Hearts of Sand(86)

“Oh,” the Reverend Harper said. “I know that’s how you feel about it now—”

“That’s how I’ve felt about it since the beginning. It’s how I’m going to feel about it ten years from now and twenty years from now and thirty years from now. And if you try to bring this up at the picnic, I will walk right out on it.”

“Yes,” the Reverend Harper said. “I can see—I’m sure the death of Mr. Westervan has upset you—maybe I’ll just—”

“Don’t just anything,” Caroline said. “This is the way I feel about this, and it is none of your business.”

She snapped the cell phone shut. Then she looked at it, lying dead and black in her hand.

The problem was that Caroline didn’t want to get on with things. She didn’t want to go to the parade. She didn’t want to go to the picnic. She didn’t want to talk to anybody she knew.

2

Kyle Westervan was dead. It was the first thing Tim Brand thought of when he woke up on the Fourth of July, and the only thing he could make himself think about as he started his day.

He showered and shaved and dressed and drank a glass of orange juice, and then he headed out across town. With all the road blockages and the crowds, it was easier, and he didn’t really want to drive when he was this distracted.

He got to the clinic feeling bone tired and looked inside to see if anybody was around. The reception desk was unmanned. The corridors were sparkling clean and uninhabited. Tim went out to the back and stopped when he saw the yellow crime scene tape over the back door.

He went back out to the reception area and found Marcie standing there, holding an enormous straw tote bag and wearing an enormous straw hat.

She looked up from something she’d been writing on a pad and smiled. “I thought I could find you here,” she said. “I tried calling your house. Are you going to go up to the parade? I know you must feel like hell, but virtually every one of the kids from the children’s clinic is marching in one capacity or the other, and it would mean a lot to them for you to be there.”

“I know,” Tim said. “I did intend to be there. And there’s still time. I’ve just been wandering around a little aimlessly.”

“Because of Kyle.” It was not a question.

Tim sat down in one of the molded plastic chairs meant for people waiting to be called for clinic and winced, for the hundredth time, at just how hard they were.

“Tim?” Marcie said.

“I’ve just been wandering around thinking it was odd,” he said. “Alwych without Kyle in it. I’ve known Kyle all my life, almost. Almost as long as I’ve known Virginia. We were in a nursery school play group together when we were two.”

“It’s not odd,” Marcie said. “It’s horrible. The whole thing is horrible, from start to finish.”

“I agree. But it’s also odd. Just before my father died, he told me that he’d outlived all his brothers and sisters and his aunts and uncles and even the two people he was closest to as friends, and that he felt as if he were adrift in a sea of forgetfulness. He was the only one left who remembered, and so he couldn’t know if he was really remembering at all.”

“There’s Virginia,” Marcie said. “She remembers. And there’s Hope Matlock.”

“It’s different for women and men.”

“Is it really?”

“Don’t start that,” Tim said. “I was never all that close to Hope, and Virginia—well, Virginia is Virginia. And she’s my sister.”

“I’ll admit I never did understand the thing with Hope,” Marcie said. “I know I didn’t know her when she was younger—but still. She seems to me the most unlikely person in the world to belong to the popular crowd in a place like Alwych Country Day. She seems like an unlikely person to have gone to Alwych Country Day.”

Tim shrugged. “Her family is one of the oldest in New England,” he said. “They were here before the Revolutionary War. They’ve had members fight in every war the United States has ever been in. When I was growing up, all that was more important than the things you’re thinking of. It was starting to change even then, but it was still more important.”

“And then it changed to just being about money,” Marcie said.

“Something like that,” Tim agreed. “But there’s a scholarship at Alwych Country Day that’s named after her great-grandfather, and there’s a scholarship at Miss Porter’s that was named after her grandmother, and she got both of those because there were stipulations in the endowments that said she would. Not her specifically, you understand, but—”