Atlantic City

The telephone at the lake house rang at twenty past six on a Tuesday morning in July.

Nina answered it in her bathrobe. Hollis, who had been awake since five, heard her say, "Slowly," and then "No," and then heard nothing at all for a long minute, and then went out into the hall in her bare feet and saw Nina's face, and knew.

It was Corinne, relaying Ashford, relaying Faye, who had been incoherent on the telephone at six in the morning. Roxy had gone. She had gone on Sunday night with Dex Cray. They had not been married. There had been a note left on the kitchen table in pencil, in which Roxy said that they were going to Atlantic City and would be married there and that everyone was to be happy for her, and in which she had spelled Atlantic with two L's.

There was nothing the police would do about a girl of eighteen who had left a note; they said so at the station on Sunday night. They were not married. Gil had driven to Poughkeepsie himself on the Monday and come back with it: the county clerk had no licence in his book, and the register of a motel on the boardwalk showed one room for the ninth of July, taken under his own name by a man named Dexter Cray, and the clerk remembered him because he had asked the price of two nights and paid for one, which was the sort of detail Gil would carry for the rest of his life.

Hollis sat down on the bottom step of the stairs with the telephone still in her hand and thought the thing she had been trained by a lifetime of orchard arithmetic to think, which was: what does this cost. First the orchard. Then the town: the egg stall, the armory, the market on Saturdays. Then Preston Pell, who would move on the trust the moment the family had a scandal on it and who had been handed, by this, the one thing he had never had, which was a reason. Then Tessa, who was nineteen. Then Petra, who did not set foot in the church for five weeks and then played the keyboard at the wedding with her chin down and never once looked up. Then Sylvie, who had already lost one man to a rumour and would now lose another to a fact. And last of all Roxy herself, because Dex Cray had no money and no intention and a history, and when he was done with her he would put her on a bus.

Nina made coffee. Ray drove into Lenox for the paper and came back with it under his arm unopened, because he had bought it at the garage and could not bring himself to hand it over, and it lay on the hall table all day with nobody touching it. Sylvie came down the stairs at seven and sat on the step beside her sister and said, "Tell me."

Hollis told her.

Sylvie said, "Then we must go home."

"We must."

"And Roman Ashcroft will hear it from his aunt before the week is out."

"I know."

"Do you want him to hear it?"

Hollis put her face in her hands. "I want nobody to hear it. I want to go back to the lake house at four o'clock yesterday."

He came at nine.

He had driven over from Ironwood in a car that had not been washed, and he came to the door and asked for Ray Duval first, which was the correct thing and which took four minutes, and then Nina brought him into the small front room where Hollis was standing by the window, and Nina went out and shut the door, and he stood inside it and said, "I have heard. Mrs. Duval told me. I am sorry."

And she, who had rehearsed a whole manner for him, composed and dry and a woman who had been right all along, said the thing she had not meant to say, which was: "They are not married. She is eighteen. He has a room on the boardwalk under his own name and he has debts in three counties and my father is in Ashford with the police and there is nothing in the world I can do."

He crossed the room and stood two feet from her and did not touch her and said, "There is a great deal I can do. Tell me what you know."

She told him. She told him everything she knew, which was not much: the note, the motel, the fact that Cray's unit had been on annual training in Jersey in June and that he had been in Ashford three times in July, and the fact that Roxy had said, at dinner on the Thursday before she went, that Dex Cray was the only person in the valley who did not treat her like a child.

"I know him," Roman said. "I know where he goes and I know what he is owed. I will go to New York tonight and I will find him within a week. Will you write down what you have? Names, numbers, the motel, the note."

She wrote. Her hand shook so badly she had to stop twice. When she gave him the paper he took it and put it in his coat and said, "I will write to you here. Every day. Whether there is news or not."

"Why," she said.

"Because you asked me once why I did what I did to your sister, and I have wanted for three months to be asked a second question by you and I have not been asked one."

He went. From the doorway he turned back and said, "It will be well. I have no right to say that. I am saying it."

And the worst of it, the thing she would remember for years with a kind of shame that had no name, was that he had not once in that room said: I told you about Cray.