years.”
“Children?”
“A daughter. Shannon. She’s seventeen. She just graduated high school.”
“College plans?”
“The Oberlin Conservatory of Music,” I said. “She’s a cellist.”
He looked impressed. “Wow,” he said.
“What kind of work do you do?” I asked, then held up my hand. “Wait. Let me guess,” I said. “You teach marine biology.”
He laughed. “I’m a carpenter,” he said.
“Oh.” I nodded. That was not what I’d expected. If anyone had told me skinny little Ethan Chapman would end up working with his hands instead of his head, I never would have believed it. I thought of his ambitious father, Rosswell Chapman III or whatever he had been. The summer I was twelve, he was chief justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court and he later ran unsuccessfully for governor. I wondered if he’d been disappointed to see his sons turn out to be an accountant and a carpenter rather than follow him into law or politics.
“I wasn’t the least bit surprised you turned out to be a writer,” Ethan said.
“No?”
“Your family was so artsy. Your mother painted, right?”
“That’s right. She was a teacher, but she painted as a hobby.” I’d almost forgotten how my mother loved to set up her easel on the bungalow porch.
“And your father was a doctor, but wasn’t he a writer, too?”
“A columnist for a magazine,” I said.
“You’ve got a daughter who plays the cello,” he continued. “And your little sister, Lucy, used to play that plastic violin.”
“What?” I laughed. “I don’t remember that at all, but you’re probably right because she does play the violin now. She’s in a band called the ZydaChicks.”
He smiled. “There you go,” he said.
I took a sip of my iced tea, wondering if Isabel would have shown any special talent if she’d been given the chance to grow up.
Ethan was still smiling at me, his head cocked to one side.
“What?” I asked.
“You really, really look terrific,” he said.
I felt myself blush. “Thanks,” I said.
“I mean it,” he said, then leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Well, I guess we’d better talk about what we came here to talk about.” He lifted the briefcase from the floor and pulled out an envelope. “Abby told me she showed you a copy of the letter,” he said, handing it to me.
I studied the envelope. Unlike the typed letter, the address of the police department was handwritten, printed in precise, slanted letters.
“Why haven’t you taken it to the police?” I asked, shifting my focus from the envelope to his eyes. They were a clear, deep blue. I’d never noticed their color behind the Coke-bottle glasses he used to wear. “I mean, it’s obvious that Ned wanted them to have it.”
“No, he obviously had second thoughts,” Ethan corrected me. His voice might have been gentle, but the words carried their own force and, although I didn’t agree with him, I liked how he stood up for himself. Glen always allowed people to steamroll right over him. “The letter was dated a couple of months before he died,” Ethan added.
“But he didn’t throw it away,” I said.
Ethan sighed. “Julie, if I take it to the police, they’re going to assume Ned did it. They’re going to start asking questions. I don’t care what they ask me, but my father is elderly. I don’t want his last years to be spent thinking that his son murdered someone. I have a buddy at the police department and I ran this by him, in a hypothetical sort of way. He said they’d open the case up again. They didn’t do much with forensics back then, so they’d be looking at the evidence from a new perspective now. But they’d almost certainly want to talk with my father. I don’t want to put him through it.”
I saw genuine concern in his face and couldn’t help but be touched by his reasoning. I hoped I could protect my mother from ever knowing anything at all about the letter, no matter what the outcome. I wasn’t sure I would be able to, though. I knew from the sort of books I wrote that Ethan’s friend at the police department was right. It didn’t matter how old the case was, the police would reopen it. Start fresh. I just prayed they could leave my mother out of it. Ross Chapman, though, would certainly be questioned, since he was the person who’d confirmed Ned’s alibi. “Is your mother also still alive?” I asked.
The waitress arrived with our food before he could answer, and we fell into small talk with her about her sunburn. She’d fallen asleep on the beach, she said, pressing her hands to her crimson cheeks once she’d set our plates on the table.
“I’m in agony,” she said, with a flair for drama.
Ethan reached into his briefcase again and pulled out a tube of lotion. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Put this on the burn. It takes the sting away instantly.”
She looked surprised. “Thank you,” she said.
“You can keep it,” Ethan added.
“That’s so nice of you,” she said, slipping the tube into her apron pocket. “Don’t worry about a tip.”
Once she’d left our table, I turned to him. “Do you always carry sunburn cream with you?” I asked. I liked that he’d talked so easily to the waitress. Glen would have looked right through her. Why did I keep comparing him to Glen?
Ethan shrugged. “I love being outdoors,”he said, “but two minutes in the sun and I’m burned. I have to work up to it gradually.”
I smiled. I could still see the delicate little kid in him, hiding behind a much manlier facade. I watched the muscles in his forearms shift as he lifted the hamburger to his mouth. The triangle of skin in the open collar of his shirt was the same ruddy tan as the rest of him, and for a moment, I got lost in the shallow valley at the base of his throat. The muscles low in my belly suddenly contracted. It had been so long since I’d experienced that sensation that it took me a moment to recognize it as desire.
Oh, I thought, this is very strange.
“I was asking about your mother,” I said, returning to the relative safety of our conversation.
“Right,” he said, swallowing a bite of his hamburger. “She died last year. And that’s part of why I’m concerned about my father. He was broken up about Mom, and Ned’s death really hit him hard. I’m trying to get him to see a counselor, someone who works with the elderly, but he won’t accept help any more than Ned would.” He lifted a French fry to his mouth, then set it down again. “I actually think he wants to die at this point.”
“Is he ill?” I asked.
“Not ill. Just old. Just
