“What number on Hoicks Hollow?” Pirate asked.

“Thirty-three,” Hayes and Angie said together.

Pirate hit the brakes, and Angie grabbed the seat in front of her.

Pirate eyed Hayes in the rearview mirror. “Are you a friend of Deacon Thorpe’s?”

Hayes put his arm around Angie. “We’re his kids.”

Pirate puzzled over this, taking a glance at Angie in the rearview.

“I’m adopted,” Angie said.

Pirate frowned skeptically, the way people had been doing all of Angie’s life. She’d had one instructor at the CIA who hadn’t believed Angie was Deacon Thorpe’s daughter until Deacon had shown up at graduation.

Pirate said, “I’m very sorry for your loss. Your father was a good man, a generous man. I drove him from the ferry to the house when he came out the last time.”

“You did?” Hayes said. Hayes was in a chipper mood, but of course he had slept for the entire drive, laid out in the backseat, his head resting on his soft suede travel duffel. Angie had tried to snooze on the ferry while Hayes smoked cigarettes and drank Bloody Marys with a very sophisticated couple who owned a cheese shop in Yountville, California. Angie had heard Hayes say, I adore Auberge du Soleil; really, there’s no other place that compares in Napa or Sonoma. A glass of Stags’ Leap chardonnay on that deck in the four o’clock sunshine-well, I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t get any better than that. And she thought, The man can talk to anybody about anything. Hayes leaned over the seat so that he could more easily converse with Pirate. “Really? So you were one of the last people to see our father alive, then?”

“That, I wouldn’t know,” Pirate said. He seemed suddenly uncomfortable, and Angie realized he might not want that distinction.

She was happy to get out of the cab, much as she dreaded all that lay ahead.

Hayes said, “Do you have a card, man? So we can party with you later?”

“Party with you later”? Angie thought. Was Hayes on drugs? There wasn’t going to be any partying later. All that was happening later was a lot of painful interaction with family.

Pirate handed Hayes his card-it had a skull-and-crossbones motif, very original-and then made a grand production of extracting their luggage from the Lincoln’s trunk.

“Please call me,” Pirate said. “I would love to be your driver while you’re on-island.” He and Hayes shook hands, Hayes gave him thirty dollars, and then Pirate leapt over the driver’s side door, into the seat. Angie rolled her eyes, then turned to stare at the front of the house with dread.

She suffered a positively dismaying memory of her father and Scarlett’s wedding. Angie had been sixteen years old and had not wanted to attend. She had loved and worshipped Scarlett once upon a time. But in Scarlett’s second appearance in Angie’s life-as her soon-to-be stepmother-she had had far less appeal. Angie’s nanny-who had let her swim in Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and helped Angie throw a full-blown Halloween party in the middle of April-was now the same woman making all the screaming sex noises coming from her father’s bedroom.

The wedding had been held in Scarlett’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia, during the sweltering first week of July. The air in Savannah had smelled like a swamp, and the trees had hung heavy with Spanish moss, which Angie had never seen before; it reminded her of hair tangled in a drain. The fountains in the squares were dry; the river was stagnant and a breeding ground for mosquitoes the size of sparrows. The old mansions in town were pretty, but Angie couldn’t get past the fact that they had most likely been built by slaves. Scarlett’s parents lived in the prettiest house in Savannah; even Angie had to admit that this was true. It was a yellow clapboard Victorian with gables and a magnificent wraparound porch, complete with lush hanging ferns-possibly the only greenery thriving in the entire city-and a swing and a line of rocking chairs. When Deacon and Angie had knocked on the formidable front door, a black maid in a turquoise uniform and a pristine white apron had answered.

She had looked at Angie first, then at Deacon, then back at Angie. “Can I help y’all?” she asked.

“I’m the groom!” Deacon had exclaimed.

“Let me go fetch Mrs. Oliver,” the maid had said.

Deacon and Angie had remained on the front porch. It was the first of a thousand times Angie had wished to go home.

Mrs. Oliver had turned out to be Scarlett’s mother, Prudence, known to her familiars as Prue; Angie was certainly not the woman’s familiar and decided never to call her anything, not even Mrs. Oliver. Prue was simply an older version of Scarlett, with the same black hair, hers pulled back in a chignon; the same pale skin; the same vermilion lipstick. “Deacon,” she said, making the name rhyme with “bacon.” “You’re here.”

“That I am,” Deacon said. He shook Prue’s hand, then ushered Angie forward, like a hostess gift. “And this is my daughter, Angie.”

“Yes,” Prue had said. “I’ve heard all about Angie.”

Angie assumed this meant Prue had long ago been warned that Angie was black.

There had been many offensive things about Deacon’s wedding to Scarlett. Angie had been the only family member to attend-Hayes had gotten a pass because he was on his first assignment for the magazine, in Switzerland-and the only other person to attend from Deacon’s life was Buck, who had served as best man.

“Rewind, repeat,” Buck said to Scarlett’s uncle, the appeals judge who married the happy couple. “I was Deacon’s best man the last time around as well.”

The ceremony had been held in the meticulously landscaped back garden of the yellow mansion. Angie had roasted in the long-sleeved lavender lace dress that Scarlett had picked out for her. It was Givenchy, but who cared? It was sadistic to put a dark girl in long-sleeved scratchy material in a sickening color when it was a hundred and ten degrees out.

Worse than the heat and Scarlett’s relatives (who were self-proclaimed Confederates and therefore, Angie assumed, racists), or the fact that the Thorpes were so woefully outnumbered, was that Deacon was trying so hard to make Scarlett’s family like him, to accept him, to consider him good enough. Angie didn’t understand the dynamics at play. Scarlett had been their nanny; she had worked for them. But when Angie tried to make this point, Deacon said, “Scarlett comes from an old Savannah family, sweetheart. She was raised as a member of society.”

Deacon had worn a seersucker suit and a bow tie, and Angie had barked out a laugh and said, “What did you do with my father?”

It wasn’t bad enough that Angie was losing her father; apparently, he was losing himself. Gone was his cool self-confidence, gone was his devil-may-care attitude, gone was what Angie had thought of as his essential superiority to every other man in the world. When he was conversing with the judge uncle and Scarlett’s parents-Prue and Scarlett’s upright corpse of a father, Brace-Deacon sounded downright obsequious. He must have mentioned sixty times that Angie was getting straight As at Chapin, “a prestigious girls’ boarding school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,” and that his own “five-year plan” included “opening my own place somewhere in midtown, just as soon as I cultivate the right group of investors.”

Angie thought, Since when do you have to brag about my grades or state your goals?

The worst of the worst, however, happened during the champagne toasts that preceded the cutting of the cake. By this time, Angie was rip-roaring drunk herself, thanks to a fraternity boy from Ole Miss named Burt, who slipped a liberal amount of rum into each of Angie’s Cokes.

Deacon had raised his flute and said, “Scarlett and I have an announcement to make.”

Angie had thought, What kind of announcement? They were already married. What was left?

Scarlett said, “I’m pregnant.”

There was an ambiguous reaction from those assembled-some grumbles, some here-here’s with glasses held aloft. Angie’s own reaction had been clear-cut: she had vomited in the grass at her feet.


Now, she and Hayes ascended the steps to the front porch in near-perfect unison. A board on the floor of the porch in front of the welcome mat was loose, and Angie nearly stumbled over it.

Hayes pulled a couple of white pills out of his pocket. He threw one back, washed it down with a sip of the watery Bloody Mary he’d been nursing since they got off the ferry. He held the other pill out to Angie.

“Vicodin?” he said. “Take the edge off?”

Angie stared at the pill. There were multiple loci of her pain-her father’s death, Joel’s puzzling silence, and then… whatever waited inside this house. But Angie surprised herself by realizing that she didn’t want to take the edge off. She wanted to feel everything. Mostly, she wanted to cry.

“No, thanks,” she said.

Hayes shrugged, pocketed the pill, and held the door open. “After you,” he said.

Laurel and Buck were sitting on stools in the kitchen, having drinks. When they saw Hayes and Angie walk in, they jumped to their feet.

“You made it!” Laurel cried out. She hugged Hayes, and Buck hugged Angie.

Angie wanted to grill Buck with a thousand silly, insecure questions: Did my father love me? Did he think I was talented? Did he think I was smart? Was he proud of me?

Did he know about me and Joel?

Did he love me as much as Hayes or Ellery?

Buck released Angie; he and Laurel did a little dance step and switched partners. Buck gave Hayes a man hug, while Laurel embraced Angie.

“Oh, sweet Angie,” Laurel said.

“It’s so weird being here without him,” Angie said. She had been coming to this house with her father every summer of her life. Just behind Laurel’s head was the spot on the door frame where Angie, Hayes, and Ellery had all been measured with pencil marks at the end of each summer. Home is where the hash marks are, Angie thought. Deacon used to do the measuring on the last day of their stay, and he always said the same thing: My, my, look how you have grown!