The Body in the Kelp

1

Matilda Prescott was sitting up in bed piecing a quilt.

It was after midnight, but she wasn't sleepy. She never seemed to get really sleepy anymore and only tumbled in and out of fitful naps. Not what you'd call an honest-to-goodness night's sleep. Catnaps.

The cat, meanwhile, was snoring away at the foot of the pine four-poster that had been Matilda's grandmother's marriage bed. Matilda contemplated him with mingled affection and exasperation. Darn cat.

She put in the last stitches and cut the thread, then reached for a pencil from the nightstand. At the edge of the quilt top she lightly printed: "M. L. P. " Matilda Louise Prescott. She'd always liked the way her name sounded. Solid. Then she added a few words. She’d embroider it in the morning.

The bedroom door opened a crack. Matilda glanced up brightly without surprise.

“Now what are you doing here at this hour? Oh, I know you're up and around. Don't think I don't know what 's going on, but what do you have to come bothering me for? Just get out and leave me be. I'm sick to death of you. Sick to death of all of you.”

The door closed. An hour later it noiselessly opened again. Matilda didn't look up. She thought she must be falling asleep, but this wasn't sleep. She needed some air. She gasped for breath. Too many covers. She seemed to be tangled up in the quilt, but when she tried to pull it off, it wouldn't budge.

Sick to death.

Faith Fairchild and her husband, Tom, were sitting on the porch of the small Maine coastal farmhouse they had rented on Sanpere Island for the month of August. Tom was reading and Faith was doing nothing. The house was set high upon a granite ridge, and a broad meadow swept down to a cove. Across the water was a lobster pound, and Faith had grown accustomed to the putt-putt-putt of the lobster boats delivering their catch. When the wind was right, or wrong, they could smell the bait and fuel for the boats, a powerful combination; but somehow it seemed to go with the territory.

The farmhouse had long since been converted to summer occupancy and was filled with all the appropriate paraphernalia a rusticator might need: croquet and badminton sets, picnic gear, rain hats, sun hats, star charts, jigsaw puzzles, fishing poles, butterfly nets, board games, and bookcases crammed with slightly musty copies of Wodehouse, Jack London, Mary Roberts Rinehart, E. Phillips Oppenheim, plus all the paperbacks the family had ever acquired as well as those left behind by tenants and guests, everything from Jackie Collins to May Sarton. The adjacent barn hadn't seen a cow in more than fifty years, and it too was filled to the rafters with equipment for leisure-time activities: bikes, a Ping-Pong table, canoes, a kayak, gardening tools. Faith found it daunting even to look in there and unconsciously stood a little straighter whenever she entered the door. All this clean living—plunges into the arctic water at dawn followed by cold showers, no doubt—left her feeling vaguely uneasy. As if Teddy Roosevelt's ruddy, hearty ghost was spying on her from behind one of the archery targets. Her plan for August had been something less strenuous in the Hamptons.

Tom, however, was delighted. This was exactly the way he and his family had spent their summers, and the rest of the year, on Massachusetts's South Shore. When the weather had been too bad for messing about with boats, rafts, or anything else that would float—and it had to be gale-force winds to discourage the little Fairchilds—they had holed up inside the house to play Monopoly for hours. Faith's idea of a good time as a child had been to stroll over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and play hide-and-seek in the Egyptian wing, followed by hot chocolate at Rumpelmayer's. She loathed all board games, and the only card games she knew how to play were go fish and poker.

Still, she liked the farmhouse and her native curiosity—"dangerous curiosity" according to Tom—had prompted her to snoop around trying to piece together a picture of the Thorpe family who owned it but no longer used it.

There was a photograph album in the attic that affirmed her conviction that their shoulders were broad, calves sturdy, and haircuts terrible. They also seemed to have a penchant for wearing each other's clothes, or maybe they just bought them in lots. In any case, most of the garments were tan, and to say that L.L. Bean would have been haute couture describes them sufficiently. Nevertheless Faith had grown fond of the family and given them names she thought they would like—good Yankee names like Elizabeth, John, and Marian.

That Faith was here, five hours north of Boston, not two hours east of Manhattan, whiling away her time in this fashion, was due entirely to the blandishments of her neighbor and friend, Pix Miller, who had been coming to Sanpere since childhood. Pix painted such a vivid picture of deep-blue seas and murmuring pines that Faith agreed to try it. The fact that Pix also guaranteed a baby-sitter for two-year-old Benjamin Fairchild in the shape of her teenage daughter, Samantha, tipped the balance. At present Faith would have summered in Hoboken if someone had offered a baby-sitter along with it. They didn't call them "terrible twos" for nothing.

So, having made absolutely sure there was a bridge in good working order to the mainland, she packed her bug spray along with the Guerlain and prepared to "rough it." Pix was delighted. "You'll see. We'll have fun. There's always so much going on.”

Staring at the absolutely calm water and flat horizon from the porch, Faith sincerely doubted that. Yet, although she wouldn't exactly say she was having fun, she was having something close to it. And Pix was right about one thing: Penobscot Bay was beautiful.

Plus there was the food—lobster, mussels, clams, fresh fish, and a small farmer's market on Saturdays with great vegetables and a goat cheese made by Mrs. Carlan that rivaled anything Zabar's stocked.

Faith's interest in food was personal and professional. She had risen to fame and fortune as the founder of a Manhattan catering firm, Have Faith, giving up the Big Apple for the bucolic orchards of New England when she fell head over heels in love with Tom Fairchild and married him soon afterward. Faith had a tendency to act precipitously. Tom, who was the village parson in Aleford, Massachusetts, did not. But this was a special case. A very special case.

Faith had managed to make life in the small town a bit more interesting by giving birth to Benjamin, finding a parishioner's corpse in Aleford's belfry, and getting locked in the killer's preserves cabinet—pretty much in that order.

Lately, when she was not chasing after Benjamin, conscientiously trying to help him reach his third birthday intact, she had been expanding the Have Faith product line—jams, jellies, chutneys, sauces. She was also thinking of starting up the catering business again in Boston, with the same name since Tom didn't seem to think it would rock the pews too much.

Faith was no stranger to the ministry. Her father and grandfather were both men of the cloth, and she had had an insider's view of parish life from childhood. The last thing she had ever thought she would do was stretch her sojourn inside the goldfish bowl into adulthood. But in some cases the heart knows no reason.

Tom was naïvely insistent that it was possible to have a private life in a small parish and urged Faith to feel free to go her own way and voice her opinions. Although when Faith's remark to someone in the Stop and Save that she thought skinny-dipping was more wholesome than ogling the centerfold in Playboy came back to him as the minister's wife advocating mixed nude bathing, he was momentarily thrown.

At present, well out of the public eye, Tom was reading a Wodehouse and chuckling out loud. He was steadily working through all of them, and Faith had noticed some distinctly odd expressions in his speech lately, as well as an ever-so faint British accent. She had become accustomed to his habit of sprinkling his conversation with his own versions of French expressions picked up in one blissful sophomore year in Paris, and it appeared these would soon be joined by those of France's hereditary enemies across the Channel. Faith both hoped and feared Tom was going to be eccentric in old age. They had both turned thirty in the spring, not thirtysomething, just plain thirty, and Faith was thinking a lot about age these days.

The wild roses that grew up over the porch filled the air with an intoxicating fragrance. A single gull flew across the sky, then dove straight in to the dark green water.

Faith had had enough scenery. She jumped up.

“What ho, Thomas, you old curmudgeon. How about a spot of footwork? It's absolutely ripping out and I must fetch the chip off the old escutcheon from Pix's abode.”

Tom, deep in a fantasy of his own personal Jeeves, wrenched his attention away from the book and focused on his wife. She had cut her blond hair short for the summer, and it suited her. Some women have a tendency to look like fourteen-year-old boys when they do this, especially when dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt as Faith was; yet no one would ever mistake her for anything but what she was—a beautiful, sexy, healthy, and, at the moment, restless woman. He recognized the signs and abandoned his book with a tinge of regret. He was not above guilt induction.

“This is my only vacation, you know, Faith.”

Tom was leaving Benjamin and Faith for three weeks while he went to work as one of the invited speakers at what Faith referred to as Spiritual Summer Camp. In fact, it was a series of retreats sponsored by the denomination. The Fairchilds had spent the long car trip from Boston thinking up workshop titles: "Job: Paranoid or Persecuted?"; "Muscular Christianity: Implants or Exercise?"; "Matthew and John: Who Really Told It Like It Was?" and so on. Tom would actually be speaking and leading discussions around the theme "When Good People Do Nothing," which covered everything from the plight of the homeless to the role of the church under Fascism. Faith thought it would be more interesting to speculate about good people doing bad things, but Tom pointed out it was often the same and this way he could fit in more topics. Since no forces on earth, or in heaven, would have dragged her to one of these noble gatherings, she felt she was not in a position to argue.

“Come on, Tom, don't tell me you won't have plenty of idle moments, and it's not as if a resort on a lake in New Hampshire is exactly a penal colony. Besides, you need the exercise. You're getting fat.”

Tom hurled himself out of the wicker chair and grabbed Faith. "Take that back!" he cried, gently twisting her arm behind her back and trying to kiss her at the same time. "And if I am, which I'm not, it's your fault for cooking so well.”

Having gotten him out of his chair, Faith went inside for a hat and some sun block. She had no intention of looking like tanned shoe leather by Labor Day.

“Shore or woods?" Tom asked, following her. You could reach the Millers' cottage either by a faint path through the pines or by scrambling over the rocks by the water.

“I don't care—which do you want?" Faith replied.

“Woods, my dear, every time." Tom smiled wickedly. Soon after they had been married, Faith had happily discovered Tom's love of the outdoors, or rather love in the outdoors. Fresh air and/or open spaces were an instant aphrodisiac for him, and they had happened upon a soft carpet of moss about halfway to Pix's that was definitely beginning to show signs of wear. They started off hand in hand and Faith imagined they must look something like an overgrown Hansel and Gretel. Tom was in cut-offs, not lederhosen, but she quickly glanced behind her anyway for the bread crumbs as they left the brilliant sunshine for the cool shadows of the forest. The path was visible and there were no birds in sight.

Faith hadn't thought much about what Maine would look like, except she knew there would be a lot of water, rocks, and picturesque fishing villages. She was a city girl and proud of it.

Yet these ancient trees, draped in veils of gray moss and growing so close together they almost blotted out the sky, filled her with awe. So did the quiet. The pine needles cushioned their steps, and a twig cracking far away was all they heard, aside from an occasional rustle as some creature passed by. It was like a church. The time-honored simile, a cathedral. Maybe that was why Tom enjoyed making love here so much: Everything came together, so to speak. She decided to tell him this great insight, but not now—they had reached the carpet. "With my body I thee worship," she murmured.

Later, looking over at his peaceful face, eyes half closed gazing up at the dusty motes in the shafts of sunlight streaming down, she decided not to break the mood. What eventually did break it was insects—ants and the whine of a mosquito. That was the trouble with nature. It looked so good, but once you were out in it, there were all these hidden drawbacks. It was so natural. Faith had never found that to be the case with Fifth Avenue for example, or Madison.

Tom slapped his arm. "Merde! These little buggers are eating me alive. Come on, Faith, let's get going.”

They pulled on their clothes quickly and were soon approaching the cottage. Pix's family had been coming to the island for thousands of years and fortunately her husband, Sam, was a fervent convert. They had bought the land just after they got married, then built a small wooden summer house that sprawled out in several directions as various little Millers arrived. The oldest boy, Mark, was working as a sailing instructor farther up the coast, in a camp where tenyear-old Danny was currently a camper. Samantha, fifteen, preferred to stay on the island. Sam had taken off two weeks from his law practice in July and was returning at the end of the month.

Although the cottage was only about eighteen years old, it looked as if it had stood there for centuries. The clapboard was weathered gray, and Pix had planted delphinium, bleeding heart, phlox, and other old-fashioned flowers around the sides. There was a large vegetable garden in back and a substantial boathouse near the shore. This had recently been converted into a guest house, with a smaller shed nearby for Mark's sailboat and the dinghy the rest of them used to fish for mackerel, mostly in vain. Two potters, Roger Barnett and Eric Ashley, were currently renting the guest house, which the Millers still called the boathouse out of habit. Roger and Eric's own house, next to their studio and kiln, had burned down in May, and they had turned to Sam and Pix when they couldn't find a rental in the summer for love nor money.

As Tom and Faith approached, a giggling two-year-old traveling roughly at the speed of light zoomed around the corner, followed by two teenaged girls with outstretched arms, calling, "Benjamin! Stop!”

Faith could afford to look fondly on the scene. After all, she wasn't chasing him. His pudgy little legs were pumping away and his blond curls were plastered onto his forehead with the sweat of his exertion. He was laughing hysterically.

Samantha called out in explanation as she streaked past, "He thinks everything's a game!”

Faith and Tom nodded wisely, then went to find Pix. She was in the kitchen making gin and tonics.

Tom gave her a big hug. "What a woman! You must be psychic. Even though I don't believe in all that, or at least not until Faith takes up table turning or Ouija boards.”

Pix put everything on a tray and headed for the deck. Faith noticed that almost no one on the island ever stayed indoors when it was possible to be sitting out on a deck or in a field or on a rock. It probably had to do with the unpredictableness of the weather. It had been known to fog in for weeks on end, but Faith had a suspicion that Pix would go out anyway—in her sou'wester with a hot toddy.

Pix stretched out in an ancient canvas sling chair. That was another thing that made the house look old. It had been furnished with castoffs and permanent loans from Pix's relations, so everything looked as if it had been there forever. The wicker needed repainting and the Bar Harbor rockers new seats. All of which Pix and Sam planned to do as soon as they did everything else that needed doing. This was the only sure time of day to see Pix sitting. Usually she was picking berries, or making bread, or instructing the children in the flora and fauna of the area, or walking the dogs, or weeding the garden, or .. .

She had started off life as a wee mite, and her whimsical parents had nicknamed her Pixie, which was abruptly shortened to Pix when she reached almost six feet at age fifteen. Faith had been trying to wean her away from the ubiquitous denim and khaki wraparound skirts and white blouses she favored, at least in the direction of Liz Claiborne and then who knows where? Today's outfit was one of the new ones, a bright blue-and-white-striped top with white shorts. Pix had fantastic legs, and heretofore Sam was probably the only one to know it. She stretched her long arms above her head and reached for the local paper from the table behind her chair.

“So who's having tea with whom this week?" Faith asked. She knew the first thing Pix read in The Island Crier was the social notes, "From The Crow's Nest.”

Sanpere Island—the name was a corruption of the original French name bestowed by Champlain, St. Pierre—consisted of several towns, some of them no larger than a good-sized family. Each had a local correspondent who dutifully reported the news each week. Most of these ladies stuck straight to the facts. "The Weirs are at their cottage and entertained friends from Portsmouth, NH, over the weekend" and "Ruth Graham is out of the hospital and thanks all her friends for their cards and good wishes." However, the correspondent from Granville, the largest town on the island, kept not only her ear to the ground but her eye on the horizon. She always started her section with a brief weather report from her end of the island, then mentioned what birds were around, animals she had noted in her yard, and what she was planting or harvesting, before getting to the more mundane activities of human beings.

“Well, let's see," said Pix, who had the paper sent to her in the winter so she wouldn't miss anything.

She approached the paper the same way she ate a boiled lobster, with meticulous dedication and an unvarying routine. First she'd suck out the sweet tender meat in the long thin legs most people threw away, then crack open the claws, and then the tail. Finally, she would open the body, spreading the tomalley inside on a saltine cracker and eating any roe before taking a pick to get every last morsel out of the cavity. Faith had never seen one person get so much meat from a lobster—or take so long to do it.

Settling down with The Crier on Friday when it came out, Pix had been known to make it last through Tuesday and once in a while longer if it was a special issue with a supplement—as for the Fourth of July, which increased the usual eight pages to ten. After "From the Crow's Nest" she turned, like most other people, to "Real Estate Transfers." The Fairchilds figured Pix could tell you the owner of every square foot of shore frontage and on back and how much the person had paid for it. At the moment the seller was usually the local Donald Trump, a man named Paul Edson, who had purchased land when it was relatively cheap in the Fifties and was now selling dear to the increasing number of Bostonians and New Yorkers willing to travel this far. Edson was an off-islander too. He'd married a local woman, a Hamilton, but that didn't change the way people felt about him, or now her. To say someone was "worse then Edson" on Sanpere was about as bad as you could get, not excluding mass murder, rape, and pillage. It was a rare day in town when he would return to his parked car and find air in all his tires. Although usually his wife sat guard, and nobody ever messed with Edith Edson.

“Come on, Pix, stop reading to yourself and share the goodies," Tom protested.

“I was just looking for Granville. Here she is:

“ `Perfect weather this week. Lots of sunshine during the day and rain for the gardens at night. Three great blue heron were spotted in the cove near Weed's Hill and we can be sure that they are beginning to return to this part of the island. Tomatoes are so good, we can't put them up fast enough and have been giving them away, but the carrots have not amounted to much. Old seed? I don't want to point a finger, but the packet was pretty dusty. A very big turtle stopped traffic outside Alice Goodhue's house last week. Fortunately the fella didn't grab onto anyone's finger or toe! Come out some night and watch the Fish Hawks play at the Old High School. You won't see a better team and they are 4-0 in the county softball league.' Oh, terrific!"

“What is it?" Faith asked. From the tone of Pix's voice, it was not old carrot seeds or the Fish Hawks' winning streak.

“There's a Baked Bean and Casserole Supper at the Odd Fellows Hall next Tuesday night. Too bad you'll miss it, Tom," she said with real regret in her voice. "I know you'd love it.”

Faith rightly assumed that Pix intended her to attend—and what was worse, eat. The baked beans might be okay, but she knew what a casserole was—string beans (probably not from the garden, those had already been canned for next winter), mixed with cream of mushroom soup, water chestnuts if the chef was adventurous and had been to the big supermarket off island in Bangor lately, topped with canned onion rings for crunch.

“The desserts alone are worth the price of admission. Now, Faith"—Pix leveled an admonitory glance at her—"don't turn up your pretty little gourmet nose. These ladies know how to cook.”

Could the woman who sometimes served her family Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners and Dinty Moore stew be right? Faith doubted it, but she'd go. Blueberries were ripe, and that meant pie or maybe shortcake, the real kind of shortcake, on a biscuit, not store-bought sponge. New England was pretty reliable in the shortcake and other baked goods department, she had discovered. She cheered up about the dinner. Maybe there was a diamond in the rough out there who would do something delectable with lobster. Pix had given her a recipe for fiddlehead ferns clipped from The Crier last spring that had been delicious. Perhaps she was getting too critical. The thought was vetoed as quickly as it had come. The evening had tuna noodle written all over it.

“So what else is new?" If you had told her a week ago that she would be listening with not just pleasure but interest to a local gossip column, she would have shaken what was left of her locks in disbelief. Yet is was true. "And don't forget `The Fisheries Log'—I want to know what those poor fishermen are getting compared to what Sonny Prescott is charging.”

Pix continued, "Let's see, babies, birthdays, and family reunions. Gracious! Someone came all the way from Newfoundland for the Sanford gathering last weekend. They had a clam bake in Little Harbor. Oh, here's the card of thanks from Matilda Prescott's relatives: `We would like to thank everyone for their kindness in this time of our bereavement.' I guess they couldn't really put in what they thought, namely: `She was a cranky old lady, it was about time, and now we can finally get the house.' "

“What do you mean, Pix? Who was she? Any relation to Sonny?" Tom was as interested in gossip as Faith, though a fraction of a hair slower to admit it.

“All the Prescotts in the universe and especially on this island are related. Matilda was his aunt, or great-aunt. The house they all want is that beautiful Victorian in Sanpere Village you can see from the causeway. The question on everybody's mind is which one of the thirty thousand Prescotts will inherit. Matilda never married, so there are no children. The way I always heard it was she went away to the normal school, and when she got back all her brothers and sisters were married, so she had to stay at home and take care of her parents. And they lived a long time. When her father died, he was the oldest resident on the island and had the Boston Post gold-headed cane. But she did teach, in the old schoolhouse by the crossroads, and I guess she didn't spare the rod much.”

Faith had stopped listening after "beautiful Victorian."

“You mean the house with the gazebo?!" she exclaimed. A lifelong apartment dweller with an instinctive distrust of only two or three stories, she had been surprised to discover that she occasionally fell instantly in love with a certain house—a butter-yellow rambling Colonial in Aleford, a Bauhaus gem in nearby Lincoln; houses that seemed to be as rooted in the setting as the trees and bushes surrounding them. She'd seen the Prescott house the first morning they'd arrived when she'd gone to the IGA for supplies. A causeway separated a large mill pond from the small harbor, and the house was set back in the woods across from the old mill with a spit of land projecting into the pond. The gazebo was at the tip of it, surrounded by slender white birches like girls in their summer dresses. The house, keeping watch a discreet distance away, was tall and stately, with the gingerbread, gables, and furbelows of the period kept firmly in check. Both the house and gazebo looked squarely out toward the western part of Penobscot Bay. Sunsets could be spectacular, streaks of deep rose and violet stretching across the sky, randomly broken by the dark shapes of islands that pushed up into the horizon line—islands with names like Crabapple, Little Hogg (and Big Hogg, which was smaller now), and Ragged Top.

“Yes, that's it." Faith was dazed for a moment by the sound of Pix's voice. She had been mentally dressed in voile and a picture hat, sipping some chilled chablis with Tom as they gazed at the setting sun and each other. Invisible hands were meanwhile feeding and putting her suddenly docile child to bed.

“That's one of the most beautiful houses I've ever seen." Faith spoke enviously. "I don't suppose you have any Prescott blood mixed up with all those New England strains, Tom?"

“Sorry to disappoint you, love, and I agree. It is a jewel. I wonder why houses like that never seem to end up as parsonages." He sounded a bit wistful. "Probably whoever inherits it will make it into condominiums or something.”

Pix answered, "Oh, I doubt it. That's only farther down the coast so far. I think anyone who tried to introduce the idea of condominiums here would get quite a cold shoulder. Or worse. I'm not sure everyone here even understands what they are, but they sound bad—like Yuppies, and years ago Hippies."

“Which reminds me," said Tom, "I saw a flower child on the clam flats yesterday morning, quite early. Youngish with all the accoutrements—long hair, bandanna, granny sunglasses, tie-dyed mini dress around three inches long. And she had a baby or something in a pouch strapped to her back. Was I dreaming or is she a neighbor?"

“I saw her too, Tom, later. She was coming over the rocks, spied me, and fled instantly—before I had a chance to say anything."

“That's Bird, not her real name," Pix replied. "Although come to think of it there must be quite a few adults with similar names bequeathed to them by their letting-it-all-hangout parents—I actually knew someone who named her daughter Emma Goldman Moonflower. Anyway, Bird lives with her significant other in that tiny shack you can see from your beach, directly across the water from the lobster pound. I don't think it even has indoor plumbing. They're into macrobiotics and she was probably gathering seaweed. The guy she lives with, Andy, is a rock musician and seems to spend most of his time in Camden playing with a group down there. I don't really know them, although they've been here all winter and I can't imagine how they survived in that house, especially with a baby." Pix paused for breath. There was nothing like fresh Maine air and a gin and tonic to loosen her tongue.

“Someone you don't know? Well, I, for one, am shocked," teased Tom. "You're slipping, Pix.”

Pix clamped her mouth shut and returned to the paper.

“Come on, make up and read me `Police Brief,' you know it's my favorite. What kind of a week has crime had on the island?" Tom cajoled. With only one officer of the law and accordingly one police car, he hoped it hadn't been too unruly.

Pix acquiesced readily. "Well, the kids are stealing hubcaps again. Oh, and this is really funny—I'll read it: `A pickup truck was found upside down in Lover's Lane last Tuesday evening. A search found a quantity of empty beer cans inside, but no driver. The truck, a 1967 Ford, was registered to Velma Hamilton, who reported it stolen the next day. The truck was totaled and the matter is under investigation.' “

Tom and Faith laughed. "You mean there really is a Lover's Lane on the island?" asked Tom.

“Yes, you follow Route 17 to Sanpere Village and it's the road before the lily pond. But what could they have been doing to turn the truck upside down?”

Tom and Faith laughed harder. Faith caught her breath and said, "Oh Pix, only you. Don't you think the truck just drove off the road? It couldn't have been stopped and flipped over no matter how frisky the couple were."

“You never know; one time I heard—" Pix started, when she was unfortunately interrupted by the appearance of a much-disheveled Samantha lugging a squirming Benjamin. She came up the stairs to the deck and deposited him on Faith's lap before he could take flight again.

“I hope it's all right, Mrs. Fairchild, but Arlene and I want to go swimming now while the tide is right." She motioned behind her. "Arlene, this is Mrs. Fairchild and Reverend Fairchild." Arlene giggled and said something in that Maine accent that Faith had not yet managed to decode.

“Of course, Samantha. We were coming to get him anyway, and after all this work you need a break. But don't tell me you actually swim in this stuff without turning into a solid block of ice.”

Arlene giggled some more, and Samantha laughed. "This is the best time. The tide's come in over the rocks after the sun has been warming them all day, and the water isn't cold at all. You should try it.”

Faith shuddered. "Not this lifetime.”

Samantha turned to Tom. "How about you, Reverend?"

“You have a deal. Benjamin and I will go with you tomorrow. I don't want him to turn out like his mother. She doesn't know what she's missing." Tom had been swimming every day since they came.

Faith looked at Tom, planned to rake him over the coals later for suggesting in front of Benjamin that she might be an inadequate role model while Papa was simply too good to be true, and answered crisply, "Oh yes she does, thank you, and the only salt water I want to go near is in a pot waiting for a lobster or some mussels or clams.”

Benjamin had had enough lap sitting and was ready for round two, so they said good-bye and started back through the woods. They had taken the shore route with Ben once, and it took so long to tear him away from the tidal pools and shells he found that they stuck to the wooded path now and tried to keep him from wandering off into the bracken. He insisted on walking these days and howled if either of them came near him with the stroller or backpack. He seemed to have developed a logic all his own—after all, these same people had wanted him to walk, coaxing and encouraging him to take those first steps. Now he could do it and they wanted him to stop. It was a very puzzling universe.

Tom reached for Faith's hand while he watched Benjamin careen over the tree roots and pine needles in the path. "I know you're mad, Faith, and I'd adore Benjamin to grow up just like you. But a little like me. Besides, it wouldn't kill you to go swimming. You should try my method. You jump in all at once and swim like hell for a few seconds. Your blood gets going and it's really warm."

“Sounds like great fun, Tom," Faith said. "You knew I wasn't a Campfire Girl when you met me and I'm too old to change even if I wanted to, which I don't." Faith had always been suspicious of exercise conducted outside a health club, spa, or ski resort.

She took a few deliberately limber strides. "And I don't particularly care to have aspersions cast upon me." Umbrage tended to embellish Faith's vocabulary.

“I know, darling, don't worry. And I won't teach Benjamin to shoot, swear, and spit. He'll have to learn them on his own.”

They looked fondly at said Benjamin for an instant before realizing he was no longer in front of them, but had abandoned the path for greater adventure and was in the act of climbing a huge rock. They lunged together. Faith might not be Gertrude Ederle, but she could run fast.

“Want wock!" Benjamin screamed. Faith sighed. Even with trusty Samantha, Tom's absence was going to be tough going. How did single parents cope? She made a mental note never to get divorced no matter how many touch football games Tom wheedled her into.

The phone was ringing as they entered the cottage. Faith picked it up. Pix was on the other end.

“Faith, fantastic news! They're going to auction off the contents of Matilda Prescott's house next Thursday. It's under ‘Special Events' and there's so much listed I can't read it all over the phone, but there were some lovely things in the house and goodness knows what was in the attic! She only died a month ago, and I thought it would take them longer to go through things. I didn't even know the will had been probated.”

It was good news. Faith loved auctions, although until she had come to New England they had been of quite a different nature and mood. Now she knew enough to bring her own chair and a thermos of coffee, and to arrive at the crack of dawn to inspect things.

She hung up and told Tom. He was crestfallen. House auctions were his favorites, and he told Faith to try to get him any old tools she saw, especially if there were box lots. You never knew what you'd turn up in one of those. He was still hoping to come across a daguerrotype of Lincoln at the bottom of one, as a friend of his parents allegedly had some years earlier.

Faith fed Benjamin and together they put him to bed, chanting Goodnight Moon, his current favorite, in unison. By the second bowlful of mush, he was asleep.

Afterward they sat on the porch again and ate steaming bowls of fish chowder. Tom was thinking how much better it was than mush, whatever that was, when Faith interrupted his train of thought just before he could speculate on what she had made for dessert.

“I'm going to miss you, Tom," Faith said solemnly. "This is the longest we'll have been separated since Ben was born."

“I know, sweetheart. I'm not looking forward to it much. I'd love to stay here. Pix is right. This place really is perfect. Anyway, the time will go fast. You'll have all these exciting things to keep you busy—auctions and potluck suppers."

“ `Exciting' is not the word we're searching for here. The last thing in the world these next couple of weeks are going to be is exciting. But that's all right with me. I'll get all those books and New Yorkers read that I've been putting aside all winter. And I have to work on some new recipes.”

It was twilight and the tide was still high. A lone Larus atricilla, better known as a laughing gull perched on a rock and slung his strident cry at the approaching dark: "Ha-haha-haah-haah.”

2

The sun shone steadily on the ocean, creating island mirages and turning the real ones into silver silhouettes. Faith had closed her eyes against the brilliance and would soon have to move to a shadier spot, but for the moment it was delicious to bask in the warmth, listening to the steady thumping noise of the wheel as Eric Ashley transformed lumps of clay into graceful goblets. He had set up his kickwheel on the desk in front of the Miller's boathouse to take full advantage of the sun and the view.

Eric seemed to have no trouble talking and working at the same time, although his eyes never strayed from the cone shape he was pushing up and down. Faith had never watched anyone work on a wheel before, and she found herself irresistibly fascinated by the phallic shape that rose, fell, and rose higher again, before Eric plunged his fingers into the glistening shiny wet center, spreading it into the cup for his goblet. Her heart beat a little faster in time to the wheel. Tom had been away only since Saturday. Two days. Labor Day seemed further away than ever.

“Of course everyone is calling us `fortune hunters' and worse, much worse," Eric was saying.

Faith didn't know Eric, or Roger, well enough to have formed an opinion; but certainly Pix had been surprised along with the rest of Sanpere to find that Matilda Prescott had left her magnificent house not to flesh and blood, but to these two off-islanders. Pix had been in the IGA when she heard one bitter Prescott connection say, "Why didn't she just have the place torn down? Same thing.”

Matilda did leave the contents of the house to her relatives, and Sonny Prescott was the executor. It was his decision to auction the whole caboodle off at once rather than have endless arguments and lifetime feuds over who was supposed to get which teapot and to whom Matilda had faithfully promised the rosewood parlor furniture. This way, they'd split the money, and if someone was dying to have something, why he could just bid at the auction like everyone else. There was some grumbling over this, especially among those with the faithful promises, at least three of them for the parlor furniture; but in general the Prescotts thought Sonny had done the fair thing. However, first a bevy of them, including Sonny, was going through every chest, every drawer, every possible secret hiding place for the gold.

Darnell Prescott's gold that is.

Matilda's father, Darnell had owned the lumberyard, and it was widely known that he never trusted banks—even before the crash—nor did Matilda. He paid cash for everything, and there wasn't a Prescott on the island who didn't ardently believe in the existence of a well-worn leather pouch filled with gold coins. Others tended to classify it with Captain Kidd's cave—the real one was on virtually every island within sight.

Even if some of the Prescotts were skeptical, they weren't taking any chances of seeing headlines in the Ellsworth American, "Vacationing Indiana Couple Buys Trunk Filled with Gold Coins at Local Auction." Or still more catastrophic, having Eric and Roger pull up a loose floorboard and discover the loot.

The kickwheel stopped, and Eric deftly sliced the goblet from the base of clay and set it in a row of others in the shade.

“It's not as if her family ever paid much attention to her. They couldn't stand her and she couldn't stand them. We lived next door to her for years, and they wouldn't even bother to plow her out in the wintertime. Roger and I did. Not that we ever thought she would do something like this. My God, I couldn't believe it when the lawyer told us, but now I realizeshe was dropping a lot of hints just before she died. I had made some lobster stew, which she loved, and brought it over. She was bed-ridden at the end, you know. She kept saying over and over how terrible it was about our house. It burned down in May, Pix probably told you. Then she went on saying we wouldn't have to worry long. I thought she meant because Pix and Sam had let us have this place and said something about the Millers being great people. Matilda kind of humphed, which meant she agreed, but she went right on talking about how far away it was from our studio and how were we going to meet our orders?”

Faith realized she was no doubt expected to make some comment about all this. She had been in a semicomatose state with the heat, drone of the wheel, and singsong cadences of Eric's seemingly guilt-ridden, seemingly self-righteous defense. She sat up, stretched, and looked at Eric, who was · standing over her about to get back on the wheel.

“Well, I'm sure she knew what she was doing. From all I've heard about Matilda, she was a very determined lady, and she must have wanted to give you a place to live. An incredible place to live.”

Eric laughed. "It is, isn't it?" He paused. "It's the house of my dreams.”

Faith moved back into the shadow from the boathouse. "It's the house of anybody's dreams. I wouldn't mind having it myself and I don't even like houses as a rule. You do things for a house you would never do for anyone or anything else, not even your husband, and what do you get back? You have to do the same things all over again in a while. So it has to be an extraordinary house to be worth it, and you've got one.”

All's fair in love and real estate, Faith thought to herself, but just the same she would look behind her on dark nights for a while if she was Eric or Roger. If the two of them died without issue, the house reverted to the Prescotts. That was as good an invitation as any, and the Prescotts were certainly crying bloody murder all over the island. It was bad luck and lousy timing for them. If Matilda hadn't clung so tenaciously to what was left of her life, like one of the limpets on the granite ledges in the view from her windows, the Prescotts would have gotten everything. She had changed her will only after the fire had destroyed Roger and Eric's house.

But, Faith continued to reflect, then the Prescotts would have been at each other's throats instead of at Eric's and Roger's. They couldn't all have lived in the house. She stood up and stretched some more.

She could see Samantha and her faithful shadow, Arlene, valiantly trying to keep Benjamin from tearing himself to ribbons on the razor-sharp, barnacle-encrusted rocks near the shore. They were showing him the tiny crabs and other things that inhabited the tidal pools.

Samantha was a Pix in the making, or a Pix product, depending on whether you were looking at the apple or the tree. She had shell collections, rock collections, bird-feather collections, and fern collections, all carefully labeled, which would have put many a botanist, ornithologist, or whatever to shame.

Arlene seemed to know everything by osmosis. She didn't have Peterson's field guides, life lists, or Latin names, but she knew what would make you sick if you ate it, on which offshore islands the gulls nested, and the best places to dig for clams. What was even more important to Faith at the moment was that they were both the kind of adolescent girls who adored children.

Just as the adult world could be divided into cat lovers or haters, child worshippers or tolerators at best, there seemed to be a very clear distinction between those girls who baby-sat for the money and were perfectly adequate at keeping your child safe, even somewhat entertained and clean, and those girls who were happiest pushing a stroller, playing games, and marveling at the antics of small beings. Many of them seemed to move straight from horses to kids. Faith thought of suggesting this topic to a psychologist friend of hers for a scholarly monograph, "From My Friend Flicka to Rock-a-bye Baby.”

She gazed out at the three tiny figures by the water's edge again. She had been thankful to have Samantha on the payroll and now it looked as though Arlene would join her. Not onlywas it close to an embarrassment of riches, but the girls seemed to be having fun.

It wasn't that she didn't have fun with Benjamin. She completely adored him. They were moving from the tactile, physical communication of babyhood to the tactile, physical, verbal, you-name-it relationship of the toddler. Somewhere along the line he had lost that sweet, milky baby fragrance and taken on a sweet, sweaty little-boy smell. It had happened before she realized it.

But talking to someone who referred to himself mainly in the third person, and who rarely achieved sentences longer than three words and these mostly self-involved, did pall occasionally, and it was then that she greeted Samantha with open arms. Arms that were opened to place Benjamin squarely in Samantha's.

Faith sat down again and leaned back against the boathouse. As long as they looked so content at the shore, she'd wait a bit longer before getting Ben for lunch.

From where she was sitting she could see Eric's profile. He was extremely good-looking. His normally blond hair was bleached almost white by the sun; he had blue eyes to match and a good body. He'd taken off his shirt, and she could see he was slim without being skinny. All that potting and loading and unloading the kiln had evidently been good exercise—nice muscles. She finished her inventory by looking down at his hands. They were large with long, tapering fingers The kind of hands a statue has. In fact, it would not have been too adulatory to say he looked like a statuePraxiteles, not Michelangelo.

Not my type though, Faith thought. Too much of a piece. Tom's slightly off-center nose and rusty-brown hair strayed across her mind. Benjamin might have the same hair. His strawberry-blond curls were beginning to darken. It was too soon to tell about the nose.

Faith hadn't asked, nor cared; but Pix had told her that Roger and Eric, contrary to public belief and often derision, were not gay. They were college friends, one from Iowa, one from Texas, who shared a common passion for clay. They became partners and built up a thriving business in New York, producing unique ceramic pieces as well as an elegant line of dinnerware, much of which appeared in at least one room in the Kips Bay Decorator Show House and went from there to penthouses, country homes, and favored dwellings on both sides of the Atlantic. Needing change and more space, they had come to the island on the recommendation of a printmaker friend who lived nearby on the mainland. They had been here for six years, going their separate ways for a month or two in the dreary winter months, but otherwise living and working together in what seemed like an easy harmony.

Eric was a master at glazes, although they both did everything. His current woman friend was Jill Merriwether, who operated a small gift shop in Sanpere Village. Jill didn't sell their work. Her line tended to run to objects with blueberries on them, clam-basket planters lobster potholders, balsam pillows, books about Maine, and jam, usually strawberry and blueberry, made by a number of people on the island. The shop was, in fact, called The Blueberry Patch. Faith had bought Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal there for Benjamin, and it was rapidly supplanting Goodnight Moon as the most-requested bedtime story. She figured she had read it about twenty times since buying it, and so far neither Ben nor she was tired of it.

Sanpere was an idyllic place, but still she imagined it must be pretty horrible in the off season. The population dropped drastically—from 3000 to 1200—although according to many islanders this was a blessing—and the cold weather forced an existence just ripe for cabin fever. She had met a friend of Pix's who had lived here one winter between jobs, and she had told Faith that by January she was going to every meeting on the island, even AA, just for the company.

“Don't you miss the city, Eric?" Faith wondered aloud.

“Of course I do, and when I can't stand it anymore I go down, and then after a week I miss Sanpere and can't wait to get back. That's how I know this is right for me. If you aren't satisfied in New York, then you must either be nuts or have found a spot that's better for you. Roger feels the same. He goes to the city even less often than I do, and it's usually for the business."

“But what about the opera, theater, bagels?”

She looked at his well-worn 501 jeans. Clothes were obviously not a problem.

“Our deep freeze is stocked with bagels, Jewish rye, decent steaks, and all those necessities, and we have Alistair and PBS for the finer things of life. We do miss our friends, but they love to come up here. It's a much better atmosphere for us to work in, less pressure, less distraction. We are happier as artists and happier as people than we've ever been in our lives. Saner." He gave the clay an emphatic slap, then started to kick the wheel.

Still Faith found it all very hard to understand. Aleford was bad enough, but at least Boston was not a cultural wasteland. There were all sorts of things to do that they seldom did. Sanpere didn't even have a movie theater. She'd heard that a group of residents did get up a little-theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof a few years back. Then the week before the opening the Maggie ran off with the Big Daddy, and no one had tried since.

She stood up. "Well, I wish you good luck and much happiness in your new house, and if you have a housewarming, please invite me. I want to look in every corner and drink tea or something else in the gazebo.”

Eric gave her a warm smile. "You don't have to wait for the party, Faith. As soon as we move in, you and the Millers will be our first guests, and anytime you want to sit in the gazebo, feel free.”

Faith decided she liked him. She liked attractive people. They were nice to look at, but Eric had more than that—intelligence and the kind of good nature that charms, yet isn't revolting.

“Thank you," she replied. "That sounds wonderful and I'll try to dig up a parasol. Now I have to rescue Samantha and get Benjamin home for lunch and a nap. I never realized what a slave children are to routines. I always thought childhood was supposed to be a time of freedom, but if the same things don't happen at the same time every day, he gets totally crazy."

“I know; my sister's kids are such little conservatives. But with them it's food: `I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it' type stuff.'' Faith laughed, and her impression of him was reinforced—it was nice to share the same classics. She said good-bye and set off down the path to the beach.

Benjamin was right on schedule and started falling into his chowder at one o'clock. Faith scooped him up and put him to bed. She decided to take the new Vogue out to the hammock and have a rest herself. She'd drastically shortened most of her skirts a couple of years ago despite the prevailing fashion in Aleford, which had been mid calf since the late twenties. Now it looked as if she would have to raise some of them an inch or two more. It was absorbing work coping with trends. Besides, all this lassitude was exhausting. And she needed her strength for clamming with Pix later in the afternoon when the tide was still low.

She had no sooner opened the magazine to an Issey Miyake quilted jacket that said "Faith, you need me" when a shadow fell across the page. She looked up. In this case, way up. It was Pix.

“Faith, how long have you been asleep? You were so peaceful I didn't want to disturb you, but you said you wanted clams."

“I don't even remember dropping off. What time is it?" Faith tried to avoid wearing a watch whenever possible.

Pix consulted her gigantic multipurpose timepiece, which did everything from simply reporting the hour to informing one of the current exchange rate in Addis Ababa and the exact date of the return of the male elephant seals to Ano Nuevo.

“It's almost three o'clock."

“Oh, my God!" Faith leaped out of the hammock and started running to the house. "If Benjamin is up, there's no telling what he's into, and if he's not, he'll never sleep through the night.”

He was up, but miraculously had stayed in his crib, diverted by one of the branches of FAO Schwartz Faith kept steadily rotating there in the vain hope of keeping him from climbing out. He had learned to climb out of his crib six months before, and for weeks Tom and Faith's life was anightmare. Thrilled at the acquisition of this terrific skill, Benjamin would repeat the maneuver seven or eight times a night. It was one of those things no one tells you before you have a baby, yet everybody mentions afterward: "Oh yes, Johnny climbed out forty times a night for eight months and we were regulars on the parental stress hotline." Leach, Spock, Brazelton, all the heavy hitters commiserated and said just put him firmly back. Of course they weren't the sleep-deprived zombies in question.

It was at three o'clock one morning, after lifting Benjamin back in and admittedly snarling at him, "It's time to go to sleep, you must stay in your bed," that Faith realized she had literally stumbled on the solution to the capital-punishment dilemma. It was fiendishly simple. Put the murderers, rapists, insider traders, what-have-you, in a cell with a two-year-old hardened crib evacuator and after a week tops, total rehabilitation or insanity would have occurred. Tom was not amused when she woke him up to tell him. "Faith, you're getting dangerously close to the edge," he had mumbled.

Although Benjamin had somewhat curbed his wanderlust and slept through the night now, Faith was haunted by fears A recidivism. She and Pix were discussing this as they walked through the aspen grove that separated the cottage from the nearest shoreline. The green-gray leaves were quivering in the slight breeze on stems that looked too fragile to hold them in place. Shortly after Faith and Tom had arrived in Sanpere, Pix had told her that legend had it that the reason the aspen always quivered was because the cross had been made of its wood and forever after it mourned. Faith had been amazed that she had missed this tidbit of ecclesiastical folklore in her clerical upbringing and resolved to work it into the conversation at the next meeting of the church's ladies' alliance. She had found herself woefully lacking in such bona fides as a minister's wife. Pix would have been far abler, she reflected—not for the first time.

Samantha followed behind with Ben in a Gerry backpack. For some typical two-year-old reason he would let Samantha and no one else carry him this way.

All three of them were armed with clam hoes and wooden clam baskets lined with wire mesh. Faith was intrigued and a bit wary. Her wariness had increased when Pix had handed her a pair of olive-green rubber boots, size sixteen and encrusted with the vestiges of ancient mudfiats. Flapping along in these, wearing a bathing suit (Pix had said an old one, but then she didn't understand about updating a wardrobe), and beginning to feel uncomfortably warm, Faith found herself thinking that the victory might not be worth the price. However, she wanted clams and Pix said there was nothing in the world like absolutely fresh ones.

Faith decided to concentrate on dinner and hoped that would give her the sticking power. She had invited Pix, Roger, and Eric to taste something new she had been working on. She'd been invited to St. Louis last winter as one of the judges of a barbecue-sauce competition and while there had had a local specialty, toasted ravioli—ravioli rolled in bread crumbs and quickly deep fried. It was tasty, but she realized it could be even tastier with more interesting fillings and sauces, different bread crumbs, better oil. Since then she'd been trying all sorts of combinations. For tonight she had prepared some with chèvre and red pepper and wanted to stuff the rest with these sweet whole clams, a hint of garlic, and fresh-tomato-and-basil coulis for dipping. This primo piatto was to be followed by grilled lobsters brushed with pastis and fennel butter. Pix was bringing new potatoes and salad ingredients from her garden. The thought of what awaited took Faith over the rocks, and she stepped off, firm of purpose, into the mud, ready to rake. She instantly sank down to her boot tops and couldn't move an inch. It was like quicksand, and she felt a might Hoover sucking her into the bowels of the earth. No clam was worth this.

“Pix!" she screamed. "Save me!"

“Oh, Faith, you have to walk carefully. Now just turn your foot to the side to break the suction and pull.”

Faith turned and with a truly disgusting noise freed each captive leg.

“Okay, now we're ready." Pix had barely paused. Faith was incredulous, but she didn't see how she could get much muddier even at Georgette Klinger's, so she assumed an attentive air and thought about a long soak in the cottage's giant lion-pawed bathtub.

“You see all these little holes on the surface? Each one is a clam breathing. You don't want to put the tines of your hoe into the holes or you'll break the shells. You dig in just above and turn over the mud, like this." Pix swiftly uncovered a cache of clams, all busily taking their last breaths and squirting streams of water as they tried desperately to escape. She bent down quickly and put the larger ones into her basket. "They have to be at least two inches. People don't seem to understand that if they strip away all the clams, there won't be any. They used to be so plentiful and so cheap. Now they're almost as much as lobster." Pix was waving her clam hoe for emphasis, and Faith knew she would not hesitate to use it on anyone who dared to dig an undersized clam. She instantly resolved to pick only elderly-looking ones, even if the babies were sweeter.

“I'll start over here and you can keep working this stretch. It should be good, judging by the number of holes.' “

Faith could see the holes. They were opening and closing in the mud with a faint popping noise. Samantha had taken Ben out of the backpack, and the two of them were farther up near the high-tide mark playing in the sand. There was nothing to do except dig. Pix had given her a pair of Sam's work gloves, disdaining them for herself. They were too big, of course, and scratchy, but Faith did not intend to stick her fingers into the unknown, especially when it could well mean the loss of a nail. She put her hoe exactly as Pix had shown her and pulled. Nothing happened except for a slight soreness in her upper arms. She tried again. The clams might get scared and find another spot. The third time she succeeded in turning over two or three cupsful of the stuff with nary a clam in sight. A mosquito whined near her face. She was covered from head to boot toe with Cutter's, but she didn't relish the company. Her sun visor was making her forehead sweaty.

After an hour or so she had developed some expertise, been squirted in the face a surprising number of times by recalcitrant clams, and actually had what was going to have to be enough for dinner. Her arms, legs, and back ached, and she slid gingerly across the surface of the flat toward the tiny speck in the distance that was Pix. As she moved, she could see the overturned dark-gray mud, which looked as if someone had been able to move a backhoe in but actually marked Pix's progress. When Faith got closer, she could see Pix's basket was brimming. Maybe she would share.

“Pix, I think I'm going to call it a day.”

Pix looked up smiling. "I just love clamming. All this delicious food, just waiting for us here."

“You are truly amazing. I hardly think the backbreaking labor it takes means the food is exactly `waiting.' "

“We'll get mussels next. That really is easy, Faith. It's cleaning them that takes times."

“Yes, I know, except I don't believe any of this gathering stuff is easy. But by the next time I'll forget how sore my shoulder blades are and go musseling or whatever else you have in mind."

“How about berry picking? The cranberries should be ripe, and I know a secret spot on the Point where there are millions of them.”

The Point was a forty-acre finger extending in a curve from the end of the Millers' property. The far side faced east straight out to sea, and the views were magnificent. They often walked over at sunset. No one knew who owned it, not even Pix. Many records had been lost in a fire at the town hall in the early fifties, and people had come to regard the Point as community property, going to its long, sheltered sandy beach, a rarity on Sanpere, to picnic and swim. There were the remains of a large Indian shell heap at the tip, a reminder that the Abenakis were the first summer people.

“Berry picking I can do. Unless there is something peculiar to Maine berries so they cling to the branch and require brute force or anecdotes from `Bert and I' to get them off."

“No, I promise you. Although I'd like to hear you imitate a Down East accent. I'll give you half my clams if you tell the one about the guy in the balloon asking the farmer for directions. “

For clams Faith would do anything, she discovered, andthe two of them became convulsed with laughter as they plodded off to the water's edge to rinse the clams. Samantha, watching them from the shore, couldn't figure out what they were doing to make them weave and pitch, but then she wasn't close enough to hear Faith say, "You're up in a balloon, you darn fool.”

As they were walking back to the cottage, Faith asked Pix if she ought to invite Jill Merriwether.

“I know Eric and she are an item, yet I don't like to assume that couples go everywhere together."

“Well, they do seem to be serious. Though I've been to lots of things where only one or the other has been invited. I'd say do what you want. She's very shy, but once you got to know her, I think you'd like her."

“Then I'll invite her and make the `Crow's Nest' notes with our daring girl-boy-girl-boy-girl table.”

Later that evening, as Faith surveyed the group over the toasted ravioli, she realized she needn't have worried about an unbalanced table, because one of the girls might just as well have been a china doll. Jill didn't look like a china doll, except for her tiny size. They hadn't made bisque in quite that shade of deep tan, nor straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders after traveling in an unequivocal line across her brow. She was pleasant. She smiled. She sat down and ate. She just didn't talk.

Faith made a few attempts to draw her out, which yielded the information that Jill was native to the island but had lived most of her adult life off, returning only for visits to the grandparents who had raised her and managed to put her through college. She had come back four summers ago to start the store. In the winter she lived in Portland and did something in the schools. Probably a speech therapist, Faith reflected.

Eric and Roger were teasing Pix, one of their favorite pastimes, and after two glasses of a full, slightly tart Montrachet Pix was rising to the bait. At the moment it was Pix's penchant for sweeping generalizations that coincidentally served her purposes. "Everyone knows that developers are going up and down the coast convincing families to sell their land for what seems like a fortune, and then they turn around and make millions while the poor family has to move the trailer they bought with the money, a trailer that falls apart instantly when the warranty expires, inland on a tiny piece of land nobody wants and they never even get to see the ocean hardly."

“I suppose you mean it's common knowledge, Pix?" Roger smiled.

Roger was even taller than Eric. He looked like a basketball player of the Kevin McHale variety, big hands, long arms, and slightly pigeon breasted. But basketball players didn't have full beards and hair past their earlobes as Roger did. It was all very tidy and he was an attractive man, yet he didn't seem to generate the energy Eric did. He had gentle, large brown eyes the same color as his hair and beard. His face was tanned, and the whole effect resembled an underpainting waiting for the definitions of color. His voice matched—calm, slow, and, Faith was pretty sure, slightly stoned. Pix's voice, in contrast, was like a circus barker's, one who had made a stop at the Winsor School and Pembroke.

“Yes I do, and you and Eric know it as well as I do. Could you afford to buy anything on this island? I know Sam and I couldn't, at least not something with frontage.”

Eric broke in, playing devil's advocate. "It hasn't been my impression that people on this island are easily talked into anything, Pix, let alone swindled out of their birthrights.”

He stopped suddenly at the thought in everyone's mind, then recovered gracefully. "Case in point. Do you think it likely that Matilda Prescott could have been talked into leaving her house to the two of us, delightful as we are, if she hadn't wanted to? Forget for a minute what the whole island is saying."

“Well," Pix grudgingly admitted, "Matilda might have been an exception. Besides, she really could have sold the property for a fortune. Paul Edson would have killed to get it and years ago told her to name her price. Her answer was to tell him if he ever raised the matter again or set foot on her land, she'd shoot him. No, Matilda couldn't have been sweet-talked into anything."

“Exactly," Eric said. "And the Prescotts know it too. Otherwise they would be contesting the will. This is a very litigious island, remember. People love to have the excuse to go up to the county courthouse and maybe take in a movie or eat at McDonald's while they're suing.”

Everyone, including Jill, laughed.

Pix doggedly returned to her point. "But everybody is not Matilda, and I think a lot of people have been cheated out of their land, or at least have not gotten the fair market value for it. It's all these wealthy summer people with their big yachts."

“But Pix, you're a summer person," Faith reminded her. "Yes, but a different kind. We respect the island and the people who live here."

“How do you know the new people don't? Just because they live in big houses and need five bathrooms, eight bedrooms, hot tubs, big-screen TVs for one double-income-nokids couple?" Roger asked.

“Dinks! Exactly my point, Roger—I knew you agreed with me," Pix cried out. "And so does Eric, only he's too stubborn to admit it."

“Oh, I do admit it, Pix, and I don't think it's just that developers are offering large sums for shore lots. It's that the economy, basically the fishing industry, is in such trouble that people have to sell to support themselves. Plus the new people build houses, which means more jobs."

“So we're going to end up with a gentrification of the whole coast. Lots of snazzy planned communities with a view," Roger added. It was obviously something they both felt strongly about.

“And the first thing they'll do is go back to the original spelling, `St. Pierre', because it looks more elegant on stationery,'' Pix fumed.

Faith rose. "Let's have dessert outside. I put some citronella candles on the porch, and if we douse ourselves in repellent we may be able to survive. Although the mosquitoes could be your first line of defense. And the black flies. Maybe we should be grateful and let them have a nibble.”

She realized as she spoke that she found any thought of change on the island as distasteful as the rest of the group. The place was certainly getting to her.

Jill started to pick up a plate, but Faith stopped her. "And please just leave everything. We have some fromage blanc—and strawberries from the Miller garden—that needs to be eaten immediately."

“Is it true, Pix, that Sam is having the road widened so the trucks from Birdseye can make it down to your place?" Roger asked.

“Very funny, but I must say we are having a pretty terrific yield this year."

“Then by all means say it." Eric opened the door for her and bowed.

Everyone left early, as island custom seemed to dictate. All those energetic things to do at dawn, like weeding.

Jill had thanked Faith and hoped they would see each other again soon. Faith watched them drive away, noting that Eric had joined Jill in her car. Maybe he liked a good listener, and she was certainly a striking woman. Faith would call her beautiful—probably most other women would. Tom would say no. They never agreed on female pulchritude, so she automatically said "striking" instead of "gorgeous" in her mind. Jill had worn a gauzy white-linen shirt, full skirt of the same material, a wide dark-brown leather belt, and matching flats. She was willing to bet Jill didn't do her shopping at JC Penney, not even in the Stephanie Powers Collection.

She saw Jill again the following night at the Baked Bean and Casserole Supper with Eric and Roger. She was wearing jeans and a huge gray Champion sweatshirt, probably Eric's, and she still looked striking. They had managed to save seats for the Miller-Fairchild contingent at one of the long trestle tables set up in the IOOF Hall. It was covered with white butcher paper and someone had placed an arrangement of wildflowers in a spray-painted coffee can exactly in the center. Faith imprisoned Benjamin in his Sassy Seat with Samantha on guard while she and Pix went to load their plates with food that even from afar seemed to fulfill Faith's prophecy. There was a good warm food smell in the air, like breadbaking with a freshly brewed pot of coffee on the back burner, but it seemed to bear no relationship to what Faith could actually see in front of her.

The hall was full, and outside in the increasingly cool evening a patient crowd waited their turn for three-bean salad and watermelon pickles. When Faith returned with as little of the mystery casseroles and as much of the fresh crabmeat salad, homemade bread, beans, and what she knew was Pix's black-seeded Simpson lettuce possible, the table was full too. She recognized Elliot and Louise Frazier, long-time friends of the whole Miller family, who lived in one of the old ship's-captain houses in Sanpere Village. The others were new to her.

Pix hastened to make introductions. "Faith, these are our friends Bill Fox and John Eggleston. Bill writes books and lives not too far from us, toward South Beach. John is a wood sculptor and another man of the cloth. He lives in Little Harbor.”

A booming voice cut her off. "Used to be, Pix. Whatever sermonizing I do now is to the gulls and myself.”

The voice matched his size and general appearance. He was well over six feet, with startling bright-red hair shooting out in flames all over his head. A few gray strands were beginning to ameliorate the effect, and Faith judged him to be in his mid forties. He was wearing a Welsh fisherman's smock and a Greek fisherman's hat, which created an ecumenically nautical effect or vice versa. He must have been something to see in the pulpit. She wondered about the "used to be" part. Who left whom?

Bill Fox was a neat, dapper little man with a crisply pressed Brooks Brothers striped oxford-cloth button-down shirt. It was open at the neck, but Faith knew there were bow ties at home, just as she was willing to bet that when he stood up, he'd prove to be wearing chinos and Topsiders. He was the kind of person who has looked the same for most of his adult life, appearing middle-aged in his twenties, then when everyone else caught up looking perennially youthful. Slightly balding, horn-rimmed glasses, and anywhere from thirty to fifty. Faith was struck by a sudden thought and asked, "Bill Fox. Not William H. H. Fox!”

He smiled. "I admit to such, yes."

“Pix, `He writes books.' That has to be one of your greatest understatements of all time." Faith turned to Fox. "I love your work and have reread all of it constantly throughout my life. I've never thought of them as children's books."

“I don't either," he confessed. "But children seem to approach them most readily.”

Faith knew that Pix's reading, when she had the time, was limited to breeding manuals for Golden Retrievers and Ro-dale Press best-sellers, but she couldn't believe that she had been on the island all this time in close proximity to William H. H. Fox and Pix hadn't mentioned it.

He had written a series considered modern classics in which two children discovered that they had the power to make themselves as tiny as field mice and explore the natural world in exquisite detail. One day in the forest they ventured down a hole and came upon an enchanted land, Selega, ruled by Prince Herodias and Princess Ardea. Further books related their travels in Selega and followed them through childhood in both worlds. The last book ended with their discovery that they couldn't make themselves small anymore. Faith always cried whenever she got to that final page. It was hard to pinpoint the appeal of the stories—they were a mixture of real and surreal, fantasy and adventure, with a lot of nurserytea-type coziness thrown in whenever the children were in the big world. And Selega was perfect. There had been many a day, Faith remembered, when she longed to be transported there as Princess Ardea of the flowing dark hair and the eyes like violets. Not to mention all the handmaidens and silken gowns.

“Would you mind telling me what the two `H's stand for? I've always wondered."

“Not at all. I'd put the whole thing in, but it might not fit on the cover. My full name is William Henry Harrison Fox. With a short last name, my mother figured she could have free rein with the rest. My brother is Ulysses Grant Garfield Fox. Mom liked double initials and famous men.”

Faith had read that Fox was a shy recluse, but it was hard to attach that image to the genial man sitting across from her heartily enjoying what appeared to be canned corn mixed with sliced hot dogs and elbow macaroni.

By dessert Faith had decided Pix was right. Baked Bean and Casserole Suppers and their like were not to be missed. It wasn't the food so much, though the baked beans had been delicious, but the ambience. Everybody seemed to be having such a good time. The hall was full of happy noise, and there was a constant change of scenery as contented diners relinquished their places to newcomers. Faith sat with a thick white china mug of the coffee she had smelled earlier, a huge slab of blueberry pie, and a couple of chewy oatmeal cookies to fill in the corners and watched. John Eggleston had departed, after delivering a lengthy and learned answer to Eric's query about who were the Odd Fellows anyway? (Roots in medieval England, the first lodge in the U.S. chartered in the early 1800's and dedicated to educational assistance.) Faith wasn't surprised. Ministers always seemed to know things like this. Samantha was also gone, joining Arlene in the kitchen, where she was helping out. Everyone else was lingering over the desserts with slightly guilty glances at the line that still remained. Ben had plunged two fists into a plate of pie and was now singing softly to himself as he licked his fingers.

“I don't think I can eat another thing," sighed Pix blissfully as she finished her second piece of pie. "Of course I said that after the main courses.”

Faith started to invite everyone back to the cottage for brandy or whatever one had after such an event, when she realized that the line had shifted again and the two people who had just edged through the door were attracting a few surreptitious glances. (She had already learned that no one in Maine actually displayed overt curiosity.) It was Bird with her rock musician. He looked quite ordinary, or at least for the Hard Rock Café or some other place where adolescents and post-adolescents dressed the part. He was wearing tight black leather pants and a vest with no shirt, which had to be pretty nippy Down East, and his hair was carefully arranged in careless spikes. Faith had never seen Bird up close. She was certainly dressed like a flower child, and a rather pale baby was tied in a sling on her back, but no one was noticing her dress or the baby.

Bird was beautiful. Not striking. There would be no argument. Long shining deep black hair and luminous eyes that seemed to change from blue to purple as the light caught them. Cheeks flushed from the cold and rosy lips that were slightly parted. Absolutely beautiful.

Faith looked across the table. Bill Fox was gazing at the door with a sudden look of intense longing on his face. Roger was looking too, a slightly blurred duplicate. They wouldn't want to go anywhere for a while.

Princess Ardea had just walked into the room.

3

“Going, going, gone." The auctioneer brought his gavel down with a bang on the crate he had set on top of a chest of drawers. Another quilt had been bid up by the dealers and off-islanders. But Faith felt confident that she would get one eventually. There were so many. It seemed that generations of Prescott women had done nothing but cut up their old clothes and piece them into quilts. During the viewing in the barn, the choicest ones had been hung on the walls and suspended from the rafters like glowing pennants far a tournament. And in a way an auction was like a tournament as knight jousted with knight for the prize—a fair damsel, splinter of the true cross, or walnut five-shelf corner whatnot.

They were holding up another quilt now, a particularly beautiful one with a huge Mariner's Compass in the center in shades of blue, surrounded by smaller ones quilted in white on white. Faith raised her card hopefully when the bidding started, then sighed, sat back, and watched.

It was fascinating. The auctioneer spoke so rapidly she could scarcely follow, and as he rattled off the bids—"Two hundred dollahs, do I heayre two fifty?"—his partner, an elderly man who looked like he'd be more at home in a dory on Eggemoggin Reach checking his traps, reached toward the crowd and grabbed the bids out of thin air, keeping up a constant accompaniment—"Yep, yep, you have it. You have it.”

It was all over at five hundred dollars.

“Remember, it was one of the older ones, Faith," Pix comforted her.

They had arrived at seven o'clock, laden with chairs, a thermos of coffee, another of cold lemonade, sandwiches, tape measures, and a firm resolve not to get carried away; if one showed signs of it, the other had solemnly sworn to push her companion's chair over. Faith could afford to bid high for what she wanted, since she had a tidy little trust fund started by her perspicacious great-grandfather. The nest egg had shrunk to plover size after she had begun her catering business, but her success had let her replace what she had taken out and a good deal more. Tom looked upon it as a golden egg—insurance for old age, and also back-up college tuition for Benjamin and whoever might follow. Faith agreed, with one exception: She would pay for her clothes. She supposed that loosely defined, that could include a quilt, but she was at the auction for bargains, unless she fell head over heels in love with something. And then there was always Pix the watchdog; if she started to bid wildly, Pix would see to it that she was literally head over heels.

Pix could afford the high bids, too, but she had an ingrained Yankee frugality that continued to astound Faith—the kind that cut off the one leg in her pantyhose that had a run, matched the good leg with a similar survivor, and suffered two elastic waistbands and goodness only knew what kind of discomfort in the crotch. Faith had given her a pair of thigh highs, and Pix was initially enthusiastic until she went to Filene's to get more and found out the price.

They were both dressed in layers today. The morning had started out foggy and cool, but Pix had predicted they would be down to their tank tops before noon, and she was right.

Despite a good-sized crowd, they were able to set up camp under the tent in a prime spot—close enough to the front to follow the action there and slightly off to the side to follow any action in the crowd. They didn't have to wait long.

The first skirmish of the day broke out between Eric and Sonny Prescott before the auction started. Eric claimed that the weather vane, an old copper one in the shape of a three-masted schooner, was part of the house and not the contentsthereof. Sonny said it was like the pictures, mirrors, and other detachable things. It could be taken off, so it was auctionable. Eric pointed out with increasing heat that the ship had raced against the wind on top of the barn since it was built and was as much a part of the house as the gazebo. Sonny replied that he didn't wonder but the gazebo could be auctioned too. One of the onlookers, a spoil-sport or good Samaritan depending on how one viewed these matters, had gone to get the lawyer.

Mr. Foster was quite explicit, armed with foresight, experience, and a list. The gazebo stayed. The weather vane went. Eric angrily told the auction-house workers not to touch it, he was going to buy it, and the lawyer told the auctioneer he thought it could be bid upon from the ground. An uneasy peace reigned.

Roger arrived shortly after and went with Eric into the house, possibly to make sure the Prescotts weren't removing the wainscotting in the dining room or linoleum in the kitchen.

Now it was almost ten o'clock and it seemed that Stanley Gardiner, the auctioneer, had scarcely made a dent in the lots, even at the breakneck speed he and his runners steadily maintained. Faith sat transfixed, her index card with the number on it clutched in her hand. On the back were some sketchy notes to remind her what she wanted.

“Lot 56—Carnival glass—a beautiful grape-and-cable compote in perfect condition, with a small flake at the base. We don't often seen them this size. What am I bid for this lovely piece? Do I heayre fifty, fifty, seventy-five? All done at seventy-five? Are we buying or renting today? Fair word and fair warning—sold for seventy-five.”

Faith glanced down at her card. Lot 58 was a cherry cradle. After all, Benjamin was getting up there and it might be time to start thinking about another baby. Her mind instantly recoiled from the memory of all those sleepless nights and the fact that "easy childbirth" was an oxymoron.

She thought instead about little toes and a satiny-smooth bottom, those milky smiles and gurgles. Meanwhile the cradle could hold Ben's stuffed-animal menagerie.

“Now here's a pretty piece," the auctioneer was saying. "Lot fifty-eight, a cherry cradle. Not a scratch on it. Do I heayre twenty-five to start us off?”

Faith raised her card fast, and the old man whom the auctioneer addressed as Walter and occasionally Wally snatched the bid in his gnarled grip. "You've got it.”

Faith didn't look behind her, but apparently only one other person was interested in the cradle judging from Walter's movements.

“Nobody having babies on this island anymore? I have fifty-five. Use it for a planter—look swell with petunias in it. I have seventy-five and ninety-five. Ninety-five, ninety-five. Going, going, gone at ninety-five dollars." Faith grabbed Pix's arm ecstatically. It could have been a can full of rusty nails. The point was, she was the high bidder.

“Have cradle, will reproduce," Pix said, laughing.

The tent was full and people had set up chairs on the lawn. Earlier, Pix had used the occasion to give Faith a rapid overview of the island population: four basic groups with numerous subdivisions. There were the year-round native islanders, an inordinate number of whom were named Prescott, Hamilton, or Sanford, and the year-round off-islanders, many like Eric and Roger—artists or writers—others wanting to get away to what they thought was a simpler life. There had been a big influx of this group in the late sixties and many had stayed, but to the Prescotts et al they might have arrived a week ago. The summer people were also divided into two main groups: what Pix called the "rusticators," families who had been coming to the island for generations and marched in the annual Fourth of July parade with banners that said "Fiftieth Summer," and the newcomers, people like Faith who rented cottages for short periods of time. People who might never return to Sanpere, impossible as that was to imagine.

Faith looked around. Once you had the labels, it was easy to stick them on. A group of rusticators sat on sturdy canvas folding stools not far away with grandmother's fitted wicker picnic basket, "the one we always take to auctions," filled with egg-salad and watercress sandwiches, the thermoses with fresh-minted iced tea at their feet. Some of the women wereknitting Fair Isle sweaters, and the men strolled purposefully down to the water to check the tide from time to time. The new people had the equipment. but their baskets lacked the patina and validation of old age. The local people were eating the hot dogs being sold, and most of the artistic group had gone home after noting Matilda's taste—a Wallace Nutting or two, Granville Fuel Oil calendars—and searching fruitlessly in the boxes from the attic for a Hiroshige.

There was a large number of day visitors too—dealers from up and down the coast and summer people of both varieties from the mainland. Pix had spoken in a disparaging way about them—people who needed a movie theater within twenty miles.

The next couple of hours went by quickly. It got hotter under the tent, but it was worse outside in the sunshine. They ate their sandwiches and drank the lemonade. Pix had to supplement her lunch with one of the hot dogs after she smelled the one the person next to her had, heaped with sauerkraut.

“It goes with an auction," she told Faith, who refused.

“Funny, I don't remember seeing them at Christie's," Faith remarked, and Pix jabbed her.

“When in Rome, Faith ..."

“I know, I know. If they were selling clam rolls I might be interested, but hot dogs, no, not even for you and Sanpere.”

Pix was the successful bidder on a mixed lot of Heisey glass and almost got a repulsive Roseville jardiniere and pedestal. After that episode Faith asked her if it was permissible to overturn her chair if she bid on something hideous.

“Faith, Roseville is highly collectible, and besides it would have looked beautiful with that asparagus fern I have. I thought you liked that period.”

Before. Faith could reply that there was such a thing as selectivity, their attention was drawn away by another quilt, and again it went high. Some had been sold for lower, even bargain bids, but they did not appeal to Faith. She wanted a very special one for their bed in Aleford. The parsonage was in constant danger of slipping into New England country, and she had met the threat by bringing in modern pieces of her own; so far they coexisted happily. She thought she could safely add a quilt without fear of heart-shaped baskets, wreaths, stenciled herds of cows, and pigs in all forms following.

“Faith," Pix whispered excitedly, "the weather vane is next.”

It had been a relatively calm auction with only one minor altercation, when a lady wearing red heart-shaped sunglasses who was definitely not Lolita claimed she, and not the couple in front of her, had been the high bidder on a Limoges fish service. The auctioneer had backed up and started the bidding again. She got the fish service and left. The young couple found solace in a Nipon dessert set.

Now the crowd under the tent grew still, and people who had wandered off to the shade under the big oak trees came to stand on the sidelines.

Eric and Roger had been sitting in the front row, with the Prescotts filling in the chairs to either side and the rear. It was like a wedding where the bride or groom had only two friends. Eric's arms were folded across his chest, and Roger's , eyes assumed a steely glint quite unlike their everyday softness. Faith saw Jill standing to one side of the auction worker's table. She must have closed the store. Eric saw her too and raised a hand in greeting. Jill smiled encouragingly.

Walter had taken over for a while, but now Stanley Gardiner returned, took the microphone, and placed it around his neck. Walter moved to the side, his eyes darting around the tent, gearing up. You could hear a fly's wings flutter.

“Lot two twenty-five. Copper weather vane. As trim a vessel as ever set sail—thirty-six inches long. You've all seen it, ladies and gentlemen. Right on top of the barn. I can tell you there are no patched-up bullet holes in this one. It is in the original condition. A beauty. Fifty to open.”

Eric raised his card high, and immediately one of the Prescotts countered with a bid of seventy-five dollars. There was a lot of interest in the vane, and the bidding went high. At nine hundred dollars everyone had dropped out except the Prescotts and Eric and Roger. Eric bid nine hundred and fifty. The Prescotts looked grim and bid a thousand. Thecrowd was gasping. Eric bid twelve hundred and the Prescotts seemed to waver. Then Joe Prescott jumped up and rushed at Eric and Roger. Stanley Gardiner stood in his way, and Joe began shouting around him, "It's the gold! Why do you think they're bidding so high! You bastards! She told you, didn't she!? It's got to be gold underneath or something. "

“Are you out of your mind!?" Roger yelled at him. He and Eric were on their feet. Sonny Prescott stepped next to the beleaguered auctioneer. "Now Joe might have an ideah here. I'd say we better have a closer look at the hull of that boat."

“If you touch that weather vane, I'll kill you." Eric spoke in a flat measured voice, but his words reached all the way to the back rows. Jill moved away from the table and came up quietly behind him. Nobody else moved. Then the lawyer came and spoke to the auctioneer.

“Now everybody sit down and calm down. Gorry, I've never seen anything like an auction to get people riled up." Mr. Gardiner took out a big white handkerchief and mopped his forehead. Faith felt a thin trickle of sweat make its way down her cleavage. It was hot. And it was tense.

“What we're going to do is withdraw Lot two twenty-five for the time being until the heirs can have it appraised to everyone's satisfaction, and whether it will be done up there on the blasted roof or down on the lawn is something you can work out with Mr. Foster here." He motioned to the lawyer, who looked as cool and collected as he had at seven o'clock. "Now there's plenty left for everybody. Lot two twenty-six—Well, what do you know? An Atwater Kent in a Gothic box. Have to be a few of us here who remember this baby. Now what am I bid? Who will start the music at twenty-five?”

The music stopped at two hundred dollars and an oak chest of drawers, a tray of spongeware, and a Seth Thomas Westminster chimes clock rapidly followed. The parlor set was put up and created some excited bidding among the Prescotts. It might have a nick or two, and the rosewood needed some elbow grease, but it had stood in splendor in the front parlor since Darnell had brought it home from Pain's in Boston as a wedding present for his bride. Nora Prescott from Granville was the high bidder at $850. Just as Matilda had promised her, only she hadn't thought she would have to buy it to get it. Nora's sister, Irene, to whom it had also been promised, decided not to bid at the last moment. Blood was thicker than Old English polish, and Nora had always been there when she needed her, taking the kids when she was up at Blue Hill having her appendix out, telling her she was well rid of him when her husband took off with a hairdresser from Belfast. Irene's noble sacrifice did not go unnoticed, and Nora decided to give her the little marble-topped table, which really wasn't going to fit in her living room anyway.

Pix bid quickly and got a pretty spool bed for Samantha's room and a dry sink before Faith even knew she was bidding.

And so the auction unfolded, assuming a character distinct from all the other auctions Gardiner and Company had run or the crowd attended. You never knew what was going to happen. The Warhol cookie jars turned out to be wooden lobster pots that had been in the barn. Few lobstermen used them anymore, and as the tourists and dealers bid them up, all the locals resolved to go clean out their sheds.

Pix and Faith were determined to wait until the bitter end for all the real bargains, and at about four o'clock the box lots started. Faith quickly snared one with tools she had noted for three dollars and Pix bought two mystery boxes of china for four dollars each, which upon inspection proved to contain a lovely Wedgewood ironstone teapot, lots of saucers without cups, something that could possibly be a piece of Imari, some Tupperware, and other treasures. Faith grabbed another box, one filled with board games of varying vintages, which she had seen at the viewing. Tom's family was addicted to board games, and she knew they would be happy to have more, especially for a dollar fifty. She bought two more boxes of china on speculation for two dollars each and figured she was done. After the cradle she had successfully bid on an odd lot of plate serving pieces for thirty-five dollars, elegant Victoriana with elaborate scrolls etched on the knife blades and ladles and repoussé flowers on the handles. It had been a productive day.

Just as she and Pix were packing up and getting ready to settle their accounts, the runners brought out another quilt, or actually a quilt top. It had been pieced, but not quilted to the batting and underside. Faith paused to watch as they unfolded it. It was a sampler quilt. Every square was different, connected with lattice stripping. The colors were repeated in each design, strong blues, greens, and touches of the same pink as the granite rocks by the shore.

It was a Maine quilt. Maine colors. And Faith had to have it. She sat down and pulled Pix into her chair.

“A beautiful quilt top here. All it needs is a back, and I'm sure a lot of you ladies out there could put this together in no time. What am I bid? Do I heayre ten dollahs?" Faith raised her card. She was so excited she felt slightly lightheaded. There was something about this quilt. It was ridiculous, really. She hadn't the slightest idea how to quilt; it was not one of her accomplishments. In fact any sewing more complicated than buttons or a running stitch went to the tailor and always had. But she'd solve that problem once she had it. And she got it. Apparently there weren't any quilters in the audience and it was hers for forty dollars.

“Faith, it's gorgeous, and I can show you how to quilt. It's not difficult at all." Pix said.

“I think it would be easier if you quilted it, Pix, but as you have seen with the clamming, I'm willing to try anything." And with that they went home to gloat over their finds and bemoan all the ones that got away.

They passed Eric and Jill on the way out. Eric was tightlipped and Jill was talking to him in a low voice. They stopped and Pix asked if they wanted to come to the cottage for a drink, but Jill said they were going to the mainland to get some dinner and distance. Eric smiled wryly. "Can you believe they actually think the mythical gold is in that weather vane? And how is it supposed to have gotten there? Did Darnell climb up one night and ballast it with doubloons, in which case it would have toppled off the barn long ago? Or maybe he took it down and replaced it with one cast of solid gold and no one ever heard anything about how he got it made? Well, at least we got the wicker porch furniture and some of the bedroom sets. I'm just glad it's over and we can move in.”

Pix patted his arm. "Situations like this are always horrible. You should hear some of the stories Sam tells about settling estates.''

“Did you get some nice things?" Jill asked as they turned to leave.

“Oh yes, nothing earth-shattering, but you have to go home with something from an auction, especially a historic one like this. Faith got a cradle, a quilt top, and who knows what in the boxes, and I got my usual—china, glass. Sam says we're going to have to have an auction soon."

“Thanks for the invitation, Pix. We'll see you soon," Eric said. "Good-bye, Faith—I haven't forgotten about our gazebo party. You and Pix and whatever husbands are around can come sometime next week."

“That would be lovely, but husbands are not arriving until close to Labor Day, so you'll have to put up with the company of women."

“Never a chore." Eric smiled. His mood seemed to have lifted, and Faith was sure it was not just her imagination that Jill gave them a look filled with gratitude as she said good-bye.

The events of the auction had been unsettling, and Faith found it hard to sleep that night. It had been after six when she finally got back, and she was exhausted. She left the boxes in the barn to go through later and brought the quilt top into the house. It was even more beautiful than she had thought when they had held it up. She spread it on the bed in the spare room. It seemed at home.

After a hasty supper she read to Benjamin and settled him into his crib, then got an Angela Thirkell out of the bookcase and went to bed herself. She must have slept, because when she looked at the clock several hours had passed, but now she felt wide awake. She opened the book again and tried to lose herself in Barsetshire, but the comings and goings of the Brandons did not distract her.

There also seemed to be a lot of comings and goings in the cove and on the shore road opposite the cottage. She remembered that she had heard the same boat and truck noises a week ago Thursday night, because Tom had been lying next to her and thought it might be night fishing. The next day they had seen herring nets, so the fishermen must have been catching a run, then unloading at Prescott's straight into the trucks.

She got up, turned out the light, and went to the window. She couldn't see much, just pinpoints of light and the occasional long sweep of headlights. She didn't hear any talking—just the boat engines and the trucks. Well, it was after two o'clock and they, of all people, would know how voices carried on the water. Still, it surprised her a little that they should be so considerate. From what she had seen at the auction, Sonny Prescott didn't seem like a man who would whisper if he had something to say. If it was Sonny out there in the dark, that is.

Benjamin would be up in a few, very few hours. Faith crawled back into her bed, thought wistfully about Tom, and wondered if she would feel better or weird if she piled some pillows in his approximate shape next to her. Weird. She fell asleep.

Faith spent most of Friday in the hammock watching Benjamin chase croquet balls on the lawn. The owners of the cottage maintained a large, carefully manicured lawn in the back of the house, bordered on three sides by the meadow filled now with Indian paintbrush, Queen Anne's lace and other wildflowers. The lawn looked a bit odd there, as if someone had spread a piece of felt over the meadow, but it provided a place to sit and play all those games stored in the barn.

She did rouse herself to get lunch, which the two of them ate on the grass. Faith found feeding Benjamin al fresco made life much simpler. Anything he dropped would be picked up by the gulls later. At four o'clock Tom called. They had decided he would call her, since he wasn't as sure of his schedule as she was of hers. No schedule.

It was a case of two people who are very close to each other with not much to say. Or rather a lot to say, but nothing to say of common interest. Faith started to tell him about the Casserole Supper and Bird's entrance and the auction and the trouble between the Prescotts and Roger and Eric, then she realized he didn't really know these people and it all meant nothing to him. Tom started to tell Faith about the difficulty he was having keeping his Ecclesiastes study section on the path; the incipient power struggle between this year's conference chairman and the recently named next year's; and the distracting presence of a certain lady from Minneapolis—distracting of course not to moi, Tom protested a bit too much to himself, but some of the other men—when he also realized how boring it all was when you weren't there. Of course, Faith would have been even more bored if she had been there. And so they talked at cross purposes for a while, tried to explain, then Faith said, "Tom, I love you. Is that it? I mean isn't that why you called?"

“In a word, yes. And I love you. And I miss you. You do sound like you're having more fun. And getting better things to eat."

“Think of it as good for the soul, and I'll make it up to you when you get back. The things to eat and especially the fun."

“I hope you're thinking of the same kind of fun I'm thinking of," Tom commented.

“Absolutely, brisk swims in the ocean followed by volleyball and ten-mile hikes. Isn't that what you Fairchilds call `fun'?" Faith teased.

`Watch out, sweetheart, or I'll hold you to it."

“Oh, Tom, I almost forgot. I had a letter from Hope on Friday. She and Quentin are going to be visiting friends in Bar Harbor and wondered if we wanted company over Labor Day weekend. What do you think?"

“I think I don't want any company but yours, but you know I love your sister dearly, and if there were the slightest chance that our example of connubial bliss would nudge the two of them toward the altar, I'd take it."

“Good. I already said they could come."

“Dammit, Faith! What did you ask me for if you had the whole thing decided?"

“I wanted to hear what you would say and it was what I thought, so th s no problem. Besides, you always like Quentin after the first shock of the new wears off and he forgets he's flawless."

“That's beside the point."

“Are we quarreling?" Faith asked. "I hope not, because it's horrible enough on the phone."

“No, not quarreling. It's just necessary that I occasionally try to cling to what's left of my independence."

“Oh, Tom, this is silly. All right. It was a little highhanded of me." She paused. Tom didn't say anything. "Okay, even very high-handed and I promise faithfully, don't laugh, to consult you first in the future about house guests. And when you see the wonderful box lots I got at the auction, you'll let me do anything I want."

“I do anyway, but promise me that you'll leave at least one box for me to go through myself."

“Better. I'll give you two. I bought four, so that's fair. You can have the tools and one that looks like old games. I thought your family might like them."

“That's terrific, Faith. Now I have to go, honey. A group of us are going to Portsmouth for dinner at The Blue Straw-

“Sounds tough. Tom."

“Believe me, Faith, after a week of this food, we deserve iL "

“I'm sure you do. Just make sure any legs you encounter under the table belong to it.”

After some more of this nonsense, they hung up and Faith went back to the yard. Ben was still napping. Must be all the au air, she thought. She had noticed that the locals touted it as either invigorating or soporifIc depending on what the situation called for. Just another one of those charming contradictions that seemed to crop up on Sanpere.

No sooner was she outside than she decided to go in. She felt at loose ends. Fix had invited them for supper, but Faith had wanted to go to bed early after her wakefulness the night before and declined. sat down at the big rolltop desk by the window facing the co^ve and got out her recipe notebook to jot down a few ideas The phone rang. Of course.

“Hello, Pix," she said.

“How did you know it was me?"

“You and Tom are the only people who call me, and Tom just called, so that leaves you, Watson, my good fellow."

“Oh, I see. I called to see if you wanted to change your mind. John Eggleston is bringing over some lobster from his traps—he just has a few in front of his house—and the Fmziers are dropping by. Oh, and Jill is coming, though she wasn't sure when. She's taking inventory or something. Eric went up to some friends on Drake's Island for a couple of days, so she's at loose ends. I asked Roger too, but he's up to his elbows in new glazes, he told me this morning."

“You people seem to exist in a frantic whirl of gaiety here. One party after another. How are we going to settle down to life in Aleford? And think how bored I'll be next time I go home to the City for a visit," Faith said, reflecting on the difference between Pix the hostess as hostage of Aleford and Pix the Perle Mesta of Sanpere. Several times a year she had to give dinner parties for Sam's law partners or clients, and she would start worrying a month before. The night of the dinner something disastrous always occurred. Either with the food—one time she had forgotten to remove the plastic bag with the innards from her roast chicken—or with her persona zipper stuck halfway up on the dress she was attempting to put on—and Faith had to rush over to save her. But on Sanpere Pix thought nothing of inviting large groups on the spur of the moment. If she didn't have enough plates, she switched to paper with casual aplomb.

“I do want to get to bed early, Pix, but I'd like to see the Fraziers and especially your renegade priest again. Could Ben and I come for the aperitif?"

“Of course, and Faith, you'll never guess! The Prescotts took turns watching the weather vane all night until they got some expert down from Orono this morning. And Eric was right. There was no way the gold could have been hidden in it. Too heavy. Anyway, the man didn't mind climbing on theroof, so he went up, poked around, and took scrapings. It's copper through and through. So now it goes in the next auction Gardiner has, and they'll all go to bid against Eric and Roger out of spite and disappointment. Since the weather vane was part of the contents of the house, if it had been gold, it would have been the Prescott clan's. That's a lot of trips to Florida for the winter."

“From everything I hear about her, Matilda would have enjoyed all this," Faith commented.

“Definitely. Fortunately, she liked me—or didn't dislike me, I should say. I used to take her some of my strawberry preserves every once in a while. Oh, and Louise Frazier told me that your quilt top is probably the last one Matilda made. She was piecing one with those colors when Louise visited her just before she died."

“Thanks, Pix. It's nice to know who made it. If she appreciated your delectable jam, she couldn't have been too horrible." .

“Oh, she wasn't horrible at all just lonely and unappreciated, I think. Sam used to enjoy talking with her, sparring really. He thought she should have gone into politics. She was bright and totally honest, and had so much drive. Too much for her family. She liked to be in charge, and when she got old and couldn't be, they were used to keeping their distance."

“I want to hear more about all this, Pix, but Ben's awake. He's starting to hurl things violently out of the crib, always a bad sign, so I'd better go. When do you want us?"

“Around five?"

“Fine. I'll see you soon.”

Faith hung up and raced upstairs before one of Benjamin's missiles found the window as a target. Everything was on the floor, and Ben, having taken all his clothes off, was just climbing out of the crib. She carried him into the bathroom and sat him on the potty seat. Unpredictable in all things, he had virtually toilet trained himself. Just as she was culling information from all the experts and getting ready to start, he had announced, "No diapers," and had scarcely looked back. It was big-boy underpants—BBUs, as Tom called them—from here on in.

An hour later Faith was sipping a glass of wine and eating cold mussels and the remoulade sauce she had taught Pix how to make. She was enjoying herself. Samantha was reading to Ben, which she appeared to be able to do for hours on end without going crazy and/or speaking like Mr. Rogers.

John Eggleston was regaling them with tales of the island during Prohibition, which he had heard mostly from his neighbor and good friend, Elwell Sanford.

“Of course Elwell swears he himself wasn't involved in any of this illegal activity, although his constant references to a `friend of mine' leave me a mite skeptical. Maine was a rum runner's dream, with this convoluted coastline—twentyseven hundred miles of small coves, harbors, and inlets sandwiched into a four-hundred-mile loaf. And all the islands off shore. People tell me there are still cases buried on the Point, but I haven't heard of anyone finding one recently, Elwell's classic story, which I must admit I have heard up and down the coast, is about one of the Marshalls who was feuding with his neighbor. They were both selling hootch. One stormy night a revenuer came to Amos Marshall's house, desperate for a drink, he said. Well, Amos looked at him. His slicker was weatherbeaten and he needed a shave, but his boots were brand-new; so Amos sent him up the road saying he had taken the pledge himself, but his neighbor could oblige. The neighbor, unfortunately, wasn't so observant.”

Everyone laughed, and Pix said, "Maybe you have heard it elsewhere, but I'm sure it started here.”

After the laughter died down, Elliot Frazier remarked, "Of course we have the modern-day version with the illegal drug traffic. You're right about the coastline, John—it is virtually impossible to police it, and boats are landing the stuff all the time."

“When I first came to Sanpere in the late sixties, it had just started, or people had just become aware of it, and every newcomer to this island was thought to be either a drug peddler or an undercover agent. They certainly didn't know what to make of me," John said, laughing. "I used to fill in duringthe summer for a preacher over in Cherryfield, and when that got back to the island, they were even more confused."

“But John," Louise interrupted in her soft, faintly Southern voice, "you were doing so much good work with the teenagers here." She turned to Faith. "There was, and is, a big problem with alcohol on the island, and some drugs. There is really nothing for these kids to do here. John was the one who started the community center.”

A different kind of ministry, Faith thought. John Eggleston was certainly a compelling figure, and she could imagine he had quite an effect on kids once he got going. She liked his stories and certainly he was to be admired for whatever he'd done for Sanpere, yet there was still a suggestion of fire and brimstone lurking just behind the pupils of his eyes and the clarion surety of his voice made her uneasy. A man who thinks he is absolutely right in everything he says and does. She had the feeling that if you ever got in his way, he'd roll implacably over you. No turning the other cheek here. Maybe that was why he had left the ministry. Tom wasn't a doormat, but he had a sense of his own limitations, humility in the presence of imponderables. Faith slid in somewhere between the two. She hoped she'd go around, and not over, but knew too that humble was not her best pie.

“Faith, whatever are you thinking about? You have the most peculiar expression on your face—sort of like the two corners of your mouth can't decide whether to go up or down," Pix commented.

“That's about it, Pix. I was thinking about good and evil," Faith replied, not realizing until she said it that that was what she had actually been considering.

There was silence for a moment as they all looked at her. Then Elliot Frazier asked, "Is this in light of the auction? I ask that because the day triggered many thoughts for me, starting with the whole event. Was it good or evil of Matilda to separate things that way? We knew her well, and I am still puzzled that she wanted to have the house dismantled after she died. The things in it were as much a part of the house as the structure itself for her."

“I hadn't connected my thoughts to the auction, but you may be right. I certainly have been restless since yesterday. There seemed to be so much tension, and I don't even know all these people." Faith looked at him with a feeling of respect. An insightful man.

The Fraziers had moved to Sanpere almost forty years ago. They were in their early thirties then, with two small children. Elliot had had a serious heart attack and they had wanted to get away from the stress of life in Washington, where he had built up a thriving accounting firm. At about the same time, Louise had inherited enough money from her family to enable them to buy their lovely old house on Sanpere. Elliot never had another heart attack. He had retired years before from the job he got the first year they were here—postmaster of Sanpere Village. They were the exception to the rule—most people on the island had forgotten the Fraziers weren't born on Sanpere. They moved comfortably among all the groups on the island. Sanpere had few secrets the postmaster and his wife hadn't heard—and kept.

“I think I know why Matilda divided things," Louise offered. "She might have felt slightly guilty about leaving the house to Roger and Eric, but more likely she wanted to get everything cleaned out. Have someone start fresh, which I'm sure she wanted to do herself at times, much as she worshipped those ancestors of hers."

“You could be right," Pix said. "The end of an era."

“Exactly." John closed the gate on the conversation, and Faith realized it was getting late. She resisted their attempts to convince her to stay for dinner and set off through the woods with Benjamin in tow. The path led close to the shore at times, and Faith could glimpse the sunset through the trees. The sun was a fiery-red rubber ball making a straight path across the water, the clouds streaming out along the horizon like purple and scarlet kite tails. Life with Ben was reducing her to kindergarten imagery.

The rocks that sloped down to the water were already in darkness, and on the other side of the cove she could see a few lights at Prescott's lobster pound and the houses to either side. Bird's tiny cabin stood out against the sky. There were no lights on, and Faith wasn't sure Bird even had electricity.

She had seen her with the baby on the shore again and this time had received a brief nod and slight smile in answer to her greeting. The baby, who appeared to be under a year old, still looked pale, and whether this was from the macrobiotics or lack of sunshine penetrating the sling Bird carried it in Faith didn't know.

The porch light at her own cottage blinked a welcome as she emerged from the woods carrying Benjamin, who had suddenly decided he wanted to be picked up and was now sound asleep.

She had no trouble sleeping that night either. Her last semiconscious thought was that she had never realized Nature was quite so noisy—crickets, owls, bullfrogs, and always the sea, just close enough so she could make out the faint rhythmical lappings of the waves on the rocks.

The next morning Faith was up virtuously early. If she was a jogger, she'd go jogging, she thought. It was that kind of day. Newborn and sparkling. She packed a lunch in one of the two or three hundred knapsacks hanging from nails in the barn and set off with Benjamin for the beach at the Point. She had her bathing suit on under her shorts and shirt and thought they might even go wading, which would be something to tell Tom when he called next.

By the time they got to the beach, she was worn out. It wasn't that Benjamin didn't keep up. He could match her pace for pace, but he was stubbornly determined to forge his own trails, and it took all her energy and patience to keep him on the track. Now he could roam at will over the beach and had already found a little stick with which he was furiously digging his way to China or whatever was directly below. Faith opened the knapsack and spread out a towel next to him. She sat down and looked at the water. The tide was out and had left a wavy line of seaweed, shells, odd pieces of wood, rope from traps and buoys, and other assorted flotsam—bleach bottles, which people cut to use as bailers, a waterlogged shoe, a sardine tin. The beach itself was arranged in layers. Farthest from the sea, near the wild roses, sea lavender, and spreading junipers, the sand was covered with stones and broken shells, pushed up by the waves. A line of dried, blackened seaweed separated this layer from the sand that had recently been underwater and still glistened in the sun. When it dried, it would be soft and almost white. Down near the water's edge the rocks started again.

One of the big schooners sailed by, and Ben jumped up and down waving excitedly. "Wanna ride! Wanna ride!" He was actually beginning to make sense these days, and the next step might be conversation. In a way it was nice to concentrate on Ben, although a few days would have more than suffIced. Before he was born, she hadn't realized that there would be times when husband and child would pull at her from different directions. Like that poem of Robert Frost's that compared a woman to a silken tent with "ties of love and thought" binding her to the earth. They were either holding her up or pulling her down, depending on the day, or as Frost pointed out, the movement of the wind.

Faith and Ben ate their sandwiches and wandered out to the receding water. This wasn't a clam flat and there was no mud. Faith held tight to Benjamin's chubby little paw. He was racing toward the water crying, "Swim! Swim!" Faith stuck her big toe in and promptly lost all feeling. She decided her shoes would fit better if she did not get frostbite and managed to steer Ben away from the beckoning deep, over to the tidal pools that had been left behind in the warm sun.

“Sweetheart, we'll go look for little fishes and shells in the pools, okay? We'll swim another day." And in another place, Faith added to herself.

She helped Ben climb up onto the flat ledges that stretched around the Point, and they began to explore the endlessly fascinating pools. At first Ben wanted to jump in or at least stick his hand in right away, but Faith was able to get him to pause and look first—to see the busy world of tiny fish darting among the sea anemones and starfish, small crabs making their way across the mussels and limpets clinging to the pink and orange algae that lined the bottoms of the pools. They went farther away from the beach, carefully avoiding the sharp remains of the sea urchins the gulls had dropped on the rocks and the lacelike barnacles that covered the granite.

“What's that, Ben?" Faith looked up from the life in thepool she had been studying. It looked so arranged, so deliberate, like the pine cones she had found in the woods placed on a mat of gray moss in a star shape with a feather in the middle.

“Wait, honey, I'm coming." She made her way across the flat rock and stood next to Ben, who was crouched and gazing intently at something in a lower pool.

“Man swimming," he said. "Ben wanna swim."

“What man?" Faith started to say before she looked and the question was answered for her.

It was Roger Barnett, draped over the rocks and secured with thick ropes of brown kelp. Small waves were systematically covering and uncovering his head, filling his slackly opened mouth with sea water, fanning his long brown hair against the rockweed. His shirt was gone, and the dark kelp stood out against the unnatural whiteness of his bare arms and chest. His eyes were open and staring straight into the sun. Roger wasn't swimming.

Roger was dead.

4

Faith opened her mouth to scream, remembered Benjamin, and swallowed hard. Then she grabbed him and started to walk quickly back to the beach. Her legs felt as rubbery as the kelp that lashed Roger to the rocks, and she had trouble focusing. She stepped on a sea urchin, the sharp tines puncturing her heel, and for a moment the pain was a welcome distraction.

There had been no point in investigating closer. Roger was beyond any resuscitation attempts. She felt extremely nauseated thinking about trying.

In with the good air, out with the bad.

And she knew she wouldn't be able to move the body herself. She had to get help before the tide came in and carried him away. Faith didn't read the charts, but she could tell when it was out and when it was in. It was out now, so that meant it would start to come in sometime. Maybe soon.

They had reached the beach and she stared to run. Ben laughed delightedly and raced after her. She paused to stuff their things into the knapsack, put their sandals on, and kept going. At the end of the beach she stopped. Where were they going? Roger's face kept blotting out any reasonable thoughts. She sat down suddenly on the sand and pulled Benjamin onto her lap. She had to get herself together and think. Her heart was pounding.

The Millers' cottage was closer than hers, but Pix and Samantha had gone up the coast to visit Mark and Danny atcamp. Faith doubted the Fix would lock up, but sue couldn't take the chance. She looked across the beach and saw the gulls hovering over the tidal pools. A sudden image of the birds walking impersonally over Roger's body, pecking at him with their sharp beaks, made her shudder uncontrollably, and she held Benjamin tight.

There was a fisherman's house on the other side of the Point, and she'd have to try there. If they didn't have a phone, at least someone might be able to move the body.

The body. This was Roger. Roger, who less than a week ago had been at her house, smiling and joking, enjoying the wine and the food. Soft-spoken, easygoing Roger, who created beautiful things. How could this have happened?

She found the path that led across the Point to Long Cove and, half carrying, half dragging a suddenly weary Benjamin, felt the tears start down her face. What a terrible, terrible tragedy. Eric would be distraught—all of Roger's friends would be.

The fisherman's house emerged in front of her. She had been looking down, picking her way through some blackberry brambles, when she realized she was walking on lawn. Thank God! There was an elderly woman hanging up clothes in the back.

“Please, I need your help. A man has drowned and his body is back on the Point," Faith blurted out.

The woman looked at her in amazement, and Faith realized the whole situation was like your worst nightmare. Does she believe me? Does she think I'm a lunatic? Benjamin started to howl.

“Well now." The woman stuck the clothespin she had been holding poised over a sheet back in her apron pocket and took Ben by the hand. She put an arm around Faith's shoulders. "You'd better come inside, deah, and sit down while I try to get someone on the CB. Freeman, that's my husband, will be home for his dinner soon anyway. Could you tell who the man was?"

“It was Roger Barnett—do you know him?" Faith was having trouble with tenses.

“One of those pottery boys, wasn't he? And so young.”

She sighed. "This is the second one this summer. A woman thought her little girl was in trouble, went in to fetch her, and drowned herself.”

They walked in the back door into the kitchen. It was crammed with foul-weather gear, a lobster trap that was being repaired, firewood, and furniture, and all as neat as a pin. The aromas from a large coffeepot and some thick slices of ham in an iron skillet keeping warm on top of the wood stove mingled not unpleasantly with a faint smell of bait. Faith realized she'd better sit down before she fell down.

“You come over here in this rocker by the stove. I started it up today; it was so cool this morning. And here's a cookie for your little boy.”

Whoever this woman was, she was managing to do everything at once. Faith didn't see her pour the cup of coffee that was placed firmly in Faith's limp hand, and it was only when the CB began crackling back that she realized a message had already been transmitted. A man's voice gave some call numbers and asked what the problem was. It was the island's only police officer.

“Earl, it's Nan Hamilton. Roger Barnett has drowned and one of the summer people found the body over on the other side of the Point.”

Nan paused to listen and turned toward Faith in case she had missed it. "Earl wants to know if you can tell him where it is and I never did get your name.”

Well, it hadn't exactly been a time for Miss Manners, Faith thought, and quickly made amends. "The body is at the end of the big beach in a tidal pool, and I'm Faith Fairchild—we're friends of the Millers.”

Nan nodded and conveyed the information to Earl. "It's Faith Fairchild, you know, that minister from Massachusetts, friends of the Millers. She says the body is at the end of the big beach, up on the ledges it sounds like. Shouldn't be hard to find, and when Freeman comes we'll go over.”

There was more crackling and she signed off.

“Well, that's all over the island now," she said. "Half the population will be there waiting for him."

“Do you think the police will want me to stay here to showthem where he is or could I go home?" Faith asked, hoping she could go.

“If Earl needs you, he'll be able to find you, I'm sure, but I think you ought to sit a bit longer before you go racing off. You've had quite an experience, I'd say," Nan answered. "And let me cut you a piece of pie to go with that coffee."

“You've been so kind," Faith replied. Nan was right. She didn't feel like sprinting off just yet, and it was a long walk back.

Benjamin had finished his cooking and was busy exploring the kitchen. Faith started to get up to stop him from opening the cupboards, but Nan laughed and said she had seven grandchildren and the cupboards were turned out regularly.

“That's some of them," she said, proudly pointing to a row of school pictures tacked to the wall. "We've got better ones in the parlor.”

Faith knew there must be a mantel crammed with photos—the wedding poses and then the kids. Her own parents' mantel had a pair of cloisonné candlesticks and a few pieces of antique Chinese porcelain. For a fleeting moment she wanted to stand on someone's mantel hemmed in by Sears portraits. I must still be in shock, she told herself. Ming was Ming, after all.

The door opened and a large man who must be Freeman came in. He had white hair cut close to his head and a fisherman's tan—face, neck, hands, and forearms. You could see where it ended when he took off the top layer of several shirts. He had left his boots outside and padded around in a couple of pairs of heavy socks. If he was surprised to see Faith and Ben there, he didn't show it.

“Hello, Nan, what's for supper?" He grinned at Faith. "And who's this pretty young thing sitting in my rocker?"

“Now Freeman, behave yourself. This is Mrs. Fairchild. They're renting the Thorpes' cottage. She just found poor Roger Barnett drowned over on the big beach."

“Drowned! Why in tarnation people think they can swim here beats me. I've lived here all my life and then some and I've never been in this water on purpose. Too darned cold."

“I couldn't agree more," said Faith. "But do you mean you can't swim?”

Nan answered. "More fool he is, deah. Many of the fishermen here can't swim, and if they'd taken the trouble to learn, a lot would be here who aren't.”

Freeman was all for changing the subject. "Roger Barnett. Well, I do call that a shame. He was a nice enough feller." He chuckled and turned to Nan. "Won't those Prescotts be steamed? Of course there's still the other one, and knowing Matilda, she would have left the house to him anyway."

“Freeman, hush up now, Mrs. Fairchild doesn't want to hear about all this dirty linen.”

Mrs. Fairchild did, but evidently Freeman thought Nan was right and he veered off on another tack.

“Did I hear you were from Massachusetts? I went up there once. To Boston. They wanted eight dollars for a lobster dinner, so I come home." He laughed and Nan joined him. "Course lobster isn't as common as it used to be. When I was a boy, we'd get tired of it and beg my mother to make something else for a change.”

Benjamin was banging on pots, and Faith decided it was time to go. But first she asked Nan for a piece of paper and a pencil to write a note to leave at Pix's when they went past the house. Freeman had finished two enormous pieces of ham, several biscuits, a couple of helpings of mashed potatoes, beets, and applesauce, all washed down with coffee that his wife kept steadily pouring into his cup. Then he allowed as he'd go over to see if he could help. He'd have his pie later. Nan said she'd go with him, so the four of them set off across the Point.

As they left the porch, Freeman placed Benjamin on his shoulders. Benjamin laughed and all of them smiled up at the little boy, brown from the sun, his blond curls bobbing in the breeze. It should have been a nice day.

They parted where the path forked toward the beach one way and back to the Millers' the other, Faith offered her hand to Nan and thanked her warmly. She hoped they'd meet again under more pleasant circumstances."Come over anytime. I love to have company. And I hear you like to cook. So do I. We'll go mushrooming someday. The Point is full of them."

“You go with Nan," Freeman advised, "and you won't need a silver coin to boil with them. She knows which ones can be et."

“Freeman! You know that coin business is just an old wives' tale. Now, we'd better get going.”

Benjamin gave her a kiss and Freeman said he wouldn't mind one too and one from Mrs. Fairchild for that matter. Nan pushed him toward the path. "Don't mind him. He just never growed up."

“That's all right," Faith said. "I'm flattered." And she was.

She walked as quickly as possible to Pix's house. She had decided that she ought to drive into the village and see Jill. Faith didn't know any of these people well, but for the short time she had been on Sanpere, she felt she had been caught up in their lives with a swiftness that surprised her. She knew Jill would be trying to get in touch with Eric, and she wasn't sure what she could say about finding the body, but maybe they'd want to ask her something. It also seemed impossible to pick up a magazine and sit on the lawn after all this. She wanted to be with people.

Pix wasn't back—which Faith had expected. It was over an hour's drive to the camp, and they'd stay awhile. The door was open and Faith went in to find some tape. If she left the note on the table, it was probable no one would find it until evening. Pix and Samantha would rush in, pee if they had to, and then rush out to attack the weeds, chop firewood, or cut alders—whatever beckoned most furiously.

She couldn't find tape, but there were Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet, and with one of these Faith attached the sad missive to the door. Benjamin was happily pulling Pix's yarn out of a basket next to the fireplace, and Faith managed to get to him just before he unraveled a few weeks' worth of an Irish fisherman's sweater for Danny.

Back at her own cottage she was struck by the unreality of it all. They had just gone for a picnic. Had they really found a body in the kelp? She knew it was unfortunately true, but it was like one of those "What's Wrong with This Picture?" puzzles. An incredible day—bright-blue skies, white puffy clouds, sailboats moving gracefully in the wind, the long stretch of gleaming sand, and the tidal pools filled with jewellike mysteries and Roger's dead body.

She grabbed Benjamin and headed for the car.

Tom had taken their own car to New Hampshire, since a car came with the house. It was an old wooden station wagon—a 1949 Plymouth Suburban in "mint condition," Tom had gloated as he stroked the side panels. While Faith had not arrived at the point where she felt the need to caress the car, she loved driving it. To her the romance of the Woody was a solid, dependable one, based on mutual trust and shared interests. The gears shifted smoothly and she sat up high, as if she were in a truck, with a clear view of the road. Today she didn't pause to appreciate the car, backed out quickly, and set off down the long dirt road to the macadam that circled the island and led to Sanpere Village—the long way if you turned left, the short way if right. Faith turned right.

She pulled up in front of Jill's shop. Benjamin had fallen asleep in his car seat, waking drowsily when the car stopped. The shop was closed, but Faith knew Jill lived in the apartment over it and decided to go around back and knock. Jill came almost immediately. Her eyes were swollen and she was still crying. She was tucking a shirt into her jeans and was obviously getting ready to go someplace.

“Oh, Faith, I'm so glad you came. I've been calling you since I heard. I just can't believe it. Roger was such a strong swimmer." She began to sob, and Faith stepped into the back of the store and put her arms around her—quite a feat, since she was carrying Benjamin.

“I don't know anything about these waters, Jill. It may have been some kind of undertow." She had no idea what an undertow was, but people usually said that in these situations, Faith recalled, and it was reassuring to blame Nature.

Jill wasn't really listening to Faith, which was understandable. She had stepped back and kept talking.

“I've got to go to Eric. There's no phone where he is, andanyway i don't want him to hear me news twin a stranger.

She turned to face Faith suddenly, fully taking in her presence for the first time. "Faith, tell me honestly, was the body in bad shape?"

“I can tell you the truth, and it may help Eric too. There were no marks or cuts of any kind. Benjamin saw him first and he thought a man was swimming, and it would have been easy to think that." Except for the expression on his face and the fact that he seemed to have no bones, Faith thought.

“That's a relief. And Eric will be happy to hear at least that. I don't know what he'll do. They've known each other so long and are closer to each other than to anyone else on earth. You couldn't be friends with one and not the other, not that that was likely in any case." She was moving around the back of the store, closing the windows and putting things into a large purse.

“What about Roger's family? Will the police notify them?" Faith asked, suddenly curious as usual.

“Roger has been estranged from his family for years. It was a source of great bitterness to him. He came from Iowa, and they never understood his way of life or approved it. I don't know what Eric will say, but I'm pretty sure Roger will stay right here, in the place he loved most." That started the tears again. "Faith, he was so wonderful to me—you can't imagine how many times I've cried on his shoulder, especially when I was starting the store and didn't know what I was doing. It's the weirdest thing. I keep thinking, `I've got to go see Roger, he'll comfort me'; then I remember.”

It suddenly occurred to Faith that taciturn Jill was talking and, what's more, as if they were old friends. She sat down in a chair by the cluttered desk. Benjamin was all but asleep and rapidly becoming a dead weight in her arms.

“Please tell Eric if there's anything I can do, let me know. Or if he wants to talk to me about finding the body, although there isn't much to tell. We walked up on the rocks at the end of the long beach at the Point, and Roger was lying in one of the pools.”

Which was a pretty calm way to describe finding a body, she thought. She wanted to take some of the horror out of it for Jill. There was enough in the event itself without the details. The details that were running through Faith's mind like a video—the water in and out of Roger's mouth, his fingers clutching the rockweed.

No, it certainly wasn't necessary to recount that.

Jill was ready. Faith noticed she paused long enough to put on some lipstick and run a comb through her hair.

“Are you all right to drive? Ben and I could come with you if you want?" Faith offered, suddenly concerned at the possibility of another accident.

“Thank you, Faith, but the worst is over now and I have to be strong for Eric. He's going to need all my help.”

And, Faith realized, that might not be such a bad thing for Jill.

They left the store, and Faith waved good-bye to Jill before lowering Ben into his car seat. It looked as though he would be having his nap in several locations today. She stopped at the post office, dashed in, and found a letter from Hope and a circular from True Value Hardware in her box. She dropped the junk mail in the trash and sat in the car to read what Hope had to say.

Her sister was writing to confirm that she and Quentin were definitely coming at the end of the month, and after that she chattered on about what they had been doing. Faith felt a swift pang of longing as she read about their weekend at the house of friends in Oyster Bay, the great meal they had had at Le Bernardin, and the terrific Armani suit Hope had found at Barney's. Faith looked through the windshield at the harbor in front of her with the quaint wooden houses sloping up from either side. There was such a thing as too much charm.

But this was good news. A welcome distraction after the tragedy of Roger's death. She was glad they were coming. Now that she no longer had to live with her, she was always happy to see her sister, and Quentin was growing on her. He was so intense and well organized under a carefully composed surface calm that he made her feel incurably frivolous—suspecting, no doubt, she hadn't firmed up her plans for the next twenty years or so. He was the only person Faithknew whose Plan To Do Today list was the same as his Did Today one. She was sure they weren't getting married yet because Quentin hadn't planned to until he was thirty and had made X amount of money. And Hope loved it. Faith folded the letter, put it in her pocket, and resolved firmly that this visit she would finally tell her sister she hated being called Fay.

Pix didn't get back until after five o'clock, and she rushed straight over to Faith's. Faith and Benjamin were eating spaghetti alla carbonara in the kitchen. Pix had paled under the color the summer sun had given her and slumped into a chair. Faith made her a drink, and after a few sips she started to cry.

“I can't understand it, Faith! How could he have drowned? He was in great shape, and I think I heard he swam in college. It was wonderful having them this summer. We had all become so close. Samantha doesn't even want to talk about it. She's up in her room and I can't reach Sam.”

Faith had called Tom earlier and had been lucky enough to catch him between events. He offered to come up the next weekend, but she said she was fine. She just wanted to hear his voice.

Pix finished her drink and ate some spaghetti. Faith had discovered earlier that she was starving, and Pix seemed to be too.

“I'm sure he'll be buried here. He wasn't close to his family."

“That's what Jill said."

“I don't know what Eric will do without him. Roger was like the rudder. He kept the business, and actually their lives, on course. He was the one who pushed to move up here. Jill told me once that Eric had been close to a breakdown and had to get away.”

Bright lights, big city, Faith thought, and remembered her conversation with Eric. It sounded like he not only wanted to be away from the city, but needed to be. An artist friend of hers had once shown her his engagement book. It was crammed with openings, cocktail parties, private showings.

She had wondered how he ever found the time, or energy, to paint.

“Eric had been afraid that they would lose their customers and contacts up here, but Roger convinced him that they had built up a solid-enough reputation to make a move. And if anything they have become more well known in the last years. Living on an island gave a certain aura of inaccessibility to their work, having to be tracked down and persuaded, although of course it is all much more businesslike than that."

“Maybe Eric will marry Jill now," Faith mused out loud.

“I wouldn't be surprised. It's going to be terribly lonely for him without Roger. And the island is no place to be alone." Tears were running down Pix's face, and Faith knew she was mentally getting her guest room ready for a long visit from Eric.

“I've got to get back to Samantha and try Sam some more," Pix continued as she got up and brought her plate to the sink.

“Leave that, Pix, and call me if I can do anything," Faith said, thinking that she had already done enough. In some perverse form of logic she reasoned if she hadn't found the body, Roger would still be alive. Or it would be yesterday and she could tell him not to go for a swim.

“Thanks, Faith. I keep forgetting what an awful time you've had. Do you want to spend the night?"

“No, but if I change my mind I'll come knocking at your door. It's funny, but I'm beginning to think of this as my house and my own little bed. It feels very comforting.”

Ben had been miraculously quiet, playing with a wooden train Faith had bought at H.O.M.E. in Orland. She resolved to go back to the store and get cars, trucks, whatever they had. He looked up with one of those surprisingly adult expressions children sometimes assume. This one was slightly careworn, a little weltschmerz, a "why do these things have to happen?" look.

Faith felt the same way and, despite her assurances to Pix, had trouble blotting out the images of Roger's body, which kept floating across her eyes every time she closed them to go to sleep. It wasn't just a reminder of the fragility and transitoriness of life; it was a dreadful reminder.

The next day brought the real horror.

Freeman Hamilton was setting traps off the Point when he spotted a dinghy washed up on the shore. It was Roger's, and when Sgt. Dickinson and Freeman went over it, they found a number of recently drilled holes. Since it was unlikely that Roger would drill holes in his boat and then put to sea, there was only one conclusion.

Murder.

Faith heard the news in the market after church and once more found herself with the grim task of bearing bad tidings to Pix. As she steered the old Woody over the hills and dips on Route 17, she kept repeating the same question over and over to herself: "Who on earth would want to kill Roger Barnett?”

And this was Pix's second response. Her first was that there had to have been some mistake.

But there was no mistake. The boat was definitely Roger's. He had painted it bright turquoise with a broad white stripe around at the waterline. Apparently the holes under the seats had been filled with corks and painted over. It wasn't a spur-of-the-moment job.

“And it was in our boathouse! Whoever did it had to have done it there!" Pix cried.

Roger didn't use the boat much. Mostly for picnics on one of the small islands nearby. He had been planning to replace it with something larger and more seaworthy. In fact, they had joked about it the night of the dinner party at Faith's. "I have to bail so much, I never get to see where I'm going," he had said. He would probably not have noticed anything unusual about water in the bottom of the boat until he got a ways out and it was too late.

“But why Roger? He didn't have an enemy in the world. I just can't understand it, Faith.”

Faith was picturing the phalanx of Prescotts surrounding Roger and Eric at the auction and thought they might aptly be described as enemies. Still, you didn't go around killing someone just because he inherited the house you wanted. Or did you? On reflection, it was a pretty good motive. Pix evidently thought so too.

“The only thing I can think of is that one of the Prescotts trashed the boat to give him a scare or whatever and had no idea it would turn out this way.”

Which seemed to be the prevailing opinion on the island, fueled by Eric's angry accusations. He had arrived back late in the morning and headed straight for the police station, or rather the police room in the combined town hall, office of the law, and post office in Granville. He wanted Sgt. Dickinson to bring in Sonny Prescott and any other Prescotts around for questioning. The sergeant had already decided to do this, but he didn't want Eric or anybody else telling him what to do. Instead, according to Eric's incensed account to Pix and Faith later, he ordered him to sit down and grilled him on his whereabouts and relationship with Roger.

Eric looked terrible. He had obviously not slept and his eyes were red. He had started to cry when he saw Pix.

“What am I going to do without him? I'm nothing without Roger. Why didn't they kill me?”

Pix made a pot of strong tea and Eric began to calm down.

“I called his mother, and do you know what she said? `The world is full of sin. He is in a better place now.' Can you imagine that? That's what you say when you hear your son is dead!"

“Maybe it was the shock, Eric. Roger always said she had become very religious after his father died."

“Well, she doesn't want to have anything to do with his burial, and that doesn't seem very Christian. She said to do what I wanted. That it was no concern of hers. Roger had made his choices. All that old stuff. No wonder she made him crazy." He laughed bitterly. "The last thing she said was `Did he leave a will?' I just hung up. I couldn't believe it.”

Well, did he? Faith wondered.

“I asked young Dick Tracy down at the police station when we could have the service, and he said as soon as they finished the autopsy, probably Tuesday. Roger wouldn't haveliked a big production, so I thought I would just ask John to say a few words at the cemetery." Eric's voice was cracking. Pix put her arms around him.

“Do you think you could sleep a little? Maybe that tea was a mistake."

“No, it was good, and I couldn't sleep anyway. But I guess I'll lie down. Jill said shed come by later, so would you tell her where I am?"

“Of course," Pix assured him.

Eric left and they watched him walk slowly down the path to the little house he and Roger had shared all summer. Faith imagined how shattering it must be to walk into a room and see all the everyday possessions left so casually and so recently by someone you loved. She thought of Tom's old bathrobe hanging on the hook in the closet, the coffee mug that said, "I love you, Dad," that Benjamin had given him for Father's Day, the books he was reading. That would be the worst part. The things. They'd never be used again. The owner wasn't coming back.

Pix was saying something.

“He did make a will, though. He asked Sam to make one for him when we were here in May opening the cottage. I'm sure Eric knows about it."

“He wouldn't have had much to leave then, would he? I mean that was before he inherited the house."

“Well, he couldn't have left that in any case, because of the provisions in Matilda's will. But I imagine he did have quite a bit saved. The business was very profitable, and I've heard both of them talk about their broker, so he must have had investments. He might have left something to his mother, and I think there are some brothers and sisters, but I'm sure the bulk of it has gone to Eric.”

The tragedy was compounded by the news on Monday that the autopsy showed a significant amount of marijuana in Roger's body at the time of death. This time Pix brought the news. Faith and Ben were in the kitchen. Faith was experimenting with zucchini chutney recipes to help stem the squash invasion in the Millers' garden, and Ben was banging on pots as usual. Faith looked at him sternly. "Get it out of your system now, Buddy Rich, because you're not getting drums." She was startled by the knock on the door and Pix's serious face.

“Oh, Pix, tell me quickly. It's more bad news, isn't it?"

“Sad news. The autopsy showed that Roger had been using drugs just before he died. Oh Faith, that was why he couldn't swim. He was too stoned!”

Somehow Faith wasn't surprised. The few times she had seen Roger, he had seemed to be slightly more relaxed than the rest of the group. But it was sad. Terribly sad. He had probably taken a few hits in the boat, and it was enough to disorient him when it sank.

“I never knew he used drugs, or Eric either."

“Now, Pix, you don't know that either of them were habitual drug takers. I wouldn't leap to any conclusions.”

But there was a conclusion. If Roger hadn't taken anything, he'd probably be alive.

The coroner thought so too. Roger had never been too far offshore and was a strong swimmer. The water was cold, but not killing cold as in the wintertime.

It was Jill who reassured Pix that she had not unwittingly been landlady to an opium den all summer. Eric didn't use any drugs at all, and Roger only occasionally rolled a joint with some home-grown, pretty mild marijuana a friend on the mainland grew mixed in with his herbs and vegetables.

The state police had virtually concluded that the whole thing was a tragic accident. The holes were drilled by persons unknown and the investigation would continue, but it was clear that whoever had done it had not known it would lead to Roger's death. Roger's reputation as a swimmer was well known, and the boat would have filled with water before he was away from the shoreline of the Point. Death by misadventure, possibly second-degree murder. Sgt. Dickinson was not having much luck questioning the Prescotts. To a man, and woman, they denied any tampering and were indignant that the question was raised. Everyone on the island had a drill, and it was easy to approach the Millers' boathouse undetected from the shore, so it looked like one of those islandmysteries where eventually everyone would know who had done it, but no one would tell.

Roger's body was released and Eric made the arrangements to have him buried in the Northview cemetery. He bought a plot and told Pix there would be plenty of room for him and anyone else who cared to be there. Pix thanked him, but explained that she and Sam had purchased a plot in the King Row cemetery years ago. The Fraziers were on one side and some cousins of Pix's on the other, so she figured she'd have plenty of company and conversation should that turn out to be what awaited.

Tuesday arrived. A foggy Tuesday and humid. The kind of day that made some people's hair curl and some people's go limp. Faith's was curling damply as she searched through her summer wardrobe for something vaguely appropriate to wear. She hadn't planned on this kind of occasion when she packed, but she did have a black dress—an indispensable Anne Klein that she'd rolled up and tucked in at the last moment in case something came up off island at Bar Harbor. It would do very well for the funeral. She slipped into it, and it immediately stuck to her like a second skin. Maybe there would be a breeze at the cemetery.

Samantha was happy to watch Benjamin. She didn't want to go to the funeral and Pix didn't see why she should. Samantha prefered to remember Roger the way he had been when she had seen him last. He had been teaching her how to use the kickwheel, and she had been making steady progress under his guidance. They'd had a long session on Friday before he left for his row. It occured to Faith that Samantha might well have been the last person to see Roger alive.

She was pretty sure Samantha had had a crush on Roger, and it was making life very difficult for her now. When she'd mentioned it to Pix, her reply had been, "Why, Faith, he was old enough to be her father! I'm sure not. Besides, she would have told me. She hasn't gotten to the stage yet where she keeps things back.”

Faith was under the impression that that stage went all through childhood for most children, but she didn't disabuse Pix of her conviction and instead kept Benjamin away from Samantha and let her have her grief to herself. When Samantha came to get him on Tuesday, she looked more like her old self and picked Ben up, tossing him high. "I've missed you! Have you guys been busy?" Ben went into paroxysms of joy at the sight of her, and Faith murmured something in explanation, then went into the house to get her purse and the car keys.

“I'm sure this won't be long, Samantha," she said. "That's all right, Mrs. Fairchild, we'll have fun, don't hurry. “

Which is more than I'll have, Faith thought as she drove to the cemetery. Pix had gone with Eric earlier.

After today the summer can return to normal and we can pick up where we left off, she told herself. There was still so much of the island to explore and so many precious hours of idleness to leave unfilled.

When she got to the cemetery, she had to park quite far down the road. It looked as if the entire island had turned out for the service, and she might have known that Roger would have made so many friends in his own quiet way. She walked over to where Pix was standing with Eric and Jill next to John Eggleston, who had donned a robe for the service and was perspiring profusely.

Looking around at the crowd, she recognized a few faces. The Fraziers, Bill Fox, Freeman and Nan Hamilton, who gave her a slight smile. The rest seemed to be a combination of all the different groups on the island and a few off-islanders standing in an uneasy group together. Faith had heard some New York friends were coming, and there could be no doubt that these were they standing uneasily in well-cut dark suits and sober black-linen sheaths. One woman wore a large black cartwheel hat that would be long remembered.

It was a beautiful cemetery, and Faith suddenly realized it mattered to her where she ended up. She didn't believe she would notice her surroundings after death, but she liked the idea of selecting the spot. It was a little like choosing a house or apartment, and you would certainly be there a lot longer. She wouldn't mind a final resting place like this one. Thecemetery was surrounded by tall pines and clumps of white birches. The neatly mown plots were bordered by the ferns and mosses of the woods that circled them. Wildflowers were everywhere, along the paths and even mixing with the plastic flowers and VFW flags placed in memory by the headstones. Some of the stones were old, the white marble covered with green lichen. There were a few large memorials, including one with a schooner in full sail carved at the base of the obelisk. Most of the headstones were granite, highly polished pink, gray, and black, glistening in the sun.

John Eggleston stepped forward and looked around. He seemed satisfied that everyone was there and started to intone the service. The fullness and beauty of his voice startled Faith. She had placed him in the pulpit-thumping category. He started quietly. The air was still, the crowd of mourners silent.

“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

There was a long pause, and Faith, who had been looking down at the soft green grass feeling unutterably sad, wondered why he had stopped.

It was Bird. She was at the entrance to the cemetery walking quickly. When she got near the group, she slowed down and appeared to be searching for someone. Bill Fox stepped toward her and she went to him. She was wearing a long purple gown apparently fashioned from one of those Indian print bedspreads. There was no rosy hue to her cheeks despite the heat and long walk she had had from her house. Her hair was loose and shone in the sunlight. She looked noble and tragic and beautiful. Tennyson, Shakespeare, a Beatles lyric—there were any number of lines that would have described her perfectly. The baby was hanging from a sling at her hip, as silent as its mother. Faith realized she had never heard either of them make a sound.

John Eggleston gave a nod of welcome, acknowledgment or something, and continued.

It was a long service, and Faith began to tune out. She heard the familiar lines from Ecclesiastes without really listening: "A time to be born and a time to die," until John reached the lines about wickedness. "That iniquity was there." The voice was no longer lyrical, but harsh—and he was right. There had been wickedness and iniquity, evil had been done to this man. It was not his time to die.

At the end of the chapter, Eric stepped forward, pulled a card out of his pocket, and started to read: "Roger Barnett was the closest friend I ever had or will have. Many of you know how we have worked together over the years, but may not have known how much was due to Roger. He brought us to this beautiful island, which I cannot think of as the cause of his death but rather the place he would have wanted to be for eternity.

“As potters we knew that the clay was alive and our task to fashion it into the objects our imaginations saw. In the same way, I was Roger's clay and he shaped me with as sure and steady a hand as he did a bowl or vase. In Japan when the potter is very pleased with a piece he has taken from the fire, he bows to the kiln in thanks. I would like to do the same.”

He walked slowly to the open grave and bowed. "Thank you, Roger.

When he got back to Jill, the tears were running down his cheeks. He was not the only one.

John Eggleston finished the service with a reading from The Prophet, which seemed quite appropriate for the forever-youthful feeling generated by the day. Faith's own copy of the book had been a junior high graduation present from Hope and was reverentially inscribed, "To my sister, Faith. I hope you gain understanding and knowledge from this book. Love forever, Hope.”

Gibran's words and Eggleston's voice were a good match.

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and · to melt into the sun?

And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Faith often got a lump in her throat when she heard Gibran quoted—the memory of Hope's words and of the time when these phrases had seemed to supply all the answers. The answers weren't quite so simple anymore, but today's lines had been well chosen. She swallowed hard and blinked away the tears that had started.

Then it was the Lord's Prayer, ashes to ashes, and the final benediction. The service seemed to pick up speed, impelled by its own "restless tide," just as Roger had been engulfed by them. A few gulls screamed raucously; then it was quiet again. And still.

John picked up a handful of dirt from the mound next to the grave and threw it in, Eric followed him with Jill, and the three walked slowly toward the road. Faith and Pix fell in behind Bill Fox and Bird patiently waiting to make this final gesture. Bill dropped his handful on the simple wooden casket and stood aside for Bird.

She was taking the baby out of the sling. Her eyes darted about and settled on Pix. Placing the baby firmly in Pix's surprised grasp, she crouched down next to the grave and jumped in without a word. Her long hair streamed out behind her and disappeared as she hit the coffin with a resounding thump.

The crowd gave a collective gasp and people started running. Aware that something out of the ordinary was occurring, John, Eric, and Jill stopped and turned back.

Faith was stunned. She had seen the way Roger had looked at Bird, but that it had been reciprocated, and to such an extent, was a total surprise.

Clearly, no one knew what to do.

The baby was quite content to be in Pix's arms and gave her a smile that revealed several pearly teeth, happily oblivious of the fact that its mother was trying to get herself buried alive two feet away.

Eric arrived at the edge of the grave and looked down.

Bird was lying stretched out on top of the coffin with her eyes closed and her arms crossed at her breast, waiting for the earth to cover her. If it had been a funeral pyre, her task would have been more easily accomplished.

“Bird," Eric implored, "this won't bring Roger back. Please stand up and we'll help you out.”

She didn't move.

He continued. Was there an edge of irritation to his voice? Faith thought there was and with good reason. It wasn't exactly the tribute to Roger that Eric had envisioned.

“Bird, Roger would definitely not have wanted this. Now please get up and come back to the house with me.”

Bill Fox moved next to Eric. "I'll stay with her and get her out. Don't worry. It's hit her very hard, and this is her way of showing it. I should have held on to her, but it didn't occur to me that she would really do it."

“You mean you knew?" Eric clearly didn't like it.

“I knew how upset she was, and given that, this was the natural gesture."

“That's an odd choice of words, Bill, but you know her better than I do." Eric shrugged. "This is the worst day of my life, or rather Saturday was and it's just going on and on. Compared to what's already happened, this just doesn't matter at all. If you think it will help to bring her back to the house and talk with people who knew Roger, please do so."

“I don't think she'll want to do that, but thank you."

“No, thank you, for taking care of this.”

Eric gave one last helpless look at the motionless figure in the grave, trembled slightly, and left.

Everyone else was leaving too, many after a curious peep at Bird first. The Fraziers offered to stay with Bill, but he said it would probably be better if no one was around. Jim Sanford, the gravedigger, mumbled something about his dinner and coming back later before throwing his shovel in the back of his old pickup and bumping down the road.

Finally only Bill, Pix, Faith, and the baby were left. At Faith's suggestion she, Pix, and the baby had moved away to sit under the trees. The baby proved to be older than they had thought and a girl—a sturdy one-year-old on the point of walking, despite her unhealthy pallor. She was happy and sat playing with some pine cones, cooing and burbling softly. She was also soaked, but they couldn't do anything about it. Bird apparently didn't carry a diaper bag, but relied insteadon the absorbency of several layers of cloth. They were on the point of telling Bill that they would take the baby home for the day when they saw him kneel down and pull Bird out of her untimely grave. She didn't bother to brush the dirt out of her hair or off her dress, but walked over and took the baby as calmly as she had relinquished her. Then she reached for the hand Bill offered, and they started off down the road. Halfway to the cemetery's entrance, she sat down abruptly on one of the stones in the Sanford plot and exploded.

“It's not true! It's not Roger!" she screamed over and over, through violent tears. She clutched her child to her breast. Bill held her tightly.

Feeling like voyeurs, Pix and Faith crept away, leaving Bird to the realization of the enormity of her grief, and the patient consoler ready beside her.

Always beside her.

5

Faith swept her hand over the thick carpet of shiny green leaves emerging from the stiff gray lichen and quickly began to pick the tiny ripe wild cranberries that appeared.

That morning Pix had arrived at her door bright and early with Samantha and berry-picking containers in tow. "After yesterday I decided we desperately needed a return to normalcy, and picking berries is about the most soothing thing I can think of," she had announced.

Faith had to agree. Short of a day at Elizabeth Arden.

Unlike Tuesday, Wednesday was sunny with a cool breeze. The sky was brilliant blue with the kind of Rorschach clouds that assume shapes—an elephant, a dog running, the sixth-grade teacher you hated.

They were picking far out along the Point, on rocky outcroppings at the edge of a meadow that, judging from the old cellar hole and ancient fruit trees, must have been part of someone's farm in the past. In the large open field there were still some blueberries the birds had missed, and Samantha was concentrating on them, picking a handful, then feeding them to Ben, who was beginning to resemble one of the Picts from the juice.

The berries weren't making that saçisfying ping as they hit the pail, and Faith saw she had already picked several pints. She began to think about recipes. Of course cranberries and game, but a scallop-and-cranberry dish began to take shape. She also wanted to continue her quest for new and differentchutneys to please what seemed an insatiable market. It would not have surprised her to see Charred Seaweed Chutney or Cherry Pit Butter the next time she was at Dean and Deluca. Wild cranberries and caramelized onions? That was a possibility. And what about shrub? It suggested long-ago childhood lunches with her grandmother at Altman's Charleston Gardens or The Bird Cage at Lord & Taylor, a tiny frosted glass of pulverized fruit. Refreshing in summer. Shrub instead of sorbet as a palate cleanser?

Her hands picked automatically as her mind stirred the pots. When Pix started talking, it took a moment to turn down the flame.

“I had to tell her. She would have heard from Arlene, and I was afraid she'd be terribly upset."

“Sorry, Pix, I haven't been listening. You mean you told Samantha about Bird?"

“Yes, and I needn't have worried. She made a face and said, `That's the grossest thing I've ever heard! What did she look like, Mom? Ugh, think of all that dirt in your mouth and hair!' “

Faith laughed. It was good to find something in all this to laugh about.

“But Faith, you know what was interesting? She wasn't a bit surprised to hear about Bird and Roger. It seems he has been talking to Samantha about her all summer, how beautiful Bird is and what a rotten time she has with Andy. He takes off whenever he wants and she never knows when he's coming back."

“Then why didn't you ever see Roger and Bird together?"

“Samantha says that Bird feels she has to be loyal to Andy. I guess she really loves him, and after all he is the baby's father. Also I gather he can be violent, and she was afraid to have him find out. Lately she has been trying to decide whether to leave him for Roger, and judging from her behavior yesterday I guess she did. Thinking back, I do recall seeing them in the boat together, and Samantha said Bird was supposed to go with him on Friday. They were going to have a picnic somewhere, but the baby was sick."

“Somewhere in the boat or on the island?"

“I don't know. Samantha didn't say."

“If she had been in the boat, she might have been able to save him. No wonder she's so upset. She must be blaming herself.”

Faith thought for a moment about Bird and the men in her life before speaking. "Aren't you glad you're married, Pix? I can't imagine going through all that emotional turmoil. Not that marriage is totally without turmoil, but at least it's the turmoil you know."

“Exactly." They continued to talk about the funeral. It was destined to go down in the annuals of island history as the most talked-about funeral of all time, just edging out Virgil Baldwin's, where the bereaved widow wore a bright-red dress to show how happy she was that the old tyrant was finally gone.

Those who had attended yesterday's obsequies had gained a sudden popularity and found themselves besieged by sidelong invitations to come around for a cup of coffee or some tomatoes from the garden or whatever from those who were kicking themselves for missing it all.

Pix and Faith picked steadily, well satisfied with themselves and their labors, until it was time to stop and eat lunch. They went down to the rocks by the water, where Samantha was trying to show Ben the harbor seals sunning themselves on the rocks offshore. Every time she placed the binoculars against his eyes he tried to grab them, and eventually she gave up.

Faith had piled anything she could find in the fridge on her sandwich—fresh tomatoes, red onion, sprouts, lettuce, and Boursin—and was having a hard time controlling the drips, which were running down her fingers stained bright pink from the berries. Samantha was trying to keep from laughing. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Fairchild, it's just that I never see you like this. A mess!"

“Mess, mess!" Ben chortled.

“Sharper than a serpent's tooth,"'Faith said to Pix. "Just wait," Pix replied.

“Hey, watch what you're saying, Mom. You should countyourself lucky. It's not like we're delinquents or druggies or anything."

“Indeed. I am thrice blessed." Pix smiled.

“You know, it's really sad about a lot of the kids on the island. Arlene has been telling me. There is nothing to do here. Absolutely nothing. Especially in the winter. Can you imagine, the nearest mall is up in Bangor? So there are quite a few druggies. A kid Arlene really liked this year got really messed up and totaled his car, and her parents won't let her see him anymore, but she thinks she can help him.”

The Joan of Arc syndrome, recalled Faith, as several pathetic, needy, albeit handsome faces in her own past marched past.

“But where could kids on this island get drugs?" Pix asked.

“Oh, Mom, kids can get drugs anywhere if they want them enough, and anyway mostly they drink. But it's the same thing.”

They sat contemplating the cove. The breeze had stirred up the water, and several sailboats were skimming across the top, white sails and whitecaps. The schooner The Victory Chimes sedately made her way across the horizon.

There are so many layers to life here, Faith thought. Or rather it's like life anywhere, but we are so seldom visitors to the places we live. On the island she had a sense of being only at the surface of things as a summer person, and a transient one at that. Finding Roger's body and the funeral had been dips below, and the auction, too, with its undercurrents of tension; but she really had no idea what life on Sanpere was like for most of its residents.

“Bird is staying at Bill Fox's for a while." Pix brought her up to date after Samantha and Ben went down to the tiny beach being created by the ebbing tide. "And Eric is still at our boathouse. He and Roger had planned to start moving into the new house this week, but I don't think Eric wants to be alone there."

“You mean he's afraid?"

“Possibly, but it may be more a question of loneliness, although Jill would stay with him, I'm sure. He was at her place last night. I thought he might go back to New York with some of his friends, but he decided to stay. He came by this morning to change his clothes and told me he honestly doesn't know what to do. He seems totally lost."

“Judging from all we've heard, I think it would be a mistake for him to move back to the city. He has so many friends in Maine, and he'd just be caught up in the stress they were escaping."

“I agree, but he's even saying he's not sure he wants to continue the business without Roger. I thought what he said yesterday was beautiful and perhaps true. Without Roger he might not be able to be the artist he was. He's thinking of teaching, and of course any of those places would be happy to have him—the Rhode Island School of Design offered both of them jobs years ago and has wanted them, even temporarily, since."

“I haven't thought about it, but it looks like he has lost not only his dearest friend but, for the moment anyway, his livelihood. Teaching might be a good idea." Faith paused. "I wonder where Jill will fit into his future?”

After some further discussion the two women had settled Eric happily ever after with Jill and several children in a big old house in Providence for the school year, returning to the island for the summers until it was time to retire. At which point Eric and Jill, gray haired but nimble still, would move to the island year round and await visits from their devoted children and grandchildren. Eric would surmount his depression and make more beautiful pots than ever. Jill would get him to dress better.

Satisfied, they returned to the berry picking for an hour, then went their separate ways—Faith to her hammock and magazines, Ben to a nap, Samantha to Arlene's, and Pix to the turnout of her drawers and closets that she had been trying to get to all summer.

As Faith flipped the pages, her eyes barely skimming Lacroix's new direction—inspiration or desperation—she thought instead about Eric and Roger. One of the things under the surface that they hadn't talked about during the morning was the scuttling of the boat. She didn't blame Eric for not wanting to stay alone in that huge house, no matter how beautiful. If the Prescotts had drilled holes in Roger's boat, there was no telling what they would do to Eric, whom they appeared to dislike even more. Then again maybe they were frightened by the unanticipated outcome of their prank.

If it was a prank and if it was unanticipated. There was the unavoidable fact that Roger had died because of it. And the Prescotts might have known of his penchant for grass. They couldn't have been sure he would smoke that day, but maybe they had hoped to get lucky.

That made it murder.

And with one gone, it might be more than some varieties of human nature could bear not to have a shot at the other. Or if not literally a shot, something else deadly. Faith hoped Eric was being careful about what he ate. No mushroom casseroles left by a kindly friend at his door, for instance.

She wondered why Pix hadn't brought the subject up, or why she hadn't herself. Maybe it was that talking about it made it more real, more dangerous. And they were trying to keep Eric safe.

They were both invited to the Fraziers' for dinner that night, and Pix called Faith at four o'clock to remind her to bring the quilt top with her. Louise was an ardent quilter and had asked to see it. She had left the auction before the quilt was put up and regretted it, although she told Pix she was glad Faith got it. Faith was secretly hoping that she might prevail upon those itchy quilting fingers to do the job for her, but she was not too optimistic. In her experience, quilters were second only to the Jehovah's Witnesses in their proselytizing. She could hear Louise and Pix chorus now: "It will be so much fun to quilt. I'd love to do it, but wouldn't want to take it away from you. It's like eating peanuts!" Pix had actually said this to her once. Faith had never had any particular difficulty stopping herself when eating peanuts, and she knew that the quilt would be one of those things she would forsake for anything from cleaning her bathroom bowl to perusing Addison's Essays.

Samantha and Arlene appeared for tandem baby-sitting. Faith had left food for them, but they came armed with their own Pringles. She sighed at the foibles of youth and told them there was plenty of Diet Coke, their preferred beverage, in the refrigerator.

She stopped to pick up Pix, and it didn't take long to reach the Fraziers' house, set high on a knoll overlooking the harbor at Sanpere Village.

Louise Frazier opened the door. She was wearing a long Marimekko dress with large windowpane checks in white on black. Around her neck was a heavy silver necklace made by an artist on the island. She was tall, with gleaming white hair, and the total effect was stunning. Never one to hold back, Faith told her how lovely she looked.

“Thank you. This is one of my favorite gowns. I bought it many years ago in Finland and never get tired of wearing it. Now let's see that quilt before the others get here.”

Elliot Frazier walked into the room. He had dressed up too, in a well-worn brown velvet jacket with a slightly equestrian look to it and an Oscar Wilde bow tie. Not the at-home garb of most retired Maine postmasters, Faith reflected, but then you never knew with Maine.

“Now Louise, let this poor young woman have a drink first before you start in with all that quilt talk. We have a nice Chardonnay, from the Bonny Doon winery in California, that you might like to try. We visited the winery last spring. Beautiful country. There's also gin and tonic, vermouth, whatever you want.”

Faith asked for some wine. She had heard good things about this small vineyard near Santa Cruz, but hadn't sampled the wine.

Glasses in hand, they spread the quilt over the sofa. It looked almost alive, the colors were so intense. Yet at the same time they blended well together; the effect was perfectly harmonious, and in the end calming. Faith thought again that it was a Maine quilt. She could point to the fabrics and remember just where she had seen the color duplicated in nature—the tall pine by the cottage, the silver-gray of the ancient apple trees on the Point, the pink granite with sparkling flecks of black and white lining the shore, the jade-green hues the water sometimes assumed.

Louise was silent, then drew an audible breath.

“It's magnificent, Faith, and I won't deny being terribly, terribly jealous. Oh, you're going to have so much fun quilting it!”

There it was. No hope at all, Faith thought gloomily.

“Now let's see what we have here." Louise pointed to a square. "That, of course, is Mariner's Compass." She was starting to name another when Jill, Eric, and John all arrived at the front door at once.

Eric looked a little shaky, but he was clearly trying to deal with his grief. The first thing he said upon entering the room was, "Yes, Elliot, I'd love a very large gin and tonic and I'm doing okay.”

Elliot put a drink in his hand, and he sat down in one of the comfortable overstuffed armchairs that filled the room. John, with a glass of wine, followed suit.

Rooms seemed to get filled quite often in New England, Faith noted. Maybe because people didn't want to throw anything out. You never knew when something might come in handy. In the case of the Fraziers' living room the result was not chaos but comfort. The bookshelves were lined with all the books a person could ever want to read, especially curled up in one of the chairs on a foggy day with a fire in the fireplace. There were large pitchers of wildflowers mixed with a few garden civilians set on the pine tables scattered around the room. A huge glass-fronted china closet stood in the corner, too large for the dining room, Faith suspected, and it was filled not only with majolica and French pottery gathered on trips, but with shells and rocks collected closer to home. At Faith's side a polished slab of deep russet granite rested on top of the wrought-iron base from an old Singer sewing machine. The quilt was spread over a slightly faded chintz sofa, which provided a soft background for the brilliant squares. There were twenty of them connected by pale serpentine-green lattice strips.

“Oh Faith, is this what you got at the auction?" Jill asked. "It's beautiful."

“The same, and I feel very lucky. It's exactly what 1 wanted. Only I do wish Matilda Prescott had been able to quilt it too. I think it may take me until the next century."

“Now don't be discouraged. I'd be glad to help you baste it and get you started," Louise offered.

“Me too," Pix said. "Besides, if it had been quilted, you probably wouldn't have gotten it. I've never seen one like this. Once you start, you'll love it. We could go up to Ellsworth and get batting and fabric for the backing tomorrow or Friday if you want."

“Leave the island?" Faith teased. "I didn't think anything would get you to cross the bridge before Sam dragged you kicking and screaming home after Labor Day."

“This is a special case," Pix replied.

“I remember seeing Matilda working on these squares last Spring," Eric said. "She was having a lot of fun with them. She subscribed to all the quilters' magazines and was constantly ordering books on quilting. She'd finish one square, then go through her collection to decide which one she'd do next."

“I was able to get some of her books at the auction, Faith, and you're welcome to borrow them and my magazines. As I said, I know this is Mariner's Compass"—Louise placed her finger on the square, then moved it to another—"and this is Shady Pine, I'm sure, and Fern Berry. I wonder if she picked them for their association with Maine? Perhaps not. This is Old Maid's Puzzle, and I don't think that is particular to the state.”

They were all standing over the quilt now.

“It's interesting to know the names. I always think a sampler quilt is very special, choosing different squares instead of repeating the same one," Pix said.

Jill was looking closely at the squares.

“Her stitches were exquisite just look at how even they are." She bent down to count them. "Oh, here are her initials in the corner. She must have planned to embroider them. And the date, but I can't read what's next to it; the pencil got smudged.-

“Let me see," Louise said. "No, we need the magnifying glass." She went over to the reduced Oxford English Dictionary and took a large magnifying glass from the top. "Here, Faith, it's your quilt. You look."

“This is exciting," said Faith. "Like a secret message." She read slowly, " `Seek and Ye Shall Find.' I'm sure that's what it says, but what does it mean?”

They took turns looking and agreed on the words. Elliot offered an opinion: "Remember, Matilda was a very religious woman. It may not be cryptic at all, just simply what it says, Seek and Ye Shall Find—God, peace, salvation."

“I think Elliot's probably right," John added. "She had a big bowl next to her bed filled with tiny slips of paper with the chapter and verse of parts of the Bible printed on them, and she'd pick one every morning and every night, then read whatever passage it told her. I wouldn't be surprised if all her quilts had quotations from the scriptures on them."

“Aunt Matilda was a God-fearing woman," chided a voice from the doorway, a voice that more than hinted that few in the room would be counted in that number. Faith turned around, startled. It was Margery Prescott, Sonny's wife, and she was putting on a sweater. She was a substantial woman in her late thirties. Her hair was the same snuff brown as her sweater, and standing with her back to the door, she looked like a greatly enlarged doorstop. One of the old cast-iron ones guaranteed to keep the door from slamming shut in any wind.

“So that's what she was working on at the end," Margery said as she strode toward the group clustered around the quilt. "She made beautiful quilts. We all got one when we got married. Kept her busy, I suppose."

“Margery brought the mussels for our supper and was kind enough to stay and clean them for me," Louise explained. Margery was moving toward the door.

“I'll be going then. Enjoy your meal." She was gone, but was it Faith's imagination or did Margery cast a glance of malicious amusement toward Eric? A glance that suggested that his mussels might have something other than pearls in them?

“And now it's my turn," Louise said. "It won't take long. I hope you all like Billi Bi?”

Faith was sh. y reassured to hear that Margery had not prepared dinner too.

Louise wasn't _Lone long, returning faintly flushed. "Please come and sit down. It's a simple summer meal, but it does have to be eaten hot.”

Besides the delectable creamy mussel soup, the simple summer meal included lots of crusty bread; corn from their garden, picked as the water reached a boil; juicy slabs of tomatoes; and rhubarb compote with heavy cream for dessert. Afterward they took their coffee out to the back porch.

The sky looked like an overturned bowl of stars. It was the time of year for shooting stars, and they fell in trails of light across the darkness. Eric was sitting on a lower step leaning against Jill. John was sitting alone off to the side. Eric spoke in a low voice.

“You know, I can't believe Roger is really dead. Here we all are sitting on the porch as always, but he's not here. I just haven't been able to take it in somehow."

“Early days yet—don't try," Elliot advised.

“I believe he is here, Eric." Pix spoke softly. "Because we're here, he's here—and always will be.”

Nobody said anything for a while; ten Eric said, "Thank you, Pix.”

It was almost the same group who had been together at the covered-dish supper just over a week ago. They must have done a lot of things together. But now one of them would always be missing. Bill Fox was missing too, but Faith was sure he would have been invited if Bird hadn't been his house guest. It was not likely that Eric would want to see her just yet. Faith wondered if Bill had prevailed upon her to change her dress.

They didn't stay much longer. Faith thanked the Fraziers and realized she wanted to get to know them better. She had a feeling Tom would like them too.

Tom. It was a stabbing thought as she drove home. She missed him so keenly these days, it was easier not to think about him too much. She'd spoken^, with him last night after the funeral. He had called to see how she was, but she didn't want to tell him about Bird. He'd just worry, and it wasn't asif there was any danger. But Tom didn't like unpredictability, except in his wife, and if he thought people were jumping into graves on the island, he would assume it was only a small step to other forms of aberrance. Like pushing Faith into a grave. She knew how his mind worked.

Samantha and Arlene left after telling Faith what an angel Benjamin was, and Faith once again questioned the order of the universe that had determined that a child will always behave better for anyone, even a perfect stranger, than a parent.

After she closed the door and turned off the lights, Faith sat on her porch for a while, reluctant to go in. It was too beautiful. The air was warm and the world was full of stars—in the sky and reflected back by the water, lapping the rocks at high tide.

She thought some more about the evening at the Fraziers'. Jill had been warm and friendly; apparently recent events had penetrated her shyness and she had let down her guard. Faith was sure she was deeply upset about Roger, but there was also the way she looked at Eric, slightly maternal, certainly in love. She was needed. John Eggleston had been restless and uncharacteristically silent. Was it likely that he was still troubled by the funeral? Somehow Faith thought not. He was a cipher to her and she wasn't sure she liked him. He didn't seem to fit the circle of friends. Someone who had forced his way in and stayed? She'd forgotten to ask Pix why he had left the church and made a mental note to do so.

She lay back on the rough porch boards and tried to find the Big Dipper. Tom knew all the names of the constellations. She smiled. He would be here soon and she'd try to learn one or two. That was a good thought. She saw the flash of a shooting star and made a wish. She knew it would come true. Faith had primitive beliefs when it came to stars and fortune cookies, believing in their infallibility more than the average minister's wife was wont to do. She found the Big Dipper and something that might be Orion's belt. Tom would tell her.

The next afternoon Faith brought the quilt over to Pix's and they spread it out on the dining-room floor. Pix had some books, and Faith had borrowed a couple from Louise. They hoped they would be able to identify the squares. Samantha had gone off to Arlene's house to lend moral support while her mother gave her a perm, and for the moment Benjamin was happily playing with his little cars and some blocks Pix had dug out. He sat sputtering away at their feet, and Faith realized it wouldn't be long before her car keys, at present an instant baby calmer, would exert a different fascination. She had always been a strong proponent of environment versus heredity, but faced with objective reality, she had to admit there might be something to inborn preferences. As a truly liberated woman, she had presented Ben with balanced choices since birth—a sweet Corolle baby doll, a tea set, a truck—and it was wheels every time.

They decided to have lunch before getting down to work and had moved into the kitchen when they heard a car pull up. Pix looked out the window. "It's Bill Fox and he's alone," she said, drying her hands hurriedly on her shirt tail and walking toward the door. Faith followed her after locating a dish towel.

“Oh, Pix," he said, "there you are. I came by earlier and no one was home. I wanted to leave you a note, but I couldn't find any paper without rifling your drawers. It was an enticing notion, though perhaps a bit familiar."

“Bill, you can rifle my drawers any time," Pix offered.

This was Pix? Faith thought in amusement—our Pix who dropped her drink at Aleford gatherings if a man so much as admired her canapés?

Bill walked into the house and set a large paper bag on the dining-room table.

“I was wondering if you could follow me into Granville tomorrow and bring me home. I have to leave my car at the garage to have the brakes checked, and they're going to get rid of all this grime for me. I don't think it's been washed since last year."

“I have to go tomorrow anyway, so I'd be happy to help you out. Morning or afternoon?" '

“Let's be optimists and say morning, around nine o'clock? Maybe it will be done sooner that way. Oh, and this is foryou. Some things from my garden that I don't think you're growing."

“Or if we are, they're nowhere as good as yours. Thank you and I hope you tucked some of that white eggplant in." Faith had learned that Bill Fox's garden was famous on the island. It was beautiful to look at. Flowers, fruits and vegetables were planted together in seeming disarray. Scarlet runner beans on tepee trellising were bordered by beds of white phlox and deep-blue bachelor buttons. But the garden was not only a feast for the eye. Bill delighted in producing new and unusual varieties—all the things that were not supposed to grow in this climate. Radicchio, arugula, and baby vegetables had all been in his patch of earth long before they had inhabited Balducci's bins and Manhattan's menus.

“Faith and I were just about to have lunch, Bill. Would you care to join us?"

“Delighted." Faith studied him as they entered the kitchen. He really did look delighted. Surely his glowing expression could not simply be due to the prospect of a ride and a roast beef sandwich?

It wasn't.

They were sitting on the deck in the back of the house. Benjamin had eaten two bites of his sandwich, thereby covering himself from head to toe with peanut butter and jelly, then had promptly fallen asleep.

Two great blue heron were slowly flying across the cove, long legs streaming straight behind them, and enormous wings moving gracefully through the air, like an early flying machine. Their shadows rippled the water, until they landed on the top of an ancient black oak along the shore.

“`A dusky blue wave undulating over our meadows' is how Thoreau saw them, and I've never read a better description," Bill told them. "They're favorites of mine. I could watch them for hours. Ardea Herodias, the tallest bird in New England, the royalty of the shores and marshes.”

He took a big gulp of lemonade as if to fortify himself and abruptly changed the subject. "Nothing official yet and I know I can rely on you both to keep this under your bonnets, but I'm getting married."

“Married!" gasped Pix as Faith quickly covered her overabundant surprise with congratulations and best wishes.

“That's wonderful, Bill. Whoever she is, she's a very lucky person. It was my childhood dream to marry Prince Herodias, and in a way she is.”

He smiled. It was such a happy, calm smile. The smile of someone who feels completely fulfilled, who lets out that anxious breath he's been holding for thirty years and knows he's going to live happily ever after. After all.

“Is it someone we know?" Pix asked.

He appeared to find the question irrelevant. "It's Bird, of course."

“Bird!" Pix gasped again, and again Faith covered her confusion with happy noises about how lovely she was and now her baby would have a good home. She would have burbled on further, but Bill interrupted. He was obviously eager to share his news and tell his tale.

“I met her last winter, and it was the proverbial falling in love at first sight. I knew I didn't have a chance, but I was happy to be her friend and she enjoyed coming to the house. She's a very bright woman, you know.”

Since they had never heard her open her mouth except for that anguished outcry in the cemetery, Faith and Pix did not know.

“She has been desperately unhappy with Andy, but felt she had to try to stay with him since he was the father of her child, and they also shared a commitment to living in the natural, or rather primitive, way they did. And they are both macrobiotics. Although I have been able to get her to eat chicken and fish on occasion. What I do is put lots of sprouts on everything, and she thinks she's eating salad.”

Faith was appalled. What a way to start a marriage. This must be what was meant by living on love alone.