Chapter 10 - THE SHORELINE AT DAWN
Six months later, the smell of industrial bleach and wet coal dust was a memory that only returned when the wind came hard out of the northeast across the bay.
The house was not in Milton. It was not on Louisburg Square.
It was an old, cedar-shingled saltbox on the edge of the salt marshes in Chatham, sitting on three acres of high dune where the bayberry and beach plum grew thick enough to keep the sand from drifting across the brick walk.
The morning sun was warm—the clear, white heat of late July—and the tide was all the way out, leaving the flats ribbed with brown water and silver sand that stretched for two miles toward Monomoy Island.
Mara was sitting on the wide pine porch, her bare feet propped on the railing, her hair grown out now until it reached the top of her ears in soft, dark curls that blew across her temples with the sea breeze.
On the table beside her, resting on a velvet-lined case that had been built for it in Cremona in 1890, was the violin. She hadn't played the Mendelssohn yet—the tendons in her right wrist were still rebuilding their strength under the direction of an old physical therapist from the Cape Cod hospital—but every morning at eight she played the Bach two-part inventions, the clean, logical notes floating out across the marsh grass until the herring gulls rose from the sandbars to circle the chimney.
In the grass below the porch, in a double playpen made of smooth, unpainted ash, Julian and Leo were fighting over an empty wooden thread spool.
Julian had his mother’s violet eyes and his grandfather’s square, stubborn jaw. He was already nine pounds heavier than his brother, crawling with a violent, headlong rush that left him with grass stains on his knees and sand in his hair.
Leo was smaller, his skin pale and clear, his gray eyes watching his brother with a cool, contemplative intelligence that belonged strictly to him. When Julian lunged for the spool, Leo didn't pull back; he simply rolled onto his side, let his brother’s momentum carry him into the netting, and tucked the spool under his ribs with a quiet, triumphant gurgle that sounded like water running over smooth stones.
"He got him again," I said, coming out through the screen door with two mugs of black coffee and a bowl of fresh peaches from the stand on Route 28.
"Leo always gets him," Mara said without looking around, her head leaning back against the cedar shingles until she could see my face upside down. "Julian thinks the world is made of doors that need to be kicked. Leo knows the hinges are always on the outside if you look long enough."
I set the coffee down, leaned over the back of her chair, and kissed the small, soft hollow behind her ear where the pulse beat steady and slow—seventy beats a minute, clear as a bell.
"Thomas called from the terminal," I said.
Mara’s hand came up, her long fingers closing over mine where they rested on her shoulder. Her skin was brown from the salt sun, the scars on her wrist faded to thin, silver threads that looked like violin strings against her tendon.
"And?"
"The Dutch group settled the secondary litigation," I told her. "They paid thirty million for the rights to the north warehouse sites. The money was transferred into the educational trust this morning. The boys have their own board now. June Harper is the managing trustee until they’re twenty-five."
Mara let out a small, satisfied sigh, turning her face into my palm.
"And your mother?"
"She’s still in Hamilton," I said. "The federal court approved the residential restriction. She spends her mornings in the rose garden with two private nurses who don't have Boston accents. Thomas says she asked him last week whether the boys were going to be enrolled at St. Paul’s."
"What did Thomas tell her?"
"He told her the boys were currently enrolled in the Chatham sand dunes," I replied, "and that their primary instructor was an old fisherman named Higgins who doesn't use the Latin names for stripers."
Mara laughed—the sound deep, full, and completely free of the iron edge that had lived in her throat during that long, frozen winter in Back Bay.
She stood up, her linen skirt rustling around her shins, and walked down the three wooden steps into the grass. She didn't pick up Julian first. She picked up Leo, lifting him until his little bare feet kicked against her ribs, his laugh ringing out across the salt marsh like three clear notes from an open flute.
Julian immediately grabbed her ankle, demanding his turn with a loud, indignant yell that brought four sandpipers out of the high grass near the ditch.
I stood on the porch with the coffee mug in my hand, watching them.
The scar on my collarbone—the one Victor Vance had left with his hunting knife in the slush outside the transformer vault—pulled slightly when I lifted my arm, but it didn't hurt anymore. It was just a mark, like the high water mark on the pilings down at the fish pier, showing how deep the water had been before the storm went out to sea.
Behind us, the telephone inside the house began to ring.
It rang three times—the private line that only Thomas, June, and the lawyers had.
I didn't move.
I stood there in the July sun, listening to the bell strike the brass inside the hall until the machine clicked on, recorded the silence of an empty office in the city, and cut the line.
"Grant!" Mara called from the dunes.
She had both of them now—one on each hip, their brown legs dangling against her white skirt, their heads turned toward the sea where three gray lobster boats were heading out through the Chatham cut toward the open water of the Atlantic.
May you like
"Come down here," she shouted, the wind catching her dark curls and throwing them across her face. "Leo found a horseshoe crab. He thinks it’s an engine."
I put the coffee down on the cedar railing, walked down the steps into the warm sand, and didn't look back at the house again.
