Phần I
The oysters came off the fire in shovelfuls, steaming, dumped onto long plywood tables with holes cut in the middle for the shells. Somebody had strung lights through the live oaks. Somebody else had hired a bluegrass trio. And all of it - the oysters, the lights, the banjo, the champagne in tin buckets of ice - had been arranged by Vivian Ashby to look like it hadn't been arranged at all.
"Seven days," Julian said into Ellie's hair. "Seven days and then you're stuck with me."
"Six and a half," Ellie said. "It's already dark."
"You're counting hours?"
"I'm a stenographer. I count everything."
He laughed and kissed her temple and went to rescue his father from a state senator. Ellie stood at the end of the dock with a plastic cup of champagne, looking at the party the way she looked at a courtroom: from the edge, quietly, taking it all down.
At her side, without meaning to, her fingers were moving against her thigh. Seven days and then you're stuck with me. She'd done it since she was twenty-one. Eight years of typing other people's words, and now her hands typed even when there was no machine.
Heron Hall sat on a bluff above the Wadmalaw River, white columns and a wide porch and two hundred years of Ashbys looking down from oil paintings. Across the water, half a mile of gold marsh grass, was a dark empty lot with a crooked dock and nothing else.
Ellie didn't look at it. She had become very good at not looking at it.
Her father was at the far end of the oyster table, enormous and sunburned in a pressed shirt he clearly hated, shucking oysters faster than anyone and talking to no one. Her brother Wade stood near the bar holding a club soda with lime like it was a live grenade. Fourteen months sober. He caught her eye and raised the glass half an inch. Still here.
Judge Harlan Ashby was holding court under the biggest oak, the way he did everywhere. Seersucker jacket, silver hair, white buck shoes somehow spotless in the pluff mud. Three years ago, Ellie had sat ten feet from him in Courtroom 4B for a month-long fraud trial. On the last day, he'd stopped at her machine and said, "You're Celeste's girl. She was the best clerk I ever had." Then his son had come to take him to lunch, and Julian had looked at Ellie, and that had been that.
"Eleanor." Vivian Ashby appeared at her elbow in pale green linen, her voice as cool as the champagne. "The photographer needs you by the water. And your father is wearing a fishing knife on his belt."
"It's an oyster knife."
"At a party."
"It's an oyster roast, Mrs. Ashby."
Vivian looked at her for a long moment with an expression Ellie had never been able to read. Then she smiled, a little. "Seven days," she said, and walked away.
That was when the boat came in.
It came fast up the river, too fast, a little center-console skiff with its running lights blazing, and it hit the end of the dock hard enough that the whole party turned around. A young woman in a yellow sundress jumped off before it was tied up, kicked off her sandals, and ran barefoot down the dock with her arms out.
"Don't you dare start without me!"
"Tessa," Julian groaned, delighted.
Tessa Ashby had been in Lisbon for two years painting enormous canvases no one understood. She smelled like sunscreen and gasoline. She hugged her brother, then hugged Ellie so hard Ellie's champagne went over both of them.
"Finally," Tessa said. "Finally, someone in this family with a soul. Let me see the ring. Let me see it!"
She grabbed Ellie's left hand to look at the engagement ring, and Ellie looked down at Tessa's hand holding hers.
There was a ring on Tessa's right hand.
A small, dark-blue sapphire in an old gold setting. On either side of it, a tiny pearl, one a little bigger than the other. The gold band worn thin on one side, the way rings get when someone has worn them every single day for twenty years.
Ellie had seen that ring every day of her life until she was fourteen. On her mother's hand stirring grits. On her mother's hand on the steering wheel. On her mother's hand brushing hair off Ellie's forehead when she had a fever.
The last time she'd seen it, it was on her mother's hand waving goodbye from the porch of the house across the river. The house that wasn't there anymore.
"Ellie?" Tessa said. "You okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Your ring," Ellie heard herself say. Her voice came out perfectly normal. "It's beautiful. Where did you get it?"
"Oh! Daddy gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday." Tessa twisted it fondly. "It was Granny Ashby's. I never take it off."
"Bought it at an estate sale in Savannah," said a warm voice behind them.
Judge Ashby had walked up without anyone hearing, bringing a faint smell of cigar smoke and lemon cologne with him. He slid an arm around his daughter's shoulders and smiled down at Ellie. "Tess romanticizes everything. Don't you, sweetheart?"
"Daddy, you said it was Granny's."
"I said it was like Granny's." He laughed. "Come on. The senator wants to meet the famous painter."
He steered her away. Over his shoulder, he gave Ellie a wink.
Ellie stood very still on the dock.
Under the edge of her cup, her fingers were typing. It was Granny Ashby's. Bought it at an estate sale in Savannah.
Two different stories. Ten seconds apart.
She had sat through a hundred trials. She knew what it meant when two witnesses couldn't keep their stories straight.
It meant somebody was lying.
At the bar, Wade had gone completely white. He set down his club soda, very carefully, and walked straight out to the parking field without saying goodbye to anyone. Ellie watched his truck's taillights disappear down the oak avenue.
She looked down at the judge's white shoes, moving away through the crowd.