Chapter 7 - The Clear Horizon
The spring came to the North Shore in the third week of April, not with the gentle green of the inland valleys, but with the raw, blue brilliance of the maritime salt winds.
The marsh had turned from yellow thatch to that vivid, electric emerald that only salt-grass knows after a long freeze.
The great room of the Hamilton carriage house was filled with the afternoon light that bounced off the high water of the Essex estuary. The French doors that opened onto the stone terrace were flung wide, letting in the smell of low tide, sweet fern, and the sharp, clean ozone of the open bay three miles out.
Noah was on his feet now.
He stood by the stone sundial on the lawn, his small, fat hands clutched around the iron gnomon, his legs planted wide in his blue canvas overalls, his mouth open in a wide, triumphant, four-toothed grin as he shouted at a herring gull that was wheeling against the blue sky.
"Dah!" he yelled, his voice carrying across the clover. "Dah! Bird!"
Ten feet behind him, Lily was crawling through the grass with the furious, horizontal speed of a small badger, her white sun hat hanging down her back by its ribbon, her hands green from the clover she was systematically tearing up and stuffing into her pockets.
I sat on the low stone wall that bordered the carriage sweep, wearing an old linen shirt and my gardening clogs, a pair of rusted sheep shears in my hand.
Beside me sat Julian Vaughn’s ex-wife.
Not Sierra.
Claire Vaughn—Julian’s first wife, the one he had discarded twelve years ago when he took his seat on the governing board of the Boston Symphony and decided he needed an ornament with a younger throat.
Claire was fifty-two, with silver hair cut into a sharp, magnificent bob that didn't care about the wind, wearing an old Barbour jacket and heavy leather boots that had seen forty seasons of bird-shooting in Scotland.
She was sipping cold cider from an enamel mug, her long legs stretched out into the sun.
"The federal judge signed the final liquidation order on the firm this morning," Claire said, her voice dry, raspy, and comfortable as an old saddle. "Julian gets forty-eight months at the camp in Pennsylvania. His lawyer tried to argue that his diabetes required private supervision, and the judge told him that the federal bureau of prisons had three hundred thousand gallons of insulin and four hundred miles of perimeter wire."
"And Sierra?" I asked, trimming the dead stalk of a sea-lavender bush.
"Sierra is in Boca," Claire said with a short, barking laugh. "Living in her mother’s guest cottage behind the third green. She tried to sell the Akoya necklace to a dealer in Palm Beach last Tuesday."
I stopped my shears. "Did she?"
"The dealer called Daniel within ten minutes," Claire smiled, her grey eyes glittering with that clean, savage humor that only women who have survived a public execution can truly enjoy. "The provenance was flagged on the national insurance registry. The necklace was seized by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department under the corporate forfeiture writ."
She took another sip of the cider.
"Daniel told the sheriff to auction it for the benefit of the pediatric clinic at Salem Hospital. Said it was the only way to get the smell of hotel sheets out of the pearls."
I looked across the lawn.
Noah had lost his balance on the sundial, landing with a soft, padded thump on his backside in the thick clover. He didn't cry. He looked down at his knees, found a dandelion head that had turned to white seed, and shoved the entire globe into his mouth with an expression of supreme, scientific inquiry.
Lily reached him three seconds later, grabbed his shoe, and began gnawing on the rubber toe with rhythmic devotion.
"You look different, Lauren," Claire said softly, looking at the side of my face.
"I sleep," I said.
"It’s not just the sleep," she said, leaning her elbow on the granite wall. "You don't listen for the car anymore. For six years, every time I saw you at the club or the symphony, you had that look. The one my pointer gets when the thunder starts three towns away. You were always waiting for the shot."
I laid the shears on the stone.
My left wrist was smooth now. The purple had gone in January; the green had gone in February; now there was only the pale, clean skin that had never belonged to anyone except the girl who had run barefoot through the tide pools at Manchester-by-the-Sea thirty years ago.
"The shot already fell, Claire," I said.
"And it missed?"
"No," I told her, looking out toward the blue horizon where the white sail of an Ipswich lobster boat was heading out through the spit into the deep water of the bay. "It hit the house. It tore the plaster down, it broke the mirrors, and it killed the thing that was living inside the walls."
I stood up, shaking the dry clover leaves from my apron.
"And now?" she asked.
May you like
Noah had spotted me. He had scrambled back to his feet, his arms out, his little canvas legs wobbling with an unsteady, beautiful, perilous balance as he began his first, five-step journey across the grass toward my knees.
"Now," I said, opening my arms as his small body hit my shins with the force of an uncontainable, clean joy, "the sun is up. The tide is full. And the children have their own names."
