Cabot joined me at the rail. He held on with both hands.
The water below was slate gray in color. Past the channel markers, it was darker. A big herring gull flew over the wake.
“I’ve come down here every August for fourteen years,” Cabot said.
“It’s a tradition.”
“The first year I was twenty-four. I hadn’t been at theGlobefor a full year yet. Eleanor’s daughter was getting married for the second time. My mother and Eleanor went to the same boarding school, Miss Porter’s. That was enough for that first invitation.”
“It went well?”
“Maria fed me a sandwich at midnight that first summer. I’d skipped dinner. She found me in the kitchen and made me a sandwich of ham and butter on a kaiser roll. She told me Eleanor’s third son had eaten the same sandwich on the same counter at twenty-four, and that he’d become a lawyer. That made her think it would be good luck for me.”
“And it was?”
“Until Maria—”
He didn’t finish the thought. Three minutes later, he spoke again. “I’m about to walk into a room and tell an old woman thatthe woman who’s fed her every meal for forty years has been planning to kill her family for at least five.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Then I’m going to sit at her kitchen table and watch them take Maria out a service door.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know how to do both at once: the friend and the reporter. I don’t know how to be in the room without seeing the room.”
“Then don’t do both,” I said. “Eleanor doesn’t need a reporter today. She needs a man she’s known for fourteen years who’s going to tell her the truth. The reporter gets to come back in March. He can write the long piece for theGlobeand win a prize for it. None of that is in the room today. Today, you walk in and you sit down, and you tell her.”
My phone buzzed against my hip. I turned a quarter into the wind and pulled it out.
Farrow:Wiley and Samuel made me eat leeks. Send help.
I laughed. It was a relief. I held the phone out to Cabot. He laughed too.
I thumbed back.
Dane:Enjoy the leeks.
***
Eleanor’s morning room ran along the southern face of the main house. Light came in through five tall windows that opened onto dune grass, a slate terrace, and the ocean beyond.
The orchid corridor was twenty feet to my left through an open doorway.
Eleanor wore a soft grey wool dress and a long cardigan the color of bone. There was a coffee service on a low table, and she had her hands folded in her lap.
She looked at Cabot first.
“Stanley.” She held out both hands, and he offered his.
“Eleanor, good to see you.”
“Please sit.”
He sat across from her. I took the chair to his left, with a sightline through the doorway to the corridor. Reed took a chair to his right, with a sightline to the inner door and the catering vestibule beyond.
She looked at Reed and then at me.