To hell with dreams. To hell with sacrifice. His jaw tightened. The angel reaching sadly down picked up the golden feather in the dust.
Jennifer Linton was silent. He brought himself abruptly back to the job in hand and glanced sideways at her . . . the recalcitrant daughter of a lovely mother, granddaughter of old James V. Maloney, supposed to flower, if possible, scrabbling what nutriment was left in the shade of the lush luxuriant weed. Assistant Trust Officer Finlay’s problem. He saw her again, simple and lovely, the aura of springtime in April about her.
The pale half-moon of her face was grave.
“You don’t banish dreams,” she said, her voice as grave. “They blow up, when you’re not looking. They blow to pieces, right in your face.” She laughed unexpectedly then and rubbed her nose quickly, like a child. “I know. It’s what happened to me, just now.”
“A dream blew up?”
“With a bang. I live with my stepmother, because my parents were divorced. My father was killed in a car accident, two years ago. And my mother . . . well, she can be. . . . Anyway, she said I had to come to Newport this summer. But I hate it, and she’s so . . . so hard to get along with, anyway. So I wasn’t going to Newport no matter how much of a row my mother made. I was going to stay with my stepmother. Then today I got a cable. I didn’t have to go to Newport. My mother’d changed her mind from the other day when she called me up . . . right when I was 6-2 in the match set for the school cup, so I had to lose by default. And she said, ‘Go back to your silly game.’ ”
She laughed a little. “I guess it’s funny, anyway.”
“It wouldn’t be to me,” Fish Finlay said.
“Me either. Anyway, she changed her mind, and I didn’t have to come to Newport. It was wonderful. That’s why I’m in these clothes, I didn’t take time to change. One of the girls’ mothers was there with a car, coming down this way, so I dashed home. I thought Anne—that’s my stepmother—would be as glad as I was.”
“Wasn’t she?”
Jennifer Linton didn’t answer for so long that he glanced over at her and saw her still shaking her head, her lashes moist.
“I’m sorry,” he said, disappointed some way.
“I didn’t tell her,” she said then. “There was a . . . a man there. An old friend of all of us. I sneaked in—kid stuff, I guess. You know . . . Big Surprise. He was there, talking to her . . . telling her how much he loved her, and how tired he was of waiting and . . . seeing her struggle, trying to hang on to the farm for . . . for somebody else’s spoiled brat—that’s me—when she ought to have a life and children of her own. I . . . I was just stunned, I guess.”
She took a deep breath.
“I was so stunned I couldn’t get out, and so I heard her say she loved him too but she wasn’t going to break up the only home I had till . . . till I got myself a job and got squared away, just when I’d got myself together and had some confidence in myself and the fact that somebody really wanted me around.” She paused a moment. “I just never thought about Anne getting married. I guess my mother’s been married so many times I thought it was enough for everybody. And this man’s terribly nice and has money enough to . . . I was just stupid. But it was a shock. You bear right at the next corner.”
She was silent for a moment.
“So I’m going to Newport,” she said, calm again. “It’s funny. I get some money some day, and I’ve been planning all the things I’d do for Anne. Pay the mortgage on the farm, and that sort of thing. She’s done so much for me. And here all the time she could have had . . . everything. I was just sick. And on the road, I was terrified somebody I knew would come along, and she’d find out I’d been home. She’d feel awful if she knew I’d heard. And she knows how I . . . I don’t like this new husband of my mother’s.”
“Why not?” Fish Finlay asked.
“She thinks it’s because my mother didn’t even tell me she was getting married, this time, and one of the girls heard it on a radio gossip program. But that’s not it. It’s what another girl at school told me about him. Her father’s a diplomat in Washington. They’re from the Argentine.”
Fish Finlay concentrated silently on the road.
“This new husband was married before to a cousin of theirs. And she was supposed to have killed herself.”
A sudden sharp chill froze the base of Finlay’s spine.
“Supposed to?”
It came out more casually than he’d dared to hope.
“That’s right. But the family doesn’t think she did. This girl says they know, in fact—that she didn’t kill herself.”
Finlay’s spine was not chilled at the base, it was stone-cold deep up into his cerebrum. “You don’t mean—”
He caught himself. This was fantastic.
“It isn’t me,” she said. She spoke with a literal realism, so clear-eyed and without emotion that it made her seem at once both older and younger than he knew she was. “It’s what the girl told me. She says they knew she didn’t kill herself. She doesn’t know how. It was just things she overheard.”
Dear God . . . she can’t possibly know what she’s saying. He slowed the truck down, his eyes glued to the road.
“She said they fought like tigers to keep her from marrying him. Then when she died, they found out something. This girl isn’t sure what. But they didn’t want a scandal. Or maybe they didn’t have actual legal proof. But they could see he didn’t get anything out of it. And he didn’t . . . not her money, or even her personal stuff. Not even her furs. This girl has a coat of hers. It’s beautiful, but . . .”
She shivered a little, the only sign that she knew the meaning of what she’d said.
Fish slowed down again and looked around at her. There was no ripple on the opaque mask she’d drawn over her face since the naked moment back on the culvert.
“Now look,” he said, as quietly and soberly as he could. “You don’t seriously believe all this, do you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “This girl swears it’s the truth. My mother knows he didn’t get any of her estate. But the story she’s heard is different. I know, because I tried to tell her, in Nassau last winter, when she had me down to meet him. So I shut up. I was afraid, anyway. And he doesn’t like me to begin with . . . any better than I do him.”
“You didn’t tell her—”
“I didn’t even get started, really,” she said calmly. “She cut me off with a lot of corny stuff. He’d told her his story and she believes it. He’s smart.”
“You haven’t told anybody then.”
“No. And I don’t know why I’m telling you, except that I felt so horrible. And I’m glad I did, because you’re probably right. It does sound crazy. You see, I’m not worried about my mother, because she doesn’t have any money to leave anybody. Unless something happens to me, before I’m twenty-two. Or unless she hasn’t told him she just has income,” she added.
As indeed she hasn’t.
“Because she’s funny about money. Terribly generous if it’s something she wants you to have, not five cents if she doesn’t. Like iron. Her last marriage went on the rocks over some fishing tackle. But maybe this one’s smarter.”
The wheeze and rattle of the truck intensified her silence and Fish Finlay’s.
“I was going to tell my stepmother,” she said then. “But she’d have worried. She wouldn’t let me go to Newport now.”
“She’s