crow said obediently, “Hi, Milo,” and sank back to sleep in a ruffle of feathers.
“Now,” said Harry, planting drinks on the kitchen table, “what’s going on? You look like a ghost, and it can’t be only Evelyn’s cooking. You’re more than a match for Milo. Is it Hunter? Bess?”
Quietly, not tasting her drink but turning the icy round of it with one hand, Sarah told him. She held nothing back —that seemed impossible at the moment—and when she had finished Harry gave his dark head a shake as though he had just emerged from water.
“No wonder you look . . . Well, let’s see. For one thing, Nina was so distantly related to Rob and Kate, and even then by marriage, that I don’t think Charles ever connected them in his mind. He was thirty when his father married Nina, and she was thirty-six.”
The chowder muttered in another world. “It was one of those idyllic May-and-December affairs, or maybe June and November, that outsiders never quite believe in,” said Harry. “Edward Trafton was a very odd guy, and he’d been lonely and bitter for years. Nina changed all that, and at the same time she was close enough to Charles’s age to understand him, too. He’d never seen his father
