And in the center was Penny, her long, dark hair pulled back from her face by a headband, the blue of her sundress echoed in the blue of her round eyes. In this photo her mouth was partially open, as though she’d been caught laughing.

Laughing in the picture taken hours before her death. We could barely wrap our minds around it.

Overall, opinion on the article was good. Princess Diana had been no better remembered, we said. We took pride in that. Nantucket nurtured its own.


It did seem strange to us that there was no mention at all-none whatsoever-of Jake Randolph. Jake had been Penny’s boyfriend since freshman year, and the two of them were rarely out of each other’s sight. They had shared the kind of absorbing true love that only the luckiest among us found in high school. And yet the article hadn’t mentioned Jake, and none of Penny’s friends had mentioned Jake. We checked the byline: Lorna Dobbs. We wondered if maybe Lorna Dobbs hadn’t known about the salt- and-pepper, peanut-butter- and-jelly matched set of Penny and Jake. But how could she not have known? Then we wondered if the long arm of Jordan Randolph could be exerting its influence from half a world away. Maybe Jordan had instructed his staff not to pair the names of Penelope Alistair and Jordan Randolph. We noted that in this article there had been only passing reference to the accident that had caused Penny’s death. We initially thought that this was as it should have been. After all, the piece was meant to celebrate Penny’s life, not explain the circumstances of her death. But then we began to wonder if this might not be by design also.

These questions nagged, but eventually we let them go. We saved the article, folded it carefully, and tucked it away in a drawer or scrapbook where we would find it years or decades later, only to be struck yet again by the sad mystery of it all.

JORDAN

July was winter: he had to keep reminding himself of that. But winter weather in Fremantle was humid and balmy, much like a really good day in late May at home. It was 73 degrees Fahrenheit, without a cloud in the sky; it had been raining every night, and everyone’s garden was going gangbusters. The grass was so green it hurt Jordan’s eyes to look at it.

On the last Sunday in July, Ava took Jake to Heathcote Park for a family barbecue. Ava had brought her son back to Australia with her four times, but not since grade school, and neither Jake nor Jordan had seen anyone from Ava’s family since they’d been here this time. This had been at Jordan’s specific request. He wanted to give Jake a chance to settle in. And the last thing Jordan wanted was for their rental house to be inundated by Ava’s relatives. Things were bad enough as it was.

The person Jordan dreaded seeing most was Ava’s mother, Dearie. Dearie had been a perfect bitch toward him when he journeyed halfway across the globe to ask for her daughter’s hand in marriage, but she’d been even worse on the one occasion when she’d come to the States. On that visit, she had told Jordan that he was no better than a criminal in her eyes. He had abducted her daughter; he had broken up the freakishly close-knit Price clan. “As if losing Father wasn’t bad enough!” Dearie screamed at Jordan on the penultimate evening of her visit, when she had drunk an entire bottle of Riesling by herself.

Jordan tried to point out that he hadn’t stolen Ava. He had asked her to marry him, she had said no, and he had retreated to the States with his tail tucked, a perfect gentleman. Ava’s return to Nantucket the following summer had come as a complete surprise to him; he’d had nothing to do with it. “She came back to me of her own volition,” he told Dearie. The reason for Ava’s return had never been clear to him-just one of many mysteries about the woman. But he refused to take the blame.

Because of his abhorrence of Dearie, Jordan had flat-out refused to go to the barbecue with his wife and son. This was very bad behavior on his part, and it led to a near-rebellion by Jake.

“I don’t get it,” Jake said. “Why do I have to go, but you don’t?”

“They want to see you, not me,” Jordan said. He thought back to the family dinner he’d suffered through on the evening he’d arrived in Perth so many years ago. All he’d wanted was five minutes alone with Ava so he could properly kiss her, but the house was so crammed with people that it verged on the comical. It was like dozens of clowns’ climbing out of a Volkswagen: just when Jordan thought there couldn’t possibly be any more relatives, another one would descend the stairs or pop out of the bathroom. Dearie had cooked three legs of lamb to feed everybody, and all Jordan remembered was that he was served the burnt ends. Ava, for some reason, had been seated at the opposite end of a very long table, and Jordan got the impression that though he had traveled ten million miles to see her, he hadn’t gotten any closer. “You’re their blood,” he told Jake now. “But I’m not.”

“God,” Jake said.

Jordan felt sorry for his son. Jordan had met the Price family twenty years ago, and since then everyone had married and reproduced. Ava’s siblings had a passel of kids among them. Ava’s oldest sister, Greta, had a daughter named Amanda who was pregnant at eighteen. She was only a year older than Jake, and she was having a baby. Greta was going to be a grandmother at forty-seven. And the worst part was, nobody in the Price family saw the shame in this. Ava reported that Dearie was positively over the moon about it; she glowed as though she were the one who was pregnant. She was sixty-seven years old and about to be a great-grandmother.

The population of Western Australia was 2.3 million, and half of those people had to be Prices. In that family, progeny was more important than career or religion or net worth. This explained why Ava, when they first got married, had said she wanted “at least five” children. Jordan had laughed. Five children? Who, in this day and age, wanted five children? It was irresponsible. When Ava had trouble conceiving again after Jake was born, Jordan was inwardly relieved. Unfortunately, he’d made the grave error of letting his relief show. He’d said, “I was an only child, and I turned out just fine,” to which Ava had angrily responded, “I am not having an ONLY CHILD!” She was a Price, after all. Her sister Greta had six; her brother Noah had three boys already, and his wife was pregnant again with twin boys, which meant they would undoubtedly try for a sixth.

Ava had pursued a second pregnancy the same way she used to play volleyball on the beach: ruthlessly. She did all the things that the desperate-to-conceive do: she bought a kit that tracked her ovulation, she took her basal temperature, she hunted down Jordan night after night so they could try out new positions that she’d heard might help: her on top, him behind her, her hanging upside down. For a while he’d loved it-what man wouldn’t? But as the years passed, she grew frantic. It was bad enough that Ava was the only member of her family who had married an American, now she was also the only one who was having problems conceiving! (Dearie, it was well known, had gotten pregnant with Ava’s youngest brother, Damon, at the age of forty-two while she had an IUD in place!) Ava began to suspect that she was unable to conceive precisely because Jordan was American. And an only child. She accused him of having lazy sperm; she suggested one night that perhaps he’d secretly had a vasectomy. Jordan was then subjected to a hospital visit during which he had to jerk off into a plastic cup just so the lab technician-Charlotte Volmer, whom he’d gone to high school with-could reassure him that all was well. He had millions of healthy swimmers.

The chase for baby number two grew tiresome. Ava used to appear at the newspaper on the night of a deadline and demand that Jordan lock the door to his office and have sex with her right then. The first time it happened, their subsequent emergence garnered a round of enthusiastic applause from his staff. The tenth time, hardly anyone looked up.

In ways too numerous to count, the Prices’ obsession with progeny had ruined Jordan’s life.

When it began to seem clear that a second baby was never going to happen, when Jordan had given up hope and he believed Ava had as well, Ava returned to Australia alone. She had planned to stay for two weeks, but she ended up staying for six. During their phone calls, Jordan gently inquired as to when she might be coming home. He missed her. He missed her as his wife, and he missed her as Jake’s mother; she had left him as a single parent, and he also had a newspaper to run. Jake was only twelve years old at the time, and Jordan had to feed him, help him with his homework, and chauffeur him all over the island. Jordan was careful not to press too hard, however: Ava’s trips to Australia were a touchy subject because for all the times that she had gone back, Jordan had never accompanied her. He told her it was because he couldn’t leave the newspaper, which was true enough, but more than that, it was because he didn’t want to go. In this particular instance, Jordan understood that her extended trip to Australia was something of a consolation prize: it was what he was giving Ava because he hadn’t given her a baby.

When Ava had been gone for four weeks and three days-a detail that Jordan couldn’t forget-she mentioned in a phone call that she had been spending time with Roger Polly, the man fifteen years her senior with whom she had once been in love. The man who had broken her heart.

“ ‘Spending time’?” Jordan said. He was incensed by this news, and completely panicked. “What does that mean, ‘spending time’?”

“We’ve been out,” Ava said. She then let it slip that Roger’s wife had drowned the year before at Kuta Beach in Bali while on vacation with some friends, adding that when she heard this news, she had called him to offer her condolences. This had led to a second phone conversation, then a meet-up for coffee, then dinner at Fraser’s in Kings Park. When Jordan looked up Fraser’s on line, he learned that it was one of the nicest restaurants in Perth.