for all of us. None of us’ll ever have money enough to fight about, anyway.”
“Perfect set-ups have a way of becoming imperfect. Life and circumstance—both change.” Judge Twohey shook his head. “Well, Mr. O’Leary, I understand that God takes care of fools and children—my experience to the contrary notwithstanding. I wish you’d listen to me. But if you won’t, you won’t.”
CHAPTER III
IF SPIG O’LEARY had asked, no one would have told him. The site of the bridge that was to cross the Devon River, picked by the Corps of Army Engineers, and the location of the super-highway, Devon County’s link in the new coastal defence system, were top secret in the hands of the State Roads Commission. There were rumours in Devonport, but Spig O’Leary was clearing honeysuckle, week-ends and nights when he got home. It took him another three months to find out that the bridge site and almost a mile of the dual-lane approach to it were on the Plumtree Cove tract, on the Eden’s Landing side of Harlan Sudley’s fence line. The reason for Judge Twohey’s warning was also clear. The bridge site and a good two-tenths of a mile of the approach were on the ten velvet acres the O’Leary’s had given Kathy for a wedding present—very velvet for Kathy and Stan Ashton. The bridge, fifty feet from Sudley’s marker on the shore, took two hundred feet of the Ashtons’ beach. The two-tenths of a mile right-of-way on it took four of their ten acres. The Ashtons took eight thousand dollars. The next section of right-of-way was five acres belonging to the O’Leary’s, but it was through the filled-in marsh and not good for much. The O’Leary’s got the standard fifty dollars an acre.
But there wasn’t any dissension. The O’Leary’s could have used the eight thousand dollars. They were a little rueful, but they weren’t bitter, and by the time the cheque came, they were glad it gave Stan Ashton the chance to take a couple of years off and write his book, “Safety Factors in Highway Control.”
“It’ll make him famous and we’ll all be so proud of him . . .” Kathy was starry-eyed and confident. And it did make him famous, but not at once—not until a paper-backed edition of the book was brought hastily out when Kathy was killed in the first hideous accident on the new two-million dollar bypass around Devonport. Coming home from a strawberry festival at the church, she put on speed to pass a gasoline truck in front of the Breezy Inn as six punk kids roared out into the road, cutting directly across in front of the truck. Seven people were dead, before or after the truck exploded no one knew, and the driver died that evening. That was just three months after the Governor had come down to open Devon’s link in the new highway. The O’Learys were bitter then, not about land or money but about the road and about Stan Ashton and his book. It had a new title, “Death Takes the High Road,” with a lurid picture on the front cover, maybe not Kathy but somebody like her, and a sub-title, “An Author’s Personal Tragedy,” with a note about the author’s three-year-old child. Maybe none of it was Stan Ashton’s fault, but having a best seller certainly eased his personal tragedy. The O’Learys and Molly Ashton, the three-year-old who’d come to stay with them, saw him on television but seldom in person. Until one Sunday afternoon, not a full five months after Kathy’s death, he came out driving a Cadillac convertible that belonged to the blonde girl in the seat beside him.
“This is Anita,” he said happily. “I wanted her to meet you. We’re going to be married Wednesday. You’ll put her up overnight, won’t you? She couldn’t stay in that flea bag in town, and you know my stand on motels.” As an afterthought, he asked, “Where’s little Molly?”
“She’s with our kids,” Spig said. “They’re having a picnic supper over at Miss Fairlie’s.”
“Well, then, don’t bother,” Stan said. “Anita can see her later. She’s got a kid of her own. Lucy. She’s sixteen.”
“Fifteen,” said Anita. She was slim, sleek and self-possessed, not as young as she’d looked in the car, dark-eyed, with long hair in a knot of glittering gold at the nape of her neck. She was polite and detached, a transient at a convenient inn. She tossed her floppy black hat on the sofa and tapped her lips to smother a yawn. “Don’t you get horribly bored, way out here?”
“We love it,” Molly said.
Stan lighted a cigarette with a new gold lighter. He was tall, on the slender side, clean-cut and boyish in a sort of academic way, with his steel-rimmed spectacles. The quiet shyness that had been one of his most attractive qualities seemed to have got swallowed up somewhere along the line.
“We’ll just mosey on over and have a look at my place,” he said. “Anita’s got plans for a house she wants to build. We’re going to turn the old shack into a garage with a guest studio upstairs. Anita knows a lot of topflight artists. They can come down and work, be company for her while I finish the new book. They’ll be a bit of leaven for the local dough-heads.”
A little towards the woods between the two places, he left Anita and came back. “I knew you’d be crazy about her,” he said. “Her first husband was a louse, stinking rich, but her father’s a lawyer, so she got enough to do as she pleases. You’ll probably want to get some of the neighbours in, but let’s keep it small—just the Camerons and Potters. We brought some Scotch in the trunk. We won’t be long.”
The Camerons and the Potters had the only show places, except Eden itself, out on the peninsula known as Eden’s Neck. The rest of the neighbours were people like the O’Learys, with jobs in Washington, people who wanted a place for their kids and had bought two or three acres when Sudley sold off a worn-out farm across from Miss Fairlie’s gate on the old road.
Spig tried to avoid the pale shattered look in Molly’s eyes as she stood there, a white line around her lips. Then he went over to her.
“I’m all right.” She turned abruptly away. “How could he? Oh, how could he!” she whispered. “What’s happened to him? He used to be so——”
“Don’t, Molly . . . please.” Spig was sick himself, and then angry, at the callous nonchalance of Stan Ashton’s announcement. “And I’m damned if we’re going to call the Camerons.”
“Yes.” Molly’s eyes kindled. “Yes, we are. We’re not going to be rude to her.” She turned quickly back to him. “Spig—she won’t take Molly A., will she? I couldn’t bear . . .”
“I don’t think we need to worry.”
“Then you call the Camerons. Ask them to lend us some Scotch—I wouldn’t touch theirs. And ask them to bring ice—the kids took ours to Miss Fairlie’s.”
They thought about Kathy’s child, but they didn’t think about Kathy’s property. Not till later when Joe Cameron and Spig were out in the kitchen. Over the pink geraniums on the long window sill they could see the airy silver structure of the bridge, soaring gallantly out across the Devon, white sails like a flock of shining sea birds resting on the blue, sunlit water beneath it. Its landfall was hidden at this end by the pair of great chestnut oaks on the Ashtons’ shore. The only sign there was a highway over there was a wide gap in the tree tops, in front of the taller beeches and willow oaks that filled the shallow arc between the road and Sudley’s fences.
“Lucky for us old Stan’s a Town Planner and a big wheel in highway improvement circles,” Joe Cameron remarked. He was a big, red-faced man with light hair and stupid, ox-brown eyes, as steady as an ox and very shrewd. “The little lady looks more like Bailey’s Beach than Plumtree Cove to me, and that’s a nice fifty feet Stan’s got between the bridge and Sudley’s place. And about three hundred yards along the road? Might be a temptation to cash in . . . if she didn’t like it down here.”
Spig
