“Old Lachlan Lee had no use for me,” Hamm said, answering Polly’s question. “He ran me off one time.”
“Why?” Maud asked.
“I wasn’t his kind of people!”
“No,” Polly said. “It was because you shot an eagle.”
“Did I?” He raised his eyebrows.
“You most certainly did. We saw you do it.”
“Uh-oh! Whoops!” He laughed.
“You don’t remember?” Polly shifted to acting on Agnes’s behalf as well as her own, pressing now beyond the bounds of politeness.
He gave her a shrewd grin. “Maybe I do.”
“Why would you do such a thing?” Polly asked.
“You never know what people will do,” Hamm said. “Isn’t that right? Do you agree?” he asked Heidi.
“Heidi lives here. She’s one of the Reeds.”
They’d told Heidi, and walked her through Rock Reed. “It’s mine?” she’d asked, and they’d explained the shares to her, but she could only repeat the question: “It’s mine?” It was too much of a wreck to live in without repairs and renovation, and it was undecided whether or not she ever would. It was such a big old white elephant. Meanwhile she lived with Agnes.
Hamm didn’t react to the news that Heidi was a Reed. Maybe he wasn’t in on the details of the real estate transaction perpetrated by his son.
“I have a question,” Polly said. “May I?” She’d never have risked this in the past. She counted on other people to be confrontational. Now that she was the person who’d bested Archie Lee, her perception of her place in the world had changed.
“Shoot,” Hamm said.
“If you love it here so much, why would you want to develop it?”
He did something then that her father had done, a shift in gears he made when she or anyone else had overstepped. He got a smile on his face, but it lacked humor. It mocked. It dismissed. She used to think she’d made it happen, but she’d seen Ian Hancock do it to totally innocent people. Dick had told her, gently—it was her father, after all—that it was a form of bullying.
She prepared to be bullied by fooling with her sweater buttons.
“You people,” Hamm said. “You like to believe you know what’s best for this land. You think you aren’t developers? Look around.” He waved his hand at the five large houses: Outer Light, Rock Reed, Leeward Cottage, Meadowlea, WesterLee, and up at the Rookerie. He turned and pointed at the Sank. “You want the world to stop with you. You think your ways are the good ways. What do you know about us, really? We see you, but do you see us?”
Polly could hear Dick saying that the servant knows the master, but the master has no idea about the servant.
“How do you know what’s best for this place?”
“I know as much as you do,” Polly said. “I’ve lived on this land for over eighty years.”
“I guess we’ll see about that,” Hamm said.
Maud was approaching with plates. Hamm Loose introduced himself to her, a flicker of masculine evaluation passing through his blue eyes, which made Polly angry. Maud’s eyes widened with recognition when Hamm’s name was pronounced, and she gave him a curt nod. She’s good, Polly thought.
Heidi also noticed how Maud responded to Hamm, though she didn’t know why. Heidi was content to sit at the table with everyone and eat a bit of food. She looked around, something she never got tired of—this was a beautiful place. She lived in Leeward Cottage with Agnes Lee, who’d known her when she was small, and no one made her do anything much. She was glad to be out of the hospital. She took a lot of walks and she watched the water. She tried swimming but it was too cold. Robert walked with her and helped her over rocks and things. She felt very relaxed with him. He said they’d known each other when they were children, which she thought was nice. She also read. There were lots of books in the house. She read to Clemmie, books about a girl named Nan. She knew the words that would appear on the next page, and Maud told her that she had read her the same books when she was a girl, and to Clemmie when she was younger. So much was funny that way. She read adult books, too, and understood them, though when she tried to talk her brain felt like syrup. “It’s the medicine,” Maud explained. “You’ll think faster when you’re off it completely.”
Heidi dropped a piece of bread and bent down to pick it up. She found herself looking into the face of a chipmunk. The chipmunk was after the bread, too, so she pushed it a little way in that direction. The chipmunk hesitated for a moment but then snatched it and scrammed. Heidi sat back up. She was facing the water, her favorite. The people across the inlet might be curious what was going on here, though maybe they were all here already. There were a lot of people, but now they were at her back. Look—there were Robert and Clemmie and Hope, walking by the sea. She watched them until they blurred. She’d lived here when she was Clemmie’s age, she was told. Robert, though older and taller, had been her friend. Suddenly she caught a glimpse of a different dog, a small white dog. Star, she remembered.
Wait—had she held a chipmunk once?
Agnes lay on her back for a while. She wasn’t wearing a watch, so she couldn’t verify how much time had passed, but by means of her long experience of the light on the Point—on her face, now—she’d put it at nearly five. People would be leaving. Was there even a point to having the Point party anymore? Not one person today had remembered her father to her or evoked the past. Maybe the spell had been broken by canceling the party for the last two summers, or maybe the party had lost its glamour because she was less interested in gossip and more aware of moving toward the next stage—the end.
She wished she had the faith to believe that after death she’d see people she loved again, but she’d never been able to muster that fantasy. Instead she imagined people who had no existence outside her mind and in the minds of the readers who took up her vision and augmented it with their own notion of what the Franklin Square girls looked and sounded like. She’d made up stories. The Fellowship Agreement was also a story, imagined up by her great-grandfather. He’d made up a story that would preserve this land forever, nearly as it was when he first rode his horse down the peninsula. He hadn’t even wanted houses built. The land and the birds were enough for him. He’d compromised in the spirit of fellowship—other people wanted other things, and he’d wanted to be in agreement with them. When he’d set the terms for the dissolution of the association—three shareholders had to agree—did he imagine that such a situation might ever come to pass? Or had that seemed so unlikely that he was, in a sense, making up an absurdity. Three people? Har har! Funny joke! But it had come to that. Unfortunately there was no third person of firm mind who could prevent the joke from being told. Even so, Fellowship Point had had a good run. He’d done well by the land.
The cool of the earth seeped through her silk shirt, and the grass tattooed her arms. She’d like to stay and watch night fall, but she supposed she should go back to her party. Possibly Mary had shown up, though Agnes doubted it. Better for Agnes to show Mary the Point on a quiet day when she could be the only guest. Though it was awkward to think of her as a guest here. If it weren’t for the happenstances of history, and the success of ideas that Agnes, as a Quaker, had been raised to view as wrongheaded—war and conquest and hierarchy and so on, all the bad ideas that had hurt millions—Mary might be living here now. She and her people. They belonged here as surely as—