The next letter in the series was the one that had just arrived. Agnes considered. She wouldn’t rewrite the book, but perhaps that was a message more successfully delivered in person.
Anyway, Polly’s family was coming and Agnes would have no playmate for a few weeks.
She went to the back room again, typed out a letter, and printed two copies. She reread it again before putting it in the envelope.
Dear Maud,
As we live in a semi-free country, I can’t stop you from coming to Maine. There’s no bed-and-breakfast nearby so you may as well stay here. I have a lot of room, as you may have gathered. I’ll give you more info about travel shortly.
A.
Agnes found Polly in her dining room playing with place settings. She’d asked Sylvie to come along, but she’d declined. Sylvie was aware that Polly felt inhibited in her presence.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” they said at the same time.
Agnes was dressed as usual—jeans, an old family sweater, sneaks. Polly had on a skirt.
“What if we walk around the Sank?” Agnes said.
“I can walk around the Sank in this. It’s about a hundred yards of material.” Polly pulled the sides apart—and curtsied. They’d curtsied to the headmistress every morning for years at Miss Dictor’s.
“You can still bend a knee,” Agnes said.
Polly rubbed at her leg. “Not really.”
“I’m going for rustic yet elegant.” Agnes put her hair behind her shoulders.
“You achieved the rustic part.”
“They aren’t going to care how we look if we hand over the land.”
“You make a good point,” Polly said. “Now come help me. I thought I’d serve from the sideboard.”
Earlier Polly and Shirley had made a crabmeat salad, a tomato aspic mold, corn muffins, and iced tea and set it out on the sideboard.
“Where is Shirley? I see her drive by but I never run into her.”
“I sent her home for the afternoon. She’s coming back later to wash the dishes. I don’t need that, of course, but I want to pay her.” Polly adjusted the placement of the serving dishes. Agnes would have separated them by another half an inch—but it wasn’t her house.
“Butter. I’ll get it.” Agnes felt strong and eager. That wasn’t the case every day anymore, and when it was she sought ways to apply her vigor.
The two guests arrived, and after brief introductions they sat down. The meal began with the usual sort of small talk, a sighting of Martha Stewart in Northeast Harbor and reports of nearby moose. Agnes had spoken to the person called Jane on the phone and was gratified to see that she looked exactly as imagined: slightly stooped, wiry gray hair, dressed like a hiker, knowing. Her partner, Nathan, was tall enough that the height of the rooms at Meadowlea seemed necessary, and he was a handsome man. Fiftyish, boyish slenderness, relentlessly polite—the better to coax people to part with their property. An Archie Lee type.
They had come armed with a plan, and many examples of successful people who’d recently donated lands. Had Polly or Agnes heard about the gift of Aldemere Farm in Camden to the Maine Coast Heritage Trust? “The Oreo cookie cows,” Polly said. Yes, they’d heard. Polly asked how it worked with the houses on a property and was assured that it could work any way the owners wanted. The houses could remain privately owned, and only the land put into trust; or they could be put into a conservation easement whereby the family could use them in perpetuity but they would belong to the trust; or they could be donated but remain in the hands of the present owners until their deaths. There were also many options for how the transfer could work. The land could be directly donated all at once, or it could be donated a bit at a time, or it could be sold to the trust and bought with funds raised by the trust for that purpose, or the transfer could be structured so that the family would get an annual annuity to live on. And so on. Basically, it could work any way they wanted.
“This place is so well cared for,” Jane said. “Who is your caretaker?”
“Robert Circumstance,” said Agnes and Polly in the same moment.
Nathan paused, fork and knife held in midair. “How do I know that name?”
“He’s a landscape architect. He’s done a lot of gardens along the coast,” Polly said.
“The gardens here as well,” Agnes added.
“No, that’s not it.” Nathan looked at his plate for the answer.
Agnes and Polly had the discipline to not even exchange a glance. Agnes watched Nathan pursue the question and felt a flash of hate toward him. Immediately she corrected herself. Ire might push him toward what he sought—a memory of Robert on the front page of the Portland Herald, being led out of the courthouse in handcuffs. Agnes wished she’d never seen that image.
“Well, it’s just lovely in any case.” Jane smiled at them. She’s like Polly, Agnes thought, always seeking equilibrium.
“And we want it to remain so,” Agnes said. “It should be obvious that that must be done, but there are those who only care about development.” Spoken as if it were a curse word, as she believed it to be. “We are most interested in how the birds would be cared for.”
“In other places the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service oversees the care and well-being of birds and animals on trust sites,” Jane said. “Do you know what birds nest here, specifically?”
“That would be good to know, wouldn’t it?” Nathan asked as he stood to forage for seconds.
“We’ve kept records for over a hundred years.” She didn’t offer to show them.
“That’s good, that will be very helpful,” said Jane.
Nathan had the habit of running his thumbs over the pads of his fingers. He even did it between bites. He also hid his cherry tomatoes under a piece of lettuce. Sexual tells? Evidence of secret greed? Agnes made a mental note of these gestures.
“Are the U.S. Fish and whatever people good at taking care of birds? We have a system. Will they follow our system?” Agnes picked up a tomato in her fingers and popped it in her mouth. “Oh, that’s so good. I wonder if we have more tomatoes in the kitchen. I’d love to have another right now.”
Nathan glanced at his plate. Mens rea.
“I think they’ll do as you ask,” Jane said. She had the sheepish look of someone who knew things weren’t going very well.
Leave it to Polly to feel sorry for them. “What projects are you working on now?” she asked encouragingly.
Nathan piped up. “We are planning to purchase a several-hundred-acre tract near the Penobscot River, don’t you know. We’re sorting out the rights. There is another group interested, too, a Wabanaki group, but it doesn’t seem as though they’ll be able to raise the money.”
“I didn’t know the Native Americans buy land,” Polly said. “I thought they lived on reservations.”
“It’s complicated,” Jane said, setting down her fork. “I have never been able to follow all the treaties that were made and broken in New England. It comes down to the Wabanaki in general seeing themselves as sovereign peoples and wanting to self-govern. The concept of land relationship is different, too. They have the idea of peoples and tribes having rights to hunt and fish in specific places, but traditionally they don’t believe anyone can own a plot.”