The Four Ms. Bradwells (39 page)

Iz sits across from me, still in the oversized-man’s-shirt-and-boxer-shorts pajamas that no doubt have their origin in this divorced man I’m supposed to embrace. A man nearly as close in age to me as to her.

“Does he want more children?” I ask. “He already has—”

“We’ve barely been dating a month, Mom,” she protests.

“But it’s one thing to love a man and another thing entirely to love a whole family, Iz. To be denied children of your own when—”

“We’re not planning our futures together yet, Mom! So why don’t you just chill?”

The closed-in Tea Parlor is beginning to feel claustrophobic. Amazing what an effect lack of sunshine will have on you.

“Maybe I don’t want children,” Izzy says. “Aunt Mia doesn’t have children, and she’s the happiest one of you.”

Mia’s startled brown eyes fix on this daughter of mine who adores her.

Maybe Izzy doesn’t want children?

“Oh good lord, Isabelle, you can’t want to be like Mia,” I say. “She can’t even hold a relationship together. She doesn’t know
how
to love!”

The untruth of my words rushes over me as Mia picks up her fork and pushes the cold, gelatinous remains of a crêpe around.

Annie rises to Mia’s defense, saying, “That never stopped anyone in my family.” Probably referring to her Uncle Frank, who is on his third wife, his third set of kids, and his third law firm. But her dagger hits Ginger’s heart. You can see it in the way her pale eyes and her wide mouth soften. Laney and Mia and I all suspect Ginger’s marriage isn’t as Midwestern-idyllic as Ginger likes to project. But this is the first crack in the façade any of us has actually seen.

I need to say something funny here. Something that apologizes to Mia and lets Ginger know her daughter isn’t talking about her. But I don’t feel funny. I don’t feel apologetic or forgiving.

I want Ginger to explain how she could possibly ever have thought it was okay to have sex with her cousin.

I want Mia to stop forever thinking she knows better than everyone else. I want to throw Faith’s words in her face:
It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is
. Get over it, Mia. Let go of it. Move on.

Iz is the one who moves on, though. She excuses herself to shower and dress. I want to stop her, but there is no reasoning with Isabelle when she’s upset.

Annie announces she needs to dress, too. She’s always been Izzy’s loyal puppy. She hurries across the hall after my daughter.

Laney watches the empty hallway long after the girls disappear into the Ladies’ Salon and up the servants’ stairs. I’m pretty sure it’s her daughter Gem she’s thinking of rather than my Iz or Ginger’s Anne. Her brown slacks and turquoise three-quarter-sleeve blouse are fresh and pressed but her eyes are weary.

“I didn’t kill Trey,” she whispers.

Only then does she focus on the pink-walled room and the round table. The four of us sitting in the flowered chairs. She’s lain awake all night rethinking her decision to go public about her rape, thank God. It’s the way Laney has always been. Mia makes a decision and never looks back. Ginger is the same although perhaps she
ought
to rethink her decisions. I’m a worrier like Laney, but it rarely keeps me awake all night. Not since those early months after Zack died. Laney though? She goes over and over her choices even when there is no longer anything to do about them. Maybe she was like this before the rape. Or maybe she wasn’t. I don’t remember anymore.

Have we seen her bright smile at all this weekend?

“If I go public with … with what Trey did, the whole world will think I killed Trey and y’all helped me cover it up. I didn’t, but they’ll be mighty sure I did anyway. Who else would have done it?”

“Any of us might have, Lane,” Mia insists.

“But none of us did,” I whisper. We’re all whispering. We can’t get away from the fact of the reporters outside. Their attention was raised by my outburst about Mia. Cranky journalists who’ve had no decent sleep. Who need to justify their discomfort with news.

“We were all together in that little bunkroom the night he died,” I say without conviction.

In the long silence that follows I stare out through the archway, into the Ballroom Salon and the door to Faith’s Library beyond on the far wall. This is one of the questions I worried someone would ask me back then. It was one of the questions I held my breath for as the Judiciary Committee grilled me. The question I’ve never put to Mia because I haven’t wanted to know for sure. One of the uncertainties I hang my hat on when I’m assuring myself I don’t really
know
what happened to Trey Humphrey. That I have nothing to add to the public record.

“I wasn’t, not all night,” Ginger says.

I turn to her, confused. This is the confession I expected but not the source. Ginger was in the bunk with Laney. It was Mia who was out. Mia who tried to slip in without being seen.

“I went out for a walk, just for a short walk,” Ginger says. “Trying to sort things out.”

“I wasn’t either,” Mia says. “I was out for … for a while.”

“But you weren’t alone, Mia,” I say. Launching into a choice selection of the little speech I’d prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee before Mia talked me into the single “nothing to add to the public record” line: Mia wasn’t alone.

Ginger’s hand goes to her lips. “You and Dougie?” she says. “I
knew
you were with him that week. You can’t say I didn’t warn you not to listen to him sing.”

Mia looks to the Music Room and the Painter’s Studio, the journalists on the pier outside. “With Beau,” she whispers, maybe because of the journalists or maybe because that’s all the air she can get behind the confession.

“No way.” Ginger looks for support. Finds none. “No way,” she repeats.
She crosses her arms at her chest. Trying to communicate a conviction she doesn’t feel. “Shit, Mia,” she says. “You’re seducing my brother while you’re engaged to Andy?”

I’m pretty sure what Laney told me she saw in the Painter’s Studio was Beau seducing Mia. But I don’t say this. No one says this.

“You’re fucking
fucking
my brother while my cousin is drowning in his own blood?”

Mia doesn’t protest. As if this attack isn’t about her at all.

The anger in Ginger’s voice improbably bubbles over into something else. Sadness or fear or some other emotion that has her touching her hair for comfort that way she does. Trying so hard not to cry.

“He was dead when I got there,” she sobs. “Or maybe he was alive, a little alive, I don’t know.” She sinks back into her chair. Focuses on the emptiness in front of her as if the ghost of Trey Humphrey were floating in the stale-breakfast air under the chandelier. “But he’d already shot himself, the blood was all over the place.” She closes her eyes against the horror she’s buried under layers of pretend happiness for thirty years. “The blood was all over the place.”

Mia

THE TEA PARLOR, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

T
REY WAS DEAD
when Ginger got there?
As we sit in stunned silence, the journalists outside laugh, just another day at work. It seems so bizarre that it stops me. How many times have I been laughing just outside, passing the time waiting for news to drop into my lap?

Laney is the first of us to recover. She moves to the chair beside Ginger and takes her hand, saying, “Hey, Ginge,” comforting Ginger the same way we’ve so often seen Ginger comfort Laney. “Hey,” she says again. “Hey.” I half expect her to offer up a line of Latin in apology for the blast she gave Ginger last night. If Ginger tucks her emotions into lines of other people’s poetry to cast them off, Laney tucks hers into Latin words no one can understand.

Max emerges from the Ladies’ Salon and crosses the hall. Before I can figure out how to turn him back, he blunders into the Tea Parlor, saying, “Rain’s going to start within the hour.” He stops when he sees Ginger, who is working hard to recover her composure. He shoots me a look, as if I might have some clue how to help him out here. He’s interrupted something, he sees that. But he’s in it now.

“I’m making a run across for groceries,” he says as nonchalantly as he can muster. “Any special requests?”

“Across?” Ginger’s voice so artificially light it sounds ridiculous. “To the mainland?”

Max runs a hand over his thinning hair. “Don’t worry, Ginge,” he says, grinning in a way that is almost convincing. “I’ve been practicing my ‘No comment’ all morning. I think I’ve got it down.” And he’s in the hallway
and headed out the back door before we can put in the special requests we haven’t thought of yet.

Ginger bolts from the windowless Tea Parlor through the Ballroom Salon and into Faith’s Library, Betts and Laney following her. I bring up the rear, thinking Ginger really
is
smarter than I am; I’d have gone straight for the closer Music Room windows, where we would more likely be seen peering out.

We peek through the tinted glass of the low-e windows, through the tree branches beyond the glass. Outside, Max faces a large bouquet of microphones offered by the swarm of reporters. If we’d planned this, we could easily be slipping out of Chawterley while they’re distracted, but Iz and Annie are upstairs showering, and where would we go, anyway?

Ginger cracks open a window just in time to hear Max say, “The only comment I have for you folks is that the sky up there looks mighty ugly.” They all look up, and he pushes through them and throws the lines, hops onto his boat. Not the skiff, but the larger boat he brought the girls over in. A minute later, he’s headed out.

“He’s not going to the mainland,” Ginger says as we watch the boat grow smaller. “He’s headed to town. That makes more sense.”

The loud motor of a boat approaching not much later makes me glad of the fact we’ll have food. With a quick peer through the drapes, though, we see that the boat is not Max’s but rather the ugly wreck that takes the day’s catch across to the mainland, a.k.a. “the ferry.”

“What the hell is Arthur doing here?” Ginger asks.

It’s started spitting; the microphones thrust toward the poor guy trying to secure the boat are held by slightly damp journalists. With the press distracted, Ginger again opens a window slightly so we can hear what’s going on.

The guy looks at the journalists like they are poisonous.

Max emerges from the ferry cabin, hiking up his baggy jeans. The press turn as one, offering him their bouquet as he hops to the pier. His expression is almost smug.

“Oh, shit, he’s going to talk,” Ginger says.

Cameramen are wiping the drizzle from their lenses and focusing. Max seems to be waiting for them to be ready. His glasses are misting over, too, but he doesn’t clear them.

“Does he know anything?” Betts asks Ginger. She turns to me. “You didn’t—”

“Of course not!”

“Good afternoon,” Max calls out. The sound guys all flinch, and adjust. “Occurred to me some of you folks might like to catch a ride with me before your equipment gets soaked. I figure I have just enough time to cross the bay and get back with some champagne a friend of mine needs. Anyone wants a ride, you’re welcome.”

The journalists laugh but eye the clouds uneasily and wipe their lenses again.

I say, “They won’t leave the island, it’s too hard to get back here. If it starts raining, they’ll figure they can find a hotel in town.”

“Only the one little inn,” Ginger says.

Outside, Max says, “Tide’s coming up, too. It’s already crested the break and headed up the walkway at the inn.” He eyes the pier. “ ’Course this ground is a little higher. Probably won’t come much above the third step here, I don’t think.”

The cameramen frown at their equipment.

“The inn is closed for the weekend,” Max continues. “Even if you don’t mind the long walk in the pouring rain, there aren’t rooms. Restaurant’s closed, too. They’re having a little party for the innkeepers’ anniversary. Everyone in town will be there, ’less they have to cancel on account of the weather. The owner of Brophy’s and the barmaid, too.”

He offers this little bit with such conviction that I’m pretty sure the whole thing is untrue, although the champagne is a nice touch. A flurry of questions from the press follows. They, too, are skeptical.

“Suit yourself,” Max says. “Not sure there’s room enough for everyone, but first come first served. Arthur and I have got to get going, or we’ll be late for the party. He’s promised he’ll return to the mainland to fetch you tomorrow morning if you like, though. Island hospitality.”

Arthur nods, a man of few words.

“Hate for anyone to catch pneumonia out here in the rain all night,” Max says.

The rain starts coming harder then.

“Like he’s planned the downpour,” I say gleefully.

“Anyone who grew up on the island can read the weather without the need of news channel satellite data,” Ginger says. “Every choice people make here is governed by the weather.”

“The bit about the tide on the Pointway Inn walkway is a little over the top,” Betts says.

“That, actually,” Ginger says, “is one of the few things he said that’s probably true.”