Cheating at Solitaire(19)

“And he’s probably in there.”

“No way to tell from here. Why don’t you stay up here and let me go down and see?”

Annabeth Falmer was not a woman most men had found a need to protect, but she recognized the impulse when she saw it. She wondered what he was protecting her from: the climb down, or the fact that this Mark Anderman was very probably lying in the driver’s seat stone-cold dead. Either way, she didn’t want to be protected. When Stewart Gordon started down the long bank toward the pickup truck and the beach, she followed him.

It was a bad climb down. Margaret’s Harbor was not Maui. It was not a gentle place. The slopes that led from the roads to the sea were covered with scattered rocks, and steep. Annabeth kept hitting her ankles against hard things, and sinking her legs far into the snow so that the wet came in over the tops of her boots. The sea would have been beautiful if she hadn’t been so afraid of it. It reminded her of that poem by Matthew Arnold, of the death of religious faith, with the waves crashing against the shore under the great white chalk cliffs of Dover.

They were almost at the truck. Stewart Gordon had stopped to wait for her. “What were you thinking about? You looked like you were thinking about something.”

“I was thinking about trying to write in my office at home when the boys were small, and it would be so cold I’d try to type with gloves on, and it wouldn’t work,” Annabeth said. “It would go down to three degrees Fahrenheit and nothing I did could make the house warm, and I’d be aware all the time, you know, because heat’s expensive and I’d be running it at full blast, that the bill was going to come in and I wasn’t going to be able to pay it. But it was so cold I pumped it up anyway, and then it took forever to get my work done, because it was so hard to type.”

“And your husband? What did he do?”

“Oh, he was dead by then. He died when the boys were small. Three and seven, I think they were. He—my husband, I mean—he worked with computers and things.”

“And your sons are now grown up and they’re, what—a doctor and a lawyer?”

“A cardiologist and a litigator, yes.”

“And they like you enough to buy you a house on Margaret’s Harbor just because you wanted to spend a year to read?”

“I should have thought of going to Italy. I like Italy. I’ve been thinking of writing a book about Italy. About Lucrezia Borgia, maybe. At least there wouldn’t be this kind of snow.”

“That’s very impressive.”

“A book about Lucrezia Borgia?”

“No. The fact that your sons like you enough to set you up this way after you did whatever it was you had to do to get them where they are. I’ve seen women like that. Most of them survive by getting hard. You didn’t.”

“How do you know I wasn’t set up with enough life insurance to choke a horse?”

“The fact that you were afraid of paying the heating bills.”

“Fair enough,” Annabeth said. “I was thinking of something else, though. While we were coming down. There’s a poem by Matthew Arnold, called ‘Dover Beach.’ ”


“‘… for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.’”

Annabeth stopped still. “Exactly,” she said. “That’s amazing. Very few people know that poem. Even English majors of my generation—our generation, really, I’m fifty-five and I seem to remember—”

“Sixty-two.”

“Yes, well, even English majors of our generation weren’t asked to read that, and nobody else ever does except in graduate school. Maybe it was different in England—”

“Scotland,” Stewart Gordon said. “I’m Scots. You’ve got to keep that straight, or men in kilts will storm your door and beat on it with large swords.”

“Right,” Annabeth said.

“But you didn’t go to graduate school in English literature, did you? It must have been history.”

“Oh, it was. But then I taught as an adjunct for a while in a small place and they had me teaching everything. They put it in textbooks for undergraduates now. ‘Dover Beach,’ I mean. And, you know, I know that the night of the poem isn’t supposed to be a storm. The moon is out. But then there’s all that at the end, and it just feels more like a night like tonight. I’m babbling.”