“I met his son. Brooks.”
“Did you?” She pretended she hadn’t watched them in the moonlight, certain they’d be pulled together. Kiss. It had made her blush. Imagine that, at eighty, blushing like a girl? Peeping at young lovers from behind a curtain. She had accepted she was like the rest of the island’s platinum-bobbed grandmothers—their girlhoods as debutantes, beauty queens, army nurses, and war brides, and, in her case, farm girl, so distant they all had forgotten the desire of youth. Watching her granddaughter and the boy, she’d felt a stirring of desire, a bittersweet loss, and, for the span of an owl’s call, it had cracked open her precise military life as fixed as the tick of a metronome.
Maddie watched the caterpillars crawling across the window glass, and, beyond, the trees swaying in the sea wind. Veronica knew the girl had returned to the lawn on that dewy summer night.
“What is the boy like?”
“He is”—she took a deep, dreamy breath—“wonderful.”
Veronica wasn’t surprised. She too had fallen for the handsome black man she’d talked with at the dessert party who spoke of floral arrangements with a religious focus (a bit of a poof, Bob might call him). He had made her laugh. And had spoken as if he knew her. Knew the secrets she was keeping.
The Mormons had taught her to be “in the world but not of the world,” and that is how she had lived those decades on the island. She had wanted to tell Julius that she too was an outsider. But what a thing to say to a black man—a true outsider, alone on an island of warmongering white men. On an island where every child—East and West—went on annual field trips to the Whaling Museum to learn about the first white men to settle Avalon in the 1700s. They were Dutch whalers and their crude harpoons and lances hung on the museum’s walls. Veronica had visited the museum many times, volunteered at their annual benefit, seen the centerpiece of the exhibit—a treasured artifact, a rusted black cauldron once filled with bubbling whale blubber. What they weren’t taught, Veronica knew, was that, first, before they set upon the whales, the Dutch men of Avalon—killers by trade from day one—had slaughtered thousands of brown-skinned natives.
Maddie sat up, patting her knees. “I’m going to the Castle,” she whispered. “Tonight.”
The girl knew it was a visit her parents would object to. And here she was, Veronica thought, trusting her with this news. Veronica wouldn’t have to find a circuitous way of bringing up Leslie Day Marshall after all. Maddie had done just that.
“Brooks invited me. All the kids, actually.”
“What fun,” Veronica said, thinking fast. “If you see his mother—Leslie—please do tell her hello from me. Leslie’s mother and I, we were old friends.”
“Sure.”
“And one other thing. When you come back tomorrow—we are watching the Oprah show, I hope—I want to hear all the details. About the Castle and Brooks.” She added, “And his parents. Especially his mother.”
Maddie nodded happily. Mission accomplished, Veronica thought.
They kissed on both cheeks when Maddie left (European-style, Maddie said), and she promised to be at the big house the next day in time for Oprah. Veronica promised in return—she’d have popcorn ready.
She stood at the picture window watching Maddie sashay across the lawn toward the cottage. Just like a young girl in love. Veronica drew circles around the caterpillars with a finger, but they seemed not to know she was there, on the other side of the glass. They charged forward like tiny bristled trains on an erratic schedule.
She’d have to find a way to use Maddie’s proximity to Leslie Marshall to gain knowledge of that woman’s plans. Leslie was scheming, Veronica was certain. The timing was impossible—all these problems raining down on the island like it was holy hell’s target. She had learned in her eighty years that what seemed like coincidence rarely was. The pollutant complaint from the EPA. The buyout offer. The graffiti soiling the island. The Marshall girl had a hand in some—or, possibly, she thought, all—of it. And now the woman was luring in the island’s children, maybe even using them in her twisted agenda. Leslie Marshall, Veronica thought, the pied piper of Avalon.
15.
Dom
The pistol, black and hard, looked out of place in his grandfather’s pale and soft hands. Like bags filled with pudding, Dom thought as he watched the old man aim at the empty tomato cans propped on the salt-weathered fence in the clearing behind White Eagle. They were the cans Dom’s dad had used to make the spaghetti sauce his grandfather sucked down at lunch the other day.
Dom didn’t know much about him—only bits and pieces he’d stitched together to create the character that was the Colonel. What he did know was this: the islanders were scared of his grandfather. Mentioning the Colonel flicked a switch in people who usually treated Dom like he was invisible, or worse, looked him up and down with a dismissive head shake. Like the old geezers in the club dining room who played bridge all day so they could stay nice and drunk—one mention of the Colonel and poof, they transformed into cheek-pinching (the old ladies), back-slapping (the old men) doters who pressed folded twenty-dollar bills into his hand. “Buy yourself a soda, kid!” and “I hear they have gummy worms down at the Wildcat Sweet Shoppe!”
The rest he’d had to intel (that was a military word he’d picked up watching spy movies) from his brief experiences with the Colonel before he and Veronica took off to Florida. The Colonel was a relentless backseat driver. He rolled down the Cadillac’s window when someone cut him off and yelled, “You stupid ass!” The Colonel’s favorite afternoon snack was a beer and chunk of Limburger cheese, which made the fridge at the big house smell like diarrhea farts. The Colonel was always ragging on Dom’s mom—calling her fat, telling her she was too fresh and opinionated, even saying (in front of his dad!) that she’d made a mistake marrying an uneducated man. Dom wasn’t sure if all this made the Colonel plain honest. Mean. Crazy. Or all of the above.
But he was different since he’d come back to the island—Dom was sure of it. He’d studied the Colonel at lunch the other day, and again, only a half hour ago in the big kitchen of White Eagle, as the old guy slurped down root-beer floats he’d made for them. He’d chugged it like a hungry little kid, holding the frosted mug with two hands, his pinky finger pointing, its rock of a diamond ring glinting. The foamy mix spilled down his chin as he guzzled.
Now as his grandfather lifted the pistol, one eye squinting, his hands shaking, he shouted, “Shit!”