“Go! Scat! Scram, ya bloody blackguards!”
They rose into the air.
“And you!” She turned to the mother eider. “Could you do a better job watching your kids? You’re giving me a heart attack!”
The eider craned her neck and spun around. She paddled off nonchalantly, considering the danger. The ducklings followed, equally unconcerned.
“Morons,” she said. Yet she was glad they were safe. She’d prevailed for one morning. She turned back toward the house and walked up the path, the wall of rugosa rose scratching at her jeans. Robert’s truck was tooling down the road. In spite of her agitation, it made her smile to see him step from the truck. She often teased him that he could have been the Marlboro Man, with his gaze trained on doings high on the mesa. He took after his rangy father, where his siblings were stocky like Mrs. Circumstance.
“It’s about time you rolled up. You missed the drama.”
Elegantly, he shut the door behind him. “Oh? What was that?”
“The gulls!” She poked her stick at him. “What can we do about them?”
“Whoa! Put that thing down.” Robert leaned against his truck and looked at her fondly. He was deeply tanned. Outdoor work. “What do you think we can do? Or let me rephrase—what do you want to do?”
“I don’t want to see them snacking on the ducklings while I am trying to work in the mornings. Anything that will put a stop to that.”
He nodded slowly, as if thinking the problem through from every vantage point. As he did when he planned a new garden bed. His hair slipped down over his forehead, just as Hiram’s always had. Robert now sported a few grays. “I can understand that. I could shoot them.”
“Har har. What else have you got? I want them gone, but not dead.”
“They are regulars here. This is their favorite restaurant. I don’t know that I can interfere with nature.” He squinted rather than wearing sunglasses. Cowboy.
“Excuse me, but aren’t you a landscape architect? Isn’t interfering with nature your métier?”
He laughed. “Agnes, I can rely on you to keep things honest.”
“So you’ve got nothing for me?”
“Beyond applauding your efforts? Nothing that I would feel good about.”
“Oh, all right.”
“Nature can be harsh.” He gave her such a sympathetic look that she felt better. It always gave her a jolt when men could be of comfort—though Robert often gave her that jolt. “Speaking of which, what’s news on the eagles?”
“I’m concerned about the nest near the Deel Club. I haven’t seen as much activity as there should be around it. We’ll see.”
“Fingers crossed they’re all right. And how’s my cousin Archie? You were working there yesterday, I take it.”
“I was, for longer than I expected. The boxwood I put in last spring isn’t happy. Which was predictable. But a certain someone is insisting on having topiary in her garden.” He raised his eyebrows playfully. “Seela Lee is a tough customer.”
“Dammit, Robert, there’s plenty of work for you here, and all over the Cape, and all over Maine, and the world! Seela is going to eat up all your time, on purpose. Polly and I will be picking weeds by August.” Agnes’s blood came up again at the thought of Robert being monopolized by Seela. An image of her bony wrist encircled by chiming Lee charm bracelets came to mind. She gritted her teeth.
“No. I’ll be here. Don’t worry about that.”
“Robert! What aren’t you telling me?”
Robert crossed his arms and twisted around to look up at the sky. His movements were easy, graceful. He always seemed to be doing things slowly and deliberately, but he accomplished more than anybody. “We could use some rain.”
“Robert!” Now she was enjoying herself. A little flirting lifted her spirits. She saw Polly get giggly around her sons. Well, Robert was like a son to her, if fondness were the measure.
“All right. You’ll find out anyway. Mrs. Lee has asked me to make her a white garden, modeled on Sissinghurst.”
Agnes banged her stick on the ground. “You have got to be kidding! If she’s ever read a single book by anyone in the Bloomsbury group, I’ll dig the garden myself. Honestly, there’s no excuse for her. Once again I wonder why they don’t buy a house in the Hamptons and be done with it. Especially after the great wampum belt robbery of 1999.” She couldn’t think of the mayhem Seela had caused the summer before without feeling a wave of disgust.
“They’re having a security system put in,” he taunted.
“Oh, for God’s sake. Can’t he just accept that it was one of his light-fingered friends who took it? Or that he threw it out himself after a few drinks?”
The summer before, when Archie Lee took a visitor into his library to show her his treasures, his version of the Let me show you my etchings routine, he noticed that an extremely valuable wampum belt was missing from the display case. He wasn’t exactly sure when it had disappeared, but he remembered having shown it to another houseguest not long before. The belt was one of his favorite belongings, a classic and symbolic pattern—though it didn’t come out what the symbols stood for. When he noticed the object was missing, Archie called the police—Bobby and Joe, boys well known to them. They were flummoxed from the beginning, their line being DUIs and thefts from the campgrounds, barking dogs and loud parties, and lately, meth labs in trailers. Art theft was an unprecedented incident on Cape Deel, and the belt was easy to abscond with. It could be anywhere, and anyone passing through the house could have easily pocketed it.
Archie could talk of nothing but the theft. Seela was as aggrieved as Archie. Her degree of upset and devotion to his cause illuminated the reasons for his attraction to her. Agnes knew the type—a woman who took over without the man quite knowing what happened—and ran his life, well. She loved to write about such women, who by all rights should be running the world. Seela was older than Archie by fifteen years, but that was of no consequence compared to the easy existence she made possible for him. Yoko, Agnes joked, without the creativity. A shrewd helpmeet in a disaster, such as the theft of the wampum belt, as she laid her arthritic fingers on the pulse of every party and sensed when the time had come to limit the subject to a few answers about developments in the case. She didn’t want Archie to become known as a bore.
But Archie rejected her concern. As certain as Dick was of his erudition, Archie was of his allure. “How could this happen?” he asked, with the incredulity of a person who’d never come in touch with rejection. He didn’t feel the need to add the words that obviously came at the end of his question: to me? It went around that he was thinking of hiring a private detective from New York. “That places him,” Dick said. Agnes was always bemused when Dick lapsed into snobbery—his bleeding heart pumping out its true colors.
“Tell me you’re not going to do it,” Agnes said now. “Robert, please quit them. It’s a waste of your time.”
“It’ll be all right. I told her it might be hard to get the right plants.” He didn’t seem at all put out.